Rethinking the camera eye: dispositif and subjectivity

Abstract

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 René Descartes's discourse on Optics and as a gravedigger for classical notions of subjectivity in Dziga Vertov's radically constructivist aesthetics of the kino-eye. By looking at Descartes's early modern and Vertov's 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 Paech's 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
• René Descartes

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 métapsychologiques de l'impression de réalité’ (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).

3. As Paech (1997, 187n54) observes, Pierre Bourdieu's 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 ‘nature's unconscious making with a new, rational artisanship under the direction of the Cartasian mind’. He continues: ‘In effect, Descartes terminates nature's apprenticeship and reorganizes the enterprise by bringing in a new and more efficient production team. This is not just a metaphor: Descartes's 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 Vertov's 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 Vertov's kino-eye from within a classical instrumental logical of analytical philosophy, see Turvey (1999).

6. See also Mikhail Kaufman's 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).