Product Description: What Parisian shopping arcades were to the nineteenth century and capitalism, Dubai's luxurious mega-malls are to the new millennium and late capitalism. The Baudelairean flâneur, who patrolled the avenues as a detached observer, today is replaced by the phoneur, a wired wanderer who uses a cell phone to text, call, Web-surf and snap digital images on the fly...read more

This volume of Zone presents a diverse group of reflections and interventions on the fate of the body and of subjectivity within twentieth-century modernity. Essays, image-text projects, photographic dossiers, and philosophical and scientific articles examine the multiple emergences over the last 100 years of new models of life based on technological and biological developments, whose roots go back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but whose full expression is only beginning to emerge. These new transformations and modalities are discussed and figured in relation to an older set of models that long ago began to dissolve - the classical notions of unity, interiority, and organism. In its heterogeneous approach, Zone 6: Incorporations provides a rich cartographic description of the particular capacities and trajectories of the contemporary body drawing on the work of neurologists, anthropologists, filmmakers, architects, philosophers, historians, biologists, dancers, novelists, and artists. Contributors include: Paul Rabinow, Eve Sedgwick, François Dagognet, Peter Eisenman, J. G. Ballard, Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze, Klaus Theweleit, Elaine Scarry, Francisco Varela, Liz Diller, Ric Scofidio, John O'Neill, Manuel DeLanda, and Ana Barado. (view table of contents)

In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. Inverting conventional approaches, Crary considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision. Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s. Jonathan Crary is Assistant Professor of Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University. He is a founding editor of Zone and Zone Books.