Observe the figure above. It’s immediately obvious that it is the silhouette of a woman, or at least, a very convincing simulation. Perhaps she’s a dancer. Is she spinning in a clockwise or anticlockwise direction? Compare your observation with those of a few other people. Are your answers the same? Most likely not. Apparently those that perceive the motion of this figure as clockwise use the right side of their brains more often than the left and vice versa.

Much like Goethe's work with the camera obscura, this demonstrates how idealistic the notion of a detached observer is, one who observes without the interference of what I would call ‘internal influences’. ‘Problems’ such as this simulation, I believe, are what must have led Jonathan Crary to grope beyond the definition of an observer as, quite simply, one who observes, for ‘…(one who) sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, embedded in a system of conventions and limitation….’. It’s a bit disappointing to discover that as ‘external influences’ and technology increasingly obscure the metaphorical border between real and unreal, we, in seeking for the distinction, as observers, aren’t even afforded sanctuary in ourselves; our own minds have been biologically conditioned to interpret a different set of realities from that of the next person. Harping on this, Crary is more willing to accept the notion of an observer as typically subjective. Moreover, echoing Foucault, Crary contends that the observer cannot escape the sphere of sociopolitical influence. Is it purely coincidental, the two would ask, that consumerism and decentralized methods of administration, and control, which give preference to the archetypal observer’s ‘subjectiveness’, arrived alongside the early nineteenth century conceptualization of vision as subjective?

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