206 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE at the difficulty of imagining unmediated metaphors, and most will not share Limon’s worry that it will be all up for literature if science should arrive at a unified theory of reality before modern literary theory can destroy the possibility. Indeed, provocative as some of Limon’s remarks about mechanization are, historians of technology may wonder whether the defense of literature requires such anguish. Joseph W. Slade Dr. Slade is director of the School of Telecommunications at Ohio University. He is coeditor ofBeyond, the Two Cultures: Essays on Science, Technology, and Literature (Iowa State University Press) and author of Thomas Pynchon, which has been reissued by Peter Lang. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. By Jonathan Crary. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. Pp. ix+ 171; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $19.95. It is something of a commonplace to begin the history of photog raphy with a glance backward toward its “precursors,” as they are invariably construed: the camera obscura, perhaps the stereoscope, the diorama, and various other image-making devices whose popu larity presumably paved the way for the invention of the photo graphic camera. It is the thesis ofJonathan Crary’s challenging book, however, that what is at work here is not a linear evolution from a rather more simple to a rather more complex technical instrument but a fundamental break in the constitution of the viewing subject that had already set in, he asserts, around 1830. Photography did not herald the new regime; it ratified it. “One who sees,” Crary argues, is “one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations” (p. 6). Accordingly, the task he sets himself is to delineate the system of discursive, social, technological, and institu tional relations that constitute the observing subject of the 19th century. Photography, in this light, is but an adjunct of what has been called the “modernization” of the individual, the remapping of mind and body to render them serviceable to the requirements of 19thcentury capitalism and industrialism. The key to this process is what Crary calls the “relentless abstraction of the visual.” Corresponding to the formation of a new social self is a progressive shift of the locus of vision away from the autonomous “seeing subject” (with apologies to Descartes’s ego cogito), securely situated in space and time, to one characterized by the multiple, subjective, £nd mechanically mediated perspectives whose discovery was supposedly the achievement of the modernist painters later in the century. The leading indicator of this process is the shift away from geometric optics, which had dominated the theory of vision since the Renaissance and which govern the operation of the camera obscura, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 207 and toward a theory rooted physiologically in the body. The signifi cance of this thesis, whose subtlety can only be hinted at here, is to suggest that the history of technology—in this case technologies of visual representation—may be recast as the study of “a new arrange ment of knowledge about the body and the constitutive relation of that knowledge to social power” (p. 17). The body of the modern viewer, no less than that of the laborer or the prisoner, becomes an object of standardization, regulation, and control. This is a demanding book, written by an art historian who is steeped in recent theoretical debates about the character of modernity. Behind it lies the work of Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem, who have sought to demonstrate how the modern subject came into being, disciplined, measurable, and productive; the analyses of Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard of the manner in which not only tangible commodities but signs, symbols, and images become objects of circulation and consumption under the regime of late capitalism; and, from Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, the analysis of the “phantasmagoria” of bourgeois life in the mid-19th century. Crary makes no concessions to those who may not be immersed in this recondite literature, which is regrettable if only because it will limit unnecessarily the readership of his fascinating, provocative study. His work, and the theoretical controversies on...
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Jan 1, 1994
Donald B Zobel 
Open Access