A Study Of Jonathan Crary's Visual Culture Theory

Jonathan Crary is an outstanding scholar in the field of American contemporary art history and visual culture.The formation of Crary's theory of visual culture was forced by the arrogation of current digital virtual medium to human natural authority rather than by his personal interests.The theory induces us to track the origin of the “colonization”of visual medium back to the 19 th century,and gradually demonstrate the process of capital using media spectacle to build the subject from the beginning to the end.This is the theoretical premise for us to understand the study of Crary's visual culture.This paper discusses the content and the practical significance of Crary's vision theory by the following four chapters.The first chapter mainly discusses the technical metaphor of the observer's paradigm transfer from the perspective of the media archaeology.“Observer” is a theoretical basis of the visual modernity.At the beginning of the 19 th century,the disembodied observer of the classical camera obscura metaphor was directly replaced by the model of the observer which takes the stereoscope as the carrier.The most obvious sign of the replacement was the functional change of the image making device,which makes the return of the “body” and the redefinition of the geographical territor.In addition,in view of the lack of evidence on the paradigm shift of observers,Crary has given necessary material evidencesto support it from many popular entertainment visual spectacle and artistic practice(especially Turner's painting)at that time.The second chapter,starting from the observer's body,focuses on the daily supervision of capital on the perceptual attention of the subject.Firstly,clarifying how attention can become another theoretical basis for exploring the visual modernity,that is,what are the generating conditions of the visual modernity? There two reasons.One is the disenchantment of the camera obscura model by the subjective vision in the 19 th century,and the other is the failure of Kant's innate comprehensive solution to epistemology.Secondly,under the context of capital builds the homogeneous observers,the concentration behavior of attention from automatically degeneration to distraction is revealed.Finally,through the ues of the heterogeneous texture of the paintings of Manet,Seurat and Cezanne in the late 19 th century,the paradox of perceptual attention is presented.The third chapter continues the issues of observer and attention,which specifically analyzes the control logic of “spectacle”,and perspectives the revolutionary potential of “sleep” in deviating from the norm and escaping from the construction of capital.Spectacle is an important means to regulate the subjective view of capital.Crary not only traced the origin of the ancient Latin characters in the spectacle category,but also made an inferential study of its missing historical pedigree.Theideological distribution of spectacle image in the digital virtual age has detached the control of perceptual attention,and has been extended to the instinctive need levels such as sleep and dreams,which is essentially the occupation of the fixed time to block the operation of capital,and it has the characteristics of rhythm and convention to resist capital regulation.The Chapter four,based on the specificity of Crary's visual culture theory,describes the its theoretical enlightenment of crary's visual culture theory to the current study of visual culture in China.The process from physiological vision to visual modernity revealed by the exploration of visual modernity is actually a recontextualization of visuality.The modern evolution from physiological vision to visualization,which is revealed in the origin of visual modernization,is actually a re-situational creation of visual and other categories,which is a backwash to the tendency of thick concepts and thin context in academic circles.The theoretical ideat of visual archaeology is the switch of visual thinking.The focus of the visual archaeology is not the explicit meaning of the works,but its hidden discourse configuration.Starting from the fracture point,excavating the hidden and buried knowledge schema,then recasting the gray memory of history.Nowadays,scholars have responded to this.The microscopic topology of visual practice is an important expansion of the filed of visual research.The observer's perspective may not be unusual,but study of attention and sleep arerarely heard.Facing the bureaucratic structure of various power systems,Crary has never shown any pessimistic emotions,but still has drawn a good prospect on visual culture study in an optimistic attitude.