Jonathan Crary: Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990–) [EN, HU, TR, ES, BR-PT, CN]

“In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity.

Inverting conventional approaches, Crary considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of “subjective vision” were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision.

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.”

Publisher MIT Press, Dec 1990
October Books series
ISBN 0262031698
171 pages

Publisher (EN)

Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (English, 1990, 21 MB, updated on 2015-2-18)
A megfigyelő módszerei. Látás és modernitás a 19. században (Hungarian, trans. Ágnes Lukács, 1999, no OCR)
Gözlemcinin Teknikleri. On Dokuzuncu Yüzyılda Görme ve Modernite (Turkish, trans. Elif Daldeniz, 2002/2004, added on 2024-3-3)
Las técnicas del observador: visión y modernidad en el siglo XIX (Spanish, trans. Fernando López García, 2008)
Técnicas do observador: visão e modernidade no século XIX (BR-Portuguese, trans. Verrah Chamma, 2012, added on 2024-3-3)
Guan cha zhe de ji shu / 观察者的技术 (Chinese, 2017, added on 2024-3-3)

Edward T. Hall: Beyond Culture (1976)

“Edward Hall’s fifth book is both a summary of many themes first raised in his volume on proxemics in 1959 and a fresh insight more reminiscent of a psychologist than an anthropologist. The psychological flavor appears epigramatically in a double index to the book. First there is the ‘Index of IDEAS and techniques of TRANSCENDENCE’. Immediately following is an ‘Index of Themes’ in addition to the normal index one finds in most textbooks. The indexes signal a selfconsciousness of the main proposition advanced by Hall, viz., ‘What is called for is a massive cultural literacy movement that is not imposed but springs from within.’ This movement of the collective individual would begin to relieve the two cultural crises in the contemporary world of human experience. One crisis is the population/environment connection and the other, ‘equally lethal’, is man himself.

The analysis offered by Hall covers 15 chapters beginning with the paradoxical nature of culture, where persons and their mechanical/technological extensions are confused. In a populist flourish, Hall labels this tendency the ‘E.T. screen’. An Extension Transference emerges where one intellectually confuses an extension with the process extended. Hall readily admits this issue is not new, being the focus of the Korzybski heritage of General Semantics. Yet, Hall does make the heuristic point that culture per se is now a prime, systematic example of ET.” (from a review by Richard L. Lanigan, American Anthropologist, 1978)

Publisher Anchor Books, 1976
ISBN 0385124740, 9780385124744
320 pages

Review (Marc R. Tool, Journal of Economic Issues, 1977)

PDF (29 MB, no OCR)
See also his monograph The Silent Language, 1959.

Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space (1957–) [FR, DE, EN, ES, IT, PT-BR, RO, RU]

Since its first publication in 1957, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space remains one of the most appealing and lyrical explorations of home. Bachelard takes us on a journey, from cellar to attic, to show how our perceptions of houses and other shelters shape our thoughts, memories, and dreams.

Publisher Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1957
Third edition, 1961
214 pages

English edition
Translated by Maria Jolas
Publisher The Orion Press, 1964
New edition, Beacon Press, Boston, 1994
With a new Foreword by John R. Stilgoe
ISBN 0807064734
241 pages
via esco_bar

Review: Joan Ockman (Harvard Design Magazine, 1998).

Wikipedia (EN)
Publisher (FR)
Publisher (EN)

La poétique de l’espace (French, 3rd ed., 1957/1961, no OCR)
Poetik des Raumes (German, trans. Kurt Leonhard, 1960)
The Poetics of Space (English, trans. Maria Jolas, 1964/1994)
La poética del espacio (Spanish, trans. Ernestina de Champourcin, 1965/2000)
La poetica dello spazio (Italian, trans. Ettore Catalano, 1975/2006, updated on 2014-11-18)
[A filosofia do não. O novo espírito científico.] A poética do espaço (Brazilian Portuguese, trans. [Joaquim José Moura Ramos, Remberto Francisco Kuhnen], Antônio da Costa Leal and Lídia do Valle Santos Leal, 1978)
Poetica spaţiului (Romanian, trans. Irina Bădescu, 2003)
Poetika prostranstva (Russian, trans. N.V. Kislova, G.V. Volkova and M.Yu. Mikheev, PDF’d HTML, 2004)