Jonathan Crary in Techniques of the Observer grants a theatrical still modern point of view on the ocular culture of nineteenth century. In this book he has re-approached the complications and plights of visual modernism and social modernity both. Extroverting conventional ideas the author has considered the trouble of visual sight by studying the historical construction of observer and not by images or art works. Crary justifies the fact that the problems associated with vision cannot be separated from the conduction of social competence. He has also examined it in this book that how actually it works. By 1820,s the observer was introduced as the site of new practices and discourses that were located within the body in shape of physiological happening.
[...] It is this notion of touch as part of vision that is appropriate to the sphere of knowledge whose contents are categorized as a stable status within a wide terrain. It was 19th century when these notions transformed in to an incompatible field which was categorized around exchange and flux, where a knowledge bounce would have been incongruous with a centrality of commodities and mobile signs. The identity of these mobile signs and centrality is exclusively optical. } "Let a room be made as dark as possible; let there be a circular opening in the window shutter about three inches in diameter, which may be closed or not at pleasure. [...]
[...] It was the same time when the physical incarnation of that paradigm was a commonly used by means of observing the visible world, of scientific inquiry, an instrument of popular entertainment and of artistic practice. It may be seen that the formal functioning of a camera obsura as an abstract figure many remain constant while the functioning of the instrument or metaphor within a real social or discursive field has altered decisively. "The distinctions with which the materialist method, discriminative from the outset, starts are distinctions within this highly mixed object, and it cannot present this object, and it cannot present this object as mixed or uncritical enough." Walter Benjamin. [...]
[...] Large portion of this book examines that how actually in the beginning of nineteenth century a new kind of relation among the body and forms of discursive and institutional power redefined the grade of an observing thesis. The book does not addresses the local and marginal kinds through which dominant practices of vision were deflected, resisted as well as imperfectly made. Crary suggests that technology is a concomitant and subordinate division of other forces. For Gilles Deleuze, society is defined by its amalgamations, not by its tools . [...]
[...] There is no more the possibility of perspective under which a technique of beholding can take place. The bond of image to observer or observer to image is no more than an object quantified to a place in space but rather two divergent images whose locations simulates the anatomical structure of the observer's framework. In order to completely applause the rupture signified by the stereoscope it is significant to take in consideration the original instrument the so called Wheatstone stereoscope. [...]
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