This article aims to reconstruct and analyse the late-19th century debates about the standards used for measuring eyesight. It deals in particular with the creation of eye charts, one of the main tools used to assess visual acuity. My argument is organized as follow: I start by providing an account of the historical background against which modern eye charts were developed; the best-known of them will be discussed together with their characteristics. Next, I analyse the debates among ophthalmologists of the time about the definition of "normal eye" and "normal vision", and show the divergence between the ones theoretically formulated and the data collected during clinical researches. Finally, I consider the question of sight measurement, looking on the one hand at the specialists' desire to standardize a framework for measuring visual acuity, and on the other at the many obstacles in the way of achieving that aim.

Cet article a pour objectif d'analyser les débats sur les normes définissant l'oeil et la vision « normaux » pendant la seconde moitié du XIX e siècle en Europe. Il s'attache en particulier à la création des tableaux ophtalmologiques, l'un des principaux instruments utilisés pour mesurer l'acuité visuelle. Après avoir évoqué le cadre historique dans lequel les tableaux visuels modernes ont été développés, nous présenterons les plus célèbres d'entre eux ainsi que leurs caractéristiques. Nous analyserons ensuite les débats entre ophtalmologistes sur ce que sont une vision ou un oeil dits normaux et nous montrerons le décalage entre les définitions théoriques avancées et les résultats des études cliniques. Enfin, nous considérerons la question de la mesure de l'acuité visuelle en dévoilant, d'une part, la volonté des spécialistes d' établir un cadre normatif et, d'autre part, les multiples obstacles qu'ils ont affrontés. Mots-clés. Histoire de l'ophtalmologie, acuité visuelle, histoire des sens, histoire sociale de la médecine au XIX e siècle Abstract. This article aims to reconstruct and analyze debates centring on normal eye and vision standards during the second half of the 19 th century in Europe. It particularly addresses the creation of ophthalmology charts, one of the main tools for measuring visual acuity. Having briefly described the historical context in which modern eye charts were developed, we will present the better known ones of these and their characteristics. We will then analyze ophthalmologists' debates about what constitutes a normal eye and normal vision, and show the discrepancy between established definitions and clinical studies. Finally, we will consider the issue of measuring eyesight while focusing, on the one hand, on specialists' desire to create a

"My publisher, Pickering and Chatto, have made available the introduction to my recent book - which I share with you here. The index is also available as a free file, and you can find that on the publisher's page for my book, which is: http://www.pickeringchatto.com/monographs/vision_science_and_literature_1870_1920"

As a response to Susan Sontag’s classic writing on the poster, this essay analyses the phenomenon of the French ‘pictorial’ publicity poster, which developed in concert with a specific type of spectatorship delineated in contemporary poster criticism as linked to the city of Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. By comparing the collective reading of political placards and announcements in the early modern period to the hurried viewing of illustrated publicity posters at the dawn of the consumer economy, this essay contextualizes the poster’s spectatorship as dependent upon its conditions of public display in Paris after the city’s renovation and rationalization under Haussmannization.

Scientific objective: The concept of ocularcentrism as the dominant ideology acts as a very important role within visual shaping photographic models of vision used by social media and photographic images. The paper focuses on the concept of ocularcentrism as the dominant effect of sight in visual culture, the problems of "ocularcentric discourse," presented in forms of the "phono-logo-centrism" paradigm, and ocularcentric ways of seeing, or scopic regimes: "Cartesian perspectivalism," the "Art of Describing," "baroque vision," and photographic models of vision that have been discussed in two theoretical contexts: Lev Manovich's Software Studies and Cultural Analytics methods and Zygmunt Bauman's consumer society theory that can be understood as the "embodied eye" and the "armed eye" concepts. Research methods: I suggest use of critical methods of Martin Jay's Visual Studies in the perspective of the history of visuality from the ancient Greek to the philosophical, twentieth-century French thought, undertaking Software Studies and Cultural Analytics methods, in an analysis of the research project of Manovich's "Phototrails," as well as Bauman's consumer society theory in an analysis of the photographic project of Alain Delorme's "Totems." Results and conclusions: I hope that exploring theoretical problems of visual culture will allow researchers to open a new fi eld of reciprocal correspondence between the concept of ocularcentrism, photographic models of vision, Software Studies, and Cultural Analytics methods, as well as Bauman's consumer society theory, based on possibility of coming to conclusions, posing questions, and hypotheses. Cognitive value: The paper is an attempt to make a contribution to the hitherto unexplored research on the concept of ocularcentrism as the dominant effect of sight, subjecting to analysis the research project of Manovich’s “Phototrails,” from the perspective of Software Studies and Cultural Analytics methods within “media visualizations,” as well as the photographic project of Delorme’s “Totems,” from the perspective of Bauman’s consumer society theory, consumerism, consumption, and social exclusion.

In 1844, in the first photographically illustrated book, The Pencil of Nature, Fox Talbot includes a perplexing chapter, “A Scene in a Library,” which couples a photograph of a bookshelf with a seemingly unrelated passage of text. Here, Talbot speculates about a fantastical voyeuristic scenario involving a proto-night vision device and its literary possibilities. In this chapter, it is shown that the vexing nature of “A Scene in a Library,” particularly Talbot’s pairing of invisible light with books, stems from the challenge that light beyond the visible range of the spectrum, such as ultraviolet and infrared, posed to the dominant epistemology of the time. His recourse to a literary form of invisibility was an attempt to reconcile the incommensurability of invisible light with the prevailing episteme structured around tropes of visible light and the eye.

To look at the Future Combat Systems Command and Control vehicle, one might be tempted initially to imagine it to be a kind of rolling, armoured camera obscura. With its blank ‘face’, it has the semblance of an eyeless cave dwelling variant of the other FCS manned ground vehicles and one can easily imagine it to define the observer as “isolated, enclosed, and autonomous in its dark confines” just as Jonathan Crary says of the camera obscura. Nevertheless, doing so would presume an evolutionary understanding of visualizing technologies; precisely what Crary seeks to forestall. Instead, this paper argues that the FCS C2 vehicle and the networked Battle Command system that it has been fitted with can be understood as a different order of “epistemological figure” in which the observer’s relation to both the world and the visualizing apparatus are yet to be put into place. Within the FCS C2 vehicle, the bodies of the crew and the Battle Command system enter into what Deleuze and Gauttari term a machinic relationship such that they become parts of a material-informational assemblage. Sat before the dual screen of the Warfighter Machine Interface within the vehicle, the body of the crewmember is deterritorialized into a larger sensor-actuator apparatus. This deterritorialization produces a distributed and what Virilio terms “sightless vision” in which the speed of perception threatens to outstrip the speed of human cognition. This calls into question the abilities of the crew in terms of attentiveness, reaction times, thresholds of stimulation, and fatigue but now, rather than being subject to disciplinary systems of standardization, in order to be logistically useful, distributed perception must be organized through post-disciplinary forms of modulation of inputs.