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Rethinking the camera eye: dispositif

and subjectivity
Christian Quendler

Department of American Studies, University of Innsbruck, Innrain

52, 6020, Innsbruck, Austria
Available online: 26 Oct 2011

To cite this article: Christian Quendler (2011): Rethinking the camera eye: dispositif and
subjectivity, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 9:4, 395-414
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2011.606530

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New Review of Film and Television Studies

Vol. 9, No. 4, December 2011, 395414

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Rethinking the camera eye: dispositif and subjectivity

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Christian Quendler*
Department of American Studies, University of Innsbruck, Innrain 52, 6020 Innsbruck,
Austria
Metaphors of the camera eye are among the oldest and most powerful tropes
to depict human vision and subjectivity. As a proto-cybernetic metaphor that
lends itself both to anthropomorphic and mechanomorphic readings, the
camera eye has become a double agent of subjectivity. It has served as
midwife for a modern philosophy of the subject in Rene Descartess
discourse on Optics and as a gravedigger for classical notions of subjectivity
in Dziga Vertovs radically constructivist aesthetics of the kino-eye. By
looking at Descartess early modern and Vertovs modernist notions of the
camera eye as two paradigmatic case studies, this paper sets out to explore
the intricate relation between subjectivity and mediality. It examines figures
of the camera eye as conceptual metaphors that construct subjective relations
to orders of discourse and media spaces. Drawing on Joachim Paechs
reflections on the dispositif for a theory of the order(ing) of media, I will
review the concept of the dispositif as strategic place in the alignment of
medium, discourse and genre.
Keywords: dispositif; camera; Dziga Vertov; kino-eye; Rene Descartes

The work of the camera eye, like the work of any verbal or nonverbal metaphor,
is to bridge gaps or open up and accommodate spaces that seem foreign, uncanny
or cognitively impenetrable to us. We can describe the work of metaphors, figures
and tropes or any given conceptual configuration as creating new mental spaces
that blend elements of familiar mental frames. By projecting similarities and
differences between the camera and the eye, metaphors of the camera eye have
been variously employed to account for mechanisms of both media and the mind.
The camera and the eye in these uses function metonymically as they stand in for
the entire human and cinematographic (or photographic) apparatus,
respectively.1
In a historical sense, the fusion of camera and eye can be interpreted as a
modern expression of the age-old philosophical dream of returning to an original
unity. Only this time the return promises the entrance into a cybernetic paradise
that is entirely the creation of a human engineer. If the camera, which stands in

*Email: christian.quendler@uibk.ac.at
ISSN 1740-0309 print/ISSN 1740-7923 online
q 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2011.606530
http://www.tandfonline.com

396
Table 1.
Token
Order
Domains

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Cultural
habitus

C. Quendler
Orders and domains in camera eye and mind screen notions.
Camera
Dispositif
Regime of the
visible/sayable

Screen
Dispositio
Discourse space

Eye
Disposition
Psychological realm of
perception, emotion, etc.

Genres (practices of use)

for the medial dispositif, and the eye, which stands in for the human perceptual
and cognitive disposition, are united, then their horizons seem to converge into
one and the same screen, which in outlining the discourse that is projected onto
it may be likened to the rhetorical notion of the dispositio (see Table 1). In this
interpretation, the discourse displayed on the screen appears to be the product of a
single unitary force. The mind as a screen is a powerful and equally flawed
explanatory analogy that expresses this desire. It resolves the complications of
thinking about discourse as co-determined by structures of the dispositif and
receptive dispositions. This paper revisits the relationship between dispositif and
subjectivity by examining how figures of the camera eye align with regimes of
visibility with discursive regimes. How are orders of discourse informed by
regimes of light? How are they accommodated by genres and practices of use that
shape a cultural habitus? Since camera-eye conceptions are geared towards
calibrating media and senses, analyzing them sheds light on these questions.
Taking up Joachim Paechs suggestion (2003) of thinking about dispositif in a
conceptual triad with the rhetorical notion of the dispositio and the psychological
category of disposition, I will discuss how regimes of visibility organized by a
dispositif can be seen to encroach upon discursive regimes either to construct or
deconstruct classical notions of subjectivity. To illustrate this, my examples will
come from historical extremes, the beginnings of a philosophy of the subject in
the early modern period of the sixteenth century and the radical way of rethinking
subjectivity during the modernist period in the twentieth century. I will suggest a
dialogic exchange between Rene Descartess Means of Perfecting Vision which
he discusses in the seventh discourse of his treatise on Optics (published together
with his Discourse on Method in 1637) and Dziga Vertovs ideas on the forever
perfectible kino-eye, which he propagated in the 1920s in numerous manifestoes
and filmic works.
1. Camera and dispositif
In retrospect, the camera eye appears like a relict of a bygone modernity, a time
long before the indifferentiation of human and technological organs in the digital
matrix. The camera eye has become above all an emblem of cinematic modernism,
where camera vision promised to synthesize the experience of modernity

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(see, e.g. Casetti 2008; North 2005; Rancie`re 2006). Modernist invocations of the
camera are often paradoxical; they emerge as vanishing points where a number of
opposites converge: the objective and the subjective, the real and the imaginary,
the conscious and the unconscious, the organic and the mechanical, the inside and
the outside, the private and the public, the pure visibility of the spectacle and the
ordering principle of narrative (or, as Jacques Rancie`re [2006] has put it, opsis and
muthos).
If the camera eye served as a means to re-negotiate such oppositions, it may
be tempting to conclude that in a post-humanist and post-cinematic age, the
conjunction between camera and eye or between camera and man has become
obsolete. What can the old prosthesis of the camera eye still show us today? As
William Brown points out in his insightful essay Man without a Movie Camera
Movies without Men: Towards a Posthumanist Cinema? (2009), the case is far
more complicated. Not only do film scholars apply the label camera for moving
images that were made without a camera but, as Edward Branigan argues in
Projecting a Camera (2006), notions of the camera are themselves projections
generated within specific film theoretical language games. While a camera may be
perceived as a mechanical device used to record an event that lies outside the
world represented on a screen, its signification is bound to the formal and informal
languages we use to see it (Branigan 2006, 18). Parsing a century of film theory,
Branigan surveys a catalogue of camera conceptions that range from material
definitions of the camera as an origin of sensory display to semiotic and cognitive
labels or shorthand descriptions for viewing hypotheses. Notions of camera cut
across profilmic and postfilmic understandings that invoke the camera as pointing
devices and narrative agents. A camera may be seen to express mental and bodily
states or encode mechanisms of the unconscious. Branigans study on camera
conceptions examines what happens in film theory after a camera has done its
magic. While camera work typically precedes the projection of a film, it is the
viewers reception that projects a camera. By addressing the viewers or critics
projections, Branigan draws attention to the complex processes of aligning the
spaces generated by a visual technology with the language games that seek to
conceptualize these spaces.
The two sides of the camera and its polyvalence as a theoretical concept have
interesting parallels to the philosophical and methodological implications of the
concept of dispositif that gained currency in the wake of Michel Foucaults
writing in the 1970s.2 Philosophically, Foucaults conception of the term
responds to the demands of a theory of immanence. Not unlike Gilles Deleuzes
and Felix Guattaris notion of the rhizome, the notion of the dispositif belongs to
a tradition of twentieth-century philosophy that theorizes the limits or premises of
knowledge without assuming a meta-stance or committing teleological fallacies.
Rather than seeking an encompassing principle, the dispositif approaches the
outside of knowledge in the intervening spaces of networks. In What is an
Apparatus?, Giorgio Agamben has offered an intellectual genealogy that links
Foucaults notion of the dispositif to the theological legacy of the Christian

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C. Quendler

church. He traces the dispositif back to the Greek notion of the term oikonomia,
which between the second and sixth century came to signify a division in God as
being and praxis: the nature and essence on the one hand, and the operation
through which He administers and governs the created world on the other
(Agamben 2009, 11). While traditionally, operations are thought of as behavior
grounded in essence or metaphysical cause, twentieth-century philosophy has
challenged this hierarchy by re-conceptualizing being as process or by attributing
the operational mechanism an autonomy of thought. Henri Bergson and Martin
Heidegger are often cited as philosophical patrons who criticized substantial
conceptions of being. Cybernetic philosophy of the 1940s and 1950s represents
another influential approach to deconstructing the subject as an autonomous
agent. Notably, Deleuzes and Felix Guattaris reflections on machinic thinking
in Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980) bring together both
philosophical traditions (Welchman 1997).
Methodologically, Foucault (1980, 194) views the heuristic power of the
dispositif in its translinguistic application for a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble
consisting of discourse, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory ideas, decisions,
laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical moral and
philanthropic proposition. Defined in functional and relational terms, the dispositif
can help to conceptualize relations that cut across oppositions and interdependent
structures such as the subject and the object, body and mind, form and medium
(Peeters and Charlier 1999). In his interpretation of Foucault, Deleuze has described
dispositifs as:
neither subjects nor objects, but regimes which must be defined from the point of
view of the visible and from the point of view of that which can be enunciated, with
the drifting, transformations and mutations which this will imply. And in every
apparatus [dispositif ] the lines break through thresholds, according to which they
might have been seen as aesthetic, scientific, political, and so on.

Thus conceived as an in-between, the dispositif mediates between the world of

objects (including the material support structure of the dispositif) and it informs
the space that extends between the subject and the object. This functional
definition implies that the specific historical or cultural configuration of the
dispositif can only be resolved as relations to the physical or material world. Put
differently, the space shaped by the dispositif is an engineered space. As a
threshold of information, it defines the relation between subject and object as
regimes of what can be seen and expressed. This is why the dispositif always
involves a process of objectification and, as Foucault and Deleuze stress, subject
formation.
Paech has criticized Deleuzes definition of the dispositif for conflating the
spaces construed by media with the dimensions gauged by discourse. Rather
than viewing media and discourses as exhausting themselves in a series of
entanglements and mix-ups, Paech proposes distinguishing between medium
and discourse as different places or orders of subject formation. For this reason,
he reserves the concept of the dispositif for the place where media arrange

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elements. He considers the dispositif in a conceptual triad with the rhetorical

notion of the dispositio and the aesthetic-psychological concept of the
disposition. The dispositif refers to a space of interaction and communication
organized by media assemblies where things become visible and virtually
available to be identified discursively. The dispositio refers to an intentional
ordering of things in discourse in order to achieve a certain persuasive effect.
Dispositio may be described as a model of coherence, as a logic or grammar
that structures an argument. It is the proper method of discourse championed by
Descartes, which begins by delimiting, defining and outlining the subject
matter of discourse. Or rather, such an introductory outline is the rhetorical
application of the dispositio; it is an outline, map or model transformed into
discourse. Thus, a prominent place where the dispositio manifests itself is in
the segmentation of discourse and the network of the critical apparatus.
Another crucial device for showing the order of discourse are diagrams. (In this
paper, the ordering of discourse in the medial space of the dispositif is
illustrated by modeling the diagrams on the principle of refraction, which
provides the backbone for Descartess Optics; on Thinking in Diagrams see
Mullarkey [2006, chap. 5].)
Paech describes the dispositio as co-determined by dispositif and disposition,
the cognitive and affective attitudes and beliefs that inform behavior. Disposition
may be considered a virtual system of knowledge in contrast to the actual
manifestations of knowledge engendered by this system. This understanding of
disposition faces a problem that is analogous to the division between being and
praxis that, for Agamben, lies at the heart of the concept of the dispositif. Ludwig
Wittgenstein (1958, 149) draws attention to this analogy when he emphasizes the
operational sense in our conceptions of disposition. He describes disposition as a
state of mind that is more like the state of a mental apparatus (perhaps the brain)
by means of which we explain the manifestations of that knowledge. Yet, he
adds, there are objections to speaking of a state of mind here, inasmuch as there
ought to be different criteria for such a state: a knowledge of the construction of
the apparatus, quite apart from what it does (Wittgenstein 1958, 149 50).
Genres and conventional practices of media that inform a cultural habitus can
thus be seen to emerge recursively from blending principles or mechanisms of
discourse and understanding.3
To illustrate this, we may place the dispositif in series with the dispositio
and disposition. Together they structure the intervening spaces where intentionality as the flow between the subject and object is refracted (see Figure 1).
Traditionally, the relation between subject and object is represented as some
sort of equation where identity and truth are seen as successful or satisfying
correlations. The dispositif projects a discursive order of things that seems
congruent with the order of things organized by the hierarchy of our senses. In
this model, congruence means that each point in the object correlates with one
point in the subject, which, as I will show in my discussion of Descartes, is the
classical premise of obtaining a clear focus on the object.

400

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Object
P1

P2

C. Quendler
Dispositif

Dispositio

Disposition

Subject
P2'

P1'

Figure 1. Subject object relations refracted by dispositif, dispositio and disposition.

There are many ways of establishing correlations between dispositif and

disposition and whether we find them successful or satisfactory depends to a large
extent on the appeal of the discourse that organizes the correlations. One way of
doing this is to conceive of a convergent evolution as the biochemist and Nobel
Prize winner George Wald (1950, 32) proposed in accounting for the resemblances
between the camera and the eye:
Of all the instruments made by man, none resemble a part of his body more than the
camera does the eye. Yet this is not by design. A camera is no more a copy of an eye
than the wing of a bird is a copy of that of an insect. Each is the product of an
independent evolution; and if this has brought the camera and the eye together, it is
not because one has mimicked the other, but because both have had to meet the
same problems, and have frequently done so in the same way. This is the type of
phenomenon that biologists call convergent evolution, yet peculiar in that the one
evolution is organic, the other technological.

For Wald the frame of reference that organizes the convergence of camera and
eye is the biological model of evolution. Biology subsumes technology. Although
biological frames of reference were common in early histories of film that
compared the development of film to the growth and decline of a biological
organism, such versions of film history, which David Bordwell (1997, 13 26)
has dubbed the basic story, have been refuted by later generations of scholars as
overdetermined and teleological. Yet, we can find similar kinds of reasoning
whenever orders of the dispositif and orders of the disposition seem to converge.
The organizing constraints of convergences may be ontological or idealistic as in
the case of Bazins myth of a total cinema, or the constraints maybe founded upon
ideological grounds as in Braudys apparatus theory, or embedded in a psychoanalytical framework as in the later works of Christian Metz. Notwithstanding the
differences between these film theoretical approaches, they all aim at blending
aspects of the cinematic dispositif and the viewers disposition in order to make
the filmic discourse determined by one unitary force (see Figure 2).
Another way to look at this model is to consider how the dispositif, dispositio
and disposition affect the extensions of the subject and object. Terminologies in
phenomenology and media theory offer an interesting point of intersection when

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Object

Dispositif

Disposition

401
Subject

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Dispositio

Figure 2. The convergence model.

they talk about resolution (cf. Le Morvan 2005): high resolution means the
medium is transparent and the delimiting lines between subject and object are
concise. In Figure 1, this is suggested by having each point in the object correlate
with a point in the subject. Translucent or opaque states can be considered as low
resolutions that diffuse one-to-one correlations between subject and object.
However, we may arrive at a different idea of resolution if we invert the figureand-ground relation. If we focus on the intervening spaces organized by the
dispositif, dispositio and disposition, the subject and object become, as it were, a
fuzzy background and what emerges in high resolution are the figures of motion
or flow between subject and object (see Figure 3).
2.

Descartes and Vertov on perfecting vision

In order to illustrate consequences of this figure ground inversion for conceptions

of media, discourse and subjectivity, I want to propose an unlikely conjunction
Object

Dispositif

Figure 3. The figure ground model.

Dispositio

Disposition

Subject

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402

C. Quendler

between Descartess theory of vision modeled on the camera obscura and Dziga
Vertovs futurist vision of the kino-eye. While this juxtaposition of ideas from
early modern philosophy and twentieth-century avant-garde cinema must seem
historically irresponsible, it may be tolerated as an experiment in thought. Rather
than suggesting an evolutionary logic between Descartess metaphysical
investment in the camera obscura and Vertovs futurist celebration of the kinoeye, I will consider their conceptions of visual technologies as two paradigmatic
approaches towards a theory of subjectivity. The different ways in which Descartes
and Vertov blend notions of camera and eye highlight the bi-directionality of
camera eye metaphors, which lend themselves to both anthropomorphic and
mechanomorphic readings and engender respective notions of subjectivity.
Both Descartes and Vertov approach perceptual technologies as scientific
instruments where vision becomes synonymous with the production of truth. As
Jonathan Crary (1990, 25 67) observes, the camera obscura does not simply
provide a model for human vision but, more importantly, a new model of consciousness and subjectivity. The camera obscura is the place of a twofold
reflection: the observation of empirical phenomena and the reflective introspection
of observation. This double reflection makes the camera obscura an ideal
metaphor for human consciousness. In this model, the mind becomes sensitive
screen, upon which impulses are impressed and reflected. However, in contrast to a
projection screen, the reflection is not returned back to the world but thrown into a
deeper recess, where it appears for the second time. In classical logic, this
superimposition of the second reflection (I see) onto the first reflection (image)
constitutes a minimal definition of consciousness (see Gunther 1957). In
Descartess diagram, which blends an anatomical depiction of an eye with the
geometric model of a camera obscura, this screen may be located as the shaded
field (see Figure 4). The shaded field delimits the space where the retinal image
becomes a conceptual image. Notably, it provides a common background for
both the first (optical) and second (cognitive) reflection. When viewed against
the white background, the shaded field outlines an interface that includes the inner
body of the eye, which is linked to the nervous system, and the mind represented
by the head of the homunculus. It excludes the body of the homunculus from the
shoulder downwards (representing perhaps the body of the mind). As I will discuss
below, the way the shaded field divides the eye indicates where Descartes
conceives of a linkage for aided vision.
As a site where relations between the outside world and the observing self are
negotiated, the camera obscura can be read as a figuration of subjectivity. It
serves as a laboratory where the laws of nature interface with human or manmade laws of physics, mathematics and logic. It is not surprising that the camera
obscura has also become a popular refuge for the Baconian project of the socalled mastery of nature.
In Optics, Descartess application of the law of refraction not only helps to
account for principles of human vision, it also enables him to point to certain
shortcomings in the provisions nature has made. The conclusions Descartes

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Figure 4. Diagram form Descartess discourse on Optics (1664).

draws from these insights have extensive ramifications. While human vision,
insofar as it is a product of nature, cannot be improved, technologically aided
vision is perfectible. Technology not only allows human beings to see more and
better, it also fundamentally changes the function of seeing altogether. As Neil
M. Ribe (1997, 60) puts it, the ultimate role of Cartesian optics is to raise the
eye from an instrument of self-preservation to one of scientific knowledge.
Descartes himself has described this transformation as a habitual perversion of
the order of nature:
I have been accustomed to pervert the order of nature, because these perceptions of
the sense, although given me by nature merely to signify to my mind what things are
beneficial and hurtful to the composite whole of which it is a part, and being
sufficiently clear and distinct for that purpose, are nevertheless used by me as
infallible rules by which to determine immediately the essence of the bodies that
exist out of me, of which they can of course afford me only the most obscure and
confused knowledge. (1641, 97)

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C. Quendler

Although the scientific endeavor remains committed to a project of illuminating

the obscure realms of nature, it also points towards a scientific decoupling from
nature to make room for an engineered world.4 Descartess misuse of sensory
perception blends the human disposition towards sensory perception with the
dispositio of the scientific reasoning. He does so by modeling this blend on the
regime of light organized by the law of refraction. In other words, Descartess
discourse Of the Means of Perfecting Vision is also a discourse on the proper (or
transparent) alignment of the orders of the dispositif, dispositio and disposition.
Some 300 years later, in 1920s Moscow, this kind of detachment from nature
finds a radical expression in Vertovs concept of the kino-eye. Inspired by
constructivism and futurism, Vertov developed the idea of the kino-eye together
with his wife Elizaveta Svilova and his brother Mikhail Kaufmann and promoted
it in a number of programmatic writings and filmic works. As Yuri Tsivian (2004,
5 8) has emphasized, Vertov was strongly influenced by the art-denying spirit of
constructivism and the revolutionary movement. In contrast to Sergei Eisenstein,
he conceived of the kino-eye above all as a scientific project. The language of the
kino-eye for Vertov was one of higher mathematics and its ultimate goal was the
production of truth. In an article on The Birth of the Kino-Eye dated 1924, he
notes: Not kino-eye for its own sake, but truth through the means and
possibilities of the film-eye, i.e. kinopravda [film-truth] (Vertov 1924, 41).
As an instrument of scientific knowledge, the kino-eye subsumes virtually all
existent cinematic techniques and inventions. Set out to discover regularities in
the accidental and to explore the laws that govern the chaos of life the kino-eye
resorts to microscopic, telescopic and X-ray vision; it operates on remote control
and shows things in slow or accelerated motion; and it introduces mathematical
and psychological principles to its editing method. Not unlike Descartes,
Vertovs enthusiasm for the camera as metaphor for seeing is based on an idea of
technological perfectibility: We cannot improve the making of our eyes, but we
can endlessly improve the camera (Vertov 1923, 15).
Set against this common concern of exploring visual technologies as an
instrument of scientific knowledge, I will now take a closer look at their
respective ideas on perfecting vision, their implied notions of subjectivity and its
relations to medium and discourse. How does place and order of the dispositif
facilitate transparency or high resolution? What kind of discursive order is
modeled on this transparency? The first question addresses inferences made
between the media dispositif and the human disposition. It is concerned with the
linkage or continuity through which media become extensions of the senses. The
second question will deal with the distinction of seeing better and seeing more
as a cultural hierarchy of practices of seeing and their embodiment in genres and
discourse types.
Descartes begins his discourse Of the Means of Perfecting Vision by
suggesting that (in principle) they can be applied to three things: the objects
seen, the internal organs that receive the impulses of these objects, and the
external organs, which dispose these impulses to be received as they ought

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(1637, 114). Descartes has little to say about the objects of vision and explicitly
brackets internal organs from his discussion. Since we cannot change the
objects themselves, their treatment becomes simply a question of mise-enscene: that is, placement and lighting. He has even less to say about internal
organs, meaning the nervous system and the brain. Even if it were possible to
improve or modify them, he argues, such an endeavor would be a concern of
medicine and is thus irrelevant for his subject matter. This leaves Descartes
with the external organs, which include, quite remarkably, both the transparent
parts of the eye, as well as the all the other bodies that we can place between the
eye and the object (1637, 114).
Descartes considers four conditions or provisions for perfecting sight. The
first one may be called clear focus: rays that reach the optic nerve in the retina
should correspond (as far as possible) to a single point in the object. The rays
must not be altered in intervening space between object and eye as to avoid
diffusion, distortion and obscurity and to guarantee a distinct resemblance
between object and image. The second condition concerns the size or
resolution of the image. It should be large in the sense that its lineaments or
lines can be easily discerned. The third provision regards image brightness in
relation to its impact on the optic nerves. Finally, Descartes considers the angle or
field of vision: we should see as many objects as possible at a single glance
(1637, 115).
With the notable exception of the last provision, Descartes (1637, 115)
maintains, nature although it presumably has done all that is possible falls
short of perfection. For instance, near- and farsightedness are imperfections of
clear focus that result from the limited range of curving and changing the body
of the eye. Yet, they are imperfections that can be amended by applying the law
of refraction. In the case of the second condition, image size, Descartes
(underestimating the role of refraction) erroneously views this deficiency
mainly as a matter of the size of the eye, that is, the distance between the retina
and the point of intersection of the rays. For Descartes the best way to magnify
images is to increase the distance between this point of intersection and the
retina by extending the natural eye with a long tube filled with water:
Descartess prototype of the telescope. Since Descartes considers the outer
body of the eye and optical lens of the same category, this extension is almost a
natural process: Sight will take place as if Nature had made the eye longer
(1637, 120). Ribe (1997, 54 5) in this context, suggests that Descartes has the
natural eye give birth to a telescope.
Descartes adds little to the issue of image brightness. He considers three
methods of adjusting the brightness of an image. The first one is to place cloudy
objects or veils between the eyes and the objects of observation, or to use
additional sources of light (gathered by means of mirrors or burning glass). Since
this option is only available for accessible objects, Descartes also discusses
widening and narrowing the aperture as means of adjusting image brightness in
telescopes. As a third way of improving the brightness of vision, he mentions

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C. Quendler

training to look at extremely bright objects or to discern objects in the dark but
immediately discards them:

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these things belong rather to medicine, whose purpose is to remedy the deficiency of
sight through the correction of natural organs, than to Optics, whose purpose is only
to minister to the same deficiency through the application of other organs that are
artificial. (Descartes 1637, 126)

As pointed out in Descartess diagram (Figure 4), for him the nexus between
artificial and natural organs is the outer body. It is along the outlines of the shaded
field that the optical lens and the outer body of the eye form a homogeneous
threshold, where the law of nature coincides with the law of refraction.
As mentioned before, the only condition where Descartes cannot find a way to
improve nature is the field or angle of vision. However, for him the convenience
of seeing more is only of relative importance. In fact, it conflicts with the
imperative of seeing distinctly: Seeing more, Descartes (1637, 125) argues, is
principally useful only in order to ascertain toward what direction we must
subsequently turn the eye in order to look at the one which we will wish to
consider better. It is for this finding function that the provision of seeing more
is included in Descartess description of the three-barreled telescope:
as these telescopes make objects appear larger, they let us see less of them at one
glance it is even necessary, besides this, to join the most perfect ones to some
others with less strength, through the aid of which we can, as if by degrees, come to
know the location of the object that these more perfect ones can make us perceive.
(1637, 156)

The telescope in this sense not only perfects vision but also reconciles at least
serially seeing more and seeing better as two aspects of seeing, which
Descartes considers mutually incompatible in unaided vision.
What is important is that the function of selective approximation that is
attributed to seeing more is strictly subservient to what is already a given object.
Observing subjects must not be found out by their objects of observation. The
subservience of seeing more to seeing better is a necessary premise to ensure a
one-directional causal determination. For the same reason the telescopic eye in
being like nature rules out other additional forms of determination. Descartess
subordinate integration of seeing more and seeing better on principles of
selection and distinction has been a key source for a long tradition of thinking about
cinema. Vsevolod Pudovkin is an early important theoretician in point. His
psychological definition of montage as the filmic organization of time and space
that results in a clear and distinct impression (Pudovkin 1925, 16) has had a
strong impact on later generations of film scholars (cf., e.g. Lindgren 1948).
In this scientific rationale, the process of discovery and recognition or the
observers subjective and technological investment is necessarily edited out.
Pudovkins equation of the cameras lens with the viewers eye, like Descartess
subsumption of the lens and the outer body of the eye as one category, presupposes
a continuity of body and media that finds its expression in the clarity and

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distinctness of the observation and its ensuing discourse. Pudovkins camera eye is
an observation in postproduction that entails the process of editing modeled on
scientific exposition:

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Just as a scholar preparing an article setting out the course and results of his research
carefully plans and constructs it, discarding what is superfluous and leaving in what
is essential, sometimes dwelling on a characteristic detail and sometimes confining
himself to general observations, so too the film-maker in the process of montage
exposition must retain the viewers attention in the appropriate manner and thus
imbue his work with the necessary credibility. (1925, 16)

Like expositional writing, cinematic exposition combines principles of selection

and combination and strives to make a cogent and persuasive argument. In The
Film Director and Film Material, Pudovkin (1926, 78) explicates this, suggesting
that [m]ontage, like living language, uses words whole pieces of exposed film
and sentences combination of these pieces. Coherent vision and clarity are
inferred as imperative generic aspects for considering the camera eye as an integral
element of cinematic exposition. The metonymical chain of eye, observation and
scientific exposition informs a correlating chain of camera, montage and cinematic
exposition.
This scientific logic and its conception of technology differ radically from
what goes on in procedures of experimental arrangements that identify objects
approximately through loops of positive and negative feedback (which is
facilitated by the built-in homing function of the three-barreled telescope). Here
technology is recognized as a subject object relation. The subjectivity and
objectivity are distributed over the intervening space that is organized by the
medium, the discourse and the recipients disposition (see Figure 3). As an
expression of desire, the medium becomes a vehicle for the objective part of our
subjectivity. An early reformulation of metaphysics and classical logic that
introduces technology and engineering as the excluded third can be found in
Gotthard Gunthers cybernetic philosophy. Gunther (1957, 67) argues that if
figures of fantasy and imaginations are expressions of consciousness in the form
of intentions or actions directed inwardly, then technology can be attributed a
sense of consciousness in that they are expressions of intentionality and action
directed outwardly. Alternatively, as Gunther (1979) put it later, technology is
the only historical form in which volition can express itself in a generally binding
form (my translation).
Such a reflexive definition of technology can help us to interpret what is
perhaps the most controversial passage in Vertovs manifesto of The Council of
Three (1923).5 Having asserted the superiority of camera vision over human
sight on the basis of technological perfectibility, Vertov calls for the
emancipation of the camera, which so far had been forced to copy the work
of the human eye (Vertov 1923, 16). The affirmation of the kino-eye with its own
dimensions of time in space culminates in the point of self-affirmation, which in
the manifesto is mimicked by a conspicuous pronominal shift from the
filmmakers first person plural to the first-person point of view of the kino-eye:

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I make the viewer see in the manner best suited to my presentation of this or that
visual phenomenon. The eye submits to the will of the camera and is directed by it to
those successive points of the action that, most succinctly and vividly, bring the film
phrase to the height or depth of resolution. (Vertov 1923, 16)

This passage on the kino-eye illustrates well the state of in-betweeness attributed
to the dispositif. It blends subject and object as well as being and praxis. It is at
once actual and virtual in that its actual performance of the kino-eye aims at
exhausting its virtue or full potential. The kino-eye assumes a hybrid identity in
that it signifies both a theory of film and its application. Vertov (1924, 40) stresses
these meta-implications by equating the kino-eye not only with film analysis but
also with a theory of movement along with a theory of how all things are related
on the screen. The ambiguous state of the kino-eye as neither subject nor object is
expressed effectively in its act of self-affirmation, an imaginative leap that
projects the deictic center onto the kino-eye itself. In this deictic projection the
notions of the camera as technique of visibility (to record and present visual
phenomena) and as a means of expression (that generates film phrases) blend
with human scale scenario of actual language use.
The paramount goal of the kino-eye as an instrument of scientific knowledge
is kinesthetic resolution, which we can correlate to Descartess imperative of a
clear and distinct vision. Yet, while Descartess imperative is geared towards
ascertaining an autonomous object, Vertovs resolution is best described as the
visceral effect that results from calibrating technology to the chaos of life.
Through this explorative process, Vertov (1928, 287) argues in his scenario of
Man with a Movie Camera, Lifes chaos gradually becomes clear [ . . . ] Nothing
is accidental. Everything is explicable and governed by law. However, Vertov
saw himself more as a poet than as a theorist and he is never precise about what
exactly makes up the resolution of a film phrase. Yet, this poetic vagueness seems
almost programmatic. His notions of phrase and resolution blend many conceptual domains combining musical, linguistic, literary, scientific, kinesthetic
and mathematical frames of reference. In a Deleuzian sense, the kino-eye
represents a threshold where different kinds of discourse break and diffuse.
While this obscures traditional patterns of coherence, it affords us with different
figures or lines of coherence.
Vertovs idea of resolution is linked to his theory of intervals, which became a
recurrent concern throughout his writings of the 1920s (Petric 1987). His notions of
phrase and resolution and his theory of intervals share musical connotations.
While phrase further extends to language and writing, resolution refers both to
kinesthesia and music. We can think of Vertovs notion of film language as a
gradual process of abstracting natural languages. In this process, music and his
theory of intervals play a crucial mediating role. Music as the most abstract art
forges a link to the prosodic properties of language and poetry.6 Vertovs theory of
intervals may be compared to a kind of information theory. It is an odd form of
applied mathematics that maps musical structures across kinesthetic patterns and
principles of perception.

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Intervals organize the order and duration of shots in the montage of film phrase
by correlating a number of visual parameters. In his Paris lecture From Kino-Eye to
Radio-Eye, Vertov (1929a, 901) lists as the most important relations of shot
scales, the interaction of camera angles, movements within frames and relations
between recording speeds. Not unlike Pudovkins principles of montage, the aim of
organizing film with reference to the theory of the interval is to intensify the viewing
experience. However, for Pudovkin intensification results from turning the viewing
process into an ideal form of observation; that is, by selecting and combining
elements in such a way that their order coheres to the dispositio of scientific
discourse. For Vertov, increased kinesthetic resolution is geared towards exciting
the sensorymotor experience of the film viewer. The order of elements in Vertovs
film phrase is not modeled on a preconceived discursive order in the sense of a preestablished synthesis of dispositif and disposition guided by a persuasive purpose.
The persuasive power of Vertovs film phrase is to be discovered in the resolution of
a pattern that emerges from foregrounding the structures of the dispositif, dispositio
and disposition. The kino-eye promotes an extension of the regime of the visible and
sayable by combining all kinds of visual technologies and expressive forms. It
outlines film discourse by scientific, musical and verbal models. In addition, it aims
at discarding instilled habits of human embodied perception:
The mechanical eye, the camera, rejecting the human eye as crib sheet, gropes its
way through the chaos of visual events, letting itself be drawn or repelled by
movement, probing as it goes its own movement. It experiments, distending time,
dissecting movement, or, in contrary fashion, absorbing time within itself,
swallowing years, thus schematizing processes of long duration inaccessible to the
normal eye. (Vertov 1923, 19)

The kino-eye, it seems, learns by adapting possibilities of the cinematic

apparatus to conditions of the visual world it records. The perfectibility of the
camera, which, on the one hand, is opposed to the imperfect human eye, is, on the
other hand, mapped across with the human ability to learn. The kino-eye gains
insights into the chaos of movement by emulating the very movements and
gestures of the visual world, assuming, as it were, their point of view:
Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility, I am in constant motion,
I draw near, then away from objects, I crawl under, I climb onto them. I move apace
with the muzzle of a galloping horse, I plunge full speed into a crowd, I outstrip
running soldiers, I fall on my back, I ascend with an airplane, I plunge and soar
together with plunging and soaring bodies. Now I, a camera, fling myself along their
resultant, maneuvering in the chaos of movement, recording movement, starting
with movements composed of the most complex combinations. (Vertov 1923, 17)

This kind of mimetic or emulative learning of the kino-eye becomes the

trajectory for training the perceptual sensibilities of the cameraman or kinokpilot, as he commends himself to the cameras experiments in space. The roles of
the cameraman and the director in this process are somewhat ambiguous as they
are at once fully at the service of the camera and the strategic brain that controls,
directs, observes and gauges the recordings and presentation of the camera

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C. Quendler

(cf. Vertov 1923, 19). The relation between camera and cameraman is seen as
correlative and dialectical: by submitting himself to the will of the camera, the
cameraman liberates the camera from the shortcomings of embodied human
perception, which in turn engenders a presentation of life that brings out new
and startling aspects of reality. In other words, the prosthetic function of the
camera as an explorative device blends with an elaborate scenario of mutual
emancipation, in which the camera vis-a`-vis the cameraman is seen as cooperative agents.
It is also in this context that we can place the generic framing of Vertovs
Man with a Movie Camera as fragments or extracts from the diary of
cameraman. The revival of the diary and memoirs as a literary form at the
beginning of the twentieth century provides an important historical context,
which in the 1920s Viktor Shklovsky both theorized (in Theory of Prose, 1929)
and practiced (in his memoirs A Sentimental Journey, 1923). Vasily Rozanovs
experimental journals Solitaria (1912) and Fallen Leaves (1913 and 1915),
which explore a new literary form through a polyphonic clash of a variety of
genres (Crone 1978), offered Vertov a literary model of reconciling accounts of
personal everyday experiences with political and journalistic writing. From the
perspective of genetic criticism, the connection between camera work and diary
writing may be traced back to the practice of reporting on dailies (see, e.g.
Bottomores [2003] essay on Charles Brabins diary written while filming in
the UK for Edison in 1913). The diary as a literary counter discourse of a
cameraman taking revenge on commercial mainstream cinema finds an early
satirical treatment in Luigi Pirandellos The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio,
Cinematograph Operator (1916). Conversely, John Dos Passos trilogy U.S.A.
(1930 36) and Christopher Isherwoods Goodbye to Berlin (1939) are wellknown examples that, inspired by Vertovs Man with a Movie Camera, explore
camera vision as literary mode of autobiographical writing.
Besides the historical intertext, there are also general aspects that bring
journal and memoir writing into the generic proximity of the kino-eye as film
language and writing. As journal and diaries come only with a minimal set of
generic constraints, they can be easily adapted to the heterogeneous discursive
regime of the kino-eye. More importantly, the journal is by definition a work in
progress. If progress is understood in a positive sense, the journal may generate a
narrative of learning. This is particularly true of Mikhail Kaufmans expectations
about the movie, envisioned as a kind of ABC of film writing, a primer or
methodological aid for beginners (Tsivian 2004, 25). We may also look at the
notebook of Man with a Movie Camera in terms of Lev Vygotskys notion of a
zone of proximal development. In this sense, the generic frame of the journal
accommodates an intervening space that is both subjective and objective. It is like
Vertovs kino-pravda expressive both of the external reality of lifes chaos and
internal impressions of an ordinary eye. In this zone of approximation, the
observer-as-camera creates, as Vertov puts it, an organized memo of the ordinary
eyes impressions (1923, 19). The journal also generates what Genette calls

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interpolated narration, a complex form of narration that combines simultaneous

reporting and reporting after the fact. Interpolated presentation not only
approximates a fusion of perception and communication, it also allows for all
kinds of positive and negative feedback loops and thus opens up a realm of
interaction in the broadest sense.
In the Man with a Movie Camera, this applies not only to the interaction
between man and camera, but also the process of filmmaking and its exhibition.
In an interview about its reception in Berlin in 1929, Vertov has described the
film as developing along three intersecting lines:
(1) life as it is in reality on the screen, (2) life as it is in reality on the strip of film,
(3) simply: life as it is in reality [ . . . ] By annihilating the boundaries between
spectators and spectacle and by making the process of film production visible to the
viewer Man with a Movie Camera navigates lifes chaos. (1929b, 366 7)

This breaking down of boundaries between spectators and spectacle is illustrated

well in the framing sequences of the film. The prologue of the film shows the opening
of a theater until the projection begins in an animated fashion that turns the
preparatory phase before the screening into a spectacle. The chairs in the auditorium
unfold themselves and the spark that ignites the projector also cues the orchestras
entrance. The projection setup is cut across shots of the audiences seating. In
rhetorical terms, we may view this juxtaposition as an illustration of how the
theatrical apparatus accommodates (to) the audience and its structures of
expectations.
The epilogue of the movie provides a one-minute synopsis of the film and can
be described as a thumbnail version of what Vertov (1923, 19) called an organized
memo of the ordinary eyes impressions. Thematically and formally, the epilogue
brings together recording, editing and perception, which can illustrate the spaces
of the dispositif, dispositio and disposition. The synthesis builds upon three
shot/reverse-shot sequences: one between the audience and the projected film,
another between the cameraman and the visual phenomena he records and the third
between the editor and the filmstrips on her cutting table. Camera and cameraman
find rapprochement in the observation of movement, the editing responds to the
synthesis of mechanical and human eye but cutting along the emergent patterns of
this synthesis. The visceral effect the editing has on the audience can be seen as a
response to what may be thought of as the body of the image.7
Experiencing the body of the image through the visceral effects of filmmaking
can be regarded as the counterpart to Descartess division of body and mind. As I
have demonstrated throughout this paper, the body in Descartess dualism has an
exclusive and inclusive side. On the one hand, the body of the mind appears to be
excluded in the representation of the homunculus; on the other hand, through a
conceptual unity of lens and vitreous, the body extends to the materiality of
instruments. In contrast to Descartes, the visceral appeal of the kino-eye conceives
of a linkage between camera and eye along the inner organs. In its experimental
alignment of medial and dispositional structures, the kino-eye generates a

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C. Quendler

discursive order that is radically at odds with Descartess method of discourse and
classical notions of subjectivity.
Vertovs kino-eye is merely one example in a long history that privileges the
heuristic and scientific value of seeing more over the discriminatory practice of
seeing better favored in traditions of analytical philosophy. Seeing more and
making the invisible visible (Vertov 1924, 41) not only require forming new
habits of perception and aesthetic sensibilities that attune to the visible regimes
supported by visual technologies and techniques, they also call for novel ways of
charting the adjustments between dispositif and disposition onto new discursive
orders. Paechs conceptual triad of dispositif, dispositio and disposition offers a
useful distinction for analyzing the ramifications of these adjustments for our
understanding of subjectivity. As formats that are particularly conducive to this
explorative process, diaries and notebooks have served as popular generic models
for accommodating personal and expressive ways of envisioning and engaging
with the cinematic dispositif. The diary advanced to a key concept in auteur theory
of the 1950s, it experienced a revival in avant-garde and documentary film of the
1960s and 1970s (Sitney 1977, 2002; Lane 2002) and continues to be an important
frame of reference in exploring novel forms of storytelling across new media.
I have suggested viewing Vertovs kino-eye as a model of camera vision that
inverts the figure ground relations on which Descartess model is based. As
such, Vertovs kino-eye builds on, or responds to, preconceived similarities
between camera and eye. They provide a backdrop for the disanalogies from
which the kino-eye evolves. For Vertov the differences between camera and eye
serve as an incitement for learning. Yet, the Cartesian model too, involves a
practice learning that goes beyond ingrained habits of perception. Descartes has
described this practice as a habitual misuse of sensory perception. Notably for
him this transformation of a natural disposition is a preliminary premise, which,
like the subjective and objective vanishing points in the kino-eye model (see
Figure 3), may be located at the edges of the diagram. Thus, rather than
considering the two models as exclusive alternatives, we can look at them as
challenges for framework that manages to reconcile them.
Acknowledgements
The research for this paper was supported by the project of the Austrian Science Fund
Framing Media: The Periphery of Fiction and Film.

Notes
1. On the theory of blending mental spaces, see Fauconnier and Turner (2002).
2. The two sides also play a crucial role in another important theoretical affiliation of the
term dispositif, which Jean-Louis Baudry developed contemporaneously into what has
become known as apparatus theory. In his essay Le dispositif: approches metapsychologiques de limpression de realite (1975), he distinguishes between appareil
de base (the material apparatus required to produce and project films) and dispositif, by
which he refers to the viewing situation of the film. See also Kepley (1996) and
Riesinger (2003).

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3. As Paech (1997, 187n54) observes, Pierre Bourdieus concept of the habitus mediates
between both symbolic forms and the disposition in the system of internalized patterns.
4. Ribe (1997, 60) has aptly described this process as the replacement of natures
unconscious making with a new, rational artisanship under the direction of the
Cartasian mind. He continues: In effect, Descartes terminates natures apprenticeship
and reorganizes the enterprise by bringing in a new and more efficient production team.
This is not just a metaphor: Descartess attempt to grind hyperboloidal lenses in the
1620s was in fact organized as a rudimentary manufacturing business with three
workers in a well-defined division of labor. We may construe here another parallel to
Vertovs ideas On the Organization of a Creative Laboratory (1936), in which he
outlined a program for the rationalization of the film production process.
5. For a critique of Vertovs kino-eye from within a classical instrumental logical of
analytical philosophy, see Turvey (1999).
6. See also Mikhail Kaufmans reflection on film language in Film Analysis (1931,
391) where he regards the language of music, rather than natural, verbal languages,
as a model for film language.
7. In Man with a Movie Camera visceral effects often synthesize the act of observation
with the event observed; see Petric (1987, 139 48).

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