Filozofska istraživanja, Vol. 29 No. 1, 2009.
Original scientific paper
Vision and Interpretation: Karl Marx’s Two Metaphors and One Thesis on Technique as an Epistemological Figure
Aleksandar Mijatović
; University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Camera obscura and human eye were key metaphors engaged in the interpretation of the concepts of ideology and commodity fetishism in Karl Marx’s fundamental texts German ideology (1845–46) and Capital (1867). The aim of this paper is to reconsider interpretative strategies that Marx used while he was proposing his main thesis on ideology and commodity fetishism. In the light of these considerations the paper addresses one of the central propositions of the contemporary visual studies that modern visual culture undermines epistemological privileging of the vision. The paper critically discusses the concept of the embodied observer that American art historian Jonathan Crary introduced in the philosophy, art history, cultural history and visual studies. According to Crary the idea of vision as primarily rooted in the corporeality of the observer undercuts Cartesian idea about vision as primarily disembodied event. Crary claims that with the rise of the modernity disembodied subjectivity turns from the site of the knowledge into the figure of ideology. However, reversing the Marx’s relation between optical metaphors and concepts of the ideology and commodity fetishism poses the problem of the observing subjectivity in the quite different terms. Final proposal of this paper is that camera obscura and human eye should not only be considered as optical metaphors that Marx used in German ideology and Capital as mere analogies for explaining concepts such as ideology or commodity fetishism. Reading procedure could well go into the opposite direction: the camera obscura and the human eye are the concepts explained via the already defined concepts of the ideology and commodity fetishism. If the reading perspective is switched in that way it is clear that the thesis of the embodied observer does not necessarily entail the embodied character of the visual sensations.
Keywords
figure; metaphor; interpretation; body; vision; camera obscura; stereoscope; photography; commodity fetishism; ideology; Karl Marx; Jonathan Crary
Hrčak ID:
41074
URI
Publication date:
22.4.2009.
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