The Eye Through Time:
Dr. Orit Halpern
History Department
80 Fifth Avenue
Room 507
E:HalpernO@newschool.edu
Books:
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1995)
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007)
Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999)
Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as symbolic Form, (New York: Zone Books, 1997)
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke Press,
2003)
Rosalind Morris, In the place of origins: modernity and its mediums in northern Thailand, (New York:
Columbia Press, 2000)
Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Modern Nigeria
(Durham: Duke Press, 2008)
Suggested
Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Vol. One, trans.John Cottingham, et al. 1985.
Sigmund Freud, The Reader, Peter Gay, ed. Any version
Requirements: One 20-25 page original research paper on a topic of your choice (40%)
Presentation (20 min) on research project (10%)
Submission of an abstract on project to a conference not at the New School
Being leader of class discussion for one class. (10%)
Classroom participation and attendance (40%)
Week One: Reality Has Not Yet Begun
Screening: Image of the World and the Inscription of War (Harun Farocki, 1989)
Recommended reading:
Thomas Keenan, Light Weapons (on-line)
Rosalind Morris, The War Drive: Image Files Corrupted, Social Text 91, Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer
2007
Victory Trausk, “The Influencing Machine” (on-line)
Week 2: Cartesian Perspectivalism
Week 2:
Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (Book)
René Descartes, Optics, from The Visual Culture Reader, Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed. New York:
Routledge, 1999.
Recommended:
Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting, Chapter One (on-line)
Karsten Harries, “Descartes, Perspective, and the Angelic Eye”, (Yale French Studies, 1983),
on-line/J-stor
René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Optics from The Philosophical Writings of
Descartes:Volume One, trans. John Cottinghamn, et, al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. pp. 109-176 (on-line)
Week 3-6:Knowledge, Power, and Vision
Week3
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, Chapters 1-5.
Prepare Proposal for Final Research project-Submit on Week 4
Go to the MET—see the Vanderlyn Panorama
Week 4:
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer
Michel Foucault, Panopticism, from Discipline and Punish
Recommended:
Stephen Oetterman, Panorama (on-line)
Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon, http://cartome.org/panopticon2.htm
Brewster and Wheatstone, works on stereoscopic vision (on-line)
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The stereoscope and the stereograph” (1859) [on-line]
Week 5:
Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time,Intro, Chapter 2:Freud Marey and the
Cinema, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 2002). [on-line]
Christopher Otter, The Victorian Eye, selections, [on-line]
Week 6:
Lisa Cartwright: Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture
Introduction
Chapter 1-2,pp.1-47 and 3, and 6. (on-line)
The Body and the Archive
Allan Sekula
October, Vol. 39 (Winter, 1986), pp. 3-64 [on-line]
Please check out these movies
Screenings early cinema clips/ Archives Library of Congress [on-line]
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edshift.html
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/awmi10/index.html
Week 7:
Georges Didi-Huberman: Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the
Salpêtrière
Section I: Spectacular Evidence, pp.1-66, also read the “argument”, xi, xii.
Chapter 7: Repetition, Rehearsals, Staging , pp.175-257
Sigmund Freud:
Screen Memories, Project for a Scientific Psychology , Interpretation of Dreams and Three Essays
on Sexuality, Sigmund Freud, in The Freud Reader, Peter Gay, ed. [New York:W.W.
Norton and Company, 1995). [on-line]
The Dream Work (1900) in the Visual Culture Reader, pp.47-50.
Karl Marx, Commodities and Money (1867), in the Visual Culture Reader,pp.42-46.
Victory Trausk, “The Influencing Machine” (on-line)
Looking and Listening: The Construction of Clinical Knowledge in Charcot and Freud,
Daphne de Marneffe, Signs Vol. 17, No. 1 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 71-111 [on-line]
Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Thornton Reader, pp.58-69 (online)
Gilles Deleuze (excerpts from interviews on Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus)
Recommended:
Selections from The Case of Dora, The Freud Reader [on-line]
Kaja Silverman, Eating the Book chapter from World Spectators (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2004). [on-line]
Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (on-line)
Lacan, The Mirror Phase
Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia” [on-line]
Weeks 8-12: The Future of the Image? The
Materialization of Perception?
Week8:
Friedrich Kittler, Film, Gramophone, Typewriter
Week 9:
“Influencing Machines:Cybernetics, Design, and Bio-politics, ,forthcoming Grey Room, January 2012
Gilles Deleuze, Post-script to the Society of Control
http://www.n5m.org/n5m2/media/texts/deleuze.htm
Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia” [on-line]
Pamela Lee, Chronophobia, [Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), excerpts [on-line]
Rosalind Morris, The War Drive: Image Files Corrupted, Social Text 91, Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer
2007
Recommended:
“Warren McCulloch, et. Al. “What a Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog Brain”, from Embodiments of
Mind (1959). [on-line]
1943, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity". With: Walter Pitts.
In: Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics Vol 5, pp 115–133. [on-line]
Suggested: visit MOMA and see Bridget Riley’s work.
Week 10:
John Harwood, Excerpts, from IBM and the Interface,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, (2011)
Rheinhold Martin, Organization Complex, Excerpts, Cambridge: MIT Press (2003)
Donald Mackenzie, An Engine not a Camera:How Financial Models Shape Markets, Cambridge:
MIT press, 2008 (excerpts-on-line)
John May: “Sensing: Preliminary Notes on the Emergence of Statistical-Mechanical
Geographic Vision”, Perspecta 40, May, 2011.
Alternate Histories
Week 11
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past
Week12 : Brian Larkin: Signal and Noise
Week 13:
Rosalind Morris, In the Place of Origins
Week 14, 15—Presentations and possible screenings
Week