ABSTRACT
The chapter begins, then, by outlining Crary’s historiographic analysis of vision: how it was understood in scientific terms prior to the early 1800s; how this understanding ruptured in the 1820s and 1830s; and how a new ‘physiological’ mode of vision largely supplanted the older ‘geometrical optics’. Rather than immediately engaging with his historiography, however, we first juxtapose it with Carolyn Merchant’s analysis of how Western scientific communities’ ways of knowing the world and the body changed
dramatically in the 1600s; Man and Nature emerged as new, mechanistically interrelated, oppositional categories. The juxtaposition suggests a reframing of Crary’s discussion of vision to make issues of gender and other corporealized ‘differences’ integral rather than incidental or marginal to vision’s history. The fourth and fifth parts of the chapter, then, discuss how one might use Merchant’s work to re-corporealize Crary’s analysis. In particular, her work helps deconstruct his problematic positing of a universal observer, something that requires a singularly positioned and universal (unmarked) body. At the same time, we use Crary’s insights to significantly re-work the gendered dualism of Merchant, in the process making both analytical frameworks more malleable to historical constructions of difference.
