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ons about an observer's relation tothe world are in place. [ ... ]
These models of continuity are used in the service of both, for lack of betterterms, the right and the left. On the one hand are those who pose anaccount of ever-increasing progress toward verisimilitude in representation,in which Renaissance perspective and photography are part of the samequest for a fully objective equivalent of 'natural vision'. On the other arethose who see, for example, the camera obscura and cinema as bound up ina Single enduring apparatus of power, elaborated over several centuries, thatcontinues to define and regulate the status of an observer.For at least two thousand years it has been known that, when light passesthrough a small hole into a dark, enclosed interior, an inverted image willappear on the wall opposite the hole. [ ... ]
But it is crucial to make a distinction between the empirical fact that animage can be produced in this way (something that continues to be as truenow as it was in antiquity) and the camera obscura as a socially constructedartefact. For the camera obscura was not simply an inert and neutral pieceof equipment or a set of technical premises to be tinkered upon and
improved over the years; rather, it was embedded in a much larger and
denser organization of knovvledge and of the observing subject. If we wantto be historical about it, we must recognize how for nearly two hundredyears, from the late 1500s to the end of the 1700s, the structural andoptical principles of the camera obscura coalesced into a dominant paradigmthrough which was described the status andpossibilities of an observer.What is striking is the suddenness and thoroughness with which thisparadigm collapses in the early nineteenth century and gives way to adiverse set of fundamentally different models of human vision. I want todiscuss one crucial dimension of this shift, the insertion of a new term intodiscourses and practices of vision: the human body, a term whose exclusionwas one of the foundations of classical theories of vision and optics [... J.One of the most telling signs of the new centrality of the body in vision isGoethe's Theory if Colours, published in 1810 [... J.IThis is a work crucial not
for its polemic with Newton over the composition of light but for itsarticulation of a model of subjective vision in which the body is introducedin all its physiological density as the ground on which vision is possible. InGoethe we find an image of a newly productive observer whose body has a
range of capacities to generate visual experience; it is a question of visual
experience that does not refer or correspond to anything external to the
observing subject. Goethe is concerned mainly with the experiences
associated with the retinal afterimage and its chromatic transformations. But
he is only the first of many researchers who become preoccupied with the
afterimage in the 1820s and 1830s throughout Europe. Their collective
study defined how vision was an irreducible amalgam of physiological
processes and external 'stimulation, and dramatized the productive role
played by the body in vision.
[ ... J
[... TJhe privileging of the body as a visual producer began to collapse thedistinction between inner and outer upon which the camera obscura
depended. Once the objects of vision are coextensive with one's own body,
vision becomes dislocated and depositioned onto a single immanent plane.
[... SJubjective