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Rethinking the camera eye: dispositif

and subjectivityChristian Quendler

a

a Department of American Studies , University of Innsbruck ,Innrain 52, 6020, Innsbruck, Austria

Published online: 26 Oct 2011.

To cite this article: Christian Quendler (2011) Rethinking the camera eye: dispositif

and subjectivity, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 9:4, 395-414, DOI:

10.1080/17400309.2011.606530

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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Rethinking the camera eye: dispositifand subjectivity

Christian Quendler*

Department of American Studies, University of Innsbruck, Innrain 52, 6020 Innsbruck,Austria

Metaphors of the camera eye are among the oldest and most powerful tropes

to depict human vision and subjectivity. As a proto-cybernetic metaphor thatlends 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 Rene Descartess

discourse on Optics and as a gravedigger for classical notions of subjectivity

in Dziga Vertovs radically constructivist aesthetics of the kino-eye. By

looking at Descartess early modern and Vertovs 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 Paechs

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 ofmedium, discourse and genre.

Keywords: dispositif; camera; Dziga Vertov; kino-eye; Rene Descartes

The work of the camera eye, like the work of any verbal or nonverbal metaphor,

is to bridge gaps or open up and accommodate spaces that seem foreign, uncanny

or cognitively impenetrable to us. We can describe the work of metaphors, figures

and tropes or any given conceptual configuration as creating new mental spaces

that blend elements of familiar mental frames. By projecting similarities and

differences between the camera and the eye, metaphors of the camera eye havebeen variously employed to account for mechanisms of both media and the mind.

The camera and the eye in these uses function metonymically as they stand in for

the entire human and cinematographic (or photographic) apparatus,

respectively.1

In a historical sense, the fusion of camera and eye can be interpreted as a

modern expression of the age-old philosophical dream of returning to an original

unity. Only this time the return promises the entrance into a cybernetic paradise

that is entirely the creation of a human engineer. If the camera, which stands in

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*Email: [email protected]

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Vol. 9, No. 4, December 2011, 395414

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for the medial dispositif, and the eye, which stands in for the human perceptual

and cognitive disposition, are united, then their horizons seem to converge intoone and the same screen, which in outlining the discourse that is projected onto

it may be likened to the rhetorical notion of the dispositio (see Table 1). In this

interpretation, the discourse displayed on the screen appears to be the product of a

single unitary force. The mind as a screen is a powerful and equally flawed

explanatory analogy that expresses this desire. It resolves the complications of

thinking about discourse as co-determined by structures of the dispositif and

receptive dispositions. This paper revisits the relationship between dispositif and

subjectivity by examining how figures of the camera eye align with regimes of

visibility with discursive regimes. How are orders of discourse informed by

regimes of light? How are they accommodated by genres and practices of use thatshape a cultural habitus? Since camera-eye conceptions are geared towards

calibrating media and senses, analyzing them sheds light on these questions.

Taking up Joachim Paechs suggestion (2003) of thinking about dispositifin a

conceptual triad with the rhetorical notion of the dispositio and the psychological

category of disposition, I will discuss how regimes of visibility organized by a

dispositif can be seen to encroach upon discursive regimes either to construct or

deconstruct classical notions of subjectivity. To illustrate this, my examples will

come from historical extremes, the beginnings of a philosophy of the subject in

the early modern period of the sixteenth century and the radical way of rethinking

subjectivity during the modernist period in the twentieth century. I will suggest a

dialogic exchange between Rene Descartess Means of Perfecting Vision which

he discusses in the seventh discourse of his treatise on Optics (published together

with his Discourse on Method in 1637) and Dziga Vertovs ideas on the forever

perfectible kino-eye, which he propagated in the 1920s in numerous manifestoes

and filmic works.

1. Camera and dispositif

In retrospect, the camera eye appears like a relict of a bygone modernity, a time

long before the indifferentiation of human and technological organs in the digital

matrix. The camera eye has become above all an emblem of cinematic modernism,where camera vision promised to synthesize the experience of modernity

Table 1. Orders and domains in camera eye and mind screen notions.

Token Camera Screen EyeOrder Dispositif Dispositio DispositionDomains Regime of the

visible/sayableDiscourse space Psychological realm of

perception, emotion, etc.

Culturalhabitus Genres (practices of use)

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(see, e.g. Casetti 2008; North 2005; Ranciere 2006). Modernist invocations of the

camera are often paradoxical; they emerge as vanishing points where a number ofopposites converge: the objective and the subjective, the real and the imaginary,

the conscious and the unconscious, the organic and the mechanical, the inside and

the outside, the private and the public, the pure visibility of the spectacle and the

ordering principle of narrative (or, as Jacques Ranciere [2006] has put it, opsis and

muthos).

If the camera eye served as a means to re-negotiate such oppositions, it may

be tempting to conclude that in a post-humanist and post-cinematic age, the

conjunction between camera and eye or between camera and man has become

obsolete. What can the old prosthesis of the camera eye still show us today? As

William Brown points out in his insightful essay Man without a Movie Camera Movies without Men: Towards a Posthumanist Cinema? (2009), the case is far

more complicated. Not only do film scholars apply the label camera for moving

images that were made without a camera but, as Edward Branigan argues in

Projecting a Camera (2006), notions of the camera are themselves projections

generated within specific film theoretical language games. While a camera may be

perceived as a mechanical device used to record an event that lies outside the

world represented on a screen, its signification is bound to the formal and informal

languages we use to see it (Branigan 2006, 18). Parsing a century of film theory,

Branigan surveys a catalogue of camera conceptions that range from material

definitions of the camera as an origin of sensory display to semiotic and cognitive

labels or shorthand descriptions for viewing hypotheses. Notions of camera cut

across profilmic and postfilmic understandings that invoke the camera as pointing

devices and narrative agents. A camera may be seen to express mental and bodily

states or encode mechanisms of the unconscious. Branigans study on camera

conceptions examines what happens in film theory after a camera has done its

magic. While camera work typically precedes the projection of a film, it is the

viewers reception that projects a camera. By addressing the viewers or critics

projections, Branigan draws attention to the complex processes of aligning the

spaces generated by a visual technology with the language games that seek to

conceptualize these spaces.

The two sides of the camera and its polyvalence as a theoretical concept haveinteresting parallels to the philosophical and methodological implications of the

concept of dispositif that gained currency in the wake of Michel Foucaults

writing in the 1970s.2 Philosophically, Foucaults conception of the term

responds to the demands of a theory of immanence. Not unlike Gilles Deleuzes

and Felix Guattaris notion of the rhizome, the notion of the dispositif belongs to

a tradition of twentieth-century philosophy that theorizes the limits or premises of

knowledge without assuming a meta-stance or committing teleological fallacies.

Rather than seeking an encompassing principle, the dispositif approaches the

outside of knowledge in the intervening spaces of networks. In What is an

Apparatus?, Giorgio Agamben has offered an intellectual genealogy that linksFoucaults notion of the dispositif to the theological legacy of the Christian

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church. He traces the dispositif back to the Greek notion of the term oikonomia,

which between the second and sixth century came to signify a division in God asbeing and praxis: the nature and essence on the one hand, and the operation

through which He administers and governs the created world on the other

(Agamben 2009, 11). While traditionally, operations are thought of as behavior

grounded in essence or metaphysical cause, twentieth-century philosophy has

challenged this hierarchy by re-conceptualizing being as process or by attributing

the operational mechanism an autonomy of thought. Henri Bergson and Martin

Heidegger are often cited as philosophical patrons who criticized substantial

conceptions of being. Cybernetic philosophy of the 1940s and 1950s represents

another influential approach to deconstructing the subject as an autonomous

agent. Notably, Deleuzes and Felix Guattaris reflections on machinic thinkingin Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980) bring together both

philosophical traditions (Welchman 1997).

Methodologically, Foucault (1980, 194) views the heuristic power of the

dispositifin its translinguistic application for a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble

consisting of discourse, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory ideas, decisions,

laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical moral and

philanthropic proposition. Defined in functional and relational terms, the dispositif

can help to conceptualize relations that cut across oppositions and interdependent

structures such as the subject and the object, body and mind, form and medium

(Peeters and Charlier 1999). In his interpretation of Foucault, Deleuze has described

dispositifs as:

neither subjects nor objects, but regimes which must be defined from the point ofview of the visible and from the point of view of that which can be enunciated, withthe drifting, transformations and mutations which this will imply. And in everyapparatus [dispositif] the lines break through thresholds, according to which theymight have been seen as aesthetic, scientific, political, and so on.

Thus conceived as an in-between, the dispositif mediates between the world of

objects (including the material support structure of the dispositif) and it informs

the space that extends between the subject and the object. This functional

definition implies that the specific historical or cultural configuration of the

dispositif can only be resolved as relations to the physical or material world. Putdifferently, the space shaped by the dispositif is an engineered space. As a

threshold of information, it defines the relation between subject and object as

regimes of what can be seen and expressed. This is why the dispositif always

involves a process of objectification and, as Foucault and Deleuze stress, subject

formation.

Paech has criticized Deleuzes definition of the dispositiffor conflating the

spaces construed by media with the dimensions gauged by discourse. Rather

than viewing media and discourses as exhausting themselves in a series of

entanglements and mix-ups, Paech proposes distinguishing between medium

and discourse as different places or orders of subject formation. For this reason,he reserves the concept of the dispositif for the place where media arrange

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elements. He considers the dispositif in a conceptual triad with the rhetorical

notion of the dispositio and the aesthetic-psychological concept of thedisposition. The dispositifrefers to a space of interaction and communication

organized by media assemblies where things become visible and virtually

available to be identified discursively. The dispositio refers to an intentional

ordering of things in discourse in order to achieve a certain persuasive effect.

Dispositio may be described as a model of coherence, as a logic or grammar

that structures an argument. It is the proper method of discourse championed by

Descartes, which begins by delimiting, defining and outlining the subject

matter of discourse. Or rather, such an introductory outline is the rhetorical

application of the dispositio; it is an outline, map or model transformed into

discourse. Thus, a prominent place where the dispositio manifests itself is inthe segmentation of discourse and the network of the critical apparatus.

Another crucial device for showing the order of discourse are diagrams. (In this

paper, the ordering of discourse in the medial space of the dispositif is

illustrated by modeling the diagrams on the principle of refraction, which

provides the backbone for Descartess Optics; on Thinking in Diagrams see

Mullarkey [2006, chap. 5].)

Paech describes the dispositio as co-determined by dispositif and disposition,

the cognitive and affective attitudes and beliefs that inform behavior. Disposition

may be considered a virtual system of knowledge in contrast to the actual

manifestations of knowledge engendered by this system. This understanding of

disposition faces a problem that is analogous to the division between being and

praxis that, for Agamben, lies at the heart of the concept of the dispositif. Ludwig

Wittgenstein (1958, 149) draws attention to this analogy when he emphasizes the

operational sense in our conceptions of disposition. He describes disposition as a

state of mind that is more like the state of a mental apparatus (perhaps the brain)

by means of which we explain the manifestations of that knowledge. Yet, he

adds, there are objections to speaking of a state of mind here, inasmuch as there

ought to be different criteria for such a state: a knowledge of the construction of

the apparatus, quite apart from what it does (Wittgenstein 1958, 149 50).

Genres and conventional practices of media that inform a cultural habitus can

thus be seen to emerge recursively from blending principles or mechanisms ofdiscourse and understanding.3

To illustrate this, we may place the dispositif in series with the dispositio

and disposition. Together they structure the intervening spaces where inten-

tionality as the flow between the subject and object is refracted (see Figure 1).

Traditionally, the relation between subject and object is represented as some

sort of equation where identity and truth are seen as successful or satisfying

correlations. The dispositif projects a discursive order of things that seems

congruent with the order of things organized by the hierarchy of our senses. In

this model, congruence means that each point in the object correlates with one

point in the subject, which, as I will show in my discussion of Descartes, is theclassical premise of obtaining a clear focus on the object.


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There are many ways of establishing correlations between dispositif and

disposition and whether we find them successful or satisfactory depends to a large

extent on the appeal of the discourse that organizes the correlations. One way of

doing this is to conceive of a convergent evolution as the biochemist and Nobel

Prize winner George Wald (1950, 32) proposed in accounting for the resemblances

between the camera and the eye:

Of all the instruments made by man, none resemble a part of his body more than thecamera does the eye. Yet this is not by design. A camera is no more a copy of an eyethan the wing of a bird is a copy of that of an insect. Each is the product of an

independent evolution; and if this has brought the camera and the eye together, it isnot because one has mimicked the other, but because both have had to meet thesame problems, and have frequently done so in the same way. This is the type ofphenomenon that biologists call convergent evolution, yet peculiar in that the oneevolution is organic, the other technological.

For Wald the frame of reference that organizes the convergence of camera and

eye is the biological model of evolution. Biology subsumes technology. Although

biological frames of reference were common in early histories of film that

compared the development of film to the growth and decline of a biological

organism, such versions of film history, which David Bordwell (1997, 1326)

has dubbed the basic story, have been refuted by later generations of scholars as

overdetermined and teleological. Yet, we can find similar kinds of reasoningwhenever orders of the dispositif and orders of the disposition seem to converge.

The organizing constraints of convergences may be ontological or idealistic as in

the case of Bazins myth of a total cinema, or the constraints maybe founded upon

ideological grounds as in Braudys apparatus theory, or embedded in a psycho-

analytical framework as in the later works of Christian Metz. Notwithstanding the

differences between these film theoretical approaches, they all aim at blending

aspects of the cinematic dispositif and the viewers disposition in order to make

the filmic discourse determined by one unitary force (see Figure 2).

Another way to look at this model is to consider how the dispositif, dispositio

and disposition affect the extensions of the subject and object. Terminologies inphenomenology and media theory offer an interesting point of intersection when

Object

P1 P2'

P1'P2

DispositionDispositioDispositif Subject

Figure 1. Subject object relations refracted by dispositif, dispositio and disposition.

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they talk about resolution (cf. Le Morvan 2005): high resolution means the

medium is transparent and the delimiting lines between subject and object are

concise. In Figure 1, this is suggested by having each point in the object correlate

with a point in the subject. Translucent or opaque states can be considered as low

resolutions that diffuse one-to-one correlations between subject and object.

However, we may arrive at a different idea of resolution if we invert the figure-and-ground relation. If we focus on the intervening spaces organized by the

dispositif, dispositio and disposition, the subject and object become, as it were, a

fuzzy background and what emerges in high resolution are the figures of motion

or flow between subject and object (see Figure 3).

2. Descartes and Vertov on perfecting vision

In order to illustrate consequences of this figure ground inversion for conceptions

of media, discourse and subjectivity, I want to propose an unlikely conjunction

Object Disposition

Dispositio

Dispositif Subject

Figure 2. The convergence model.

Object DispositionDispositioDispositif Subject

Figure 3. The figure ground model.


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between Descartess theory of vision modeled on the camera obscura and Dziga

Vertovs futurist vision of the kino-eye. While this juxtaposition of ideas fromearly modern philosophy and twentieth-century avant-garde cinema must seem

historically irresponsible, it may be tolerated as an experiment in thought. Rather

than suggesting an evolutionary logic between Descartess metaphysical

investment in the camera obscura and Vertovs futurist celebration of the kino-

eye, I will consider their conceptions of visual technologies as two paradigmatic

approaches towards a theory of subjectivity. The different ways in which Descartes

and Vertov blend notions of camera and eye highlight the bi-directionality of

cameraeye metaphors, which lend themselves to both anthropomorphic and

mechanomorphic readings and engender respective notions of subjectivity.

Both Descartes and Vertov approach perceptual technologies as scientificinstruments where vision becomes synonymous with the production of truth. As

Jonathan Crary (1990, 2567) observes, the camera obscura does not simply

provide a model for human vision but, more importantly, a new model of con-

sciousness and subjectivity. The camera obscura is the place of a twofold

reflection: the observation of empirical phenomena and the reflective introspection

of observation. This double reflection makes the camera obscura an ideal

metaphor for human consciousness. In this model, the mind becomes sensitive

screen, upon which impulses are impressed and reflected. However, in contrast to a

projection screen, the reflection is not returned back to the world but thrown into a

deeper recess, where it appears for the second time. In classical logic, this

superimposition of the second reflection (I see) onto the first reflection (image)

constitutes a minimal definition of consciousness (see Gunther 1957). In

Descartess diagram, which blends an anatomical depiction of an eye with the

geometric model of a camera obscura, this screen may be located as the shaded

field (see Figure 4). The shaded field delimits the space where the retinal image

becomes a conceptual image. Notably, it provides a common background for

both the first (optical) and second (cognitive) reflection. When viewed against

the white background, the shaded field outlines an interface that includes the inner

body of the eye, which is linked to the nervous system, and the mind represented

by the head of the homunculus. It excludes the body of the homunculus from the

shoulder downwards (representing perhaps the body of the mind). As I will discussbelow, the way the shaded field divides the eye indicates where Descartes

conceives of a linkage for aided vision.

As a site where relations between the outside world and the observing self are

negotiated, the camera obscura can be read as a figuration of subjectivity. It

serves as a laboratory where the laws of nature interface with human or man-

made laws of physics, mathematics and logic. It is not surprising that the camera

obscura has also become a popular refuge for the Baconian project of the so-

called mastery of nature.

In Optics, Descartess application of the law of refraction not only helps to

account for principles of human vision, it also enables him to point to certainshortcomings in the provisions nature has made. The conclusions Descartes

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draws from these insights have extensive ramifications. While human vision,

insofar as it is a product of nature, cannot be improved, technologically aided

vision is perfectible. Technology not only allows human beings to see more and

better, it also fundamentally changes the function of seeing altogether. As Neil

M. Ribe (1997, 60) puts it, the ultimate role of Cartesian optics is to raise the

eye from an instrument of self-preservation to one of scientific knowledge.

Descartes himself has described this transformation as a habitual perversion of

the order of nature:

I have been accustomed to pervert the order of nature, because these perceptions of

the sense, although given me by nature merely to signify to my mind what things are

beneficial and hurtful to the composite whole of which it is a part, and being

sufficiently clear and distinct for that purpose, are nevertheless used by me as

infallible rules by which to determine immediately the essence of the bodies that

exist out of me, of which they can of course afford me only the most obscure andconfused knowledge. (1641, 97)

Figure 4. Diagram form Descartess discourse on Optics (1664).


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Although the scientific endeavor remains committed to a project of illuminating

the obscure realms of nature, it also points towards a scientific decoupling fromnature to make room for an engineered world.4 Descartess misuse of sensory

perception blends the human disposition towards sensory perception with the

dispositio of the scientific reasoning. He does so by modeling this blend on the

regime of light organized by the law of refraction. In other words, Descartess

discourse Of the Means of Perfecting Vision is also a discourse on the proper (or

transparent) alignment of the orders of the dispositif, dispositio and disposition.

Some 300 years later, in 1920s Moscow, this kind of detachment from nature

finds a radical expression in Vertovs concept of the kino-eye. Inspired by

constructivism and futurism, Vertov developed the idea of the kino-eye together

with his wife Elizaveta Svilova and his brother Mikhail Kaufmann and promotedit in a number of programmatic writings and filmic works. As Yuri Tsivian (2004,

58) has emphasized, Vertov was strongly influenced by the art-denying spirit of

constructivism and the revolutionary movement. In contrast to Sergei Eisenstein,

he conceived of the kino-eye above all as a scientific project. The language of the

kino-eye for Vertov was one of higher mathematics and its ultimate goal was the

production of truth. In an article on The Birth of the Kino-Eye dated 1924, he

notes: Not kino-eye for its own sake, but truth through the means and

possibilities of the film-eye, i.e. kinopravda [film-truth] (Vertov 1924, 41).

As an instrument of scientific knowledge, the kino-eye subsumes virtually all

existent cinematic techniques and inventions. Set out to discover regularities in

the accidental and to explore the laws that govern the chaos of life the kino-eye

resorts to microscopic, telescopic and X-ray vision; it operates on remote control

and shows things in slow or accelerated motion; and it introduces mathematical

and psychological principles to its editing method. Not unlike Descartes,

Vertovs enthusiasm for the camera as metaphor for seeing is based on an idea of

technological perfectibility: We cannot improve the making of our eyes, but we

can endlessly improve the camera (Vertov 1923, 15).

Set against this common concern of exploring visual technologies as an

instrument of scientific knowledge, I will now take a closer look at their

respective ideas on perfecting vision, their implied notions of subjectivity and its

relations to medium and discourse. How does place and order of the dispositiffacilitate transparency or high resolution? What kind of discursive order is

modeled on this transparency? The first question addresses inferences made

between the media dispositif and the human disposition. It is concerned with the

linkage or continuity through which media become extensions of the senses. The

second question will deal with the distinction of seeing better and seeing more

as a cultural hierarchy of practices of seeing and their embodiment in genres and

discourse types.

Descartes begins his discourse Of the Means of Perfecting Vision by

suggesting that (in principle) they can be applied to three things: the objects

seen, the internal organs that receive the impulses of these objects, and theexternal organs, which dispose these impulses to be received as they ought

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(1637, 114). Descartes has little to say about the objects of vision and explicitly

brackets internal organs from his discussion. Since we cannot change theobjects themselves, their treatment becomes simply a question of mise-en-

scene: that is, placement and lighting. He has even less to say about internal

organs, meaning the nervous system and the brain. Even if it were possible to

improve or modify them, he argues, such an endeavor would be a concern of

medicine and is thus irrelevant for his subject matter. This leaves Descartes

with the external organs, which include, quite remarkably, both the transparent

parts of the eye, as well as the all the other bodies that we can place between the

eye and the object (1637, 114).

Descartes considers four conditions or provisions for perfecting sight. The

first one may be called clear focus: rays that reach the optic nerve in the retinashould correspond (as far as possible) to a single point in the object. The rays

must not be altered in intervening space between object and eye as to avoid

diffusion, distortion and obscurity and to guarantee a distinct resemblance

between object and image. The second condition concerns the size or

resolution of the image. It should be large in the sense that its lineaments or

lines can be easily discerned. The third provision regards image brightness in

relation to its impact on the optic nerves. Finally, Descartes considers the angle or

field of vision: we should see as many objects as possible at a single glance

(1637, 115).

With the notable exception of the last provision, Descartes (1637, 115)

maintains, nature although it presumably has done all that is possible falls

short of perfection. For instance, near- and farsightedness are imperfections of

clear focus that result from the limited range of curving and changing the body

of the eye. Yet, they are imperfections that can be amended by applying the law

of refraction. In the case of the second condition, image size, Descartes

(underestimating the role of refraction) erroneously views this deficiency

mainly as a matter of the size of the eye, that is, the distance between the retina

and the point of intersection of the rays. For Descartes the best way to magnify

images is to increase the distance between this point of intersection and the

retina by extending the natural eye with a long tube filled with water:

Descartess prototype of the telescope. Since Descartes considers the outerbody of the eye and optical lens of the same category, this extension is almost a

natural process: Sight will take place as if Nature had made the eye longer

(1637, 120). Ribe (1997, 545) in this context, suggests that Descartes has the

natural eye give birth to a telescope.

Descartes adds little to the issue of image brightness. He considers three

methods of adjusting the brightness of an image. The first one is to place cloudy

objects or veils between the eyes and the objects of observation, or to use

additional sources of light (gathered by means of mirrors or burning glass). Since

this option is only available for accessible objects, Descartes also discusses

widening and narrowing the aperture as means of adjusting image brightness intelescopes. As a third way of improving the brightness of vision, he mentions


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training to look at extremely bright objects or to discern objects in the dark but

immediately discards them:

these things belong rather to medicine, whose purpose is to remedy the deficiency of

sight through the correction of natural organs, than to Optics, whose purpose is only

to minister to the same deficiency through the application of other organs that are

artificial. (Descartes 1637, 126)

As pointed out in Descartess diagram (Figure 4), for him the nexus between

artificial and natural organs is the outer body. It is along the outlines of the shaded

field that the optical lens and the outer body of the eye form a homogeneous

threshold, where the law of nature coincides with the law of refraction.

As mentioned before, the only condition where Descartes cannot find a way to

improve nature is the field or angle of vision. However, for him the convenienceof seeing more is only of relative importance. In fact, it conflicts with the

imperative of seeing distinctly: Seeing more, Descartes (1637, 125) argues, is

principally useful only in order to ascertain toward what direction we must

subsequently turn the eye in order to look at the one which we will wish to

consider better. It is for this finding function that the provision of seeing more

is included in Descartess description of the three-barreled telescope:

as these telescopes make objects appear larger, they let us see less of them at one

glance it is even necessary, besides this, to join the most perfect ones to some

others with less strength, through the aid of which we can, as if by degrees, come to

know the location of the object that these more perfect ones can make us perceive.(1637, 156)

The telescope in this sense not only perfects vision but also reconciles at least

serially seeing more and seeing better as two aspects of seeing, which

Descartes considers mutually incompatible in unaided vision.

What is important is that the function of selective approximation that is

attributed to seeing more is strictly subservient to what is already a given object.

Observing subjects must not be found out by their objects of observation. The

subservience of seeing more to seeing better is a necessary premise to ensure a

one-directional causal determination. For the same reason the telescopic eye in

being like nature rules out other additional forms of determination. Descartesssubordinate integration of seeing more and seeing better on principles of

selection and distinction has been a key source for a long tradition of thinking about

cinema. Vsevolod Pudovkin is an early important theoretician in point. His

psychological definition of montage as the filmic organization of time and space

that results in a clear and distinct impression (Pudovkin 1925, 16) has had a

strong impact on later generations of film scholars (cf., e.g. Lindgren 1948).

In this scientific rationale, the process of discovery and recognition or the

observers subjective and technological investment is necessarily edited out.

Pudovkins equation of the cameras lens with the viewers eye, like Descartess

subsumption of the lens and the outer body of the eye as one category, presupposesa continuity of body and media that finds its expression in the clarity and

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distinctness of the observation and its ensuing discourse. Pudovkins camera eye is

an observation in postproduction that entails the process of editing modeled onscientific exposition:

Just as a scholar preparing an article setting out the course and results of his researchcarefully plans and constructs it, discarding what is superfluous and leaving in whatis essential, sometimes dwelling on a characteristic detail and sometimes confininghimself to general observations, so too the film-maker in the process of montageexposition must retain the viewers attention in the appropriate manner and thusimbue his work with the necessary credibility. (1925, 16)

Like expositional writing, cinematic exposition combines principles of selection

and combination and strives to make a cogent and persuasive argument. In The

Film Director and Film Material, Pudovkin (1926, 78) explicates this, suggesting

that [m]ontage, like living language, uses words whole pieces of exposed film

and sentences combination of these pieces. Coherent vision and clarity are

inferred as imperative generic aspects for considering the camera eye as an integral

element of cinematic exposition. The metonymical chain of eye, observation and

scientific exposition informs a correlating chain of camera, montage and cinematic

exposition.

This scientific logic and its conception of technology differ radically from

what goes on in procedures of experimental arrangements that identify objects

approximately through loops of positive and negative feedback (which is

facilitated by the built-in homing function of the three-barreled telescope). Here

technology is recognized as a subject object relation. The subjectivity andobjectivity are distributed over the intervening space that is organized by the

medium, the discourse and the recipients disposition (see Figure 3). As an

expression of desire, the medium becomes a vehicle for the objective part of our

subjectivity. An early reformulation of metaphysics and classical logic that

introduces technology and engineering as the excluded third can be found in

Gotthard Gunthers cybernetic philosophy. Gunther (1957, 67) argues that if

figures of fantasy and imaginations are expressions of consciousness in the form

of intentions or actions directed inwardly, then technology can be attributed a

sense of consciousness in that they are expressions of intentionality and action

directed outwardly. Alternatively, as Gunther (1979) put it later, technology isthe only historical form in which volition can express itself in a generally binding

form (my translation).

Such a reflexive definition of technology can help us to interpret what is

perhaps the most controversial passage in Vertovs manifesto of The Council of

Three (1923).5 Having asserted the superiority of camera vision over human

sight on the basis of technological perfectibility, Vertov calls for the

emancipation of the camera, which so far had been forced to copy the work

of the human eye (Vertov 1923, 16). The affirmation of the kino-eye with its own

dimensions of time in space culminates in the point of self-affirmation, which in

the manifesto is mimicked by a conspicuous pronominal shift from thefilmmakers first person plural to the first-person point of view of the kino-eye:


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I make the viewer see in the manner best suited to my presentation of this or that

visual phenomenon. The eye submits to the will of the camera and is directed by it tothose successive points of the action that, most succinctly and vividly, bring the filmphrase to the height or depth of resolution. (Vertov 1923, 16)

This passage on the kino-eye illustrates well the state of in-betweeness attributed

to the dispositif. It blends subject and object as well as being and praxis. It is at

once actual and virtual in that its actual performance of the kino-eye aims at

exhausting its virtue or full potential. The kino-eye assumes a hybrid identity in

that it signifies both a theory of film and its application. Vertov (1924, 40) stresses

these meta-implications by equating the kino-eye not only with film analysis but

also with a theory of movement along with a theory of how all things are related

on the screen. The ambiguous state of the kino-eye as neither subject nor object is

expressed effectively in its act of self-affirmation, an imaginative leap that

projects the deictic center onto the kino-eye itself. In this deictic projection the

notions of the camera as technique of visibility (to record and present visual

phenomena) and as a means of expression (that generates film phrases) blend

with human scale scenario of actual language use.

The paramount goal of the kino-eye as an instrument of scientific knowledge

is kinesthetic resolution, which we can correlate to Descartess imperative of a

clear and distinct vision. Yet, while Descartess imperative is geared towards

ascertaining an autonomous object, Vertovs resolution is best described as the

visceral effect that results from calibrating technology to the chaos of life.

Through this explorative process, Vertov (1928, 287) argues in his scenario ofMan with a Movie Camera, Lifes chaos gradually becomes clear [ . . . ] Nothing

is accidental. Everything is explicable and governed by law. However, Vertov

saw himself more as a poet than as a theorist and he is never precise about what

exactly makes up the resolution of a film phrase. Yet, this poetic vagueness seems

almost programmatic. His notions of phrase and resolution blend many con-

ceptual domains combining musical, linguistic, literary, scientific, kinesthetic

and mathematical frames of reference. In a Deleuzian sense, the kino-eye

represents a threshold where different kinds of discourse break and diffuse.

While this obscures traditional patterns of coherence, it affords us with different

figures or lines of coherence.Vertovs idea of resolution is linked to his theory of intervals, which became a

recurrent concern throughout his writings of the1920s (Petric 1987). His notions of

phrase and resolution and his theory of intervals share musical connotations.

While phrase further extends to language and writing, resolution refers both to

kinesthesia and music. We can think of Vertovs notion of film language as a

gradual process of abstracting natural languages. In this process, music and his

theory of intervals play a crucial mediating role. Music as the most abstract art

forges a link to the prosodic properties of language and poetry.6 Vertovs theory of

intervals may be compared to a kind of information theory. It is an odd form of

applied mathematics that maps musical structures across kinesthetic patterns andprinciples of perception.

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Intervals organize the order and duration of shots in the montage of film phrase

by correlating a number of visual parameters.In hisParis lecture From Kino-Eye toRadio-Eye, Vertov (1929a, 901) lists as the most important relations of shot

scales, the interaction of camera angles, movements within frames and relations

between recording speeds. Not unlike Pudovkins principles of montage, the aim of

organizing filmwith reference to thetheory of the interval is to intensify the viewing

experience. However, for Pudovkin intensification results from turning the viewing

process into an ideal form of observation; that is, by selecting and combining

elements in such a way that their order coheres to the dispositio of scientific

discourse. For Vertov, increased kinesthetic resolution is geared towards exciting

the sensory motor experienceof thefilmviewer. Theorder of elements in Vertovs

film phrase is not modeled on a preconceived discursive order in the sense of a pre-established synthesis ofdispositifand disposition guided by a persuasive purpose.

Thepersuasive power of Vertovs filmphraseis to be discovered in theresolution of

a pattern that emerges from foregrounding the structures of the dispositif, dispositio

anddisposition. The kino-eye promotes an extension of the regimeof thevisibleand

sayable by combining all kinds of visual technologies and expressive forms. It

outlines film discourse by scientific, musical and verbal models. In addition, it aims

at discarding instilled habits of human embodied perception:

The mechanical eye, the camera, rejecting the human eye as crib sheet, gropes itsway through the chaos of visual events, letting itself be drawn or repelled by

movement, probing as it goes its own movement. It experiments, distending time,dissecting movement, or, in contrary fashion, absorbing time within itself,swallowing years, thus schematizing processes of long duration inaccessible to the

normal eye. (Vertov 1923, 19)

The kino-eye, it seems, learns by adapting possibilities of the cinematic

apparatus to conditions of the visual world it records. The perfectibility of the

camera, which, on the one hand, is opposed to the imperfect human eye, is, on the

other hand, mapped across with the human ability to learn. The kino-eye gains

insights into the chaos of movement by emulating the very movements and

gestures of the visual world, assuming, as it were, their point of view:

Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility, I am in constant motion,I draw near, then away from objects, I crawl under, I climb onto them. I move apacewith the muzzle of a galloping horse, I plunge full speed into a crowd, I outstrip

running soldiers, I fall on my back, I ascend with an airplane, I plunge and soartogether with plunging and soaring bodies. Now I, a camera, fling myself along theirresultant, maneuvering in the chaos of movement, recording movement, startingwith movements composed of the most complex combinations. (Vertov 1923, 17)

This kind of mimetic or emulative learning of the kino-eye becomes the

trajectory for training the perceptual sensibilities of the cameraman or kinok-

pilot, as he commends himself to the cameras experiments in space. The roles of

the cameraman and the director in this process are somewhat ambiguous as they

are at once fully at the service of the camera and the strategic brain that controls,directs, observes and gauges the recordings and presentation of the camera


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(cf. Vertov 1923, 19). The relation between camera and cameraman is seen as

correlative and dialectical: by submitting himself to the will of the camera, thecameraman liberates the camera from the shortcomings of embodied human

perception, which in turn engenders a presentation of life that brings out new

and startling aspects of reality. In other words, the prosthetic function of the

camera as an explorative device blends with an elaborate scenario of mutual

emancipation, in which the camera vis-a-vis the cameraman is seen as co-

operative agents.

It is also in this context that we can place the generic framing of Vertovs

Man with a Movie Camera as fragments or extracts from the diary of

cameraman. The revival of the diary and memoirs as a literary form at the

beginning of the twentieth century provides an important historical context,which in the 1920s Viktor Shklovsky both theorized (in Theory of Prose, 1929)

and practiced (in his memoirs A Sentimental Journey, 1923). Vasily Rozanovs

experimental journals Solitaria (1912) and Fallen Leaves (1913 and 1915),

which explore a new literary form through a polyphonic clash of a variety of

genres (Crone 1978), offered Vertov a literary model of reconciling accounts of

personal everyday experiences with political and journalistic writing. From the

perspective of genetic criticism, the connection between camera work and diary

writing may be traced back to the practice of reporting on dailies (see, e.g.

Bottomores [2003] essay on Charles Brabins diary written while filming in

the UK for Edison in 1913). The diary as a literary counter discourse of a

cameraman taking revenge on commercial mainstream cinema finds an early

satirical treatment in Luigi Pirandellos The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio,

Cinematograph Operator (1916). Conversely, John Dos Passos trilogy U.S.A.

(193036) and Christopher Isherwoods Goodbye to Berlin (1939) are well-

known examples that, inspired by Vertovs Man with a Movie Camera, explore

camera vision as literary mode of autobiographical writing.

Besides the historical intertext, there are also general aspects that bring

journal and memoir writing into the generic proximity of the kino-eye as film

language and writing. As journal and diaries come only with a minimal set of

generic constraints, they can be easily adapted to the heterogeneous discursive

regime of the kino-eye. More importantly, the journal is by definition a work inprogress. If progress is understood in a positive sense, the journal may generate a

narrative of learning. This is particularly true of Mikhail Kaufmans expectations

about the movie, envisioned as a kind of ABC of film writing, a primer or

methodological aid for beginners (Tsivian 2004, 25). We may also look at the

notebook of Man with a Movie Camera in terms of Lev Vygotskys notion of a

zone of proximal development. In this sense, the generic frame of the journal

accommodates an intervening space that is both subjective and objective. It is like

Vertovs kino-pravda expressive both of the external reality of lifes chaos and

internal impressions of an ordinary eye. In this zone of approximation, the

observer-as-camera creates, as Vertov puts it, an organized memo of the ordinaryeyes impressions (1923, 19). The journal also generates what Genette calls

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interpolated narration, a complex form of narration that combines simultaneous

reporting and reporting after the fact. Interpolated presentation not onlyapproximates a fusion of perception and communication, it also allows for all

kinds of positive and negative feedback loops and thus opens up a realm of

interaction in the broadest sense.

In the Man with a Movie Camera, this applies not only to the interaction

between man and camera, but also the process of filmmaking and its exhibition.

In an interview about its reception in Berlin in 1929, Vertov has described the

film as developing along three intersecting lines:

(1) life as it is in reality on the screen, (2) life as it is in reality on the strip of film,

(3) simply: life as it is in reality [ . . . ] By annihilating the boundaries between

spectators and spectacle and by making the process of film production visible to theviewer Man with a Movie Camera navigates lifes chaos. (1929b, 3667)

This breaking down of boundaries between spectators and spectacle is illustrated

well in the framing sequences of the film. The prologue of the film shows the opening

of a theater until the projection begins in an animated fashion that turns the

preparatory phase before the screening into a spectacle. The chairs in the auditorium

unfold themselves and the spark that ignites the projector also cues the orchestras

entrance. The projection setup is cut across shots of the audiences seating. In

rhetorical terms, we may view this juxtaposition as an illustration of how the

theatrical apparatus accommodates (to) the audience and its structures of

expectations.The epilogue of the movie provides a one-minute synopsis of the film and can

be described as a thumbnail version of what Vertov (1923, 19) called an organized

memo of the ordinary eyes impressions. Thematically and formally, the epilogue

brings together recording, editing and perception, which can illustrate the spaces

of the dispositif, dispositio and disposition. The synthesis builds upon three

shot/reverse-shot sequences: one between the audience and the projected film,

another between the cameraman and the visual phenomena he records and the third

between the editor and the filmstrips on her cutting table. Camera and cameraman

find rapprochement in the observation of movement, the editing responds to the

synthesis of mechanical and human eye but cutting along the emergent patterns ofthis synthesis. The visceral effect the editing has on the audience can be seen as a

response to what may be thought of as the body of the image.7

Experiencing the body of the image through the visceral effects of filmmaking

can be regarded as the counterpart to Descartess division of body and mind. As I

have demonstrated throughout this paper, the body in Descartess dualism has an

exclusive and inclusive side. On the one hand, the body of the mind appears to be

excluded in the representation of the homunculus; on the other hand, through a

conceptual unity of lens and vitreous, the body extends to the materiality of

instruments. In contrast to Descartes, the visceral appeal of the kino-eye conceives

of a linkage between camera and eye along the inner organs. In its experimentalalignment of medial and dispositional structures, the kino-eye generates a


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discursive order that is radically at odds with Descartess method of discourse and

classical notions of subjectivity.Vertovs kino-eye is merely one example in a long history that privileges the

heuristic and scientific value of seeing more over the discriminatory practice of

seeing better favored in traditions of analytical philosophy. Seeing more and

making the invisible visible (Vertov 1924, 41) not only require forming new

habits of perception and aesthetic sensibilities that attune to the visible regimes

supported by visual technologies and techniques, they also call for novel ways of

charting the adjustments between dispositif and disposition onto new discursive

orders. Paechs conceptual triad of dispositif, dispositio and disposition offers a

useful distinction for analyzing the ramifications of these adjustments for our

understanding of subjectivity. As formats that are particularly conducive to thisexplorative process, diaries and notebooks have served as popular generic models

for accommodating personal and expressive ways of envisioning and engaging

with the cinematic dispositif. The diary advanced to a key concept in auteur theory

of the 1950s, it experienced a revival in avant-garde and documentary film of the

1960s and 1970s (Sitney 1977, 2002; Lane 2002) and continues to be an important

frame of reference in exploring novel forms of storytelling across new media.

I have suggested viewing Vertovs kino-eye as a model of camera vision that

inverts the figureground relations on which Descartess model is based. As

such, Vertovs kino-eye builds on, or responds to, preconceived similarities

between camera and eye. They provide a backdrop for the disanalogies from

which the kino-eye evolves. For Vertov the differences between camera and eye

serve as an incitement for learning. Yet, the Cartesian model too, involves a

practice learning that goes beyond ingrained habits of perception. Descartes has

described this practice as a habitual misuse of sensory perception. Notably for

him this transformation of a natural disposition is a preliminary premise, which,

like the subjective and objective vanishing points in the kino-eye model (see

Figure 3), may be located at the edges of the diagram. Thus, rather than

considering the two models as exclusive alternatives, we can look at them as

challenges for framework that manages to reconcile them.

AcknowledgementsThe research for this paper was supported by the project of the Austrian Science FundFraming Media: The Periphery of Fiction and Film.

Notes

1. On the theory of blending mental spaces, see Fauconnier and Turner (2002).2. The two sides also play a crucial role in another important theoretical affiliation of the

term dispositif, which Jean-Louis Baudry developed contemporaneously into what hasbecome known as apparatus theory. In his essay Le dispositif: approches me ta-psychologiques de limpression de realite (1975), he distinguishes between appareilde base (the material apparatus required to produce and projectfilms) and dispositif, by

which he refers to the viewing situation of the film. See also Kepley (1996) andRiesinger (2003).

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3. As Paech (1997, 187n54) observes, Pierre Bourdieus concept of the habitus mediates

between both symbolic forms and the disposition in the system of internalized patterns.4. Ribe (1997, 60) has aptly described this process as the replacement of natures

unconscious making with a new, rational artisanship under the direction of theCartasian mind. He continues: In effect, Descartes terminates natures apprenticeshipand reorganizes the enterprise by bringing in a new and more efficient production team.This is not just a metaphor: Descartess attempt to grind hyperboloidal lenses in the1620s was in fact organized as a rudimentary manufacturing business with threeworkers in a well-defined division of labor. We may construe here another parallel toVertovs ideas On the Organization of a Creative Laboratory (1936), in which heoutlined a program for the rationalization of the film production process.

5. For a critique of Vertovs kino-eye from within a classical instrumental logical ofanalytical philosophy, see Turvey (1999).

6. See also Mikhail Kaufmans reflection on film language in Film Analysis (1931,391) where he regards the language of music, rather than natural, verbal languages,as a model for film language.

7. In Man with a Movie Camera visceral effects often synthesize the act of observationwith the event observed; see Petric (1987, 13948).

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