Rethinking the camera eye: dispositif and subjectivity

Abstract

Metaphors of the camera eye are among the oldest and most powerful tropes to depict human vision and subjectivity. As a proto-cybernetic metaphor that lends itself both to anthropomorphic and mechanomorphic readings, the camera eye has become a double agent of subjectivity. It has served as midwife for a modern philosophy of the subject in René Descartes's discourse on Optics and as a gravedigger for classical notions of subjectivity in Dziga Vertov's radically constructivist aesthetics of the kino-eye. By looking at Descartes's early modern and Vertov's modernist notions of the camera eye as two paradigmatic case studies, this paper sets out to explore the intricate relation between subjectivity and mediality. It examines figures of the camera eye as conceptual metaphors that construct subjective relations to orders of discourse and media spaces. Drawing on Joachim Paech's reflections on the dispositif for a theory of the order(ing) of media, I will review the concept of the dispositif as strategic place in the alignment of medium, discourse and genre.