Unbinding Vision Author(s): Jonathan Crary Reviewed work(s): Source: October, Vol. 68 (Spring, 1994), pp.

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UnbindingVision

CRARY JONATHAN

of in One of the most important developmentsin the history visuality the sudden emergenceof models of subjective nineteenthcentury was the relatively vision in a wide range of disciplinesduring the period 1810-1840.1 Withinthe space of a fewdecades, dominant discourses and practices of vision effectively broke witha classicalregimeof visuality and grounded the truthof visionin the of was densityand materiality the body.2One of the consequences of this shift of thatthe functioning visionbecame dependent on the contingent physiological thus rendering visionfaulty, unreliable,and even,it was makeup of the observer, From mid century an extensive on amount of workin science, argued, arbitrary. and art was a coming to termsin variouswayswith the philosophy, psychology, thatvision,or anyof the senses,could no longerclaim an essential understanding or objectivity certainty. the 1860s the workof Helmholtz,Fechner,and many By othersdefined the contoursof a general epistemologicalcrisisin which perceptual experience had none of the primal guarantees that had once upheld its relationto the foundationof knowledge. And it is as one dimensionof privileged a widespreadresponse to thatcrisisthatvisual modernismtook shape beginning in the 1870s. The idea of subjectivevision-the notion thatthe qualityof our sensations depends less on the nature of the stimulusand more on the makeup and functioning of our sensoryapparatus-was one of the conditions for the historical emergenceof notionsof autonomousvision,thatis,fora severing(or liberation) of perceptual experience from a necessary and determinate relation to an exteriorworld. Equally important, the rapid accumulation of knowledgeabout the workings a fully of embodied observermade visionopen to proceduresof norof malization,of quantification, discipline.Once the empiricaltruthofvisionwas
1. Earlierversionsof thispaper were presentedat the Gauss Colloquium at Princetonand at the Center for Literaryand Cultural Studies at Harvard. I am gratefulto P. Adams Sitneyand Victor Brombert Princetonand to NormanBrysonand Guiliana Bruno at Harvardfortheirinvitations. at See my Techniques theObserver: Vision 2. On and Modernity theNineteenth in of Century (Cambridge: MIT Press,1990). OCTOBER 68, Spring 1994,pp. 21-44. ? 1994Jonathan Crary.

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determinedto lie in the body,it was then thatthe sensesand visionin particular were able to be annexed and controlledby externaltechniquesof manipulation and stimulation. This was the epochal achievement the scienceof psychophysics of in the mid-nineteenthcentury-above all the work of scientist-philosopher GustavFechner-which rendered sensation measurable and embedded human perception in the domain of the quantifiable and the abstract. Vision thus became compatiblewithso manyotherprocessesof modernization. was a critiIt cal historicalthresholdin the second half of the nineteenthcentury when any betweena biosphere a mechanosphere to and significant qualitativedifference began evaporate. The relocation of perception into the thicknessof the body was a of a preconditionforthe instrumentalizing humanvisionintomerely component distinction of new machinicarrangements. This disintegration an indisputable of of and became a condition theemergence spectacular for betweeninterior exterior culture. modernizing I to It maybe unnecessary stressthatwhen I use the word "modernization" or detachedfrom notionsof progress development, mean a processcompletely any creation of new needs, but one thatis instead a ceaseless and self-perpetuating new production, and new consumption. Thus perceptual modalities are in a constant state of transformation or, it might be said, in a state of crisis. Paradoxically,it was at this momentwhen the dynamiclogic of capital began of to dramatically undermineany stable or enduringstructure perception,that to thislogic simultaneously regimeof imposedor attempted imposea disciplinary within humansciences the It attentiveness. was also in the late nineteenth century, that the problem of the and particularly nascent field of scientific psychology, was attention became a fundamental issue. It was a problem whose centrality directlyrelated to the emergence of a social, urban, psychic,industrialfield increasinglysaturated with sensory input. Inattention, especially within the of contextof new forms industrialized production, began to be seen as a danger modernized the eventhoughitwas often very and a seriousproblem, arrangements of labor that produced inattention.It is possible to see one crucial aspect of to as modernity a continual crisisof attentiveness, see the changingconfiguraand thresholds, to and distraction newlimits tionsof capitalism pushingattention and new products,new sources of stimulation, with unending introductionof withnew methodsof managingand and of streams information, thenresponding perception. regulating Since Kant, of course, part of the epistemologicaldilemma of modernity and amid the fragmentation has been about the human capacityfor synthesis field. That dilemma became especiallyacute in the atomization of a cognitive second half of the nineteenth centuryalongside the development of various fromthe mass techniques for imposing specifickinds of perceptual synthesis, of diffusion the stereoscopein the 1850s to earlyformsof cinema in the 1890s. Once the philosophicalguaranteesof anya prioricognitiveunitycollapsed, the problem of "reality maintenance" became a function of a contingent and

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23

merely psychological facultyof synthesis,whose failure or malfunction was withpsychosisand other mental pathololinked in the late nineteenthcentury gies. For institutional psychology in the 1880s and 1890s, part of psychic bind perceptions into a functional normalitywas the ability to synthetically whole, thereby wardingoffthe threatof dissociation.But whatwas oftenlabeled or of as a regressive pathological disintegration perceptionwas in factevidence in of a fundamentalshift the relationof the subjectto a visual field.In Bergson, involvedthe bindingof immediatesensory for example, new models of synthesis and for Nietzsche the will to perceptions with the creative forces of memory, of and synthesizing forces. mastering powerwas linkedto a dynamic were adjacent to an emergenteconomic system These and other thinkers of thatdemanded attentiveness a subjectin termsof a wide range of new producwhose internalmovement tive and spectacular tasks but that was also a system was continuallyeroding the basis of any disciplinary attentiveness. Part of the cultural logic of capitalism demands that we accept as naturalswitchingour attentionrapidlyfromone thing to another. Capital, as accelerated exchange and circulation,necessarily produces thiskind of human perceptualadaptability and becomes a regimeof reciprocalattentiveness distraction. and The problem of attentionis interwoven, although not coincident,withthe in of In history visuality the late nineteenthcentury. a wide range of institutional discoursesand practiceswithinthe arts and human sciences, attentionbecame of partof a dense network textsand techniquesaround whichthe truthof vision was organized and structured. is throughthe frameof attentiveness, kind of It a inversionof Foucault's Panoptic model, that the seeing body was deployed and made productive, whether students, as workers, consumers, patients.Beginningin in the 1870s but fully the 1880s,therewas an explosion of researchand reflection on this issue: it dominates the influentialwork of Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt, Edward Titchner, Theodor Lipps, Carl Stumpf,Oswald Killpe, Ernst Mach, WilliamJames,and manyothers,withquestions about the empiricaland episteAlso, the pathologyof a supposedlynormative mological statusof attentiveness. attentiveness was an important part of the inaugural work in France of researcherslike Charcot,AlfredBinet,PierreJanet,and Theodule Ribot. In the 1890s attentionbecame a major issue forFreud, and was one of the problemsat the heartof his abandonmentof TheProject a Scientific and for Psychology his move to new psychical models. attention can be said to have been Before,of course,the nineteenth century a topic of philosophicalreflection, and in discussionsof the historical problemof attention oftenencounterthe claim thatthe modernpsychological we of category attention reallya more rigorously is whichwas developed notion of apperception, in important verydifferent waysforLeibniz and Kant. But in factwhatis crucialis the unmistakable historical betweenthe problemof attention the in discontinuity second half of the nineteenth centuryand its place in European thought in the premierimporter German of previouscenturies.Edward BradfordTitchner,

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into America (who moved fromLeipzig to Ithaca,New experimental psychology asserted categorically in the 1890s that "the problem of attention is York), a essentially modern problem,"although he had no sense of how the particular perceivingsubject he was helping to delineate was to become a crucial component of institutional modernity. For attention notjust one of the manytopicsexaminedexperimentally is by It late-nineteenth-century psychology. can be argued that a certain notion of attentionis in factthe fundamental conditionof its knowledge. That is, mostof the crucialareas of research, whether reactiontimes, sensory of of and perceptual of reflexaction, of conditioned responses-all of these presupposed sensitivity, a subject whose attentivenesswas the site of observation, classification,and and thus the point around which knowledgeof manykindswas measurement, It like accumulated. wasnota question,then,ofa neutraltimeless activity breathing or sleeping but ratherof the emergenceof a specificmodel of behaviorwitha historicalstructure thatwas articulatedin termsof sociallydeterminednorms. familiarwith the historyof modern psychologyknows the symbolic Anyone Wundtestablished labohis importanceof the date 1879-the yearwhenWilhelm of of natureof Wundt's at the University Leipzig.3Irrespective the specific ratory intellectual space and itspracticesbecame the model for project,thislaboratory around the whole modern social organizationof psychological experimentation stimuli. to of the study an observerattentive a wide range of artificially produced To paraphraseFoucault,thishas been one of the practicaland discursive spaces in whatthey are."4 within modernity whichhumanbeings"problematize of as Giventhe centrality attentiveness a scientific object,it mustbe emphaof sized that the 1880s and 1890s produced a sprawling diversity contradictory to explain it.5Since then the problemof attentionhas remainedmore attempts
the see of 3. On Wundtand the beginnings the psychology laboratory, KurtDanziger,Constructing Research HistoricalOriginsofPsychological Press, 1990), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Subject: in as pp. 17-33. See also Didier Deleule, "The LivingMachine:Psychology Organology," Incorporations, eds.JonathanCraryand SanfordKwinter (New York:Zone Books, 1992), pp. 203-33. RandomHouse, 1985),p. 10. trans. RobertHurley(NewYork: 4. MichelFoucault,TheUseof Pleasure, A fewof the verylarge numberof workson thissubjectduringthisperiod are William 5. James, vol. ThePrinciples Psychology, 1 [1890] (New York:Dover,1950), pp. 402-58; Theodule Ribot,La psyof A de (Paris: F. Alcan, 1889); Edward BradfordTitchner,Experimental Psychology: chologie l'attention The Practice Manual ofLaboratory (New York:Macmillan,1901), pp. 186-328; HenryMaudsley, Physiology [1893], trans.E. of ofMind (New York:Appleton,1893), pp. 308-21; Oswald Kiilpe, Outlines Psychology vol. B. Titchner(London: Sonnenschein,1895), pp. 423-54; Carl Stumpf, Tonspsychologie,2 (Leipzig: S. Mind11 (1886), of "Is Hirzel,1890), pp. 276-317; F. H. Bradley, There AnySpecial Activity Attention," Drummond(New York:G. P. Putnam),pp. pp. 305-23; Angelo Mosso,Fatigue[1891], trans.Margaret Ladd, Elements 177-208; Lemon Uhl, Attention (Baltimore: of JohnsHopkins,1890); George Trumbull (New York: Scribner's, 1887), pp. 480-97, 537-47; Eduard von Hartmann, Psychology Physiological [1868], trans.WilliamC. Coupland (New York:HarcourtBrace, 1931), pp. of Philosophy theUnconscious in 105-8; G. StanleyHall, "ReactionTime and Attention the HypnoticState,"Mind8 (April1883), pp. der Zur Theorie sinnlichen [1873] (Leipzig: A. Adelmann, 170-82; Georg Elias Mfiller, Aufmerksamkeit Brain 13 (1890), pp. 145-64; John Processes in Attention," n.d.); James Sully,"The Psycho-Physical and Memory [1896] (New York:Harper, 1886), pp. 132-55; Henri Bergson,Matter Dewey,Psychology trans. W. S. Palmer and N. M. Paul (New York: Zone Books, 1988), pp. 98-107; Theodor Lipps,

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or less withinthe centerof institutional empiricalresearch,though throughout the twentieth and the cognitive sciences century minority positionsin philosophy More recently see we have rejectedit as a relevantor even meaningful problem.6 itspersistence within generalizeddisciplinary the setupof the social and behavioral sciencesin the dubious classification an "attention of deficit disorder" a label for as and unmanageableschoolchildren others.7 The prominenceof attention a problem,beginningin the late 1870s,is a as sign of a generalizedcrisisin the statusof a perceivingsubject.In the aftermath of the collapse of classical models of vision and of the stable, punctual subject those models presupposed, attention became the ill-definedarea in which to describe how a practical or effective world of objects came into being for a perceiver. Initially armed with the quantitative and instrumentalarsenal of the psychophysics, studyof attentionpurportedto rationalizewhat it ultimately revealed to be unrationalizable.Clearlyspecificquestionswere asked-how does attentionscreen out some sensationsand not others,how manyeventsor objects can one attendto simultaneously forhow long (i.e., whatwereitsquantitative and and physiologicallimits),to what extentis attentionan automatic or voluntary or In act, to whatextentdoes it involvemotoreffort psychicenergy? earlybehaviorismits importancediminishedand it became merelya quantitythatcould be In measured externally. most cases, though, attentionimplied some process of in perceptualor mentalorganization whicha limitednumberof objectsor stimuli are isolatedfrom largerbackground possibleattractions. a of Wundt'spostulationof an attentioncenter located in the frontalcerebral lobes was particularly influential.8 account thusposed attention one of the His as
Grundtatsachen Seelenlebens des (Bonn: M. Cohen, 1883), pp. 128-39; L. Marillier, "Remarques sur le de Revue 27 m&canisme l'attention," philosophique (1889), pp. 566-87; CharltonBastian,"Les processus nerveux dans l'attention et la volition,"Revuephilosophique (1892), pp. 353-84; James McKeen 33 Mind15 (1890), pp. 373-80;JosefClemensKreibig, Die Cattell,"MentalTestsand theirMeasurement," als (Wien: Alfred H61lder, 1897); H. Obersteiner,"Experimental Aufmerksamkeit Willenserscheinung Researches on Attention," Brain 1 (1879), pp. 439-53; PierreJanet,"Etude sur un cas d'aboulie et d'idees fixes," Revuephilosophique (1891), pp. 258-87, 382-407; Sigmund Freud, "Project for 31 in trans. Scientific Psychology," TheOrigins Psycho-analysis, Eric Mosbacherand JamesStrachey(New of York:Basic Books, 1954), pp. 415-45; Edmund Husserl,LogicalInvestigations, 1 [1899-1900],trans. vol. J.N. Findlay(New York:HumanitiesPress,1970), pp. 374-86. 6. See, for example, the negative argument in Maurice Merleau-Ponty,The Phenomenology of trans.Colin Smith (New York:Routledge, 1962), pp. 26-31. Recent studieson attention Perception, have workedwithnotions of cognitiveprocessingand channel capacity, borrowedfrominformation theory.One of the most influentialmodern accounts of attentionwas Donald Broadbent's "filter and (New York:Pergamon,1958). theory"in his Perception Communication 7. One of the first de explicitly sociological accounts of attentionis Theodule Ribot, Psychologie of and class are central to his (1889), in which determinations race, gender,nationality, l'attention evaluations.For Ribot,those characterized deficient by capacityforattentioninclude children,prostitutes,savages, vagabonds, and South Americans. Ribot's book was one of the sources for Max Nordau's reflections attentionin Degeneration on (New York:Appleton,1895), pp. 52-57. 8. Wilhelm Wundt, Grundziige physiologischen der vol. Psychologie, 3, [1874] 6th ed. (Leipzig: trans. Edward Engelmann, 1908), pp. 306-64; in English as Principles Physiological of Psychology, Bradford Titchner(New York:Macmillan,1904).

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Wundt'sschematic diagramofthe at center top. brain,withattention 1880.

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within organism an whosemakeupwas emphatically functions highest integrating work and (throughthe notion that "ontogeny hierarchical, repeatsphylogeny") of on attention withmanyof the social assumptions evolutionary became suffused Wundt'smodel of thoughtin the 1870s and 1880s. Perhaps more significantly, withwill,was founded on the idea that which he effectively attention, equated in and mentalprocesseswerenecessarily inhibited orderto varioussensory, motor, That inhibiattention.9 and focusthatcharacterized achieve the restricted clarity tion (or repression) is a constitutive part of perception is an indication of a the of dramaticreordering visuality, implying new importanceof models based That is, a noron an economyof forcesratherthan an optics of representation. mativeobserveris conceptualized,not onlyin termsof the objects of attention, the and but equallyin termsof whatis not perceived,of the distractions, fringes thatare excluded or shutout of a perceptualfield. peripheries kinds What became clear,though oftenevaded, in workof manydifferent containedwithin on attention whata volatileconceptitwas.Attention was always of it itself conditionsforitsown disintegration; was hauntedbythe possibility the its own excess-which we all know so well wheneverwe tryto look at any one of feature a productive was thingfortoo long. In one sense attentiveness a critical and socially adaptive subject, but the border that separated a socially useful absorbed or divertedattentionwas profoundly and a dangerously attentiveness
see of 9. For a detailed overview thisproblemin the nineteenth century, Roger Smith,Inhibition: of in Sciences Mindand Brain(Berkeley: and Press,1992). University California of History Meaning the

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norms.Attention nebulous and could be describedonlyin termsof performative different statesbut existed on a single and distractionwere not two essentially continuum, and thus attention was, as most increasinglyagreed, a dynamic and diminishing,rising and falling,ebbing and flowing process, intensifying according to an indeterminateset of variables. In the interestof keeping this introduction brief,I can only mention another major part of the inaugural researchand discourseon attentionin the late nineteenthcentury--andthiswas the study of hypnosis. Hypnotism uneasily stood for several decades as an extreme model of a technology of attention. As experimentation seemed to and a hypnotic show,the borderlinebetween a focused normativeattentiveness trance was indistinct:that is, theywere essentially continuous with each other, and hypnosiswas often described as an intense refocusingand narrowingof attention,accompanied by inhibitionof motorresponses.Perhaps more imporresearchdisclosed a seemingly of tantly, paradoxical proximity dreaming,sleep, and attention. Much of the discourseof attention to stable attempted salvagesome relatively notion of consciousness and some formof a distinct but it relation, subject/object tended ratherto describeonlya fleeting of immobilization a subjecteffect and an manifoldinto a cohesivereal world.Attention ephemeralcongealingof a sensory was describedas thatwhichprevents perceptionfrombeing a chaoticflood of our sensations,yet research showed it to be an undependable defense against such chaos. In spiteof the importance attention the organization of in and modernization of production and consumption, most studies implied that perceptual experience was labile, continuallyundergoing change, and finallydissipative. Attention seemed to be about perceptualfixity the apprehensionof presence, and but was insteadabout a durationand fluxwithin whichobjectsand sensationhad a mutating provisional existence, and it was ultimately that which obliterated its objects. The institutionaldiscourses on attention depended both on the and mobility a perceiver the same timetheysoughtto make this of at malleability fluxuseful, and controllable, socially manageable. Thus attention, terms itshistorical in of position,is much more than a question of the gaze, of looking,of opticality, ratherhow within but vision modernity is merelyone layerof a body thatcould be captured,shaped, directedbya range of externaltechniquesbut whichwas also an evolvingsensory-motor system capable of creatingand dissolving forms.

I want now to continue this discussionof the new practical and discursive froma more localized point of view,throughthe importance of attentiveness frameof a paintingbyManet. He is important here, less as an emblematicfigure some of the mostdominantaccountsof modernism, and more as one supporting of a number of thinkersabout vision in the late 1870s, workingwithina field

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Below: Edouard Manet.In the Conservatory. 1879. Manet.Self-Portrait a Palette. with Opposite Edouard left: 1878-79 Edouard Manet. Opposite Reading. 1879. right:

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Vision Unbinding

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and materialtexture whose discursive was,as I have suggestedelsewhere, already Thus I will examine certain features of the painting in being reconfigured. a of (1879), in terms itspositionwithin social space in question,In theConservatory be would increasingly set up as the guaranteeof certainpercepwhichattention tual norms and in which attention,in a wide range of institutional discourses, thatwould be the as a centripetal would be posed as a synthetic energy activity, or a glue holding together "realworld"againstvariouskindsof sensory cognitive breakdown. Accordingto a number of critics,one of the crucial formalachievements of Manet's work in the context of earlymodernismwas his tentativesplitting apart of figural, representational facts on the one hand and the facts of autonomous pictorialsubstanceon the other,and thatin his advanced canvases Around 1878 and 1879, in, he approached a breakingpoint of "formlessness."o10 he or Portrait George with for example, Self-Portrait Palette, Moore, The Reader, of dances near the edges of this possible rupture.Painted with an openness and to but also a deeply confidentinattention looseness, a kind of manual velocity, the object and its coherence, we see in such images what Georges Bataille referred as Manet's "supremeindifference."11 to I In writing about In theConservatory, however, have chosen to look at a quite different kindof paintingfromthe late 1870sbyManet,one thatwas perceivedat
27 10. See, forexample, Makeup,Pollen," October (Winter1983), pp. 3-44. Jean Clay,"Ointments, Wainhouseand JamesEmmons (New York:Skira,n.d.), 11. GeorgesBataille,Manet,trans.Austryn p. 82.

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the time and has continued to be seen as a retreatfromfeaturesof his more ambitiousstyle. Exhibitedat the Salon of 1879,itprovokedsome telling responses in wrote mainstreamcritics. Jules-Antoine by Castagnary, the newspaper Siecle, witha tone of mock surprise:"Butwhatis this?Faces and hands more carefully drawn than usual: is Manet makingconcessionsto the public?"12 Other reviews withwhichManet had executed thiswork. noted the relative"care" or "ability" on And the avalanche of recentcommentary Manet in the last two decades has the littlenotice,in a sense perpetuating evaluation thispaintingrelatively given It of it as somehowconservative. is usuallyclassed as one of Manet's representations of fashionablecontemporary life,of "la vie moderne,"and an image with of and formalaudacityof Bar at the littleof the inventiveness Folies-Bergere1881. A leading Manet scholar insiststhat,in contrastto other advanced paintingof do the late 1870s, the man and woman in In theConservatory not fora moment in "waver and disintegrate the colored light."Others have pointed to "the more conservativetechnique," and the "more contained outlines" of the figuresin to contrast Manet's otherworkof the same years.13 of I would like to pursue here some of the implications the choices Manet has made in this particularimage, of what it mightmean to suggestthathe is or to working "contain"things, to ward offexperiholding somethingtogether, Because I do not thinkthatit explainsmuch to say that ences of disintegration. or back to a more conventional a the workis simply shift "naturalism," that,stung of a string Salon rejectionsin the 1870s,he modifiedhis stylein the hope of by of wider criticalacceptance, for this does not address the verystrangeness this is, Rather,I believe In theConservatory among manyother things,an painting. attemptto reconsolidatea visual fieldthatwas in manywaysbeing disassembled immobilization. contents thatresisted to and an attempt fasten symbolic together I see the paintingas a complex mapping out of the ambiguitiesof visual and thatManet knewso deeplyand intuitively a playingout of his attentiveness I relationto a visualfield.Perhapsmostimportantly,see own mixed and shifting withinthe perceptuallogic of of the paintingas a figuration an essentialconflict modernityin which two powerful tendencies are at work. One is a binding togetherof vision,an obsessiveholding togetherof perceptionto maintainthe of viability a functionalreal world,while the other,barelycontained or sealed and economicexchange,of equivalenceand substitution, is over, a logic of psychic stable posithe apparently of fluxand dissolutionthat threatensto overwhelm thatManet seemsto have effortlessly tionsand terms arranged. but in There are manysignsof thisbindingenergy the painting, perhapsthe critics is moststriking the carefully painted face of the woman.As contemporary in noted, thisface seemed to be an obviousindicationof a shift Manet'spractice,
12. Jules-Antoine Siecle, June 28, 1879. Cited in George Heard Hamilton,Manetand His Castagnary, Critics (New York:Norton,1969), p. 215. 13. p. George Heard Hamilton,Manetand His Critics, 212.

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Edouard Manet. In Detail from the

Conservatory.

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and in factpartof the specificcharacter Manet's modernism of turnsaround the ofwhatGillesDeleuze calls "faciality."14 is, in much ofManet'swork That problem the veryimprecisionand amorphousness of the face becomes a surface that, or and alongsideitscasualness,no longerdisclosesan inwardness a self-reflection, becomes a new unsettlingterrainthat one can trace into the late portraitsof Cezanne. But something is and quite different at workin In theConservatory, it is more thanjust a tightening of whathad been called his "messy broken clearly up to bound touch,""hisvague and sloppyplanes."Ratherit is a return a moretightly order of "faciality," that resistsdismantling one and connection with anything outside the articulated of hierarchy a socializedbody.It is as ifforManet the relativeintegrity the face defined(or approximated)a certainmode of conformity of to a dominantreality, conformity so much of hisworkevades or bypasses. a that thisrelatively cohesivefaciality, centralto the effect the and of Supporting entirepainting, the woman'scorseted, is belted,braceleted,gloved,and beringed markedbyall these pointsof compression and restraint.15 figure, Alongwiththe of the man,theseindications reigned-in of bodies standfor coiled,indrawn figure
Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Universityof 14. MinnesotaPress,1987), pp. 167-91. 15. See David Kunzle, Fashionand Fetishism (Totowa, N.J.:Rowman and Littlefield, 1982), p.31. "The lacingand unlacingof the corsetwererituals whichretainedancientlevelsof symbolism the and magical associationsof the conceptsof 'binding' and 'loosing.' In folklanguage,to be deliveredof a child or to be deflowered, to be 'unbound'; to unbind was to release special forms energy. was of ... The stateof being tightly corsetted a formof erotictensionand constitutes is ipso factoa demand for eroticrelease,whichmaybe deliberately controlled, prolonged,and postponed."

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so manyotherkindsof subduingand constraint thatgo into the construction of an organizedand inhibitedcorporeality. can also note the waythe flowerpots We and vases stand as signsof a relatedenclosureand holdingin, as instruments of the domestication, thatconfines, leastpartially, proliferating at the of growth vegetation surrounding figures. the Even the lathed verticalpostsof the bench are littleechoes of the cinched figureof the woman,as if the wood, like some malleable substance,is squeezed in the middle witha clamp. (And thisfeaturealso of suggeststhe mechanicalrepeatability the seated figure.)Thus thisimage is a back of circulating and previously scattered holdingaction,a forcing components into a semblance of cohesive pictorialunity.The result,however, a disjunct, is and space-drained field.And the thematicof pressure, squeezing of compressed, the is curiously suggestedby Manet's titleforthe work-Dans la Serre--for word meant simply closed "a of serre, course,means "greenhouse," thoughit originally to whichmeans to grip,to hold tightly, place." It is also a formof the verb serrer, clench,to tighten. It is around thismoment-the late 1870sand early1880s-that a remarkable of of not onlyin some practices visualmodernism overlapping problemsis evident and in the empiricalstudyof perception and cognition,but also in the newly emergingstudyof pathologiesof language and perception,especiallyin France If and the empiricalsciencesaround and Germany. certainareas of modernism 1880 were both exploring a perceptual field newlydecomposed into various abstract units of sensation and new possibilities of synthesis, contemporary identified nervousdisorders, whether researchon newly abulia, psychashysteria, thenia, or neurasthenia,all described various weakeningsand failuresof the of Alongsidethe integrity perceptionand its collapse into dissociatedfragments. disorders of aphasia,a set of grouped under the category discovery the linguistic were describedby the resonanttermagnosia.16 relatedvisual disruptions Agnosia or was one of the primaryasymbolias impairmentsof a hypotheticalsymbolic of visualawareness an object,thatis, an it function. Essentially describeda purely of identification an object,a failure to inability make any conceptualor symbolic was a of recognition, condition in whichvisual information experiencedwitha As kind of primalstrangeness. seen throughthe frameof the 1920s clinicalwork of KurtGoldstein,agnosia was when the objectswithina perceptualfieldceased or withintentional lived into a practicalor pragmatic to be integrated plasticity, coordinates. modern reconfiguraIf the studyof aphasia was bound up in a specifically of agnosia and other visual disruptions tion of language, the study produced a
Der aphasische The landmarkinaugural work on aphasia is Carl Wernicke, 16. Symptomencomplex full clinical accounts of agnosia is Hermann (Breslau: Cohn and Weigert,1874). One of the first Lissauer, "Ein Fall von Seelenblindheit nebst einem Beitrage zur Theorie derselben," Archiv fiir of review the und 21 (1890), pp. 222-70. For a recentclinicaland historical Psychiatrie Nervenkrankheiten Farah, Visual (Cambridge:MIT Press,1990). Agnosia problem,see MarthaJ.

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range of new paradigmsfor the explanation of human perception.For classical thoughtthe perceiverwas generallya passive receiverof stimulifromexterior objects,whichformedperceptionsthat mirroredthis exteriorworld.What took were notions of percepshape in the last two decades of the nineteenthcentury tion in which the subject, as a dynamic psychophysical organism, actively constructedthe worldaround it througha layeredcomplex of sensoryand cognitiveprocesses, of higher and lower cerebral centers.Beginning in the 1880s and continuing through the 1890s, various models of holistic and integrating neural processes were proposed, especially in the work of John Hughlingswhich challenged localizingand associationist Jacksonand Charles Sherrington, models. Out of his workin the 1880s PierreJanetwas to postulatethe existenceof what he called the "realityfunction." He repeatedly saw patients with what seemed to be fragmented of systems sensory responseand whathe describedas a reduced capacity to adapt to reality.One of the key symptoms this loss of a of so-called realityfunction forJanet was a failure of a capacity for normative attentivebehavior.But this failurecould either be in termsof a weakening of for and abulias, or an intensification, as attentiveness, example, in psychasthenia in fixedideas and monomanias. Janet'swork,no matterhow much it has been disparagedforits "incorrectness" in relation to hysteria, particularly is valuable forits formaldescriptionof different kindsof perceptualdissociation.What is important notJanet'soften is exorbitantclassification various neuroses but ratherhis account of common of symptomsthat traversed so many differentkinds of patients: various forms of splittingand fragmentationof cognition and perception, what he called "desegregation,"widelyvaryingcapacities for achieving perceptual synthesis, formsof sensoryresponse.17 disjunctionsbetween or isolation of different Again and again he recorded constellations symptoms of involving perceptualand senin soryderangements whichautonomoussensationsand perceptions, virtueof by theirdissociationand fragmented But character, acquired a new level of intensity. if I single out Janet,it is simply one of manyresearchers as who discoveredhow volatile the perceptual fieldcan be, and thatdynamicoscillationsof perceptual awareness and mild forms of dissociation were part of what was considered normative behavior. Implicitwithinsuch dynamictheoriesof cognitionand perceptionwas the notionthatsubjectivitya provisional is of assembly mobileand mutablecomponents. Evenmoreexplicit, was of was perhaps, theidea thateffective synthesis a "realworld" to withadaptation a social environment. to synonymous a large extent Thus,within variousstudieson attention therewas a consistent neverfully but successful attempt

17. For Janet's early work on perceptual disorders and his account of "la desagregation psy(Paris:FelixAlcan, 1889). chologique,"see L'Automatisme psychologique

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34

OCTOBER

from Photograph Iconographie

1878.

de photographique la Salpetriere.

Im
I mi-:il::~

to distinguishtwo formsof attentiveness. The first was conscious or voluntary whichwas usuallytask-oriented oftenassociatedwithhigher, and more attention, evolved The secondwasautomatic passive behavior. or whichincludedfor attention, scientific the and other reverie, psychology areas of habitualactivity, daydreaming, absorbedor mild somnambulant states.The threshold whichany of thesestates at could shift into a socially was definedand pathologicalobsessiveness neverclearly could onlybecome evident with some clearfailure socialperformance. of Now to go back to the paintingby Manet: one of the most ambivalent but featuresof the workis the state of the seated woman. How does one significant begin to characterize it or situate it historically? ClearlywithinManet's work there are manyfiguresand faces we can affiliate with this one. Is she merely another instance of an often-cited Manet blankness,psychologicalemptiness, or disengagement? Perhaps. But I believe such a reading can be specifiedand further. pushed Jean-JacquesCourtine and Claudine Haroche, in their book Histoire visage, du insistthatin the nineteenthcentury new regimeof faciality a takes shape.18Afterthree centuriesin which the meaningsof the human face were explained in termsof rhetoric language,the face in the nineteenth or cencame to occupy a precariousposition by belongingto a human being both tury as a physiologicalorganism and as a privatized,socialized individual subject. Courtineand Haroche see CharlesDarwin's TheExpression Emotions Man and in of in 1872, as belongingto a worldno longerin communication Animals, published
18. Courtineand ClaudineHaroche,Histoire visage du (Paris:Rivages, 1988),pp. 269-85. Jean-Jacques

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with that of Le Brun. Darwin's work is indicative of the split status the face a of acquired-the face became simultaneously symptom an organism'sanatomical and physiological the and,in itsrelativeimpenetrability, markof functioning the success or failure of a process of self-mastery and control implicitin the social constructionof a normativeindividual.In particular, is withinthe field it of mental pathology, withitsspecifically modern analysesof hysterias, obsessions, became a sign manias, and anxieties,that the face, withall its intrinsic motility, of a disquietingcontinuumbetweenthe somaticand the social. With the idea of that continuum in mind I thinkit is possible to see the woman, withface and eyes as a special key,as, on one level, a straightforward of of image of a public presentation an impassive mastery self (perhapsa self-masteryin response to some verbal remarkor proposal by the man), but a mastery that coexistswithbeing in the grip of some thoroughly or ordinary involuntary automaticbehavior. And again we are allowedbyManet,who paintedthe facewith uncharacteristicdefinition,to ask such specificquestions.19Is she engaged in or or attentiveness borders that thought, vacuous absorption, thatformof arrested on a trance? It's hard to think anotherfigure Manet'swiththisinert of of waxwork quality. In a sense we are showna bodywitheyes open but ones thatdo not see-that is, do not arrest,do not fix, or do not in a practical way appropriate the world around them,thatdenote even a momentary statecomparable to agnosia. Again I would restate that it is not so much a question of vision, of a gaze, but of a broader perceptualand corporalengagement(or perhapsdisengagement) witha of sensorymanifold.If it is possible to see the suggestion somnambulancehere,it is simply a forgetfulness the midstof beingwakeful, indefinite as in the persistence of a transient Researchin the early1880s made clear thatseemingly daydreaming. states of reveriecould transform themselves into inconsequential and everyday WilliamJames, himselfa painter for a time, in his Principles auto-hypnosis. of which in howsuch statesare inseparable Psychology, he began writing 1878,describes from attentive behavior: This curiousstateof inhibitioncan at least fora fewmomentsbe the producedat willbyfixing eyeon vacancy... monotonousmechanical activitiesthat end by being automatically carriedon tend to produce it... the eyes are fixedon vacancy, sounds of the worldmeltinto the confused unity,the attention becomes dispersed so that the whole as of body is felt, it were,at once, and the foreground consciousnessis
19. Another approach to thisworkis suggestedby T. J. Clark's discussionof social class and the "face of fashion"in his chapteron Manet's A Bar at theFolies-Bergtre (1881-82) in his ThePaintingof Modern Press,1984), pp. 253-54: ".... fashionand reservewould Life(Princeton:PrincetonUniversity fromidentity general. The look which resultsis a special one: in keep one's face fromanyidentity, not bored, not tired,not disdainful, not quite public, outward,'blase' in Simmel's sense, impassive, focusedon anything."

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filled,if by anything, a sort of solemn sense of surrenderto the by emptypassingof time. In the dim backgroundof our mind we know whatwe ought to be doing: gettingup, dressingourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us. But somehowwe cannot start. to Everymomentwe expect the spell... break,forwe know no reason pulse,and we whyit should continue.But it does continue,pulse after
float with it.20

It was learned thatin both somnambulant and hypnotic states,sensations, froma bindperceptions,and subconscious elementscould loosen themselves ing synthesis and become floating detached elements, free to make new in connections.With the spatial relation between the two figures thispainting to there is a curious similarity one of the earlyformsof therapeuticpractice thatcame out of the workof Charcot, Janet,and othersin the early1880s at the patients hospital of Salpetriere:a method of standingbehind so-calledhysteric to to and whispering themwhiletheyappeared to be preoccupiedand inattentive witha such thatit seemed possible actuallyto communicate theirsurroundings, dissociatedelementof a fragmented subjectivity.21 Manet's painting is about a more generalized experience of dissociation unifiedsurface, even whilehe assertsthe even while he maintainsa superficially Consider how Manet has painted the man's eyes function." of efficacy a "reality here an even more (or, more accurately, onlyalluded to them). Manet suggests of in and/or distraction, which the punctuality visionis equivocal attentiveness no disrupted.There is no visual mastery, ocular potencyhere. His two eyes are shownsplit,a literaldissociation-one eye seemingly open, lookingbeyondand above the womanbeneath him. Of his othereye,all we see is the perhapsslightly lowered eyelid and eyelash.Perhaps it is looking at the woman's umbrella,her gloved hand and the loose glove it holds, the pleats of her dress,perhapseven at he But whatever sees, it is as a disunified the ring on her finger. field,withtwo that is continually disparate optical axes, and he sees it with an attentiveness deflectedand misalignedwithinthe compressedindoor/outdoorworld of the

greenhouse.22 Manet discloses attentive a So within workdepictingtwoapparently figures, statesof distracbeen folded into two different thathas actually an attentiveness and unityof the paintingbegin to corrode.That tion withinwhich the stability or as whether auto-hypnosis or attentiveness, surpassing breakdownof normative and some other mild trancelike state, provided conditions for new mobile

vol. William 20. Dover,1950), p. 444. ofPsychology, 1 [1890] (New York: James,Principles PierreJanet,TheMentalStateofHystericals 21. [1893], trans.Caroline Corson (New York:Putnam, shouldbe used withcaution. 1902), pp. 252-53. This translation see of On the organization the gaze in Manet'smultifigure 22. paintings, Michael Fried,"Manetin 19 His Generation:The Face ofPaintingin the 1860s,"Critical Inquiry ((Autumn1992), pp. 59-61.

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and we see in thispaintinga whole set of associativechains transientsyntheses, that are part of a libidinal economythat exceeds the bindinglogic of the work. linked an involuntary mobile attentionwith the statejust Freud, in particular, There are the obvious and not so before falling asleep and with hypnosis.23 obvious metaphoric displacementsand slippage between the cigar,fingers, the rings on the fingers,the closed umbrella, braceleted wrist,and the rebuslike chain of flowers that become ear, eyes,and then flowers again. Or the way the attenuatedto a point like the huge spiky is man's fingertip curiously green leaves behind him,or the playbetween the leaves of the engulfing plant to the rightof the man and the pleatsof the woman'sskirt. can look at the odd displacement We of the man's lowerlegs by the two pots of a similarcolor to the lowerright.One could go on, but these are some of the waysthatattentionas a selectiveor,some functiondrifts the cohesion of mightsay,repressive awayfromitself, scattering the work,which begins to crack and scatter. And thishappens amid the overall compression of the space, which seems to buckle and ripple at certain points, withtheirdisorespeciallyin the odd push-pullof the twovases at the lowerleft, dered figure/ground relation.At the same timeit is possible to map out a larger trajectoryin which the breakdown of a normativeattention into a dispersed distraction is the verycondition for its reassemblage and rebinding into the lawsof the unconscious. repetitive In addition to what I have suggested so far,another obvious sign of the binding energyof the workis of course the twoweddingrings,adjacent to each other near the verycenterof the painting.24 Since it was first exhibitedtherehas been back and forthspeculationon whetherManet intended to show a married couple (and in fact his models for this workwere married) or an image of an illicitrendezvousbetweena man and a woman marriedto otherpartners. would I insistthat this indeterminacy a crucial part of the work.It bespeaks the split is relationof Manet to his subject-it is an image of conjugality and adultery simulThe weddingbands and the alliance thus implied are about a fieldof taneously. fixed positions,of limits, desire contained and channeled, a system which of in the couple is a bindingstasis.One of the originalmeaningsof the Germanword was bindung the hooping of a cask of liquid, thatis, a containingof flux,like the hooped, corseted torso of the woman which is part of this obsessiveholding in. And one mighteven suggestthatthe structure the workin whichthe male and of female are kept apart by the grid of the bench and differentiated their two by fieldsofvisionis a "blossoming" bride and bachelorenmeshed noncommunicating in a verdantmachine of perpetualnonfulfillment. But curiously, I don't mean to stakeanything and on terribly significant this,
23. trans. Avon,1965),p. 134. (New York: SigmundFreud,TheInterpretation ofDreams, JamesStrachey 24. Manet's ambivalenceabout thiscriticalarea of the paintingis revealed,in part,bythe anatomically anomalous formof the woman's lefthand. It appears to have a thumband only three fingers, thusputtingin question the exact location (and significance) her rings. of

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In Edouard Manet. Detail from the Conservatory.

:::::_:-;:x~8ii~::: ::r_::::_:_::~:ji: ;:::~~:1j~lii '::::: _':i-:::_::;:j:::: :?i::r.:.i: ::~~: ~1-:::::1--1 .::: : ::::::: : :?:?::::i : :i:::;:::-:: iiii'::i:ii :~:'l'-;i:~B~i~~:??-;i~~ii!:::::i~-f~a~~::i:::::i:::::l:~-:.:I: :r-:i;: ~?-??lllasmr~a~-w:~~~-~?i:'~::~'::j?:;~: :::::: :: -il::iii,?i: i"id~i?.ii? . :'::': :iii-:i-i~ :::':::::::

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is is That is,ifthe "liaison" what the Frenchtranslation Freud's bindung liaison.25 of the of holds thingstogetherpsychically, figuration an adulterousliaison in this in paintingis also what underminesthatverybinding.Adultery, the contextof but no longerhas a transgressive status, is whatTonyTannercalls modernization, of of of "a cynicism forms," merelyanother effect a dominantsystem exchange, whichis whatManetcan onlyindirectly and equivalence, confront.26 circulation, The fingers thatalmosttouchbut do not is a centralnonevent. Theysuggest a tactility thathas become anesthetized even paralyzed.It is an image of attenor of tivenessin which there is a drift and gap between different systems sensory a lesseningof the mutualawarenessof the different senses,saybetween response, of It sightand smell.27 would be hard to rule out here the suggestion an olfactory of attentiveness the kindFreud describedin a letterto Fliessin whichhe stressed is thatthe smellof flowers the disintegrated productof theirsexual metabolism.28 We also have the splitbetweenthe woman'sone glovedhand and the other, bare, to receive or initiate a caress. But the man's hand seems shaped into a ready
trans. See J. Laplanche and J.-B.Pontalis, TheLanguageofPsycho-Analysis, Donald Nicholson25. Smith(New York:Norton,1973), pp. 50-52. in and Transgression 26. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Tony Tanner, Adultery theNovel: Contract Press,1979). University Withindiscussions attention, of therewas considerabledebate overwhetherone could attend 27. to more than one sense simultaneously. See, for example, the negative argumentin ErnstMach, trans.C. M. Williams(Chicago: Open Court,1885), p. 112. Contributions Analysis Sensations, tothe of Letters and 28. 1887-1902, Fliess, Drafts Notes SigmundFreud, TheOrigins Psycho-Analysis: toWilhelm of trans.Eric Mosbacherand JamesStrachey(New York:Basic Books, 1954), pp. 144-45.

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as fromhis already pointingfinger, ifindicatinga focusof attentionthatdiverges ambivalentglance, and in a directionopposite fromwhere the umbrelladirects our eye. Could he be pointingat the woman's strangely disembodied hand and bentwrist--abend thatis anatomically extremeas manyimagesof hysteras overly ical contracture?(AlfredBinet, Richard Kraft-Ebbing and others in the 1880s noted the prevalence,especially male subjects, a hand fetishism.) anycase, in of In the frozencharacterof the scene, or what we could call its powerfulsystem of fixations and inhibition, coexists withanotherlogic of errance, the wandering with of a sensory out of bodythatseekspathways of bindingarrangements all kinds.It is an unfixedeye thatis always thefoldbetweenattentiveness distraction. at and That veryfold,where attentiveness produces its own dissolution,takes on concreteform the pleatsof thewoman'sunderskirt, in almostlike theleglessend of a mermaidbeached on the greenhousebench,and it opens up onto a whole new of withwhichso much of Manet'slateworkis intertwined. organization distraction, He showsus here a ratherdetailed image of whatis clearlya fashionof 1879, the so-called "Princess-style" dress,withits close-fitting walking-out hip-length jacketbodice and double skirt, tightsleevesand cuffs its at It slightly flaring the wrists. is world of fashionthatthe ephemerality especiallywiththe emergingcommodity of attentiveness comes into play as a productivecomponent of modernization. The display an for is here,the bodymerely armature the commodity, a momentary immobilization withina permanently installed congealing of vision,a temporary economyof fluxand distraction. Manet in 1879 stands close to a turningpoint in the visual status of the fashioncommodity: yearor so laterwas when FredricIves patentedhis half-tone a printing process,whichwould allow photographsto be reproduced on the same thus settingup on a mass scale a new virtualfield of the page as typography, as of that "commodity image,"and along withit new rhythms attentiveness would become a formof work, workas visualconsumption.In thispainting increasingly we have Manet elegantlydisclosingwhat Walter Benjamin was to articulate so bluntlyin the Arcades Project: not only is it an image of what Benjamin called "the enthronement of merchandise," but the painting illustratesBenjamin's observationthatthe essence of fashion"residesin itsconflict withthe organic.It fashionasserts couples the livingbody to the inorganicworld.Againstthe living, the rightsof the corpse and the sex appeal of the inorganic."29 Thus despite Manet's play here withthe image of adorned woman as a flower among flowers, or of fashionas a blossomingforthinto a luminous apparition of the new,the is commodity partof the largersuffocating organizationof the painting.Fashion worksto bind attentiononto its own pseudo-unity, at the same time it is the but intrinsic and transienceof thisformthatunderminesManet's attempt to mobility

29. Walter Benjamin, Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), pp. 152-53.

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it integrate into the semblanceof a cohesivepictorialspace and thatcontributes of to the derangement visualattention mapped out acrossitssurface. Mode,the magazinehe produced in 1874,was one of Mallarme'sLa Derniere the earliestand mostpenetrating of explorationsof thisnew terrain objectsand of events.La Derniere Modeis a kaleidoscopicdecomposition and displacement the in Attention Mallarme,as Leo Bersani veryobjectsthatare evokedso glitteringly. of has noted, alwaysmoves awayfromits objects,undermining any possibility a and of life The emerging worldof fashioncommodities realized presence.30 fully as at structured consumption, leastforseveralmonthsin the fallof 1874,revealed world that to Mallarm&a presentimpossible to seize hold of, an insubstantial of seemed alignedwithhis own sublimedisavowal the immediate. Manet gives, in one sense, a solidityand palpable presence to what for is but even here the fashioncommodity present Mallarmeremainedevanescent, as a kind of vacancy,and it is haunted by what Guy Debord describes as its of fromthe centerof acclaimand the revelation itsesseninevitabledisplacement Within this new systemof objects, which was founded on the tial poverty.31 as continualproductionof the new,attention, researchers learned,was sustained this of and enhanced by the regularintroduction novelty. Historically, regimeof coincides withwhat Nietzsche described as modern nihilism:an attentiveness as of exhaustionof meaning,a deterioration signs.Attention, partof a normative and comes intobeing onlywhenexperiencesof singularity account of subjectivity, are exchange. by identity overwhelmed equivalenceand universal attentiveness is how itfigures of Partof the precariousness In theConservatory but also as thatwhich of as somethingconstitutive a subject withinmodernity and coherence of a subjectposition.In a crucialsense the dissolvesthe stability is work,in itsuse of the twofigures, poised at a threshold beyondwhichan attentive vision would break down in a loosening of coherence and organization. that Manet perhapsknewintuitively the eye is not a fixedorgan,thatit is marked and that intensities, an indeterminate organization, by by bypolyvalence, shifting Gilles will to sustainedattentiveness anything relievevisionof itsfixedcharacter. about what he calls "the special relationbetweenpaintingand Deleuze, writing an for that, thehysteric, objectsare too present, excessofpresence suggests hysteria," has if and thatmakesrepresentation impossible, thatthepainter, notrestrained, the the classical For capacityto extricatepresencesfromrepresentation.32 Deleuze, that off model of paintingis about warding the hysteria is so close to itsheart.
of Leo Bersani, The Death of StiphaneMallarme(Cambridge: University Cambridge Press, 30. 1982), pp. 74-75. trans.Donald Nicholson-Smith 31. (New York:Zone Books, of GuyDebord, TheSociety theSpectacle, 1994), p. 45 (sec. 69). de Bacon:Logique la sensation 1981), pp. GillesDeleuze, Francis 32. (Paris:Editionsde la diff6rence, and 36-38. The paradoxicalrelationbetweenrepresentation presencein paintingis a majorthemeof a kindof is Mallarme'sessayon Manet. If representation to be exceeded, Mallarm6suggests, particular all mustbe achieved:"... the eye should forget else it has seen, and learn anew fromthe attentiveness

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in Thus In theConservatory, the waysI have indicated,revealsManet (for a number of possible reasons) attemptingambivalentlyto reclaim some of the But termsof thatclassicalsuppressionand restraint. the resultis something quite froma returnto an earliermodel, and I have triedto suggestthe range different in of disjunctionswithinManet's synthetic activity thiswork.Perhaps the most notable featureof the paintingthatevades the stateof enclosure,of being "in the Is grip"or "dans la serre,"is the tangled mesh of green behind the figures.33 this what also fillsthe other side of the room, a possible object of the woman's attenaround Manet has applied the paint of the vegetationthickly tion or distraction? in an encroachingridgearound them,and thusthe green is the figures, risingup zone of This turbulent themselves. closer to our view than the figures physically itssymbolic domestication and ceases to function exceeds color and proliferation It as partof a figure/ground relationship. becomes the signof a perceptualorder alien to the relations Manet has sought to freeze or stabilize around the two in It is figures. is a siteon whichattention enfoldedinto itsown dissolution, which it can pass froma bound to a mobile state.It is amid the continuity betweenthese statesthatvisioncan become unhingedfromthe coordinatesof itssocial determinants. And this is what Manet's grip can only imperfectly keep in check-an that attentiveness would lose itself outsidethose distinctions. In terms of the larger project of which this paper is part, it is perhaps important to suggest some other organizations of visual attentiveness,other networks perceptualbindingand synthesis of thatwere takingshape around this time. In Max Klinger's Glovecycle,which he worked on in the late 1870s, the kind of libidinalsetup and a perceptualfieldis held togetherby a verydifferent different ofvisualambiguity.34 gloveand otherpotentialsites The very experience of fixationin In theConservatory none of the overloaded investment have thatthe has in Klinger,where attentivenessoverrunsany normativesynthesis to glove become exclusivelydetermined by a singular content. What is crucial about bound and focused,is at the Klinger'scycleis the wayvision,althoughobsessively same time dispersedinto serial and metamorphicmovements. even as Attention, it is ostensibly tied to the glove,deliriously out as a dynamic and productive opens process.It tracesa mobile and shifting path fromimage to image,adjacent to that

lesson beforeit. It should abstractitself frommemory, seeing onlythatwhichit looks upon, and that as forthe first time; and the hand should become an impersonalabstraction guided onlyby the will, oblivious of all previous cunning." Stephane Mallarme, "The Impressionists and Edouard Manet," [1876] in PennyFlorence,Mallarme, Manet,and Redon(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press,1986), pp. 11-18. 33. The first etchededitionof thiscycleappeared in 1881,althoughthe inkdrawings were exhibited in 1878. See ChristianeHertel, "Irony, Dream and Kitsch:Max Klinger'sParaphrase the of Finding a of and GermanModernism," Bulletin (March 1992), pp. 91-114. Glove Art 74, 34. On the structural importanceof the color green in Manet's work,see Gisela Hopp, Edouard Manet:Farbe und Bildgestalt (Berlin:Walterde Gruyter, 1968), pp. 54-58 and 116-37.

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A Max Klinger. Glove:Action. Right: 1881. disc. Below Zoopraxiscope left: Below zoopraxiscope. right: Muybridge's 1879.
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UnbindingVision

43

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A Max Klinger Glove:Anxieties.1881.

of on of socialterrain whichflows desireand thecirculation commodities emerging willceaselessly overlap. that In a briefhistorical aside in his book on cinema,Gilles Deleuze insists coincideswiththe moment the crisisof perceptionin the late nineteenth century at whichit was no longerpossible to hold a certainposition,and he indicatesthe wide range of factorsthat introduced more and more movementinto psychic two images in the Glove life.35 is especiallysignificant It that the first cycle are kineticseeing body set in motion,to about roller-skating: observeras a newly the Also,both the greenhouse glide along uncertainsocial and durationaltrajectories. and the skatingrinkwere two of what Benjamin called public "dream spaces," whichopened up new arenas of visual consumptionand providedthe possibility unknown libidinalencounters and itineraries. forpreviously The futuretasks of an attentivesubject were also foreshadowedin 1879, when Edweard Muybridge built his zoopraxiscope, a projection device for a induced bindingcreatingmovingimagesthatoperatedthrough technologically of visual sensations,and which he broughtto Paris in 1881 for some together It before groups of artistsand scientists.36 is one of celebrated demonstrations
of The 35. GillesDeleuze, Cinema: Movement-Image, Hugh Tomlinson(Minneapolis:University trans. MinnesotaPress,1986), p. 56. 36. Muybridgespent nearlysix months in Paris fromSeptember 1881 to March 1882. His first of Marey European demonstration the zoopraxiscopewas duringa soiree at the home ofJules-Etienne of whichwas attendedbyHelmholtzand the photographer Nadar,among others.For discussions this of Man see visit, RobertBartlett Haas, Muybridge: in Motion(Berkeley: 1976), pp. University California, Basic Books,1990), pp. 100-2. 127-32,and AnsonRabinbach,TheHumanMotor (New York:

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44

OCTOBER

of manyelementsin the automationof perceptionand of the machine synthesis and that so-called "objectivereality"that began in the mid-nineteenth century continuesunabated on otherlines today.Despite theirdissimilarities, Muybridge and Klinger are reciprocallyrelated in termsof their temporal unfoldingsof the as attentiveness: former a metricand inflexible redundancyof positionand in But of transformations. early the twentieth the latter a nomadicsystem psychic as a elements within generalized these twopoles would become overlapping century of organization spectacle. of Even beforethe actual invention cinema in the 1890s,though,it is clear intonewcompowerebeingreassembled thatthe conditionsofhumanperception and as was nents.Vision,in a widerangeoflocations, refigured dynamic, temporal, began in the synthetic-thedemise of the punctualor anchoredclassicalobserver subject, increasingly displaced by the unstableattentive century, earlynineteenth whose varied contoursI have triedto sketchout here. It is a subjectcompetent of both to be a consumerof and to be an agent in the synthesis a proliferating and a subjectwho will become the object of all the of effects," diversity "reality But of industries the image and spectaclein the twentieth century. ifthe standarda constitute path into the video and cybernetic izationand regulationof attention in which disorderinherent attentiveness, the dynamic spaces of our own present, of invention, Manet'sworkbegins to disclose,embodiesanotherpath dissolution, and of that and creative syntheses exceeds the possibility rationalization control.

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