Crary,Techniques of the Observer (Optimizado)

8/16/2019 Crary,Techniques of the Observer (Optimizado)

1/22

24

Modernity and the Problem of the Observer

ernity, one that Georg Simmel and others were to examine in detail. When

Nietzsche uses quasi-scientific words like influx, adaptation, react, and

irritability, it is about a world that has already been reconfigured into new

\

perceptual components. Modernity, in this case, coinddes with the collapse

I

ofclassicalmodelsof visionand their stablespaceof representations.Instead,

observation isincreasingly a question ofequivalent sensations andstimuli that

( haveno reference to a spatial location. What begins in the 1820sand 1830sis

( a repositioning ofthe observer, outside ofthe fixed relations ofinterior/exte-

\ riorpresupposedbythe cameraobscuraandinto anundemarcatedterrainon

I

whichthe distinctionbetween internalsensationandexternalsignsis irrev-

\ ocablyblurred. Ifthere isevera liberation ofvisioninthe nineteenthcen-

mry,this iswhen itfirst happens. In the absence ofthe juridical model of the

camera obscura, there is afreeing up ofvision, afallingawayof the rigid struc-

mres that had shaped it and constituted its objects.

But almost simultaneous with this final dissolution of a transcendent

foundation forvision emerges aplurality ofmeans to recode the activityofthe

eye, to regiment it, to heighten its productivity and toprevent its distraction.

Thus the imperatives of capitalist modernization, while demolishing the field

of classical vision, generated techniques for imposing visual attentiveness,

rationalizing sensation, and managing perception. They were disdplinary

techniques that required

a

notion of visualexperience as instrumental, mod-

ifiable,and essentially abstract, and that never allowed a real world to aC9uire

solidity or permanence. Once vision became located in the empirical imme-

diacy of the observer s body, it belonged to time, to flux,to death. The guar-

antees of authority, identity, and universality supplied by the camera obscura

are of another epoch.

..JbN4~

CQp,Q 1

TE-CHNI@JGS o.C

I

I1+G Off/6f:R-vbQ. ON ViSiON

) F}OOC-4.NiTV

N nt~

NINe;-~T i Cff\IWQYJ ~~~J

r11T PRE1 IDz Z.

r

2 The Camera Obscura and Its Subject

Ibis kind of knowledge seems to be

the truest, the most authentic, for it

bas the object before itself in its

entirety and completeness. Ibis bare

fact of certainty,

however;

is really

and admittedly the abstractest and

thepoorest kind of truth.

-G. W.F.Hegel

A prevalent tendem;y in methodo-

logical discussion is to approach

problems of knowledge

sub spede

aeternitatis,

as itwere.Statements are

compared with each other without

regard to their history and without

considering that they might belong to

different historical strata.

-Paul Feyerabend

Most attempts to theorize vision and visualityare wedded tomodels that

emphasize a continuous and overarching Western visual tradition. Clearly it

is often strategically necessary to map the outlines of a dominant Western

speculative or scopic tradi tion of vision in some sense continuous, for

instance,from platoto the present, or from the quattrocento into the late nine-


2/22

r

26

The amera Obscura and tsSubject

The amera Obscura and ts Subject

27

teenth century. Myconcern is not so much to argue against these models,

which have their usefulness, but rather to insistthatthere are some important

discontinuities such monolithic constructions have obscured. Again,the spe-

cific account that interests me here, one that has become almost ubiquitous

and continues to be developed in a variety offorms, isthatthe emergence of

photography and cinema in the nineteenth century isthe fulfillment ofa long

unfolding of technological and/or ideological development in the West

whereby the camera obscura evolves into the photographic camera. Such a

schema implies that at each step in ~is evolution the same essential presup-

positions about an observer's relation to the world are in place. One could

name several dozen books on the history offilmor photography inwhose first

chapter appears the obligatory seventeenth-century engraving depicting a

camera obscura, as a kind of inaugural or incipient form on a long evolu-

tionary ladder.

These models of continuity have been used byhistorians of divergent

and even anti thetical polit ical posit ions. Conservatives tend to pose an

account of ever-increasing progress toward verisimilitude in representation,

inwhich Renaissance perspective and photography are part ofthe same quest

for a fully objective equiv3Ient of a natural vision. In these histories of sci-

ence or culture, the camera obscura ismade part ofthe development ofthe

sciences ofobservation inEurope during the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-

turies. The accumulation of knowledge about l ight, lenses, and the eye

becomes part ofa progressive sequence of discoveries and achievements that

lead to increasingly accurate investigation and representation of the physical

world. Privileged events in such asequence usually also include the invention

of linear perspective in the fifteenth century, the career ofGalileo, the induc-

tivework of Newton, and the emergence of British empiricism.

Radicalhistorians, however, usually see the camera obscura and cinema

asbound up in a single enduring apparatus ofpolitical and socialpower, elab-

orated over several centuries, that continues to discipline and regulate the sta-

tus of an observer. The camera is thus seen by some as an exemplary

indication 6f the ideological nature of representation, embodying the epis-

temological presumptions of bourgeois humanism. It is often argued that

the cinematic apparatus, emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, perpetuates, albeit in increasingly differentiated.forms, the same

ideology of representation and the same transcendental subject.

What I hope to do in this chapter is briefly to articulate the camera

obscura model of vision in terms of its historical specificity,in order subse-

quently to suggest how this model collapsed in the 1820sand 1830s,when it

wasdisplacedpy radicallydifferentnotions ofwhat anobserverwas,and of .

whatconstitutedvision.If,laterin the nineteenthcentury,cinemaor photog-

'

raphy seem to inviteformal comparisons with the camera obscura, itis within

a social, cultural, and scientific milieu where there had already been a pro-

found break with the conditions of vision presupposed by this device.

Ithas been known for at least two thousand years thatwhen light passes

through a small hole into a dark, enclosed interior, an inverted image will

appear on the wall opposite the hole. Thinkers asremote from each other as

Euclid,Aristotle,Alhazen, RogerBacon, Leonardo, and Kepler noted this phe-

nomenon and speculated invarious wayshow itmight or might not be anal-

ogous to the functioning of human vision. The long history of such

observations has yet to be written and isfar removed from the aimsand lim-

ited scope ofthis chapter.

It is important, however, to make a distinction between the enduring

empirical fact that an image can be produced in this way and the camera

obscura as a historically constructed artifact. For the camera obscura was not

simply an inert and neutral piece ofequipment or a set oftechnical premises

to be tinkered with and improved over the years;rather, itwas embedded in

a much larger and denser organization of knowledge and of the observing

s~ Historicallyspeaking, wemust recognize how for nearlytwohundred

~fi:.~~_~~-i;rei500s to the end of the -170_0s,the ~~~:.~ and Jptical

P ~~i ?les__f_~e._~amera obscura co~esced into a dominant paradigm

throu~ ~E


3/22

28

]be Camera Obscura and Its Subjea

]be Camera Obscura and Its Subject

29

I

,

simply an optical device. For over two hundred years itsubsisted asa philo-

sophical metaphor, a model in the science ofphysical optics, and was also a

technical apparatus used in a large range of cultural activities. For two cen-

----

tur~esit stood as ~od~~ ~~boothrationalist aad emIJiri~ist thou~~ ofJt?W

observation leads totruthful inferences about the world; atthe same time the

--- ._- .

physical incarnation ofthatmodel was a widely used means of observing the

visible world, an instrument of popular entertainment, of scientific inquiry,

and of artist ic practice. The formal operation of a camera obscura as an

abstract diagram may remain constant, but the function f)fthe device or met-

aphor within an actual social or discursive field has fluctuated decisively.The /

fate ofthe camera obscura paradigm in the nineteenth century isa case in

point.

2

In the texts ofMarx,Bergson, Freud, and others the very apparatus that

a century earl ier was the site oftruth becomes a model for procedures and I

forces that conceal, inven, and mystify truth.3

Portable caTrU]T abscura. Mid-eighteenth century.

1 . The extensive l it erature on the camera obscura Is summarized inAaron Scharf , Art

and Photography (Harmondswonh, 1974), and in Lawrence Gowing, Venneer (New York,

1952). General s tudies not mentioned in those works are Moritz von Rohr, Zur Entwkk-

lung der dunkeln Kammer

(Berlin, 1925), andJohnJ. Hammond,

tbe Camera Obscura:

A Chronicle (Bris to l, 1981). For valuable information on the uses ofthe camera obscura in

the eighteenth century , see Helmuth Fritzsche, Bernardo Belotto genannt Canaletto

(Magdeburg, 1936) pp. 158-194, and Decio Gioseffi,

Cana/etto; IIquaderno delle Ga/lerle

Veneziane e I impiego del/a camera ottica (Trieste, 1959). Works on the artistic use ofthe

camera obscura in the seventeenth century include Charles Seymour,Jr., Dark Chamber

and tight-Filled room: Vermeer and the Camera Obscura, Art Bulletin 46, no. 3 (Septem-

ber 1964), pp. 323-331; Daniel A Fink, 'Vermeer's Use of the Camera Obscura: A Com-

parative Study, Art Bulletin 53, no. 4 (December 1971), pp. 493-505; A Hyatt Mayor, 'The

Photographic Eye, Metropolitan Museum ofArtBulletin 5,no. 1(Summer 1946), pp. 15-

26; Heinrich Schwar2, Vermeer and the Camera Obscura,

Pantheon

24(May-June 1966),

pp. 170-180; Arthur K.Wheelock, Perspective, Optics, and Delft Artists Around 1650 (New

York, 1977); andJoel Snyder, Picturing Vision, CriJicaJInquiry 6 (Spring 1980), pp. 499-

526.

2. c r. Co lin Murray Turbayne , tbe Myth of Metaphor (New Haven, 1962), esp. pp. 154-

158, 203-208, which poses the camera obscura as a completelyahistorical concept linked

with representative or copy theories ofperception from antiquity tothe presenl Anequally

ahistorical discussion ofthe structure of modern photography and ofthe Canesian came~

obscura isArthur Danto, 'The Representat ional Charaaer ofIdeas and the Problem ofthe

External World, inDescartes: Critical and Interpretative Essays, ed Michael Hooker (Bal-

timore, 1978), pp. 287-298.

3. KarlMarx,7beGermanIdeo/ogy, ed C.J.Arthur(NewYork,1970),p. 47;Henri Berg-

son,Matterand Memory (1896)trans. N.M.Paul and W.S.Palmer(NewYork,1988),pp.

37-39; Sigmund Freud, tbe Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey(NewYork,


4/22

30

The Camera Obscura and Its Subject


31

Whatthen allows me to suggest that there isa common coherence tothe

status ofthe camera obscura in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to

pose this broad expanse of time as a unity?Clearlythe physical and opera-

tionalmakeup of the camera obscura undelWent continual modification dur-

ing this period.4 For example, the first portable devices were in use by 1650,

and into the late 1700smodels became increasingly small.And obviously the

wide range ofsocial and representational practices associated with the instru-

ment mutated considerably over two centuries. Yetdespite themultiplicity of

its local manifestations, what is extraordinary is the consistency with which

certain primary features of the camera obscura are repeated throughout this

period. There isa regularity and uniformity with which the formal relations

constituted by the camera are stated again and again, no matter how heter-

ogeneous or unrelated the locations of those statements.

I am hardly suggesting, however, that the camera obscura had simply a

discursive identity. Ifwe can designate it in terms ofstatements, every one of

those statements is necessarily linked to subjeCts,pra~ces, and institutions.

Perhaps the most important obstacle to an understanding of the camera

obscura, or of any optical apparatus, is the idea that optical device and

observer are two distinct entities, that the identity of observer exists inde-

pendently from the optical device that is a physical piece oftechnical equip-

ment. For what consti tutes the camera obscura is precisely its multiple

identity, its mixed status as an epistemological figure within a discursive

order

and

an objectwithin an arrangement ofcultural practices.5The camera

obscura iswhat Gilles Deleuze would call an

assemblage,

something that is

'-l

I

Camera obscuras. Mid-eigbteenth amtury.

simultaneously and inseparably a machinic assemblage and an assemblage

ofenunciation, an object about which something issaid and atthe same time

anobject that isused.6lt isa site atwhich a discursive formation interseCtswith

material practices. The camera obscura, then, cannot be reduced either to a

technological or a discursive object: itwasa complex socialamalgam inwhich

its existence as a textual figure was never separable from its machinic uses.

Whatthis implies isthatthe camera obs~~I1}~.x.tricated fromthe

evolutionary logic of a technological determinism, central to influential his-

torical surveys, which position it as a precursor or an inaugural event in a

genealogy leading to the birth of photography.' To cite Deleuze again,

Machinesare socialbefore being technical.

8

Obviouslyphotographyhad

1955), pp. 574-575. Hegel 's notion of the invened world

verkebrte Welt)

is crucial for

subsequent repudiations ofthe camera obscura model; seePbenomenology ofMind, trans.

j . B.Baill ie (New York, 1 7), pp. 203-207. See also Sarah Kofman,

Camera obscura de

/ ideologle

(Paris, 1973); Constance Penley,]anet Bergstrom et aI., Critical Approaches,

Camera Obscura

no. 1 (Fall 1976), pp. 3-10; and W.j. T.Mitchell,

Icorrology: Image, Text,

Ideology

(Chicago, 1986), pp. 160-208.

4. Fo r de ta il s on var ious models du ring thi s per iod, see, for example, Giosef fi ,

Can-

aleI/O,

pp. 13-22.

5 . 'The dis tinctions with which the materialist method, discriminative from the outset,

s tarts are dis tinctions within this highly mixed object, and it cannot present this object as

mixed or uncritical enough. Waiter Benjamin,

Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era

ofHigb Capita/ism,

t rans . Harry Zohn (london, 1973), p . 103.

6. Gilles Deleuze and Fl:lix Guattari,

A Tbousand Plateaus: Capital ism and Schizo-

phrenia,

trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1987), p. 504.

7. Overwhelmingly, the staning point of histories of photography is the camera

obscura asa photographic camera in embryo. The binh ofphotography isthen explained

as the fonuitous encounter of this optical device with new discoveries in photochemistry.

See, for example, Helmut Gernsheim,A

Condse History of P/x;Jtography

(New York, 1 5),

pp. 9-15; Beaumont Newhall , The

History of Photography

(New York, 1964), pp. 11-13;

]osefMaria Eder,

History ofPhotograpby,

trans. Edward Epstein (New York, 1945) pp. 36-

52; and Heinrich Schwarz, Art and Photography: Forerunners and Influences (Chicago,

1985), pp. 97-117.

8. Gilles Deleuze,

Foucault,

trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis, 1988), p. 13.


5/22

32



33

technical and material underpinnings, and the structural principles ofthe two

'

I

devices are clearly not unrelated. I will argue, however, that the camera

I

obscuraand the photographiccamera,as assemblages,practices,and social

I objects,belong to two fundamentallydifferentorganizationsof representa-

tion and the observer, as well as of the observer's relation to the visible. By

II

the beginning of the nineteenth century the camera obscura isno longer syn-

I

I

onymous with the production oftruth and with anobserver positioned to see

I .

truthfully.The regularityof such statementsends abruptly;the assemblage

constituted by the camera breaks down and the photographic camera

becomes an essentially dissimilar object, lodged amidst a radically different

network of statements and practices.

Arthistorians, predictably, tend to be interested in art objects, and most

ofthem have thus considered the camera obscura for how itmayhave deter-

mined the formal structure ofpaintings or prints. Manyaccounts ofthe camera

obscura, particularly those dealing with the eighteenth century, tend to con-

sider it exclusively in terms of its use by artists for copying, and as an aid in

the makingof paintings. There isoften a presumption that artists were making

do with an inadequate substitute for what they really wanted, and which

would soon appear-that is, a photographic camera.9 Such an emphasis

imposes a set of twentieth-century assumptions, in particular a productivist

logic, onto a device whose primary function was not to generate pictures.

Copyingwith the camera obscura-that is,the tracing and making permanent

of its image--was only one of its many uses, and even by the mid-eighteenth

century was de-emphasized ina number ofimportant accounts. The article on

camera obscura in the

Encyclopedie

for example, lists itsuses in this order:

Itthrows great light on the nature ofvision; itprovides avery diverting spec-

tacle, in that it presents images perfectly resembling their objects; it repre-

sents the colors and movements of objects better than any other sort of

representation isable to do. Onlybelatedly does itnote that bymeans ofthis

instrument someone who does not know how to draw isable nevertheless to

draw with extreme accuracy. lONoninstrumental descriptions of the camera

obscura are pervasive, emphasizing it as a self-sufficientdemonstration of its

own activityand by analogy of human vision. For those who understood its

optical underpinnings it offered the spectacle o~representation operating

completely transparently, and for those ignorant of its principles it afforded

the pleasures ofillusion.Just as perspective contained within itthe disruptive

possibilities of anamorphoses, h?wever~ so £heveraaij'oTtfte-~a1m~ra was

haunted byitSI)roXimiw:t9t~


6/22

34

The

Camera Obscura and Its Subject

The

Camera Obscura and Its Subject

35

Atthe same time one must be waryofconflating the meanings and effects

of the camera obscura with techniques of linear perspective. Obviously the

two are related, but it must be stressed that the camera obscura defines the

position of an interiorized observer to an exterior world, not just to a two-

dimensional representation, as isthe casewith perspective. Thus the camera

obscura issynonymous with a much broader kind ofsubject-effect;it isabout

far more than the relation of anobserver to a certain procedure ofpicture

making.Manycontemporary accounts of the camera obscura single out as its

most impressive feature its representation of movement. Observers fre-

quently spoke with astonishment of the flickering images within the camera

ofpedestrians inmotion or branches moving inthe wind asbeing more life-

like than the original objects.12Thus the phenomenological differences

between the experience of a pespectival construc9on and the projection of

the camera obscura are not even comparable. What iscrucialabout the cam-

era obscura is its relation of the observer to the undemarcated, undifferen-

tiated expan-se-oftlreworld ourslae;-andhow-itS apparatUs IDakes an orderly

cut or delimitation 6[that field allo~~..it to b~_~~ed, withoiit sacrificing

the vir:illry-o(ftsheifig --Butthe movement and temporality so eVidentin the

------

camera obscura were alwaysprior to the actof representation; movement and

time could be seen and experienced, but never represented.13

Another key misconception about the camera obscura isthat it issome-

how intrinsically a Northern model of visuality.14SvetlanaAlpers, in partic-

ular, has developed this position in her insistence that the essential

characteristics of seventeenth-centUry Dutch painting are inseparable from

the experience in the North ofthe camera obscura.15Missing,however, from

her discussion isa sense ofhow the metaphor ofthe camera obscura asa fig-

ure for human vision pervaded allof Europe during the seventeenth century.

Sherefers toher Northern descriptive mode asthe Keplerian mode, based

on Kepler s important statements about the camera obscura and the retinal

image.ButKepler (whose optical stUdieswere done inthe eclecticand hardly

Northern visual cultUre of the Prague coun of Rud~lfII)was merely one of

a number of major seventeenth-century thinkers inwhose work the camera

obscura holds a central position, including Leibniz, Descartes, Newton, and

Locke.16Over and above thequestion ofthe meanings ofDutch an, itis impor-

tant to acknowledge the transnational character of intellectual and scientific

lifein Europe during this period, and more specificallythe fundamental sim-

ilarities linking accounts of the camera obscura, whether by rationalists or

empiricists, from diverse parts of Europe.17

Although she addresses a traditional an historical problem (the style of

Northern versus Italianpainting), in the course ofher argument Alpers makes

some broad speculations aboUt the historical role of the camera obscura.

Whileher argument cannot be fullysummarized here, she outlines a descrip-

tive and empirical mode of seeing, coincident with the experience of the

12. See, for example , Robe rt Smith, Compleat System ofopticks (Cambridge, 1738), p.

384, and John Harris,

Lexicon Tecbnicum

p. 40.

13. Classical science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries extracted individual

rea li ties from the complex continuum which nourished them and gavethem shape, made

them manageable, even intelligible, but always transformed them inessence. Cut off from

those precarious aspects of phenomena that can only be called their becoming, that is,

their aleatory and transformative adventure in t ime including their often extreme sensi-

tivity to secondary, tertiary, stochastic, or merely Invisible processes, and cut off as well

from their effective capacities toaffect or determine intheir turn effects atthe heart ofthese

same processes-the science ofnature has excluded t ime and rendered Itsel fIncapable of

thinking change or novel ty in and for i tsel f. Sanford Kwinter ,

Immanem:e and Event

(forthcoming).

14. Much specu la ti on about the h is tory of the came ra obscura assumes I ts or igi ns are

Mediterranean-that Itwas accidentally discovered when bright sunlight would enter

through a small aperture In shuttered windows.

15. Sve tl ana Alpe rs ,

The Art of Desoibing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century

(Chi,

cago, 1983), pp. 27-33.

16 . Alper s s omi ss ion of Descar tes s accoun t o f v is ion and the camera obscura In

La

dioptrique

(1637) Isnotable, given that Descartes lived in Holland for over tWenty years,

from 1628 to 1649, and that his opt ical theory was so closely related to Kepler s. The sim-

i lari ty of a Keplerian and a Cartesian observer tends to undermine the not ion of distinc t

regional eplstemes. On Descartes and Holland see , for example , C.Louise Thl jssen, Le

cartesianisme aux Pays-Bas, In E.J. Dljksterhuis, ed., Descartes et Ie cartesianisme bol/an

dais:Etudes et documents

(Paris, 1950), pp. 183-260. Gerard Simon Insists that Descartes s

La dioptrique on ly confirmed and made more prec ise al l the important f eat ure s of

Kepler s opt ics, inc luding the theory ofthe ret inal Image, in Apropos de la theorie de la

perception visuelle chez Kepler et Descartes, In

Proceedings ofXlIIth International Con

gress of the History of Science

vol. 6 (Moscow, 1974), pp. 237-245.

17. In a related problem, Erwin Panofsky noted the different uses ofperspect ive in the

North and the South, but he leaves no doubt thatwhat these uses haveIncommon assystem

and technique is far more Important than regional idiosyncracies. See Die Perspective als

Symbol1sche Form, in

Vortrage der Bibliothek Warburg

(1924-25), pp. 258-330.

(English trans. by Christopher S.Wood forthcoming from Zone Books, New York.)


7/22

36


camera obscura, asa permanent artisticoption inWesternart. Itisan option

or pictorial mode that has been taken up at different times for different rea-

sons and i t remains unclear to what extent i tshould be considered to con-

stitute, in and of itself, a historicaldevelopment.

18

She asserts that the

ultimate origins of photography do not lie in the fifteenth-century invention

ofperspective, but rather in the alternative mode ofthe North. Seen thisway,

one might say that the photographic image, the Dutch art ofdescribing, and

. . . Impressionist painting are all examples of this constant artistic option in

the art oftheWest. 19Myaim, on the contrary, isto suggest thatwhat separates

ehotography fr~r.nboth .p'e~e.ectiye~d__th~.~~~_QQ.SS~~_is far mor: sig-

nifi~t ~~~~~~~~y E~v~_in£QII1mon.

While mydiscussion ofthe camera obscura isfounded on notions ofdis-

continuity and difference Alpers, like many others, poses notions ofboth con-

tinuity in her lineage of the origins of photography and identity in her idea

of an a priori observer who has perpetual access to these free-floating and

transhistorical options of seeing.20 If these options are constant, the

observer in question becomes removed from the specific material and his-

torical conditions ofvision. Suchan argument, in itsreclothing of familiar sty-

listic polarities, runs the risk of becoming a kind of neo-Wolfflinism.

Standard accounts of the camera obscura routinely give some special

mention ofthe Neapolitan savantGiovanniBattistadella Porta,often identified

asone of its inventors.21Such details we willnever know for sure, but we do

have his description ofa camera obscura in the widely readMagia Natura/is

of1558,inwhich he explains the use ofa concave speculum to insure thatthe

projected imagewillnot be inverted. In the second edition of1589,della Porta

details how a concave lens can be placed inthe aperture ofthe camera topro-

duce a much more finely resolved image. But della Porta's significance con-

cerns the intellectual threshold that he straddles, andhow his camera obscura

18. Svetlana Alpers, TheArt of Describing p. 244, 037.

19. Alper s,

TheArt of Describing

p. 244, 037.

20. For an imponant discussion ofidenti ty and difference in his torical explanation, see

Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Historicism, in The Ideologies of 7beory: Essays 1971-

1986, vol. 2 (Minneapolis, 1988), pp. 148-177.

21. See Mario GHozzi , L 'invenz ione de lla camera oscura,

Arcbivio di Storia Della

Scienza

xiv (April:June 1932), pp. 221-229.

r


37

inaugurates an organization ofknowledge and seeing thatwill undermine the

Renaissance science that most of his work exemplifies.22

The natural magic ofdella Portawasa conception ofthe world in itsfun-

damental unity and a means ofobserving this unity: ' 'Weare persuaded that

the knowledge ofsecret things depends upon the contemplation andthe view

of the whole world, namely the motion, style and fashion thereof. 23Else-

where della Porta insists that one must watch the phenomena with the eyes

of a lynxso that, when observation iscomplete, one can begin to manipulate

them.

24

The observer here is ultimately seekirig insight into a universal lan-

guage ofsymbols and analogies that might be employed inthe directing and

harnessing of the forces of nature. But according to MichelFoucault, della

Porta envisioned a world in which all things were adjacent . to each other,

linked together in a chain:

In the vastsyntax of the world, the different beings adjust them-

selves to one another, the plantcommunicates with the animal, the

earth with the sea, man with everything around him. . . . The rela-

tion of emulation enables things to imitate one another from one

end ofthe universe to the other. . .by duplicating itselfina mirror

the world abolishes the distance proper to it; in this way it over-

comes the place allotted to each thing. But which ofthese images

coursing through space are the original images?Which isthe real-

ity and which is the projection?25

This interlacing of nature and its representation, this indistinction between

reality and itsprojection willbe abolished bythe camera obscura, and instead

itwill institute an optical regime that will a priori separate and distinguish

image from object.26In fact della Porta's account of the camera obscura was

22. DelIa Porta is identified as a pre-modem in Roben Lenoble,

Histoire de / idee de

nature

(Paris, 1 9), p . 27.

23. Giovanni Battista della Porta, Natural Magick (London, 1658), p. 15.

24. Ci ted inEugenio Garin,

Italian Humanism: Philosophy and CivicLife in the Renais-

sance

t rans . Peter Munz (New York, 1 5), p . 190.

25. Michel Foucault,

The Order of Things

pp. 18-19.

26. We shou ld note de ll a Por ta 's indi fference to the rea l or i lluso ry statUSof what the

camera obscura makes visible: Nothing can be more pleasant for great men and Scholars,

and ingenious persons to behold; That in a dark Chamber bywhite sheets objected, one

may see as clearly and perspicuously, as if they were before his eyes, Huntings, Banquets,


8/22

f

38



39

means to become one with it. But this unity isonly possible ifthe

subject and the object, the knower and the known, are ofthesame

nature; they must be members and parts of one and the samevital

complex. Every sensory perception is an act of fusion and

reunification.28

a key element in Kepler's theoretical formulation of the retinal image.27Ernst

Cassirer places della Porta within the Renaissance tradition ofmagic, inwhich

to contemplate an object

Fordella Porta's natural magic, the use ofthe camera obscura was simply one

ofa number ofmethods that allowed an observer to become more fullycon-

centrated on aparticular object;it had no exclusive priority asthe site or mode

ofobservation. But to readers ofdella Porta several decades later, the camera

obscura seemed topromise an unrivaled and privileged means ofobservation

thatwas attained finally at the cost ofshanering the Renaissance adjacency of

knower and known.

Beginning in the late 15005the figure ofthe camera obscura begins to

assume a preeminent importance in delimiting and defining the relations

between observer and world. Within several decades the camera obscura is

no longer one of many instruments or visual opt ions but instead the com-

pulsory site from which vision can be conceived or represented. Above all it

indicates the appearance of a new model of subjectivity,the hegemony of a

new subject-effect. First of all the camera obscura performs an operation of

Camera obscura. 1646.

individuation; that is,it necessarily defines an observer as isolated, enclosed,

and autonomous within its dark confines. Itimpels a kind of

askesis

or with-

drawal from the world, in order to regulate and purify one's relation to thel

manifold contents of the now exterior world. Thus the camera obscura is

inseparable from a certain metaphysic ofinteriority: itis a figure for both the

observer who isnominally a free sovereign individual and a privatized subject

confined in a quasi-domestic space, cut off from a public exterior world.29

(Jacques Lacannas noted thatBishop Berkeley and others wrote about visual

representations as ifthey were private property.yo Atthe same time, another

related and equally decisive function of the camera was to sunder the act of

seeing from the physical body of the observer, to decorporealize vision.The

monadic viewpoint of the individual is authenticated and legitimized by the

camera obscura, but the observer's physical and sensory experience issup-

planted by the relations between a mechanical apparatus and a pre-given

-----

Armies of Enemies, Plays and all things else thatone desireth. Let there be over against that

Chamber, where you desire to represent these things, some spacious Pla in,where the sun

can freely shine: upon that you shall set trees in Order, also Woods, rytountains, Rivers and

Animals that are really so, or made byArt ,ofWood, or some other mat ter. . . those that are

in the Chamber shall see Trees, Animals, Hunters, Faces, and all the rest so plainly, thatthey

canno t t ell whe ther they be true o r delusions : Swords d rawn wil l g lis te r i n a t t he hol e.

Giovanni Battista della Porta, Natural Magick pp. 364-365.

27. For.the influence of del la Porta on Kepler, see David C.Lindberg, Theories ofViskm

.from Ai Kindi to Kepler (Chicago, 1976), pp. 182-206.

28. Erns t Cassir er , ]be Individual and the Cosmos in RenaissanCe Philosophy trans.

Mario Domandi (Philadelphia , 1972), p. 148.For more on del la Porta , see Mil ler H.Rien-

stra, Giovanni Battista del ta Porta and Renaissance Science (Ph.D. diss., University of

Michigan, 1 3).

29. Georg Lukac s descr ibes t hi s t ype of a rti fi ci al ly i so la ted ind ividual i n History and

ClassConsCiousness pp. 135-138. See also the excellent discussion ofinwardness and sex-

ual privatization in the seventeenth century inFrancis Barker,]be TremulousPrivate Body:

Essayson Subjection (London, 1984), pp. 9-69.

30 . Jacque s Lacan , ]be Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis trans. Alan Sher-

idan (New York, 1978), p. 81.


9/22

r

40



41

world ofobjective truth. Nietzsche summarizes this kind ofthought: ''Thesen-

ses deceive, reason corrects the errors; consequently, one concluded, reason

isthe road to the constant; the least sensual ideas must be closest to the 'true

world.'-It isfrom the senses that most misfortunes come-they are deceiv-

ers, deluders, destroyers. 31

Among the well-known texts in which we find the image ofthe camera

obscura and of itsinteriorized and disembodied subject are Newton's Opticks

(1704) and Locke'sESsayon Human Understanding (1690).Whatthey jointly

demonstrate is how the camera ObscUnLWaSJUIlQdelimultaneously for the

obselVation of empirical phenomena and for reflective introspection and

self-observation. Theslteon~'ewton's'indiiCtive-'procedures througho-;:;this

text isthe camera obscura; itis the ground on which his knowledge ismade

possible. Near the beginning of the

Opticks

he recounts:

Ina verydark Chamber, ata round hole, about one third Partofan

Inch, broad, made in the shut of awindow, I placed a glass prism,

whereby the Beam of the Sun's Light,which came in at that Hole,

might be refracted upwards toward the opposite wall ofthe cham-

ber, and there form a coloured image ofthe Sun.32

t ion of distance to an ~perture i J.1h~ w: :Jl1.QPPQ~ ~it.~ .t l?e.~e~n these two

locauonSCa point and a plane) i s an indetermina te extensive space in which

. . -'-. - - - - .. -- .---

an obselVer is amb~~


10/22

r

42



43

discover, are the windows bywhich lightis let into thisdark room.

For, methinks , the unders tanding is not much unlike a closet

wholly shut from light,with onlysome little opening left. .. to let

in external visible resemblances, or some idea of things without;

would the pictures coming into such a dark room but s taythere

and lie soorderly astobe found upon occasion itwould very much

resemble the understanding of a man.38

Animportant feature ofLocke's text here is how the metaphor of the dark

room effectively distances us from the apparatus he describes.

As

part ofhis

general project of introspection Lockeproposes a means ofvisualizing spa-

tiallythe operations of the intellect. He makes explicit whatwas implied in

Newton's account of his activityin his dark chamber: the eye of the observer

is completely separate from the apparatus that allows the entrance and for-

mation of pictures or resemblances. Hume also insisted on a similar rela-

tion ofdistance: 'The operations ofthe mind. . . must be apprehended in an

instantby a superior penetration, derived from nature and improved by habit

and reflection. 39

Elsewhere in Locke's text another meaning isgiven to the idea of the

room, ofwhat itliterally meant in seventeenth-century England to be

in cam

era thatis,within the chambers ofa judge or person oftitle.Lockewrites that

sensations are conveyed from without to their audience in the brain-the

mind's presence room, asI may so call it. 40In addition to structuring the act

of observation as the process by which something is observed by a subject,

Locke also gives a new juridical role to the observer within the camera

obscura. Thushe modifies the receptive .andneutral function ofthe apparatus

by specifying a more self-legislative and authoritative function: the camera

obscura allows the subject to guarantee and police the correspondence

between exterior world and interior representation and to exclude anything

disorderly or unruly. Reflectiveintrospection overlaps with a regime ofself-

discipline.

It is in this context that Richard Rorty asserts that Lockeand Descartes

describe an observer fundamentally different from anything in Greek and

medieval thought. For Rorty,the achievement ofthese two thinkers was the

conception ofthehuman mind asan inner space inwhich both pains and clear

and distinct ideas passed in review before an I~ner Eye.. . .The novelty was

the notion ofa single inner space inwhich bodily and perceptual sensations

. . .were objects of quasi-observation. 41

In this sense Locke can be linked with Descartes. In the Second Medi

tation Descartes asserts that perception, or the action bywhichwe perceive,

isnot a vision. . . but issolely an inspection bythe mind. 42He goes on to

challenge the notion that one knows the world bymeansof eyesight: Itispos-

sible that Ido not even have eyeswithwhich to see anything. 43ForDescartes,

one knows the world uniquely by perception of the mind, and the secure

positioning of the self within an empty interior space is a precondition for

knowing the outer world. The space ofthe camera obscura, its enclosedness,

itsdarkness, itsseparation from an exterior, incarnate Descartes's Iwill now

shut my eyes, I shall stop myears, I shall disregard mysenses. 44The orderly

and calculable penetration oflightraysthrough thesingle opening ofthe cam-

era corresponds to the f looding ofthe mind bythe l ight ofreason, not the

potentially dangerous dazzIement of the senses by the light of the sun.

There are two paintings by Vermeer in which the paradigm of the

Cartesian camera obscura islucidly represented.45 Consider The

Geographer

38. Locke,

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

II, xi, 17.

39. David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (I748; New York,

1955), p. 16(emphasis mine) . A similar setup isnoted in Descanes byMaurice Merleau-

Ponty,where space is a netWork of relat ions betWeen objecrs such aswould be seen by

a witness to myvision or bya geometer looking over i tand reconst ruct ing i t from the out-

side. Eyeand Mind,

ThePrimacy of Perception

ed.James M.Edie (Evanston, 11I.,1964),

p . 178 .Ja cque s Lacan d iscusse s Canes ian thought in te rms of the fonnul a I see mysel f

seeing myself, in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis pp. 80-81.

40. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding lI,iii,1.

41. R ichard Rorty,

Philosophy and theMin orofNature

(Princeton, 1979), pp. 49-50. For

an opposing view, see John W.Yolton, Perceptual Acquaintance.from Descartes to Reid

(Minneapolis, 1984), pp. 222-223.

42. Rene Des canes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes 2 vols., t ranS.John Cot-

t ingham, Robert Stoothoff , and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge, 1984), vol . 2, p. 21.

43. Descanes, Philosophical Writings vol . 2 ,p . 21.

44. Descanes, Philosophical Writings vol . 2 ,p . 24.

45. Mydiscussion ofVenneer c learly does not engage any ofthe extensive art historica l

specula tion about his possible use ofthe camera obscura inthe making ofhis piCtures (see

references i n foo tno te 1 ). Did he in fac t use one , and i f so, how did it af fe ct t he makeup

of his paintings? While these are interesting questions for specialists, I am not concerned

here with the answers one way or the other . Such investigations tend to reduce the prob-


11/22


r


45

Venneer The Astronomer 668

Venneer

The Geographer

c 1668 69

ii


12/22

r

46


The Camera Obscura and Its Subject 47

and TheAstronomer; both painted around 1668.Each image depicts a solitary

male figure absorbed in learned pursuits within the rectangular confines of

a shadowy interior, an interior punctured apparently byonly a singlewindow.

Theastronomer studies a celestial globe, mapped outwith the constellations;

the geographer has before him a nauticalmap. Eachhas his eyes averted from

the apertUre that opens onto the outside. The exterior world isknown not by

direct sensory examination bUtthrough a mental survey ofits clear and dis-

tinct representation within the room. The somber isolation of these medi-

tativescholars within their walled interiors isnot in the least an obstacle to

apprehending the world outside, for the division between interiorized sub-

jectand exterior world isa pre-given condition ofknowledge about the latter.

The paintings then are a consummate demonstration of the reconciling func-

tion of the camera obscura: its interior is the interface between Descartes's

absolutely dissimilar res cogitans and. res extensa between observer and

. world.46The camera, or room, is the site within whi~_~ orderly projection

of thewo 1~9 ext~~c:t~~~~bstal c~L~~c:t_~_~~~le f9f.inspection by the

mind, The production ofthe camera isalwaysa projection onto a two-dimen-

sional surface--here maps, globes, charts, and images. Each of the thinkers,

in a rapt stillness, ponders that crucial feature ofthe world, its extension, so

mysteriouslyunlike the unextended immediacyof their own thoughts yetren-

dered intelligible tomind bythe clarityof these representations, bytheir mag-

nitudinal relations. Ratherthan opposed bythe objects oftheir study,the earth

and the heavens, the geographer and the astronomer engage in a common

enterprise ofobserving aspectSof a single indivisible exterior.47Both ofthem

(and itmaywell be the same man in each painting) are figures for a primal

and sovereign inwardness, for the autonomous individual ego that has appro-

priated to itselfthe capacity for intellectually mastering the infinite existence

of bodies in space.

Descartes's description of the camera obscura in his La dioptrique

(1637)contains some unusual features. Initiallyhe makes a conventional anal-

ogy between the eye and the camera obscura:

Suppose a chamber isshut up apart from asingle hole, and a glass

lens is placed in front of this hole with a white sheet stretched at

a certain distance behind it so the light coming from objects out-

side forms images on the sheet. Now it issaid that the room rep-

resents the eye; the hole the pupil; the lens the crystalline

humour. . . .48

Butbefore proceeding further, Descartes advises hisreader to conduct a dem-

onstration involving taking the dead eye of a newly dead person (or, failing

that, the eye ofan ox or some other large animal) and using the extracted eye

asthe lens in the pinhole of a camera obscura. Thus for Descartes the images

observed within the camera obscura are formed bymeans of a disembodied

cyclopean eye, detached from the observer, possibly not even a human eye.

Additionally,Descartes specifies that one

cut awaythe three surrounding membranes atthe back so as to

expose a large part ofthe humour without spillingany... .No light

must enter this room except what comes through this eye, all of

whose parts youknow to be entirely transparent. Havingdone this,

ifyou look atthe white sheet you willsee there, not perhaps with-

out pleasure and wonder, a picture representing in natural per-

spective all the objects outside.49

lem ofthe camera obscura to one ofoptical effects and udimately painterly style. I contend

tha t the camera obscura must be unders tood in terms of how i tdef ined the pos it ion and

possibili ties of an observing subjea; i twas

not

simply a piaorial or stylist ic option, one

choice among others for a neutral and ahistorical subjea. Even ifVermeer never touched

the mechanical apparatus of the camera obscura and other faaors explain his halat ion of

highlights and accentuated perspeaive, his paintings are nonetheless profoundly embed-

ded in the larger epistemological model ofthe camera.

46. The affinity betWeen Vermeer and Canesian thought isdiscussed in Michel Serres,

La Traduction

(Paris, 1974), pp. 189-196.

47 . Descar tes rejeaed the scholas tic di st ina ion be tWeen a sublunary o r ter rest ri al

world and a qualitatively different celestial realm in his

Principles of Philosophy

first pub-

lished in Holland in 1644. Similarly, the earth and the heavens are composed ofone and

the same matter; and there cannot be a plurali ty ofworlds.

tbe Philo:;opbical Writings of

Descartes

vol. 1,p. 232.a. Arthur K Wheelock,

Venneer

(New York, 1988), Abrams, p. 108.

48. Descar tes,

tbe Philosophical Writings of Descartes

vol. 1 ,p . 166;

Oeuvres pbiloso

phiques

vol. 1,pp. 686-687.

49. Descar tes,

tbe Philosophical Writings

vol . I , p. 166 .


13/22

r

48



49

Bythis radicaldisjunction of eyefrom observer and its installation in this for-

malapparatus ofobjective representation, the dead, perhaps even bovine eye

undergoes a kind of apotheosis and rises to an incorporeal statuS.50f at the

core ofDescartes's method was the need to escape the uncertainties ofmere

human vis ion and the confusions of the senses, the camera obscura is con-

--' -

gruent with his quesuoJo l.ncl.h Q1an.kI ovvl~~ on ~pur~Jy.0Qj~e view

of the world. The aperture of the camera obscura corresponds to a single,

--- --- --

mathemati~ y_. d_e..ftn iQJ~point , f rom which the..wqrld can .~ ~gical ly

deduced by a pr.


14/22

r


51

50

The Camera Obscura and Its SuI?/ect

provisional, images presented to each eye. Descartes assumed thatthe pineal

gland exercised a crucial monocular power: 'There must necessarily be some

place where the two images coming through the eyes. . .can come together

in a single image or impression before reaching the soul, sothat theydo not

present to it two objects instead of one. 54At the same time, Descar tes's

instructions about removing the ocular membranes from the body ofthe eye

is an operation ensuring the primal transparency ofthe camera obscura, of

escaping from the latent opacity ofthe human eye.

But perhaps itis misleading to pose the vantage point ofthe camera as

fully analogous to a divine eye. It is important that the camera obscura be

understood within the context of a distinctly post-Copernican framework,

within a world from which an absolutely privileged point had vanished and

inwhich visibilitybecame a contingent fact. 55t isLeibniz,alongwith Pascal,

for whom the loss ofsuch a point isa central problem. Atthe core ofLeibniz's

thought was the goal of reconciling the validityof universal truths with the

inescapable fact of a world consisting ofmultiple points ofview.The monad

became, for Leibniz,an expression ofa fragmented and decentered world, of

the absence of an omniscient point of view, of the fact that every position

implied a fundamental relativity that wasnever a problem forDescartes.Atthe

same time, 'however, Leibniz insisted that each monad had the capacity to

reflect in itself the whole universe from its own finite viewpoint The con-

ceptual structure ofthe camera obscura isa parallel reconciliation ofa limited

(or monadic) viewpoint and, at the same time, necessary truth.

Leibniz,writing around 1703,seems generally to have accepted Locke's

model of the camera obscura, but with the pivotal distinction that it isnot a

passive, receiving device but is endowed with an inherent capacity for struc-

turing the ideas it receives:

To increase this resemblance [between observer and dark room]

we should have to postulate thatthere isa screen in thisdark room

to receive the species, and that itis not uniform but isdiversified

by folds representing items of innate knowledge; and, what is

more, that this screen or membrane, being under tension, has a'

kind ofelasticityor active force, and indeed that itacts(or reacts)

inways which are adapted both to pastfolds and to new ones.56

For Leibniz the camera obscura as an optical systemwas defined by its func-

tional relation to a cone ofvision, inwhich the point ofthe cone defined the

monadic point ofview.AsMichel Serres has demonstrated at length:

The science ofconic sections shows that there existsa single point

from which an apparent disorder can be organized into a

harmony. . . .For agiven plurality,for a given disorder there only

exists one point around which everything can be placed in order;

thispoint existsand itisunique. From anywhere else disorder and

indetermination remain. From then on, to know a plurali ty of

things consists in discovering the point from which their disorder

can be resolved, uno intuito into a unique law oforder.57

54 tbe Philosophical Writings of Descartes vol. 1, p. 340. For Jean-Fran


15/22

52


r

perspective and a bird s-eye view).58One of the most vivid examples of this

scenographic perspective is in the Monadology:

Just asthe same cityregarded from different sides offers quite dif-

ferent aspectS,and thus appears multiplied by the perspective, so

italsohappens that the infinite multitude ofsimple substances cre-

ates the appearance ofas many different universes. Yettheyare but

perspectives ofa single universe, varied according tothe pointSof

view,which differ in each monad.59

One could consider two essentially different approaches to the representa-

tion ofa cityas models ofLeibniz s distinction between scenography and ichn-

ography. On one hand, Jacopo de Barbari s View of Venice f rom 1500

exemplifies a pre-Copernican, synoptic and totalizing apprehension of the

cityasa unified entity.6Ot isaviewcompletely outSide theepistemological and

technological conditions ofthe camera obscura. On the other hand, the mid-

eighteenth century views ofVenice by Canaletto, for example, disclose a field

occupied by a monadic observer, within a citythat is knowable only as the

accumulation ofmultiple and diverse pointSofview.61Thecareer of Canaletto

was bound up in a discipline of the scenographic; he was trained as a stage

designer, was preoccupied with the theatricality of the city,and made use of

the camera obscura.62Whether it isa question ofthe stage, urban design, or

visual imagery,the intelligibility of a given site depends on a precisely spec-

58. Lettertodes Bosses,Feb.5, 1712,quoted inSerres,

Lesysthne deLeibniz,

vol.I, p.

153.LouisMarindiscusses the relation between ichnographic representation and royal

power in

Portrait of theKing,

trans.MarthaHoule (Minneapolis,1988),pp. 169-179.

59. G.W.Leibniz ,

Monado/ogy and OtherPhilosophicalEssays,

trans. PaulSchrecker

(Indianapolis, 1965),p. 157.

60. Foran important discussion ofthisimagesee]uergen Schulz, ]acopode Barbari s

View ofVenice: Map Making, CityViews, and Moralized Geography Before the Year 1500,

Art Bulletin 60 (1978), pp. 425-474.

61. The baroque c ity ,on the con tr ary , p resen ts i tsel f a san open t ex tUre without r ef -

erence to a privileged signifier that gives itorientation and meaning. Severo Sarduy, Bar-

raco (Paris, 1975), pp. 63-64.

62. For CanaIet to s use o f t he came ra obscura , see Te ris lo Pignat ti , IIquaderno di dis-

eqni del Canaletto aile Gallerie di Venezia (Milan, 1958), pp. 20-22; Andre Corboz, Can-

aleno: una Venezia immaginarla, vol. 1 (Milan, 1985), pp. 143-154; and W.G. Constable

and]. G.Unks, Canaletto, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 161-163.

The Camera Qbscura and Its Subject

53

Jaropo de Barbarl. View of Venice detail). 1500.

,

ified relation between a delimited point of view and a tableau.63The camera (

obscura, with itSmonocular aperture, became a more perfect terminus for a

J

cone ofvision, amore perfect incarnation ofa single point than the awkward

binocular body ofthe human subject.The camera, in a sense, was a metaphor

for the most rational possibilities of a perceiver within the increasingly

dynamic disorder of the world.

63. Helene Lecl erc Ins is ts that by the mid-sevente en th centUry, beginning with the

career of Bernini, a related concept of scenography traVerses theatre, urban design, archi-

teCtUre,and visual imagery, In LaScene d illusion et l hegemonie du theatre a l itallenne,

in Histoire des Spectacles, ed. Guy Dumur (Paris, 1965), pp. 581-624.


16/22

54

The Camera Obsau a and Its Subject

r


55

Although Bishop Berkeley s work on vision does not discuss the camera

obscura, his model ofperception coincides with thatpresupposed bythe cam-

era. In TheTheoryof Vision Vindicated (1732), he demonstrates his familiarity

with contemporary treatises on perspective:

We may suppose a diaphanous plain erected near the eye, per-

pendicular to the horizon, and divided into small equal squares. A

straight line from the eyeto the utmost limit ofthe horizon, passing

through this diaphanous plain, asprojected or r~presented in the

perpendicular plain, would r ise. The eye sees all the parts and

objects in the horizontal plain through certain corresponding

squares ofthe perpendicular diaphanous phrase. . .. Itis true this

diaphanous plain , and the images supposed to be projected

thereon, are altogether ofa tangible nature: But then there are pic-

tures relative to those images: and those pictures have an order

among themselves.64

Antonio Canaletto.Piazza San Marco looking eastfrom thenorthwestcorner.c. 1755.

Even though the architectural enclosure of the camera obscura isabsent, the

observer here isstillone who observes a projection onto a field exterior to

himself, and Berkeley explicitly describes the ordered surface of this field as

agrid on which the universal grammar, the language oftheAuthor ofnature,

could be known. But whether itis Berkeley s divine signs ofGod arrayed on

a diaphanous plane, Locke ssensations imprinted on a white page, or Leib-

niz s elastic screen, the eighteenth-century observer confronts a unified space

oforder, unmodified byhis or her own sensory ~d physiological apparatus,

on which the contents of the world can be studied and compared, known in

terms of a multitude of relationships. In Rorty swords, Itis as ifthe tabula

rasa were perpetual ly under the gaze ofthe unblinking Eyeof the Mind. . .

itbecomes obvious that the imprinting isof lessinterest than the observation

of the imprint-all the knowing gets done, so to speak, by the Eye which

observes the imprinted tablet, rather than by the tablet itself. 65

For Heidegger, Descartes s work inaugurates the age of the world pic-

ture, but the picture towhich Heidegger refers does not implya newpriority

64. GeorgeBerkeley,]be Theoryof VisionVindicated in ]be Worksof GeorgeBerkeley

BishopofClayne ed.A A Luceand T.E.]essop (London,1948-1957),vol. I, pp. 270-271.

65. Rony,Philosophyand theMirrorof Nature pp. 143-144.


17/22

56

Tbe Camera Obscura and Its Subject

given to thesense ofvision. Rather, whatbelongs tothe essence ofthe picture

is standing-together, system . . . a unity that develops out ofthe projection of

the objectivity ofwhatever is. 66This is the same unity ofthe camera obscura,

a field ofprojection corresponding tothe space ofDescartes's mathesis univ-

ersa/is,in which allobjects of thought, irrespective ofsubject matter, can be

ordered andcompared: Our project being, not to inspect the isolated natures

of things, but to compare them with each other so that some may be known

on the basis of others. 67

The unity of this ground on which everythin?~aY_~~_ar~~ged in com-

mon finds one O ~tS1UnesCexpressiO~ _0~ h~--p~g~~_.Q(. henC) c/opedie.

Accordingto MichelFoucault, the great project ofthisthought isan exhaustive

ordering of the world characterized by discovery of simple elements and

their progressive combination; and attheir center they form a table on which

knowledge is displayed contemporary with itself.The center of knowledge in

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries isthe

tab/e. 68

Ernst Cassirer's read-

ing ofthe Enlightenment, though unfashionable now,more than echoes cer-

tain partSof Foucault's construction of classicalthought. Whilemuch Anglo-

American intellectual history tends to pose an atomization ofcognition in this

period, Cassirer sees a Leibnizian underpinning to eighteenth-century

thought:

With the advent of the eighteenth-century the absolutism of the

unityprinciple seems to lose itsgrip and to acceptsome limitations

or concessions. But these modifications do nOttouch the core of

the thought itself. For the function of unification continues to be

recognized as the basic role ofreason. Rationalorder and control

ofthe data ofexperience are not possible without strictunification.

To know amanifold ofexperience isto place itscomponent partS

in such a relationship to one another that, starting from a given

point, we can run through them according to a constant and gen-

66. MartinHeidegger, The Age ofthe World Picture, in

TheQuestion Concerning Tech-

nology and Other Essays,

tranS. William Lovitt(New York, 1977), pp. 115-54.

67. Descartes , Rules for the Direction ofthe Mind, in

Philosophical Writings,

pp. 19,21.

68. Miche l Foucaul t,

The Orderof7bings

(New York, 1970), pp. 74-75. On Leibnjz and

the table, see Gilles Deleuze,

Lepi;

p. 38.

r

Tbe Camera Obscura and Its Subject

57

eral rule. . .the unknown and the known participate ina common

nature. 69

Cassirer might well have agreed with Foucault that observation in the sev-

enteenth and eighteenth centuries is a perceptible knowledge. 70But it is

hardly a knowledge that is organized exclusively around visuality.Although

the dominance ofthe camera obscura paradigm does infact imply a privilege

givento vision, itis avision that isapriori inthe service ofa nonsensory faculty

ofunderstanding thatalone gives a true conception ofthe world. Itwould be

. --

completely ~leadi 1g to pose the camera obscura as an early stage in an

ongoing autonomizati


18/22

58

The Ca~a Obscura and Its Subject

in the eighteenth century in his concern with achieving a fundamental har-

monization of the senses, in which a key model for visualperception isthe

sense oftouch. The Molyneux problem, which so preoccupied the thought of

the eighteenth century, poses the case ofa perceiver who isignorant of one

of the languages of the senses, namely sight.The best known formulation of

the problem isLocke's:

Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught byhis touch

to distinguish between a cube and asphere ofthe same metal, and

nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he feltone and the

other, which isthe cube, which the sphere. Suppose then the cube

and sphere placed on a table, and the blind man be made to see:

qw::tere,whether byhis sightbefore he touched them, he could now

distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube?73

But regardless of how the problem was ultimately answered, whether the

claimwas nativistor empiricist, the testimony ofthe senses constituted for the

eighteenth century a.common surface of order.74The problem quite simply

was how the passage from one order ofsense perception to another took

the thought of Locke, Condillac, and Hartley and nineteenth-century associationism, Man-

delbaum concedes, Thus, in its origins, associationis1T\was not what James Milland Alex-

ander Bain later sought to make of it, a full-blown psychological system, serving to classify

and relate a ll aspect s of men ta l li fe ; i t was , rather, a pr indp le u sed to connec t a genera l

epistemological position with more specific issues of intellectual and practical concern.

Among these issues, questions concerning the foundations ofmorality and the relations of

morality to religion had an especially importaIlt place (p. 156). However, what Mandel-

baum terms a general epistemological position is precisely the relative unity of Enlight-

enment knowledge onto which he imposes the separat ions and categories ofthe thought

ofhis own time. Religion, morality and epistemology did not exist asdiscrete and separate

domains.

73. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, ix, 8 .

74. For example, see Thomas Reid, E ss ays o n t he Pow er s o f th eH uman Mi nd [1 78 5]

(Edinburgh, 1819), vol . 2 ,pp. 115-116: Ifanything more were necessary to be said on a

point soevident , we might observe, that ifthe faculty ofseeing were inthe eye, that ofhear-

ing inthe ear, and soof the other senses, the necessary consequence ofthis would be, that

the thinking principle, which I call myself, isnot one but many. But this iscontrary to the

irresistable conviction ofevery man. When I say,Isee, I hear, Ifeel, I remember, this implies

that i t isone and the same self that performs all these operations.

r

f


59

place.75Or for Condillac, in his famed discussion ofthe senses coming to life

one byone in his statue, the problem was how the senses could reconvene,

that is, come together in the perceiver.'6

But for those whose answers toMolyneuxwere, in one way or another,

negative-a blind man suddenly restored with sight would not immediately

recognize the obie~_ before him-and these included Locke, Berkeley,

Diderot, Condillac, and others, they share littlewith the physiologists and psy-

chologists of the nineteenth century who were also, Withgreater scientific

authority, to answer the question negatively.Byinsisting that knowledge, and

specificallyknowledge ofspace and depth, isbuilt up out ofan orderly accu-

mulation and cross-referencing ofperceptions on a plane independent ofthe

viewer, ei~te n~-~~~~C}'~qught could kn()Wnothing of the ideas o(pyre

v~ib_i~~~~O~i~~_~~_.th~~ ~:~~~_thentury. .Nothingcould be more removed;

from Berkeley's theory of how distance isperceived than the science of the

)

tereoscope. This quintessentially nineteenth-century device, with which tan-

\

gibi lit y (or relief) i s constructed solely t hrough an organi zation of

optical

cues (and the amalgamation of the observer into a component of the appa-

(

ratus), eradicates the very field on which eighteenth-century knowledge

(

arranged itself.

~rom Descartes to Berkeley to Dider()t .Y. ~}()E-s.co_flceiy~d~.~~ .~~of~.-.

analogies to the senses of touch. Diderot's work will be misunderstood ifwe

do not see atthe outset how deeply ambivalent hewas toward vision, and how

he resisted treating any phenomenon in terms of a single sense.78HisLetters

on the Blind (1749), in its account of Nicholas Saunderson, a blind mathe-

matician, asserts the possibility ofa tactile geometry, and that touch aswell as

sight carries with itthe capacityfor apprehending universally validtruths. The

75. See Cassir er, 1?JePhilosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 108. For recent discussions of

the problem, see M.]. Morgan, Molyneux s Question: Vision, Touch and the Pbilosohy of

Perception

(Cambridge, 1977); and Francine Markovits, Merian, Diderot et I'aveugle, in

].-B. Merian,

Sur Ieprobleme de Molyneux

(Paris, 1984), pp. 193-282.

76. Etienne de CondilIac, Traite des sensations (1754), in Oeuvres philosophiques de

Condillac, vol. 1,ed. Georges Le Roy (Paris, 1947-1951).

77. See Michel Serres,

Hermes ou fa communication

(Paris, 1968), pp. 124-125; and

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ThePrimacy of Perception, ed.James M.Edie (Evanston, III.,1964),

pp.169-172.

78. On Diderot 's att itude toward the senses, see Elisabeth de Fontenay, Diderot: Reason

andResonance, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York, 1982), pp. 157-169.


19/22

60


essay isnot so much a depreciation of the sense ofvision as itis a refutation

of itS exclusivity. DiderOt details Saunderson s devices for calculation and

demonstration, rectangular wooden boards with built-in grids marked out by

raised pins. by connecting the pins with silk threads Saunderson s fingers

could trace out and read an infinityof figures and their relations, allcalculable

bytheir location on the demarcated grid. Here the Cartesian table appears in

another form, but itSunderlying status isthe same.The certaintyof knowledge

did not depend solely on the eye but on a more general relation ofa unified

human sensorium to a delimited space oforder on which positions could be

known and compared.79 In a sighted person the senses are dissimilar, but

through what DiderOt calls reciprocal assistance they provide knowledge

about the world.

Yetdespite thisdiscourse on the senses and sensation, we are stillwithin

the same epistemological field occupied by the camera obscura and itSover-

riding ofthe immediate subjective evidence of the body. Even in Diderot, a

so-called materialist, the senses are conceived more as adjunCtSof a rational

mind and less as physiological organs. Each sense operates according to an

immutable semantic logic that transcends itSmere physical mode of func-

tioning. Thus the significance of the image discussed in Diderot s Letters on

the Blind: a blindfolded man in an outdoor space steps forward, tentatively

holding a stick in each hand, extended to feel the objeCtSandarea before him.

But paradoxically this is not an image of a man literally blind; rather it isan

abstract diagram of a fully sighted observer, inwhich vision operates like the

sense oftouch.Just asthe eyes are not finallywhat see, however, so the carnal

organs oftouch are also disengaged from contact with an exterior world. Of

this blind and prosthesis-equipped figure that illustrated Descartes s La diop-

trique

Diderot remarks, Neither Descartes nor those who have followed him

have been able to give a clearer conception of vision. 80This anti-optical

79. On the persistence of Cartesianismin En1ightenm~nthought,see AramVananian,

Diderot and Descartes:A Study of ScientificNaturalism in theEnlightenment

(Princeton:

1953).

80. Diderot assertsthattheperson most capableoftheorizingon visionand the senses

would be a philosopher who hadprofoundly meditatedon the subject in the dark,or to

adopt the language of the poets , one who had put out h is eyesin order to be better

acquaintedwith vision. Lettressur lesaveugles in Oeuvrespbilosopbiques p. 87.

r


61

a

Illustration.from 1724 edition of Descartes s La dioptrique.


20/22

62

The Camera Obscura and Its Subject The Camera Obscura and Its Subject

63

notion ofsight pervaded the work ofother thinkers during both the seven-

teenth and eighteenth centuries: for Berkeley there is no such thing asvisual

perception of depth, and Condillac s statue effectivelymasters space with the

help ofmovement and touch. The notion ofvision astouch isadequate to a

field of knowledge whose contents are organized as stable positions within

an extensive terrain. But in the nineteenth century such a notion became

incompatible with a field organized around exchange and flux, in which a

knowledge bound up intouch would have been irreconcilable with the cen-

trality ofmobile signs and commodities whose identity is exclusively optical.

The stereoscope, as Iwill show, became a crucial indication ofthe remapping

and subsumption of the tactile within the optical.

The paintings ofJ.-B. Chardin are lodged within these same questions

of knowledge and perception. His stilllifes, especially, are a lastgreat pres-

entation ofthe classical object in all its plenitude, before itis sundered irrev-

ocably into exchangeable and ungrounded signifiers or into the painterly

traces of an autonomous vision. The slow-burning glow of Chardin s late

work, an effulgence inseparable from use values, isa light soon to be eclipsed

inthe nineteenth century, either bythe synthetic aura ofthe commodity or by

the radiance of anartWorkwhose very survivaldemanded a denial of itsmere

objectivity.In his still-lifes,with their shallow,stage-like ledges populated with

forms, to know something was not to behold the optical singularity of an

object but to apprehend its fuller phenomenal identity simultaneously with

its position on an ordered field. The aesthetic imperative bywhich Chardin

systematizes the simple forms of everyday use and of sensory experience is

close toDiderot s insistence on representing nature in itsvariability and flux,

while atthe same time deriving from that shiftingknowledge universally valid

ideas.81

Take, for example, Chardin s Basket of Wild Strawberries from around

1761.Hissuperb cone ofstacked strawberries isa sign of how rational knowl-

edge ofgeometrical form can coincide with a perceptual intuition ofthe mul-

tiplicity and perishability of life. ForChardin, sensory knowledge and rational

knowledge are inseparable. Hiswork isboth the product ofempirical knowl-

J.-B. Cbardin. Basket of Wild StraWberries. 1761.

edge about the contingent specificityof forms, their position within a world

of social meanings, and at the same time an ideal s tructure founded on a

deductive rational clarity. But the immediacy of sense experience is trans-

posed toa scenic space within which the relation ofone object to another has

less to do with sheer optical appearances than with knowledge of isomorph-

isms and positions on a unified terrain. h is in the context of the Cartesian

table that we should read Chardin s enumerative clarity,his groupings of

objects into sets and subsets. These formal analogies are not about a surface

design, but rather a permanent space across which are distributed the non-

quantitative identities and differences that separated and united things. 82

81. See Diderot, LeReve de D Alemberr in Oeuvres philosophiques pp. 299-313.

82. Foucault ,

TheOrderof Things

p. 218.


21/22

64


Chardin's painting isalso part of the eighteenth-century preoccupation

with ensuring transparency over opacity. Newtonian and Cartesian physics,

notwithstanding the large divide between them, both sought to confirm the

unity ofa single homogeneous field in spite ofthe diversityof media and pos-

sibilities of refraction within it.Dioptrics (science ofrefraction) was ofgreater

interest to the eighteenth century than catoptrics (reflection), and this pre-

deliction is most obviously evident in Newton's

Opticks.83

Itwas crucial that

the distorting power of a medium, whether a lens, air,or liquid, be neutral-

ized, and thiscould be done ifthe properties ofthat medium were mastered

intellectually and thus rendered effectivelytransparent through the exercise

of reason. In Chardin's

Bay Blowing Bubbles

from around 1739,a glassfilled

with dull soapy liquid stands atone side ofa shallowledge, while a youthwith

a straw transforms that formless liquid opacity into the transparent sphere of

a soap bubble situated symmetrically over the rectilinear ledge. This depicted

act of effortless mastery, in which vision and touch work cooperatively (and

this occurs in many of his images), isparadigmatic ofChardin's own activity

as an artist. His apprehension of the coidentity of idea and matter and their

finely set positions within a unified field discloses a thought for which haptic

and optic are not autonomous terms but together constitute an indivisible

mode of knowledge.

Thus the flickering heaviness of the atmosphere in Chardin's mature

work isa medium in which vision performs like the sense of touch, passing

through a space ofwhich no fraction isempty.84Farfrom being an airless New-

tonian realm, the world of Chardin'sart is adjacent to a Cartesian science of

a corpuscular, matter-filled reality inwhich there isno void,no action ata dis-

tance. Andifthe apoc YJ2.haltQ.~es9f ~dj P@ltipg with his fingers are to

'--

be put to use, itshould not be inthe service ofprivileging ti leless painterly

83. On the modernity ofdioptrics, see Molyneux, Dioptrica nova pp. 251-252. Noone

denies the ancients the lmowleclge of Catoptricks . ' . . yet cenainly Optick-G1asses are a

modem invention.

84. See Diderot,

Oeuvres estbetfques

ed. Paul Vemlere (Paris, 1%8), p . 484. See also

Joseph Addison,

7beSpectator

ed. Donald F.Bond (Oxford, 1%5), no. 411,June 21,1712:

Our s ight . . . may be cons idered as a more de licate and di ffusive Kind of Touch, tha t

spreads its self over an infinite MultitUde of Bodies.

r


65

J B. Cbardin. BoyBlowing Bubbles. 1739.


22/22

66


3 Subjective Vision and the Separation of the Senses

valuesbut rather to underscore the primacy ofa vision, belonging to aspecific

historical momeni,Tfi which tactilitywas fully embedded.8s

Chardin is at a vast remove from an art is t l ike Cezanne. IfChardin is

understandable in the context ofthe Molyneuxproblem andthe coordination

ofsensory languages, Cezanne implies notjust the possibility of achievingthe

state ofa blind man suddenly restored to sight,but more importandy ofretain-

__ _

-- >- ..-.

ing this innocence j?ermanendy. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-

ries this kind of primordial vision simply could not be thought, even as a

hypothetical possibility. In all the speculation surrounding the 1728case of

the Chesleden boy, no one was ever to suggest that a blind person restored

to sightwould initiallysee a luminous and somehow self-sufficientrevelation

ofcolored patches.86Instead, that inaugural moment ofvision was a void that

: could not be spoken ofor represented, because itwas empty ofdiscourse and

J thusof meaning. Vision for the newlysighted person took shape when words,

}

uses, and locations could be assigned to objects. Ifcezanne, Ruskin, Monet,

or any other artist ofthe nineteenth century isable to conceive ofan inno-

cence ofthe eye, itisonlybecause ofa major reconfiguration ofthe observer

earlier in that century.

To admit untruth as a condition

of life--this does indeed imply a ter-

rible negation of the customary

valuations.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

85. See the d iscuss ion of Chardin's t echnique in Norman Bryson ,

Word and Image:

French Paint ing of the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 118-119. On the relat ion

between Rembrandt's touch and Cartesian optics, see Svetlana Alpers,

Rembrtindt s Enter-

prise: The Studio and the Market (Chicago, 1988), pp. 22-24. Myreading of a cooperative,

rec iprocal relat ion betWeen vision and touch in Chardin asa model ofsensory attentive-

ness can be rel at ed to Michae l Fri ed 's not ion of absorpt ion a rt icu la ted in h is g round-

breaking Absorption and Tbeatrl ca lit y: Pain ting and Beholder in the Age of DkIerot

(Berkeley, 1980).

86. In 1728the surgeon Cheselden performed a successful cataract opera tion on afour-

teen-year-old boy blind from birth. See Diderot, Lettressur /esaveug/es, p. 319;and Berke-

ley, Theory of Vision Vindicated, sec. 71. See also Jeffrey Mehlman, Cataract: A Study in

DkIerot (MiddletOWn, Conn., 1979).

Being composed of a plurality of

irreducible forces the body isa mul-

tiplicity , its unity is that of a mul-

tiple phenomenon, a unity of

domination.

-Gil les Deleuze

One of the opening paragraphs of Goethe's Farbenlebre (1810) begins

with the following account:

Leta room be made asdark aspossible; let there be acircular open-

ing in the window shutter about three inches in diameter, which

may be closed or not atpleasure. The sun being suffered to shine

through this on a white surface, let the spectator from some little

distance fix his eyes on this bright circle thus admitted.

1 . Johann Wolfgang von Goe the,

Theory of Colours,

trans. Charles Easdake (1840; Cam-

bridge, Mass., 1970), pp. 16-17.

Documents

Crary,Techniques of the Observer (Optimizado)