Research Topics for Crary's Techniques of the Observer

Research Topics from Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer

1) Foucault considers that between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the transcendent subject of the Enlightenment became mapped onto the empirical body. During the nineteenth century, the body becomes "like a new continent to be explored." Because knowledge comes from embodiment, the body becomes the site for power and truth. Develop this claim, as made by Crary on pages 78-79, or start with this claim, explain it, then consider its implications in today's technology as implied by Paul Virilo in his essay "From Superman to Hyperactive Man" (in last semester's reader, An Introduction to Cultural Studies, ed. Daryl Ogden). You will want to follow up Virilo's claim with similar ideas posited by contemporary theorists or technology experts.

2) Crary continually links nineteenth century interest in the physiology of vision to demands of industrialization (81, 85). Using these claims as well as Fredrick Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management and texts examining labor and fatigue of workers.

3) Crary claims that the nineteenth century is the beginning of "the visual culture of modernity" which coincides with new "techniques of the observer" (96). The key figure for this new observer/subject is the flaneur who is the "mobile consumer of a ceaseless succession of illusory commodity-like images" (21). Discuss how the flaneur relates to the new visual culture of modernity. Muller's arbitrary relation between stimulus and sensation provides the "illusory" quality for the flaneur's consumption of images. Also, the creation of an "innocence of the eye" provides a means of consuming "new amounts of visual imagery and information increasingly circulated during this same period" (96). For more on the flaneur, also see The Dialectics of Seeing : Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project by Susan Buck-Morss, and The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin. Guy Debord develops the illusory quality of capitalist images in The Society of the Spectecal, of which a key selection can be found in last semester's reader (An Introduction to Cultural Studies, ed. Daryl Ogden).

4) Explain how Cezanne, Ruskin, and Turner develop an "innocence of the eye" and what this implies in terms of how we define the observer. Crary discusses Ruskin and Cezanne at the end of chapter three (95-96) and dedicates a whole chapter to Turner (chapter five). For more on Cezanne, see Merleau-Ponty's "Cezanne's Doubt" (on our class' library e-reserve).

5) Discuss Molyneux's problem and reactions to it by various Enlightenment thinkers and proponents of the "innocents of the eye" during the nineteenth century (57-63, 95). How does the problem itself and the two different types of reactions (Enlightenment and nineteenth century) illustrate different ideas about optics and the subjectivity that vision entails? You may also want to include paintings that illustrate the different ways of thinking about Molyneux's problem, as Crary does.

6) Nietzsche is considered one of the first thinkers of the body. Support this claim by looking at how Crary uses Nietzsche, by explaining the development of nineteenth century physiology (especially Muller) which would accord with Nietzsche's fragmented subject, and by contemporary scholars on Nietzsche (for example, Nietzsche: the Body and Culture by Eric Blondel).

7) By the middle of the nineteenth century, the stereoscopic vision gives way to the "referential illusion" produced by the photography (133). Contrast the mechanical operation of the stereoscope with that of the camera (124-136). According to Crary, each device creates a different kind of observer. The lack of "optical unity" in the planar fields of vision produced by the stereoscope constitutes a fragmented observer (as discussed by Crary on pages 76-79). The photograph, like the camera obscura, creates an assumed unity in the viewer (136, see especially Rosalind Krauss essays in footnote 57). In addition to contrasting the mechanics of each tool, show how each tool constructs a different kind of observer.

8) Discuss the relationship between mathematics and optics in the camera obscura and the stereoscope. (For the camera obscura see my web site on Cartesian optics off of our online text page. Use the footnotes as source material for your research. For the stereoscope, see Crary 120-126.) The contrasts will be between Euclidean geometry, linear perspective, Cartesian mathematics, and rectilinear light of the camera obscura; the "Riemann space" or planar images of the stereoscope (120-126). Each machine produces a different type of observer. After contrasting the machines and their optics, discuss the type of observer each device entails.

9) Explain the nineteenth century idea of the "persistence of vision" as a new way of seeing (Crary 100-112). As Crary suggests in footnote 22, neurophysiological research today suggests other ways to explain "fusion" and "blurring" of images (110). Contrast today's understanding of how motion in pictures works with the nineteenth century idea of "persistence of vision."