vision as a rhetorical heuristic it reflects the distrust, and indeed pedagogical
discredit of the senses that much of film studies has adopted from the nine-
teenth century. Although Bordwell particularly offered a trenchant criticism of
the description of film spectatorship known as apparatus theory, which saw cin-
ema and especially the“illusion of motion”as part of the ideological swindle of
the basic cinematic apparatus, that suspicion of the moving image seems to per-
sist.
My investigation of the moving image offers another take on the theory (and
history) of the apparatus. Although being vigilant about the nature and method
of ideological deception remains a duty of the theory of media, assuming an
Enlightenment critique of perception seems to me a distraction rather than a
foundation for a political praxis. I share Jonathan Crary’s attempt to provide
apparatus theory with historical, technological and phenomenological specifi-
city. However if the optical devices serve as a mode of disciplining subjects and
workers and citizens, I find the realm of the moving image provides equal op-
portunities of criticism and analysis. And I do not believe that delight necessa-
rily cancels those possibilities out. The proliferation of devices of the moving
image demands a critical history of their uses and experiences. But if a utopian
celebration of new media can blunt the edge of criticism (and produce an amne-
sia about what we have learned from previous practices of visual images), pur-
itan suspicions of the senses and their playfulness seems to be an equally deadly
route to take. There may yet be uses for philosophical toys.
Notes
. Jonathan Crary,Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century(Cambridge: MIT Press,)p..
. Ibid., p..
. R.L. Gregory,Eye and Brain:The Psychology of Seeing(London: World University Li-
brary,)p..
. Nicholas J. Wade, ed.,A Natural History of Vision(Cambridge: MIT Press), pp.
-.
. Crary, p..
. Joseph & Barbara Fisher Anderson:‘The Myth of Persistence of Vision’,Journal of the
University Film Association(Fall):-.
. Mary Ann Doane,“Movement and Scale: Vom Daumenkino zur Filmprojektion,”in
Apparaturen bewegter Bilder, Kulture und Technik, vol., ed. Daniel Gethmann
(Munster: LIT,), pp.-. German translation of“Movement and Scale:
From the Flip-book to the Cinema.”I have used a manuscript kindly supplied by
the author of the original English version and use the page numbers from that
manuscript.
42 Tom Gunning