Techniques of the Observer Author(s): Jonathan Crary Reviewed work(s): Source: October, Vol. 45 (Summer, 1988), pp.

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Techniques of the Observer

JONATHAN

CRARY

Near the opening of Goethe's Color Theory (1810) we findthe following account: Let a room be made as dark as possible; let therebe a circularopening in the window shutterabout three inches in diameter,which may be closed or not at pleasure. The sun being suffered to shinethroughthis on a whitesurface,let the spectatorfromsome littledistance fixhis eyes on this brightcircle thus admitted.' a long establishedpractice,has made a camera obscura the site Goethe, following of his optical studies.The dark room, of course, had been a crucialfeatureof the detailed by Newton in his Opticks (1704), where it establishedcateexperiments relations between interior and between lightsource, aperture, exterior, gorical and screen, and between observer and representation.And as the work of Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, and others attests,the significanceof the camera obscura wentwell beyondthe domain of naturalscience. For nearlytwo hundred years the camera stood as a sovereignmetaphorfor describingthe statusof an observer and as a model, in both rationalistand empiricistthought,of how observationleads to truthful inferencesabout the world.2 But as Goethe continues his recitation,he abruptlyand stunningly abandons the order of the camera obscura: The holebeingthenclosed[Man schliessedarauf die Offnung], let him look towardsthe darkestpart of the room; a circularimage will now
1. of Colours,trans. Charles Eastlake, Cambridge, Mass., Johann Wolfgangvon Goethe, Theory MIT Press, 1970, pp. 16- 17; Gedenkausgabe der Werke, ed. Ernst Beutler, und Gesprdche, Briefe, Zurich, 1949, vol. 16, pp. 35-36. The presentessay is adapted froma book forthcoming fromthe MIT Press on the makingof 2. the observer in the nineteenthcenturyin which I discuss the paradigm of the camera obscura at length. I argue that the camera obscura must be understood as part of a larger organization of in the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies(common to representation, cognition,and subjectivity all of Europe, notjust the Northas some have suggested)whichis fundamentally discontinuous with a nineteenth-century observer.Thus I contend thatthe camera obscura and photography, as historical objects,are radicallydissimilar. See my"Modernizing Vision," in Vision and Visuality: Discussion in ed. Hal Foster, Seattle, Bay Press, 1988. Culture, Contemporary

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be seen to float before him. The middle of the circle will appear colorless,or somewhatyellow,but the border willappear red. bright, Aftera time this red, increasingtowardsthe centre,covers the whole circle,and at last the brightcentralpoint. No sooner,however, is the whole circle red than the edge begins to be blue, and the blue graduallyencroaches inwardson the red. When the whole is blue the edge becomes dark and colorless. The darker edge again slowlyencroaches on the blue tillthe whole circle appears colorless.3 Goethe's instruction to seal the hole announcesa disordering and negationof the camera obscura as both an optical systemand epistemologicalprinciple. The betweeninnerand outer space closingoffof the opening dissolvesthe distinction on which the veryfunctioning of the camera (as paradigm and apparatus) depended. But it is now not simplya question of an observer repositionedin a sealed interiorto view its particularcontents;the optical experience described here by Goethe presentsa notion of visionwhichthe classicalmodel was incapable of encompassing. The colored circlesthatseem to float,undulate,and undergoa sequence of chromatictransformations have no correlative eitherwithinor withoutthe dark room; as Goethe explains at length,theyare "physiologicalcolors" belonging to the body of the observer,and theyare "the necessaryconditionsof entirely vision." Let the observerlook steadfastly on a smallcolored object and let it be takenaway aftera timewhilehis eyes remainunmoved; the spectrum of another color will then be visibleon the whiteplane . . . it arises froman image which now belongs to theeye.4 The corporal subjectivity of the observer,whichwas a priori excluded from the camera obscura, suddenlybecomes the site on whichan observeris possible. The human body, in all its contingency and specificity, generates"the spectrum of another color," and thus becomes the active producer of optical experience. The ramifications of Goethe's color theoryare manifoldand have littleto do withthe empirical"truth" of his assertions or the "scientific" characterof his accumulation of statements experiments.Contained withinthe unsystematized is a keydelineationof subjectivevision,a post-Kantian and findings notionthatis both a product and constituent of modernity.What is crucial about Goethe's account of subjectivevisionis the inseparability of two models usuallypresented as distinctand irreconcilable:a physiologicalsubject who will be described in
3. Goethe, Theory ofColours, p. 17. (Emphasisadded.) 4. trans.James Ibid., p. 21. (Emphasis added.) See Ernst Cassirer,Rousseau,Kant, and Goethe, Press,1945, pp. 81 -82: In his color theoryGoethe aimed Gutmann,Princeton,PrincetonUniversity "to include nothingbut the world of the eye, whichcontainsonly formand color."

Techniques oftheObserver

increasingdetail by the empirical sciences in the nineteenthcentury,and an and earlymodernisms observerposited by various "romanticisms" as the active, autonomous producer of his or her own content. This essay seeks to describe some of the featuresof thisnew kind of observerand to suggesthow his or her formationin the nineteenthcenturywas immanentto the elaboration of new empiricalknowledgeof vision and techniques of the visible. Clearly Kant's "Copernican revolution" (Drehung)of the spectator,proofPure Reason(1787), is posed in the prefaceto the second editionof the Critique of a new and of the subject. For Kant, a definitive organization positioning sign it is "a change in point of view," such that continuingthe use of optical figures, of things, as theyare given,does not conformto thesethings "our representation but that these objects as appearances, conformto our as theyare in themselves, William Blake put it more simply:"As the eye, such mode of representation."5 the object."6 Michel Foucault makes clear that vision in the classical era was thatit was thena the opposite of Kant's subject-centered epistemology, precisely formof immediateknowing,"a perceptibleknowledge." For example: Natural history [in the eighteenthcentury]is nothingmore than the of the visible.Hence itsapparentsimplicity, and thatair of nomination naivete it has from a distance, so simple does it appear and so obthemselves.7 bythethings viouslyimposed In the aftermath of Kant's workthereis an irreversible cloudingover of the of rather than a the Vision, subject-as-observer. privilegedformof transparency of of From the beginbecomes observation. itself an object knowledge, knowing, of will tend of science vision to mean the nineteenth a increasingly ning century of the makeup of the human subject, rather than of the mean interrogation It is a momentwhen the visibleescapes chanicsof lightand optical transmission. fromthe timelessincorporealorder of the camera obscura and becomes lodged in another apparatus, within the unstable physiologyand temporality of the human body. When Goethe's experiments repeatedlycall foreithera darkened room or, more closed the an experiperhaps significantly, eye, he is not simply privileging ence of being severedfromcontactwithan externalworld.On the one hand he is his convictionthatcolor is alwaysthe productof an admixtureof light indicating and shadow: "Color itself is a degree of darkness;hence Kircheris perfectly right in calling it lumenopacatum."8 On the other hand he is also posing conditionsin
5. Immanuel Kant, Critique ofPure Reason,trans.Norman Kemp Smith,New York, St. Martin's Press, 1965, pp. 24-25. 6. William Blake, "Annotations to Reynolds" [c. 1808], in Complete ed. Geoffrey Writings, Press, 1972, p. 456. Keynes,Oxford, Oxford University 7. Michel Foucault, The OrderofThings,New York, Pantheon, 1970, p. 132. (Emphasisadded.) 8. "Die Farbe selbstis ein Schattiges;deswegen Kirchervolkommenrechthat, sie Lumenopaca-

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which the inescapable physiologicalcomponentsof vision can be artificially isolated and made observable by themselves.For Goethe, and for Schopenhauer soon after,visionis alwaysan irreduciblecomplex of elementsbelongingto the observer's body and of external data. Thus the kind of separation between and exterior realityimplicitin the camera obscura beinteriorrepresentation comes in Goethe's worka single surfaceof affect on whichinteriorand exterior have fewof theirformermeaningsand positions.Color, as the primary object of vision,is now atopic, cut fromany spatial referent. Goethe insistently cites experiences in which the subjective contents of visionare dissociatedfroman objectiveworld,in whichthe body itself produces phenomena that have no external correlate. Notions of correspondence, of reflectionon which classical optics and theories of knowledge were based, aland necessity. though retained elsewhere by Goethe, have lost their centrality The priority previouslyaccorded to Lockean primaryqualities over secondary ones becomes inverted.Perhaps mostimportant is his designationof opacityas a crucial and productivecomponent of vision. If discourses of the visible in the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturiesrepressedand concealed whateverthreatof an opticalsystem, ened the transparence Goethe signalsa reversal, and instead poses the opacityof the observeras the necessaryconditionforthe appearance of are now beyond the limits of the phenomena.9Pure lightand pure transparence The articulation of subjectivevisionin the earlynineteenth centuryis part which of a shift Foucault calls "the thresholdof our modernity."When the camera obscura was the dominant model of observationit was as "a form of whichmade knowledgein generalpossible." But at the beginning representation of the nineteenthcentury the site of analysis is no longer representationbut man in his finitude. . . . [It was found] that knowledge has anatomo-physiological conditions,that it is formed gradually withinthe structuresof the body, that it may have a privilegedplace withinit, but that its forms cannot be dissociated from its peculiar functioning;in short, that there is a nature of human knowledgethat determinesits formsand that at the same time can be manifestto it in its own empirical
contents."1
tumzu nennen" (Goethe, Gedenkausgabe, p. 45). The referenceto AthanasiusKircher(1602-1680), Kircher's theJesuitturnedmagic-lantern showman,recallsa counter-useof classicaloptical systems. career as a conjurer was based on the subversionand makingopaque of the "transparency"of the camera obscura and other optical instruments. The thematicof repressionis central to Jean-FranCois 9. Lyotard's discussion of Renaissance in Discours, Figure,Paris, Klincksieck,1978, esp. pp. 163-189. representation 10. This point is made in Elaine Escoubas, "L'Oeil du teinturier,"Critique,vol. 37, no. 418 (March 1982), pp. 231-242. 11. Foucault, The Orderof Things, p. 319.

visible.'o

oftheObserver Techniques

of both the subjectiveand the physiologicalin perception Goethe's affirmation in is a wide range of well-known echoed and obviously philosophical,scientific, One less familiar but is the literary developments. significant parallel contempodecade of the century, the latter rarywork of Maine de Biran. During the first in an attemptto understand more accuoutlined a science of the sens intime ratelythe nature of inwardexperience. But in seekingto grasp the densityand of the sensintime the immediacy Maine de Biran began to blur the identity of the inwardness was his that He the term to coenesthhse very originalobject. employed describe "one's immediateawarenessof the presence of the body in perception" and "the simultaneity of a compositeof impressions inheringin different partsof the organism."" Visual perception,forexample, is inseparablefromthe muscular movementsof the eye and the physical effortinvolved in focusingon an object. In a completereversalof the classicalmodel of the apparatusas a neutral device of pure transmission, the viewer'ssensoryequipment now is inextricably mixed withwhateverobject it beholds. Seven yearsbeforeGoethe publishedthe Maine de Biran discussed how perceptionof color was determined Farbenlehre, modulationover time)and by the body's tendencyto fatigue(by a physiological that the very process of becoming tired was in fact perception.'" For both of them,the absolute values accorded to color by Newtoniantheoryare displaced by an insistenceon color's transientunfoldingwithinthe human subject. Maine de Biran unravelsthe assumptions of Condillac and othersabout the compositionof perception. Condillac's notion of sensation as a simple unit, a building block out of which clear perceptions were assembled, is no longer adequate to a new multilayeredand temporallydispersed perception which Maine de Biran details,makingimpossible"a soul reduced to pure receptivity." For both Goethe and Maine de Biran,subjectiveobservationis not the inspection of an innerspace or a theaterof representations. Instead, observationis increasa single inglyexteriorized;the viewingbody and its objects begin to constitute field on which inside and outside are confounded. Perhaps most importantly, both observerand whathe sees are subject to the same modes of empiricalstudy. For Georges Canguilhem,the reorganization of human knowledgeat the beginof the nineteenth an end to the idea of a qualitatively ning centurysignals different human order, and he citesthe major discoveryby Maine de Biran that

Maine de Biran, Considerations sur lesprincipes 12. d'une division etphysiologidesfaits psychologiques desMaine de Biran, vol. 13, ed. P. Tisserand, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, ques,in Oeuvres et phenome'nologie du corps:essaysur 1949, p. 180. An importantstudyis Michel Henry,Philosophie de France, 1965. Paris, Presses Universitaires biranienne, l'ontologie 13. Maine de Biran, Influence de l'habitude sur la facultede penser[1803], ed. P. Tisserand, Paris, 1953, pp. 56-60: "When the eye fixes itselfon a single color, for a certain lengthof time, in its mannerof becoming fatiguedthere followsa mixed formof thiscolor and several others,and over time the original color will no longer be contained in thisnew mixture."

OCTOBER

since "the soul is necessarily incarnated there is no psychology without 14 biology." The models of subjective vision outlined by Goethe and Schopenhauer in the physiological (whichwere broughtto fulfillment opticsof Helmholtzin the seen the also must be 1860s), against profound changes which took place in fromemissionand corpusculartheories theoriesof the natureof light.The shift for nineto undulatoryor wave motion explanationshave a major significance The culture as a wave of made obsolete whole.'5 teenth-century theory light any notion of a rectilinearpropagation of light rays on which classical optics was based and, in part, the science of perspective.All the modes of representation derived from Renaissance and later models of perspectiveno longer had the of a science of optics.The verisimilitude associated withperspectival legitimation but it was severed construction obviouslypersistedinto the nineteenth century, fromthe scientific base thathad once authorized it,and it could no longer have the same meanings it had when either Aristotelianor Newtonian optics held sway.Dominant theoriesof vision,whetherof Alberti,Kepler, or Newton (Huygens is the obvious exception),all described in theirown fashionhow a beam of isolated lightraystraversedan optical system, witheach ray takingthe shortest possible route to reach its destination.16 The camera obscura is inextricably wedded to thispoint-to-point epistemologicalsetup. At the same time it mustbe stressedhow deeply theologicalwas the notion thatlightwas radiant(composed of rays)and emanative. The work of AugustinJean Fresnel has come to stand for the paradigm shift.17By 1821 Fresnel had concluded that the vibrationsof which lightconwhich led him and those who followed to build sisted were entirelytransverse, such tranversewaves rather mechanical models of an ether which transmitted in the destruction of Fresnel's work or waves. than longitudinal participates rays classical mechanicsand the eventual dominance of modern physics.What had centuriesnow and eighteenth been a discretedomain of opticsin the seventeenth and became merged withthe studyof other physicalphenomena,i.e., electricity is when loses its it a moment Above all ontological privilege; light magnetism.
des et de philosophie 14. Georges Canguilhem, "Qu'est-ce que la psychologie,"Etudes d'histoire Paris, Librarie philosophique deJ. Vrin, 1968, pp. 374-375. sciences, 15. See P. M. Harman, Energy, Force,and Matter:The Conceptual ofNineteenth-Century Development Physics, Cambridge, Cambridge UniversityPress, 1982, pp. 19-26; and Thomas S. Kuhn, The of Chicago Press, 1970, pp. 73-74. Structure 2nd ed., Chicago, University Revolutions, ofScientific 16. See, for example, David C. Lindberg, Theoriesof Vision fromAl-Kindi to Kepler, Chicago, de of Chicago Press, 1976; and Gerard Simon, Le regard, I'etreetl'apparencedans l'optique University l'antiquiteParis, Seuil, 1988. 17. See Edward Frankel, "Corpuscular Optics and the Wave Theory of Light: the Science and vol. 6, 1976, pp. 141 - 184; G. N. Cantor, Politicsof a Revolutionin Physics,"Social Studies ofScience, Press, 1983, esp. pp. 150-159; and R. H. Manchester,ManchesterUniversity Newton, After Optics Silliman, "Fresnel and the Emergence of Physicsas a Discipline," HistoricalStudiesin thePhysical vol. 4, 1974, pp. 137-162. Sciences,

Techniques oftheObserver

of lightas an independent and during the nineteenthcenturythe veryidentity Goethe's color withits proposal became theory, increasingly problematic. entity between lightand color, had implicitly of a qualitativedifference suggestedsuch More as to however, here, lightbegan be seen as an developments. importantly less it had and less to do with the realm of the electromagnetic phenomenon, visibleand withthe descriptionof human vision. So it is at this momentin the when physicaloptics (the studyof lightand the forms early nineteenthcentury, of itspropagation)mergeswithphysics, thatphysiological optics(the studyof the and comes to its dominate the eye sensorycapacities) studyof vision.

is perhaps the most important The retinalafterimage optical phenomenon discussedby Goethe in his chapteron "PhysiologicalColors" in his ColorTheory. his treatment of the Though preceded by othersin the late eighteenthcentury, was far the most to that moment.'8 thorough up Subjective visual by topic had as been recorded since such but only as afterimages phenomena antiquity, eventsoutside the domain of optics,and theywere relegated to the categoryof the "spectral" or mere appearance. But in the earlynineteenth century, particularlywithGoethe, such experiencesattainthe statusof optical "truth." They are no longer deceptions that obscure a "true" perception; rather they begin to constitute an irreduciblecomponentof human vision.For Goethe and the physiwho followedhim there was no such thingas optical illusion: whatever ologists the healthycorporal eye experienced was in factoptical truth. The implications of the new "objectivity"accorded to subjectivephenomof the afterimageallowed the thoughtof ena are several. First,the privileging cut from sensoryperception any necessarylink withan external referent.The of the sensation in the absence of a stimulus- and its afterimagepresence modulations subsequent posed a theoretical and empirical demonstrationof autonomous vision,of an opticalexperiencethatwas produced byand within the and for crucial the of rest the nineteenth is subject. Secondly, equally century, as an inescapable component of observation.'9 the introductionof temporality Most of the phenomena described by Goethe in the Color Theory involve an unfoldingover time: "the edge begins to be blue . . . the blue graduallyencroaches inward . . . the image then becomes graduallyfainter."20 The virtual
18. Goethe identifiessome of these earlier researchers,including Robert W. Darwin (17661848), the fatherof Charles, and the French naturalistBuffon(1707-1788). See Theory ofColours, New York, Appleton-CenturyofExperimental pp. 1- 2. See also E. G. Boring,A History Psychology, Crofts,1950, pp. 102-104. 19. science suggested "the idea of a realitywhichendures inwardly, whichis Nineteenth-century duration itself" (Henri Bergson, CreativeEvolution,trans. Arthur Mitchell, New York, Random House, 1944, p. 395). 20. Goethe, Theory ofColours, pp. 16- 17.

10

OCTOBER

of optical transmission or extromission) was (whetherintromission instantaneity an unquestioned foundationof classical optics and theoriesof perceptionfrom of the camera obscura image withits Aristotleto Locke. And the simultaneity exteriorobject was never questioned.21 But as observationis increasingly tied to vision the body in the earlynineteenth and become century, temporality inseparable. The shiftingprocesses of one's own subjectivity experienced in time withthe act of seeing, dissolvingthe Cartesian ideal of an became synonymous observercompletelyfocused on an object. But the problemof the afterimage and the temporality of subjectivevision is lodged withinlargerepistemologicalissues in the nineteenthcentury.On one hand the attentiongiven to the afterimageby Goethe and othersparallels contemporaryphilosophical discourses (such as Maine de Biran) which describe perception and cognition as essentiallytemporal processes dependent upon a dynamicamalgamationof past and present.In the preface to his Phenomenology (1807), Hegel makes a sweepingrepudiationof Lockean perceptionand situates perceptionwithinan unfoldingthat is temporaland historical.While attacking of sense perception,Hegel implicitly refutesthe model of the apparentcertainty the camera obscura. "It mustbe pointed out thattruthis not like stamped coin issued ready from the mint, and so can be taken up and used."22Although to the Lockean notion of ideas "imprinting"themselveson passive referring to photography, which,like minds,Hegel's remarkhas a precociousapplicability offered another and form of "truth." coinage, mechanically mass-produced of in which account dialectical perception, appearance negates Hegel's dynamic, itself to become something other, finds an echo in Goethe's discussion of afterimages: The eye cannot fora momentremainin a particularstatedetermined it is forced to a sort of by the object it looks upon. On the contrary, in extreme with extreme,intermediate which, contrasting opposition, at the same time combines these with intermediate degree, degree and thus ever tends to be whole, whetherthe opposite impressions, and confined to one successive or simultaneous are impressions image.2s Goethe and Hegel, each in his own way, pose observation as the play and interactionof forces and relations, rather than as the orderly contiguityof discretestable sensationsconceived by Locke or Condillac.24

of perceptionsee, for example, Lindberg, Theories On the instantaneity 21. ofVision, pp. 93-94. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology 22. ofMind, trans.J. B. Baillie, New York, Harper and Row, 1967, p. 98. 23. Goethe, Theory ofColours, p. s3. It should be noted, however,that Hegel, in an 1807 letterto Schelling,criticizedGoethe's 24.

of theObserver Techniques

11

Other writersin the firstdecade also began to delineate perception as a continuous process, a flux of temporallydispersed contents. The physicist used the termconcretion to Andre-MarieAmpere in his epistemologicalwritings describe how any perception always blends with a preceding or remembered perception. The words melangeand fusion occur frequentlyin his attack on classical notions of "pure" isolated sensations. Perception, as he wrote to his "une suitede differences successives. friendMaine de Biran, was fundamentally "25 of the afterimage are also impliedin the workofJohannFriedrich The dynamics the movement Herbart,who undertookone of the earliestattemptsto quantify of cognitiveexperience. Although his ostensible aim was to demonstrateand of mathepreserveKant's notionof the unityof the mind,Herbart'sformulation maticallaws governingmentalexperience in factmake him "a spiritualfatherof stimulus-response psychology.'"26 If Kant gave a positiveaccount of the mind's and orderingexperience, Herbart (Kant's successorat for capacity synthesizing how detailed the subject wards offand preventsinternalincoherKonigsberg) ence and disorganization.Consciousness, for Herbart, begins as a stream of chaotic input fromwithout.Ideas of thingsand events in the world potentially were never copies of externalrealitybut ratherthe outcome of an interactional underwent process withinthe subject in whichideas (Vorstellungen) operationsof and blending(Verschmelzungen) withother previousor fusion,fading,inhibition, simultaneously occurringideas or "presentations." The mind does not reflect truthbut ratherextractsit froman ongoing process involvingthe collisionand mergingof ideas. Let a series a, b, c, d, be given by perception; then, from the first movementof the perceptionand during its continuance,a is exposed to an arrest from other concepts already in consciousness. In the sunken in consciousness,became more meantime,a, already partially and more obscured when b came to it. This b at firstunobscured, blended withthe sinkinga; then followedc, which itselfunobscured, fused with b, which was becoming obscured. Similarlyfollowedd, to become fused witha, b, and c, in different degrees. From thisarises a law foreach of these concepts. . . . It is veryimportant to determine whicha concept mustattain in by calculation the degree of strength
von und an Hegel, vol. 1, ed. color theoryfor being "restrictedcompletelyto the empirical" (Briefe Karl Hegel, Leipzig, 1884, p. 94, cited in Karl L6with, FromHegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in trans. David E. Green, New York, Holt, Rinehartand Winston, 1964, Nineteenth-Century Thought, p. 13). des Deux Amperes, ed. 25. Andre-MarieAmpere, "Lettre a Maine de Biran" [1809], in Philosophie Paris, Didier, 1866, p. 236. J. Barthelemy-Saint-Hilaire, 26. Roots Benjamin B. Wolman, "The HistoricalRole ofJohann FriedrichHerbart," in Historical ed. Benjamin B. Wolman, New York, Harper and Row, 1968, p. 33. See Psychology, ofContemporary also David E. Leary, "The Historical Foundations of Herbart's Mathematizationof Psychology," vol. 16 (1980), pp. 150- 163. oftheBehavioralSciences, JournaloftheHistory

1823. Jan Purkinje.Afterimages.

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Techniques oftheObserver

13

order to be able to stand beside two or more stronger ones exactlyon the thresholdof consciousness.27 All the processes of blending and opposition that Goethe described phenomeare forHerbart statablein differential equations nallyin termsof the afterimage discussescolor perceptionto describe the mental and theorems.He specifically Once the operations of cognition mechanismsof opposition and inhibition.28 measurable in terms of duration and intensity, it is become fundamentally and controllable. Herbart was rendered both Although thereby philpredictable or any physiological research, osophicallyopposed to empiricalexperimentation forthe later to mathematizeperceptionwere important his convolutedattempts work of Gustav Ernst Fechner, Mfiller, Weber, Johannes quantitativesensory to recognize the potentialcrisisof and WilhelmWundt. He was one of the first and to proimpliedby an autonomous subjectivity, meaningand representation was and control. Herbart a framework for its disciplining attempting clearly pose but he nonetheless prepared the ground for ata quantificationof cognition, and such measurements to measure the magnitudeof sensations, required tempts was to become a crucial sensoryexperience thatwas durational.The afterimage and means by which observation could be quantified,by which the intensity could be measured. duration of retinalstimulation Also it is importantto remember that Herbart's work was not simply abstract epistemologicalspeculation, but was directlytied to his pedagogical in Germanyand elsewherein Europe duringthe theories,whichwere influential of psychologiHerbart believed thathis quantification mid-nineteenth century.29 for controlling and determining the sequential cal processes held the possibility inputof ideas into young minds,and in particularhad the potentialof instilling were centralgoals of and moral ideas. Obedience and attentiveness disciplinary Herbart's pedagogy. Justas new formsof factory production demanded more of a worker's attention span, so the management of the precise knowledge similarinformation."s demanded In another institution, classroom, disciplinary both cases the subject in question was measurable and regulated in time. was occurringin a wide By the 1820s the quantitativestudyof afterimages of research scientific the Czech range throughout Europe. Workingin Germany, Goethe's work continued on the and modulation of Jan Purkinje persistence
27. JohannFriedrichHerbart,A Textbook in Psychology: An Attempt toFound theScience ofPsychology on Experience, and Mathematics, trans. Margaret Smith, New York, Appleton, 1891, Metaphysics, pp. 21 - 22. See Johann FriedrichHerbart,Psychologie 28. als Wissenschaft, vol. 1, K6nigsberg,August Unzer, 1824, pp. 222-224. For Herbart's theories of education, see Harold B. Dunkel, Herbart and Herbartism: 29. An EducationalGhost of Chicago Press, 1970, esp. pp. 63-96. Story, Chicago, University 30. See Nikolas Rose, "The PsychologicalComplex: Mental Measurementand Social Administraand Consciousness, no. 5 (Spring 1979), pp. 5-70; and Didier Deleule and FranCois tion," Ideology Paris, Mame, 1973, pp. 72-89. Guery,Le corpsproductif

14

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how long theylasted, what changes theywent through,and under afterimages: His empiricalresearchand Herbart's mathematicalmethods what conditions.s3 and psychophysiwere to come togetherin the next generationof psychologists and the mentalbecame one cists,when the thresholdbetween the physiological in of the primary practice. Instead of recordingafterimages objects of scientific was termsof the lived timeof the body as Goethe had generallydone, Purkinje of the irritability to studythemas part of a comprehensive the first quantification of different formal classification the first He of the eye.32 types of provided are a of them indication the his of and striking paradoxical drawings afterimages objectivityof the phenomena of subjective vision. Were we able to see the originaldrawingsin color we would have a more vivid sense of theirunprecedented overlapping of the visionaryand the empirical,of "the real" and the abstract. Purkinje timed Although workingwith relativelyimprecise instruments, how long it takes the eye to become fatigued,how long dilationand contraction For Purkinjethe of eye movements. of the pupil take,and measured the strength information:he a of became field statistical itself surface of the eye physical demarcatedthe retinain termsof how color changes hue dependingon where it and quantifiedthe strikesthe eye, describingthe extentof the area of visibility, distinctionbetween direct and indirectvision, and also gave a highlyprecise of account of the blind spot.SSThe discourse of dioptrics,of the transparency mechanical optical systemsin the seventeenthand eighteenthcenturies, has withvarying given way to a mappingof the human eye as a productiveterritory and aptitude. zones of efficiency Purkinje's research,along withthat of Johannes Miiller and others,inauof vision in the nineteenthcentury.Part gurated the comprehensivephysiology and statistical norms of the sense of of thisstudyinvolvedestablishing quantitative the assessment of "norhave and others Foucault As shown, "scientific" sight. accumufields became central to the and other in medicine, physiology, mality"
see into Czech. For relevantEnglishtranslations, 31. Purkinjewrotein Latin, whichwas translated A SourceBookin Systematic "Visual Phenomena," trans.H. R. John,in History Psychology, ofPsychology: ed. William Sahakian, Itasca, Ill., F. E. Peacock, 1968, pp. 101-108; and "Contributionsto a vol. 1 (1830), pp. of Vision," trans.Charles Wheatstone, JournaloftheRoyalInstitution, Psychology on Vision,ed. Nicholas Wade, London, Academic and Wheatstone 101-117, reprintedin Brewster Press, 1983, pp. 248-262. in whichthe physiology of the afterimage Goethe providesa tellingaccount of the subjectivity 32. and desire: "I of the attentive (male heterosexual)eye and itsoperationare inseparablefrommemory faircomplexion, had entered an inn towardsevening,and, as a well-favored girl, witha brilliantly at her as she stood before black hair,and a scarletbodice, came into the room, I looked attentively turnedaway, I saw on the whitewall, afterwards me at some distancein halfshadow. As she presently whichwas now beforeme, a black face surroundedwitha brightlight,whilethe dressof the perfectly distinct ofColours,p. 22). figureappeared of a beautifulsea green" (Theory the first classification It should be noted thatPurkinje,in 1823, formulated forhuman 33. system another technique of producing and regulatinghuman subjects. See Vlasilav Krutz, fingerprints, vol. 11, New York, 1975, pp. 213- 217. Biography, ofScientific "Purkinje,Jan Evangelista,"Dictionary

oftheObserver Techniques

15

child lation of knowledge about individuals- whetherin medicine,psychiatry, education -and of labor and thus essential to the rationalization the psychology, exercise of power. My concern here is how the individualas observerbecame an half of the 1800s, and a locus of knowledge in the first object of investigation, how the nature of vision was thus modified.One feature of this period is the widespreadeffort by researchersfroma varietyof fieldsto establishthe bounds of "normative" vision and to quantifyformsof optical and other sensoryresponse. The pervasivepreoccupationwithoptical illusionsis part of the exploraever more sharplythe and pathologyof human vision,defining tion of the limits But as has of the normal. the indicationof a shown, Georges Canguilhem shape it never occurs withoutthe specification of techninorm is not a neutralactivity; cal means to correct,or to produce normativeness.34 What is of immediateconcern here is how some of the optical devices that spawned a new mass visual culture in the nineteenthcenturyare inseparable fromthe new normativesciences of the observer and of the seeing body. The comprehensivearticulationof subjectivevision,which included the conceptual famoustheoryof specific (in MUiller's severingof visualexperience fromreferent and studyof afterimages, of persistence of nerveenergies),and the quantification vision, peripheral and binocular vision, and thresholdsof attention all were part of the creationof a new vastdomain of visual culture.On one hand directly there is a new abstractionand mobilityof images, on the other is an inverse discipliningof the observer in terms of rigidlyfixed relations to image and with the stereoscope, the kaleidoscope, the phenakistiapparatus, particularly diorama. and even the scope,

Beginning in the mid-1820s, the experimentalstudy of afterimageswas withthe inventionof a number of related optical devices and techintertwined observation niques. The boundaryseparatingtheiruse forpurposes of scientific is indistinct. Common to themall was the and as formsof popular entertainment notion that perception was not instantaneous,and the notion of a disjunction had suggestedthatsome form betweeneye and object. Research on afterimages of blendingor fusionoccurred when sensationswere perceived in quick succesand sion, and it was the durationinvolvedin seeing thatallowed itsmodification of control time becomes with new The modalities of regulation. synonymous power. have been well The details and backgroundof these devices and inventors documented and discussed at length elsewhere, but almost exclusivelyin the
34. See Georges Canguilhem,Le normalet le pathologique, de France, Paris, Presses Universitaires 1966, trans. as The Normal and the Pathologicalby Carolyn Fawcett, New York, Zone Books, forthcoming.

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in of cinema."5Filmscholarspositionthemas the initialforms serviceof a history of a an evolutionary single technologicaldevelopmentleading to the emergence is dominantformat the end of the century.Their fundamentalcharacteristic and forms. Obnascent are thus cinema, incomplete not-yet they prematurity; viouslythere is a connectionbetween cinema and these machinesof the 1830s, and oppositionin whichfeatures but it is oftena dialecticalrelationof inversion of these earlier devices were negated or concealed. At the same time there is a tendency to conflate all optical devices in the nineteenthcenturyas equally implicatedin a vague collectivedriveto higherand higherstandardsof verisimi35. See, for example, C. W. Ceram, Archaeology oftheCinema,New York, Harcourt, Brace and and Early Years of Cinema in World, 1965; Michael Chanan, The Dream thatKicks: The Prehistory London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980, esp. pp. 54-65; Jean-LouisComolli,"Technique Britain, Histoire du cinema, no. 229 (May-June et ideologie," Cahiersdu cinema, 1971), pp. 4- 21; Jean Mitry, vol. 1, Paris, Editions Universitaires,1967, pp. 21-27; and Georges Sadoul, Histoire generaledu cinema,vol. 1, Paris, Denoel, 1973, pp. 15-43. See also the brief geneaology in Gilles Deleuze, trans.Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis,UniCinema1: The Movement-Image, of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 5. versity

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litude. Such teleological approaches most oftenneglect entirelyhow these devices were expressionsof nonveridicalmodels of perception. One of the earliestwas the Thaumatrope (literally, first "wonder-turner"), in London by Dr. John Paris in 1825. It was a small circulardisc demonstrated witha drawingon eitherside and strings attachedso thatit could be twirled with a spin of the hand. The image of a bird on one side and an emptycage on the other would produce when spun the appearance of the bird in the cage. The of this"philosophicaltoy" made unequivocallyclear the hallucinatory simplicity and fabricated natureof the image and the absolute rupturebetweenperception and its object. Also in 1825, Peter Mark Roget, an Englishmathematician and the author of the first of railwaytrain Thesaurus, publishedan account of his observations wheels seen throughthe verticalbars of a fence. Roget pointed out the illusions that occurred under these circumstancesin which the spokes of the wheels seemed to be eithermotionless or to be turning backwards.Roget's observations suggestedto him how the location of an observerin relationto an intervening screen could exploit the durational propertiesof retinalafterimages to create

18

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Mid-1830s. Zellotrope.

Techniques oftheObserver

19

of motion. The physicist Michael Faraday explored similarphevarious effects the experienceof rapidlyturning wheelsthatappearedto be nomena,particularly In of the his of 1831, induction, year movingslowly. discovery electromagnetic he produced his own device, later called the Faraday wheel, consistingof two spoked wheels mounted on the same axis. By varyingthe relation between the spokesof the two wheelsrelativeto the eye of the viewer,the apparentmotionof wheel could be modulated. Thus the experience of temporality the farther itself is made susceptibleto a range of external technicalmanipulations. During the late 1820s the Belgian scientist JosephPlateau also conducted a withafterimages, wide range of experiments some of whichcost him his eyesight intothe sun forextended periods.By 1828 he had worked due to staring directly with a Newton color wheel, demonstratingthat the duration and quality of retinal afterimagevaried with the intensity, color, time, and direction of the stimulus.He also made a rough calculationof the average time that such sensations lasted- about a thirdof a second. What is more, his research seemed to do confirm the earlierspeculationsof Goethe and othersthatretinalafterimages but go througha numberof positiveand negative not simply dissipateuniformly, of the formulations statesbefore vanishing.He made one of the mostinfluential theoryof "persistenceof vision." If several objects whichdiffer sequentiallyin termsof formand positionare presentedone afterthe otherto the eye in verybriefintervals and sufficiently close together,the impressions they produce on the retinawillblend togetherwithoutconfusionand one willbelieve that a single object is graduallychanging formand position.36 the Phenakistiscope In the early 1830s, Plateau constructed (literally "deceptive his own and that of Roget, Faraday, and which research view") incorporated others. At its simplestit consisted of a single disc, divided into sixteen equal segments,each of which contained a small, slittedopening and a figurerepredrawn on sentingone positionin a sequence of movement.The side withfigures whilethe viewerstayedimmobileas the disc turned. it was faced towarda mirror When an opening passed in frontof the eye, it allowed one to see the reflected The same effect occurs witheach of the slits.The figureon the disc verybriefly. be in before the eye. By 1833, comto continuous motion then images appear mercial models were being sold in London; by 1834 two similar devices apStampferand peared, the Stroboscope inventedby the German mathematician the Zootrope or "wheel of life" of William G. Horner. The empiricaltruthof the notion of "persistenceof vision" as an explanation for the illusion of motion is irrelevanthere."3 What is importantare the
sur quelquesproprie'isdes impressions, thesis submittedat Liege, 36. Joseph Plateau, Dissertation du cinema, gene'rale p. 25. May 1829. Quoted in Georges Sadoul, Histoire Some recent studies have discussed the "myth" of persistenceof vision. They tell us, not 37.

20

OCTOBER

conditionsand circumstances thatallowed it to operate as an explanationand the historical thatit presupposed.The idea of persistence of vision subject/observer is linked to two different sorts of studies. One is the kind of self-observation conducted first by Goethe, then by Purkinje, Plateau, Fechner, and others,in which the changing conditions of the observer's own retina was (or was then believed to be) the object of investigation.The other source was the often accidental observationof new industrial formsof movement,in particularmechanized wheels movingat high speeds. Purkinjeand Roget both derived some of their ideas fromnoting the appearance of train wheels in motion or regularly spaced formsseen froma fastmoving train. Faraday indicates that his experimentswere suggestedby a visitto a factory: lead mills "Being at the magnificent of Messrs.Maltby,twocog-wheelswere shownme movingwithsuch velocity that ifthe eye were . . . standingin such a positionthatone wheel appeared behind the other, there was immediately the distinctthough shadowy resemblance of in one direction."'s Like the study of afterimages,new cogs moving slowly of and machine movementdisclosed an increasingdivergence experiences speed between appearances and theirexternal causes. The Phenakistiscope substantiates WalterBenjamin'scontention thatin the nineteenthcentury"technologyhas subjected the human sensoriumto a comWhile it was ofcourse a mode of popular entertainment, plex kindof training.""39 a leisure-time commoditypurchasable by an expanding urban middle class, it nonetheless paralleled the formatof the scientific devices used by Purkinje, of Plateau, and others for the scientific study subjectivevision. That is, a form withwhicha new public consumedimagesof an illusory "reality"was isomorphic to the apparatusesused to accumulate knowledgeabout an observer.In fact,the veryphysical positionrequired of the observerby the Phenakistiscope bespeaks a of three modes: a at once a a of confounding body spectator, subject empirical research and observation,and an element of machine production. In all three cases it is a question of a body aligned with and operating an assemblage of that generated a turningand regularlymovingwheeled parts. The imperatives rational organizationof time and movementin productionsimultaneously perA need for knowledgeof the capacities vaded multiplespheresof social activity. of the eye and its regimentation pervaded many of them. Anotherphenomenon that corroboratesthischange in the positionof the observeris the Diorama, given itsdefinitive formby Louis J. M. Daguerre in the
that current neurophysiologicalresearch shows nineteenth-century surprisingly, explanations of fusionor blending of images to be an inadequate explanation for the perceptionof illusorymovement.See Josephand Barbara Anderson, "Motion Perceptionin Motion Pictures,"and Bill Nichols and Susan J. Lederman, "Flicker and Motion in Film," both in The Cinematic ed. Teresa Apparatus, de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, London, Macmillan, 1980, pp. 76-95 and 96-105. 38. Quoted in Chanan, The Dream thatKicks,p. 61. 39. Poet in theEra ofHigh Capitalism, Walter Benjamin, CharlesBaudelaire: A Lyric trans. Harry Zohn, London, NLB, 1972, p. 126.

Techniques oftheObserver

21

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22

OCTOBER

early 1820s. Unlike the static panorama painting which firstappeared in the 1790s, the Diorama is based on the incorporationof an immobile observer into a mechanicalapparatus and a subjectionto a predesignedtemporalunfolding of optical experience.40 The circular or semi-circular panorama painting clearly broke with the localized point of view of perspectivepainting or the camera obscura, allowing the spectatoran ambulatoryubiquity.One was compelled at the least to turn one's head (and eyes) to see the entire work. The multi-media Diorama removed that autonomyfromthe observer,situatingthe audience on a circular platformthat was slowly moved, permittingviews of Like the Phenakistiscope or the Zooscenes and shifting different lighteffects. observer a wheels in of which was machine of motion and the the Diorama trope, one of of For the technical innovations was an inflexible Marx, great component. the nineteenthcenturywas the way in which the body was made adaptable to "the few main fundamentalformsof motion.""' But if the remaking of the observerinvolvedthe adaptation of the eye to rationalizedformsof movement, such a change coincided with and was possible only because of an increasing Thus a preconditionof abstractionof optical experience froma stable referent. modernizationwas the "uprooting" of vision from the delimited and static relationsof the camera obscura. Consider also the kaleidoscope, inventedin 1815 by Sir David Brewster.42 With all the luminouspossibilities suggestedby Baudelaire, and later by Proust, the kaleidoscope seems radicallyunlikethe rigidand disciplinary structure of the with of its But, Phenakistiscope, sequential repetition regulatedrepresentations. forBrewster, thejustification for makingthe kaleidoscope was productivity and He as saw it mechanical means for the of reformation art accordingto efficiency. an industrialparadigm. Since symmetry was the basis of beauty in nature and visual art, he declared, the kaleidoscope was aptlysuited to produce art through of simple forms." "the inversionand multiplication on the natureof the designsthuscomposed, and If we reflect further on the methods which must be employed in their composition,the Kaleidoscope will assume the character of the highest class of machinery,which improvesat the same time that it abridges the exertions of individuals. There are few machines, indeed, which rise
An important 40. studyon the relationbetweenthe panorama and the Diorama is Eric de Kuyper no. 34 (1981), pp. 85-96. Other works and Emile Poppe, "Voir et regarder," Communications, include Stephan Oettermann,Das Panorama, Munich, Syndikat,1980; Heinz Buddemeier, Panoneuer Medien im 19. Jahrhundert, Munich, und Wirkung rama, Diorama, Photographie: Entstehung H. Fink, 1970; and Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre:The History oftheDiorama and theDaguerreotype, New York, Dover, 1968. 41. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, New York, International, 1967, p. 374. For more on thisdevice, see my"Notes on the Kaleidoscope and Stereoscope,"Journal,no. 5 42. (Autumn 1985), pp. 38-41.

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Kaleidoscope. Mid-19th century.

higherabove the operationsof human skill.It will create in an hour, could not inventin the course of a year; and what a thousandartists while it works with such unexampled rapidity,it works also with a correspondingbeauty and precision.43 serialproductionseems farremovedfromBaudeBrewster's proposal of infinite laire's image of the dandyas "a kaleidoscopegiftedwithconsciousness."But the abstractionnecessaryfor Brewster'sindustrialdeliriumis made possible by the thatallowed Baudelaire to use the kaleidoscopeas same forcesof modernization of life itselfand the a model for the kinetic experience of "the multiplicity of all its flickering grace elements."44
Its History, Sir David Brewster, TheKaleidoscope: and Construction 43. Theory, [1819], rpt. London, John Murray,1858, pp. 134-136. 44. Charles Baudelaire, "Le peintrede la vie moderne," Oeuvres Paris,Gallimard,1961, complites, p. 1161.

24

OCTOBER

The mostsignificant formof visual imageryin the nineteenth with century, the exception of photography, was the stereoscope.45 It is easily forgotten now how pervasive was the experience of the stereoscope and how for decades it defineda principalmode of consumingphotographically produced images. This is again a form whose historyhas thus far been confounded with another and iniphenomenon,in thiscase, photography.Yet conceptually, structurally, it is independentof the now dominantmedium. Clearly, the tially,historically stereoscopeutilizedphotographicimagerybut its inventionpreceded photografromthe phy and in no wayrequired photographicprocedures. Althoughdistinct optical devices which representedthe illusion of movement,the stereoscope is nonethelesspart of the same reorganizationof the observer that those devices implied. Of concern here is the period during whichthe technicaland theoretical once it was principlesof the stereoscopewere elaborated, ratherthan its effects distributedin a social-cultural field. Only after 1850 did the wide commercial diffusion throughoutNorth America and Europe of the stereoscope occur.46 The originsof the stereoscope are intertwined withresearch in the 1820s and 1830s on subjectivevisionand more generallywithin the fieldof nineteenth-cendiscussed. The two most turyphysiology already figures closelyassociated with its invention,Charles Wheatstoneand Sir David Brewster,had already written on optical illusions,color theory,afterimages, and other visual pheextensively nomena. Wheatstonewas in factthe translator of Purkinje'smajor 1823 disserand subjectivevision,publishedin Englishin 1830. A few tationon afterimages later Brewster had summarizedavailable research on optical devices and years vision. subjective The stereoscopeis also inseparablefromearly nineteenth-century debates about the perceptionof space, which were to continue unresolved indefinitely. Was space an innate form,or was it somethingrecognized throughthe learning of cues afterbirth?The Molyneux problem had been transposedto a different In the eighteenthcentury,regardlessof how solutions.47 centuryfor different or empirithe problem was ultimately answered,whetherthe claim was nativist of the senses constituteda common surface of order. The cist, the testimony
studiesof the stereoscope.Some helpfulworksare: There are fewseriousculturalor historical 45. in America: A CulturalHistory, Edward Earle, ed., Pointsof View:The Stereoscope Rochester,Visual Studies Workshop, 1979; A.T. Gill, "Early Stereoscopes," The Photographic journal, no. 109 (1969), pp. 546-599, 606-614, 641-651; and Rosalind Krauss, "Photography'sDiscursiveSpaces: Landjournal, no. 42 (Winter 1982), pp. 311-319. scape/View," Art 46. the London StereoscopicCompanyalone had sold over By 1856, two yearsafteritsfounding, half a million viewers. See Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, The History London, of Photography, Thames and Hudson, 1969, p. 191. 47. The best known formulation of the Molyneux problem is John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander C. Fraser, New York, Dover, vol. II, no. ix, p. 8.

Techniques of the Observer

25

question was how the passage fromone domain of sense perceptionto another occurred, how did the senses "reconvene," that is, come togetherin a body.48 But those whose answers to Molyneux were negative--a blind man suddenly restored with sightwould notimmediately recognize the objects before him-and these included Locke, Berkeley,Diderot, Reid, and Condillac, share little withthe researchersin the nineteenthcenturywho also, withgreater scientific authority,answered negatively. By insistingthat knowledge, and specifically knowledge of space and depth, is built up out of an orderlyaccumulationand of perceptions on a plane independent of the viewer, cross-referencing which thoughtcould know nothingof ideas of pure visibility eighteenth-century From Descartes to to Diderot is a would arise in the nineteenth century. Berkeley thatvisionis grounded in the sense of touch.49 We could not continuedinsistence be furtherremoved from Berkeley's theoryof how distance is perceived than with the science of the stereoscope. The quintessentially nineteenth-century device, withwhichdistance (or relief) is perceptiblesolelythroughan organization of opticalcues, eradicates the fieldon whicheighteenth-century knowledge arranged itself. The question thattroubledthe nineteenth centuryhad never reallybeen a the self-evident fact that each eye sees a problem before. Binocular disparity, different image,had been a familiar phenomenonsinceantiquity. slightly Only in the 1830s does it become crucial for scientiststo define the seeing body as of the optical binocular,to quantify essentially preciselythe angular differential axis of each eye, and to specify the physiological basis fordisparity. What preocresearchers was this: that an observer with each eye a given perceives cupied how are different as or Before 1800, even image, theyexperienced single unitary. when the question was asked it was more as a curiosity, never a centralproblem. Two alternative explanationshad been offeredforcenturies:one proposed that we never saw anything except withone eye at a time; the other was a projection articulated theory by Kepler, and proposed as late as the 1750s, whichasserted that each eye projects an object to its actual location.50 were seeking anatomical evidence in the By the late 1820s physiologists structure of the optical chiasma,the pointbehind the eyes wherethe nerve fibers halfof the nerves leading fromthe retinato the brain cross each other,carrying fromeach retinato each side of the brain.5 But such physiological evidence was time. inconclusive at that Wheatstone's in conclusions 1833 came out relatively
48. See Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James of theEnlightenment, Press, 1951, p. 108. Petlegrove,Princeton,PrincetonUniversity 49. See Michel Serres, Hermtsou la communication, Paris, Minuit, 1968, pp. 124-125; and MauThe Primacy rice Merleau-Ponty, Evanston, Ill., Northwestern Press, 1964, ofPerception, University pp. 169-172. 50. A Treatiseon theEye, theManner and Phenomena See, for example, William Porterfield, of Vision, Edinburgh,Hamilton and Balfour, 1759, p. 285. 51. See R. L. Gregory,Eyeand Brain: The Psychology ofSeeing,3rd. ed., New York, McGraw-Hill, 1979, p. 45.

1849. lenticular David Brewster's stereoscope.

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Techniques oftheObserver

27

of the successfulmeasurementof binocularparallax, or the degree to whichthe angle of the axis of each eye differedwhen focused on the same point. The human organism,he claimed, had the capacityunder mostconditionsto syntheinto a single unitaryimage. While thisseems obvious from size retinaldisparity our own standpoint,Wheatstone's work marked a major break from(or often disregardof) the older explanationsof the binocular body. The form of the stereoscope is linked to some of Wheatstone's initial his research concerned the visual experience of objects relatively close findings: to the eye. When an object is viewed at so great a distancethat the optic axes of both eyes are sensiblyparallel when directed towardsit, the perspecand the appearance tiveprojectionsof it,seen by each eye separately, to the two eyes is preciselythe same as when the object is seen by one eye only.52 Instead Wheatstonewas preoccupied withobjects close enough to the observer so that the optic axes had different angles. S.when the object is placed so near the eyes thatto viewit the optic . axes must converge . . . a different perspectiveprojection of it is seen by each eye, and these perspectivesare more dissimilaras the convergenceof the optic axes becomes greater.53

Thus physicalproximitybrings binocular vision into play as an operation of of making two distinctviews appear as one. This is what reconcilingdisparity, linksthe stereoscopewithotherdevices in the 1830s like the Phenakistiscope. Its an apprehension "realism" presupposes perceptual experience to be essentially The relationof the observerto the object is not one of identity of differences. but an experience of disjunct or divergentimages. Helmholtz's epistemologywas based on such a "differential Both Wheatstone and Brewster hypothesis."54 indicatedthatthe fusionof picturesviewed in a stereoscopetook place over time and thattheirconvergencemightnot actuallybe secure. Accordingto Brewster . the reliefis not obtained fromthe mere combinationor superposition of the two dissimilarpictures.The superpositionis effected each eye upon the object, but the reliefis givenby the play by turning
Charles Wheatstone,"Contributionsto the Physiology 52. of Vision," in Brewster and Wheatstone on Vision, p. 65. Ibid. 53. 54. Hermann von Helmholtz, "The Facts in Perception," in Epistemological ed. Paul Writings, Hertz and Moritz Schlick, Boston, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1977, p. 133: our acquaintance withthe visual fieldcan be acquired by observationof the images duringthe movements of our eyes,provided only thatthereexists,between otherwisequalitatively alike retinal between distinct sensations,some or other perceptibledifference correspondingto the difference places on the retina."

28

OCTOBER

in rapid succession, similarpointsof the two of the opticaxes in uniting, pictures. . . . Though the picturesapparentlycoalesce, yetthe relief is given by the subsequent play of the optic axes varyingthemselves the similarpointsin each picturethat successively upon, and unifying, different distances fromthe observer.55 to correspond Brewsterthen confirmsthere never really is a stereoscopicimage, that it is a between conjuration,an effectof the observer's experience of the differential two other images. In devisingthe stereoscope,Wheatstoneaimed to simulatethe actual presence of a physicalobject or scene, not to discoveranotherway to exhibita print or drawing. Paintinghad been an adequate formof representation, he asserts, but only forimages of objects at a greatdistance.When a landscape is presented to a viewer, "if those circumstanceswhich would disturb the illusion are exforreality.He declares thatup to cluded," we could mistakethe representation it is impossibleforan artist to givea faithful thispointin history of representation near solid object. any When the paintingand the object are seen withboth eyes,in the case of the paintingtwo similarobjects are projected on the retina,in the thereis therefore an case of the solid object the picturesare dissimilar; between the impressions on the organs of sensaessentialdifference tion in the two cases, and consequently between the perceptions formed in the mind; the painting thereforecannot be confounded withthe solid object.56 What he seeks,then,is a completeequivalence of stereoscopicimage and object. Not only will the inventionof the stereoscope overcome the deficienciesof painting but also those of the Diorama, which Wheatstone singles out. The Diorama, he believed, was too bound up in the techniques of painting,which depended for their illusoryeffectson the depiction of distant subjects. The stereoscope, on the contrary,provided a form in which "vividness" of effect increased as the object represented appeared closer to the viewer, and the became greateras the optic axes of each of three-dimensional solidity impression of the stereoscopewas not simply Thus desired effect the likeness, eye diverged. that has been transBut it is a tangibility but immediate,apparent tangibility. formedinto a purelyvisual experience of a kind that Diderot could never have a studentof visionas Helmholtz could write,in imagined. Even as sophisticated the 1850s: in are so trueto natureand so lifelike These stereoscopicphotographs
and Construction, ItsHistory, TheStereoscope: Sir David Brewster, 55. London, John Murray, Theory, 1856, p. 53. (Emphasis in original.) of Vision," p. 66. Charles Wheatstone,"Contributionsto the Physiology 56.

oftheObserver Techniques

29

of materialthings, thatafterviewingsuch a pictureand theirportrayal recognizingin it some object like a house, for instance,we get the when we actuallydo see the object, that we have already impression, seen it before and are more or less familiarwith it. In cases of this new or kind,the actual view of the thingitselfdoes not add anything more accurate to the previousapperceptionwe got fromthe picture, so far at least as mere formrelationsare concerned.57 in the nineteenthcenturyhad so conflatedthe No other formof representation real withthe optical, an object with its image. obscene.It The stereoscope as a means of representationwas inherently between viewer and was that intrinsic to shatteredthe scenic relationship object theatricalsetup of the camera obscura. The veryfunctioning the fundamentally of the objects closest to the of the stereoscope depended on the visual priority viewerand on the absence of any mediationbetweeneye and objects viewed.58 It of what Walter Benjamin saw as part of the visual culture of was a fulfillment modernity:"Day by day the need becomes greater to take possession of the - in an image and the reproductionof the object--from the closest proximity is no that the It coincidence stereoscope became increasingly image.""5 synonymous with varietiesof pornographicimageryin the course of the nineteenth of tangibility that Wheatstone had sought fromthe century.The very effects a mass formof ocular possession.Some have were turned into quickly beginning close association of was in that the the stereoscopewithpornography speculated for its social around the of the turn sales of the demise; century part responsible device supposedlydwindled because of its link with "indecent" subject matter. Althoughthe reasons for the collapse of the stereoscope lie elsewhere,as I will thesimulation of tangiblethree-dimensionality hoversuneasilyat suggestshortly, the limitsof acceptable verisimilitude.60 If photographypreserved an ambivalent (and superficial)relation to the codes of monocularspace and geometricalperspective, the relationof the stereoscope to these older formswas one of annihilation,not compromise. Charles Wheatstone'squestion in 1838 was, "What would be the visual effect of simultaneously presentingto each eye, instead of the object itself,its projection on a plane surfaceas it appears to that eye?" The stereoscopicspectatorsees neither the identity of a copy nor the coherence guaranteed by the frameof a window.
vol. 3, trans.George T. Ladd, New 57. Hermann von Helmholtz,Handbook ofPhysiological Optics, York, Dover, 1962, p. 303. no. 29 (October 58. See Florence de Meridieu, "De l'obsc6nit6 photographique," Traverses, 1983), pp. 86-94. 59. Walter Benjamin, "A Short History of Photography,"Artforum, no. 15 (February 1977), p. 49. The ambivalence with which twentieth-century audiences have received 3-D movies and 60. holographysuggeststhe enduring problematicnature of such techniques.

30

OCTOBER

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of an already reproduced Rather, what appears is the technicalreconstitution world fragmentedinto twononidenticalmodels, models that precede any experience of their subsequent perception as unified or tangible. It is a radical The institutionof the observer'srelationto visual representation. repositioning alization of thisde-centeredobserverand the stereoscope'sdispersedand multiplied sign severed froma point of external referenceindicate a greater break witha classicalobserverthan thatwhichoccurs later in the centuryin modernist painting.The stereoscope signalsan eradicationof "the point of view" around which, for several centuries, meanings had been assigned reciprocallyto an observerand the object of his or her vision. Perspectiveis not even a possibility under the termsof thistechnique of beholding. An observerno longer sees an image that has an intelligibleor quantifiablelocation in space, but rather a composite of two dissimilarimages whose positions refer to the hallucinatory of the observer's body. anatomical structure To fully by the stereoscope,it is important appreciatethe rupturesignified to consider one of its earliest forms,the so-called Wheatstone stereoscope. In in front order to view imageswiththisdevice,an observerplaced his eyes directly

Techniques oftheObserver

31

of two plane mirrorsset 90 degrees to one another. The images to be viewed were held in slots on either side of the observer,and thus were spatiallycompletelyseparated fromeach other. Unlike the Brewsterstereoscope,inventedin Holmes viewer,inventedin 1861, the Wheatstone the late 1840s, or the familiar model made clear the atopic nature of the perceived stereoscopic image, the disjunctionbetween experience and its cause. The later models allowed the viewer to believe that he was looking forwardat something"out there." But the Wheatstonemodel leftthe hallucinatory and fabricated natureof the experience undisguised.It did not supportwhat Roland Barthescalled "the referential There simplywas nothing"out there." The illusionof reliefand of illusion."'61 was thus a subjectiveevent and the observercoupled withthe apparatus depth was the agent of synthesis or fusion. Like the Phenakistiscope and other nonprojectiveoptical devices,the steralso the of the observer. eoscope corporal adjacency and immobility required in are of a modulation the relation between eye part They nineteenth-century and optical apparatus. During the seventeenthand eighteenthcenturies,that had been essentially relationship metaphoric:the eye and the camera obscura or the eye and the telescope or microscopewere allied by a conceptualsimilarity, in whichthe authority of the eye remained unchallenged.62 in the nineBeginning teenthcentury,the relationbetween eye and optical apparatus becomes one of both were now contiguousinstruments on the same plane of operametonymy: The limitsand deficiencies of one tion, withvaryingcapabilitiesand features.63 will be complementedby the capacities of the other and vice versa. The optical apparatus undergoesa shift comparable to thatof the tool as describedby Marx: "From the moment that the tool proper is taken fromman, and fittedinto a In the older, mechanism,a machine takes the place of a mere implement."64 handcraft-based work,he explained, a workman"makes use of a tool," that is, the tool had a metaphoricrelationto the innate powers of the human subject.65
See Roland Barthes, "L'effet de reel," Communications, no. 11 (1968), pp. 84-89; trans.as 61. "The Reality Effect"by Richard Howard, in The Rustleof Language, New York, Hill and Wang, 1986, pp. 141-148. On the telescope as metaphor in Galileo, Kepler, and others, see Timothy J. Reiss, The 62. Discourse Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1980, pp. 25-29. ofModernism, 63. "In Metonymy, phenomena are implicitly apprehended as bearing relationshipsto one anotherin the modality of part-part on the basis of whichone can effect a reduction of one relationships, of the parts to the status of an aspect or functionof the other" (Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical in Nineteenth-Century Imagination Press, 1973, Europe,Baltimore, JohnsHopkins University p. 35). 64. Karl Marx, Capital,vol. 1, p. 374. In thissense, other optical instruments of the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies,like peep shows,Claude glasses,and printviewingboxes had the statusof tools. 65. Ibid., p. 422. J. D. Bernal has noted that the instrumental capacities of the telescope and microscope remained remarkablyundeveloped during the seventeenthand eighteenthcenturies. Until the nineteenthcentury,the microscope "remained more amusing and instructive, in the and practicalvalue" (Science in History, Vol. 2: The Scientific and philosophicalsense, than of scientific IndustrialRevolutions, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1971, pp. 464-469).

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Techniques oftheObserver

33

In the factory, Marx contended, the machine makes use of man by subjecting of part to other parts,and of exchangeability.66 him to a relationof contiguity, Georges Canguilheim makes a crucial distinctionbetween eighteenth-century which derived its idea of utilityfrom its definitionof man as Utilitarianism, of the human sciences in the nineteenth and the instrumentalism toolmaker, which is on "one based implicit postulate:thatthe natureof man is to be century, a tool, thathis vocationis to be set in hisplace and to be set to work.'"67Although "set to work" may sound inappropriatein a discussion of optical devices, the were in fact passive observersof the stereoscopeand Phenakistiscope apparently made into producers, by virtue of specific physical capacities, of forms of verisimilitude. A crucial feature of these optical devices of the 1830s and 1840s is the and the formof subjectionthey undisguisednatureof theiroperationalstructure entail. Even though theyprovide access to "the real," theymake no claim that otherthana mechanicalproduction.The optical experiences the real is anything are clearlydisjunctfromthe images used in the device. They theymanufacture referas much to the functionalinteractionof body and machine as theydo to externalobjects, no matterhow "vivid" the qualityof the illusion.So when the and the stereoscopeeventually disappeared, it was not as part of Phenakistiscope and improvement but ratherbecause these earlier a smoothprocess of invention formswere no longer adequate to currentneeds and uses. One reason for theirobsolescence was thattheywere insufficiently "phantasmagoric,"a word whichAdorno, Benjamin,and othershave used to describe formsof representation after 1850. Phantasmagoria was a name for a specific in of lantern the 1790s and performance early 1800s, which used type magic back projectionto keep an audience unaware of the lanterns.Adorno takes the word to indicate the occultationof productionby means of the outwardappearance of
the product . . . this outer appearance can lay claim to the status of

of the illusion being. Its perfectionis at the same time the perfection that the work of art is a realitysui generis in the thatconstitutes itself realm of the absolute withouthaving to renounce its claim to image the world.68 But the effacement or mystification of a machine's operation was preciselywhat David Brewsterhoped to overcome with his kaleidoscope and stereoscope. He
Marx again indicates the new metonymicstatus of the human subject: "As soon as man, 66. insteadof workingwithan implement on the subject of his labor, becomes merelythe motivepower it is a mere accident that motive power takes the disguise of human of an implement-machine, muscle; and it may equally well take the formof wind, water,or steam" (Capital, vol. 1, p. 375). 67. Canguilhem,"Qu'est-ce que la psychologie,"p. 378. 68. Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner,trans. Rodney Livingstone,London, Verso, 1981, p. 85. On Adorno, Wagner, and phantasmagoria,see Andreas Huyssen, Afterthe Great Divide: Mass Culture, of Indiana Press, 1986, pp. 34-42. Modernism, Postmodernism, Bloomington,University

34

OCTOBER

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Techniques oftheObserver

35

ideas in the nineteenth saw the spread of scientific centuryunderoptimistically of and he the presented a cursory possibility phantasmagoriceffects, mining in of of of civilization terms the development technologiesof illusionand history a Scottish Calvinist,the maintenanceof barbarism, For Brewster, apparition.69 and had been founded on closelyguarded knowledgeof always popery tyranny, which and highercastesruled. But his and the secrets acoustics, by priestly optics and mass of techniquesof democratization dissemination the impliedprogram, older of onto a model that illusion,simply singlehuman subject, collapsed power observer the each into transforming simultaneously magician and the deceived. Even in the later Holmes stereoscope the "concealment of the process of production" did not reallyoccur.70 Clearly the stereoscopewas dependent on a inconvenient physicalengagementwiththe apparatus whichbecame increasingly and unacceptable,but more importantly, the abstractand synthetic natureof the could never be An effaced. stereoscopicimage fully apparatus openlybased on a of on an awkward "binocular" principle disparity, body, and on an illusion from of derived the referent the patently binary stereoscopic card of paired would a form to that illusion images,inevitably give way preservedthe referential more fully before it. Photography thananything also defeatedthe stereoscopeas a mode of visual consumptionbecause it recreated and perpetuated the fiction that the "free" subject of the camera obscura was still viable. Photographs seemed to be a continuationof older "naturalistic" pictorial codes but only because theirdominantconventionswere restricted to a narrowrange of technical possibilities (that is, shutterspeeds and lens openings that rendered elapsed But photographyhad already abolished the inseparability time invisible).7" of observer and camera obscura, bound togetherby a single point of view, and made the new camera an apparatus fundamentally independentof the spectator, and incorporealintermediary between yet whichmasqueraded as a transparent observerand world. The prehistory of the spectacle and the "pure perception" of modernismare lodged in the newlydiscovered territory of a fullyembodied viewer,but the eventual triumphof both depends on the denial of the body, its pulsingsand phantasms,as the ground of vision.72

Sir David Brewster,Letters on Natural Magic, New York, J. J. Harper, 1832, pp. 15-21. 69. This device is describedby itsinventorin Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Stereoscope and the 70. vol. 3, no. 20 (June 1859), pp. 740-752. Monthly, Stereograph,"Atlantic For the disruptive of Muybridgeand Marey on nineteenth-century 71. effect codes of "naturalissee Noel Burch, "Charles Baudelaire Versus Doctor Frankenstein," tic" representation, Afterimage, nos. 8-9 (Spring 1981), pp. 10-13. On the problem of modernism,visionand the body, see the recentwork of Rosalind Krauss, 72. no. 36 (Spring 1986), pp. 147-154; and "Where's Poppa," for example, "Antivision," October, at Nova ScotiaSchoolofArt,Thierryde Duve, in, Marcel DuchampCentennial Conference forthcoming ed., Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.