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Techniques of the Observer : on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century by Jonathan Crary is a art available to read on EtoBox.

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Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. This analysis of the historical formation of the observer is a compelling account of the prehistory of the society of the spectacle.Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.

Who reads Techniques of the Observer : on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century?

Author

Jonathan Crary

Publisher

The MIT Press

Published

1990

Language

EN

ISBN

9780262531078

Category

art

Subjects

Social Science, Philosophy, History

Rating

4.07 / 5 (278 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14