Keystone’s mystical sphere: covert transgressions within a disciplinary regime

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ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that the ‘eye-training’ stereoviews of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are full of playful transgressions against the medical regime of ocular discipline in which they were embedded. These views were intended for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes within a project to medicalize and normalize spatial seeing. Read within that framing, they exemplify the influential claims of Jonathan Crary about stereoscopy’s role in the standardization and mechanization of vision, rendering it rational and efficient within an increasingly global system of industrial mass production. But evident within the design of these views is a more complex story. Many of them, visually and conceptually, are direct descendants of early nineteenth-century stereoviews used in rational recreation. These were intended to stimulate critical thinking about how perception and optical deceptions worked and return agency and social power to the observer. Others embody some of the tropes of modernist art of the early twentieth century – mixed-media collage, spatial fragmentation and re-composition, plus a reflexive, ‘meta-pictorial’ logic. Rather than a dull notion of conformity to a standardized spatial regime, these views invite the idea that space is a somewhat arbitrary construction, open to the often witty and creative agency of artist and viewer. They offer a kind of effectivity within modernity that is best understood in class terms.