The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium.

"Machines of the visible," they are often called in the burgeoning literature on visual culture, those marvelous devices that delight, educate, and discipline the eye. Some - the camera obscura, the phantasmagoria, the panopticon - have even become emblematic of distinct scopic regimes. Now with Deborah Lucas Schneider's genial translation of Stephan Oettermann's lavishly illustrated The Panorama, first published in German in 1980, we can add another to this repertoire of culturally defining optical machines. Although the importance of the panorama was recognized by Walter Benjamin in his unfinished Passagenwerk and developed thematically in Dolf Sternberger's 1938 Panorama of the 19th Century, it is only with Oettermann's exhaustive treatment of the phenomenon that we can get a full view, as it were, of its significance.

Providing a lucid account of the panorama's technical workings, helpful comparisons with such competing devices as Daguerre's diorama, and chapters on its proliferation in Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and America, Oettermann's book will satisfy the curiosity of anyone who wants to know more about the panorama's moment in the sun (or rather in a rotunda in which sunlight was diffusely cast onto a circular canvas as well as onto a "false terrain" of real objects - sand, underbrush, etc. - between it and the viewer). That extended moment, as Benjamin and Sternberger have pointed out, corresponded almost perfectly to the nineteenth century, the expansive era of bourgeois optimism.

Despite predecessors such as baroque theatrical stagecraft and the "Eidophusikon" invented by the scenic designer de Loutherbourg in the mid-eighteenth century, it was only with the onset of the Age of Revolution that the time was ripe for a new mass entertainment. Although competing claims to its invention were made by Johann Adam Breysig, the first patent for a panorama was taken out in 1787 by Robert Barker, who also coined the word from the Greek pan (all) and horama (view). Not only did the invention quickly win an international audience, but the meaning of the word itself also soon expanded to include any general overview of a landscape, real or represented, including a field of knowledge. The panorama, along with a host of other more primitive optical entertainments, thrived until around 1900, when the nascent cinema supplanted them all. The few panoramas that survived did so as vestiges of an era that was clearly over.

Oettermann has read his Benjamin and Sternberger, as well as his Foucault on the panopticon. He situates the panorama's origins in a revolutionary transformation of visual culture, a veritable "see-fever" also manifest in such inventions as hot-air balloons. This was a revolution, he argues, at once democratic and bourgeois. It was democratic because the privileged vantage point in the ancien regime, occupied by persons at the apex of a hierarchy of power, could now be filled by anyone able to pay a modest fee to file through rotundas designed to provide the thrill of seeing sites previously beyond the common man's experience (alpine vistas, famous battles from the point of view of commanding generals, exotic cityscapes).

The panorama was bourgeois because it conformed to a secularized God's-eye view that sought to dominate all that could be illuminated in an ever-wider horizon, to enclose the visual world as the enclosures of early capitalist agriculture had parceled out the English countryside. Its subject matter, moreover, was no longer allegory or myth, but the depictions of actual scenes or great historical and current events, rendered with as much realistic detail as possible. Simulacral wonders, they were, as Wordsworth put it in The Prelude, "mimic sights that ape/The absolute presence of reality." Whether the canvases were works of "high art" was debated from their inception, but at their best they achieved a naturalist fidelity to the "real world" that flattered the characteristic bourgeois prejudice against idealization and fantasy. More precisely, they fed the hunger for trompe l'oeil deceptions that made viewers yearn to be fooled about experiences they knew to be unreal, a dynamic that continues to drive the technological wizardry of our own entertainment industry.

Oettermann does not, however, rest content with a simple celebration of the medium. Instead, he sees it in a dialectical relationship with its seeming opposite, the panopticon, which was promulgated (if not actually realized) by Jeremy Bentham at virtually the same time Barker took out his patent for the panorama. Although the latter can be understood as a mode of bourgeois play and fantasy, whereas the former functioned in the service of work or discipline, both contributed, according to Oettermann, to a new scopic regime. "The discovery of the horizon, the liberation of the eye, and at the same time the era's diffuse sense of imprisonment," he writes, "all have a perfect counterpart in the panorama: while seeming to offer an unconfined view of a genuine landscape, it in fact surrounds observers completely and hems them in far more than all previous artistic attempts to reproduce landscapes. At the same time that the panorama celebrates the bourgeoisie's ability to 'see things from a new angle,' it is also a complete prison for the eye. The eye cannot range beyond the frame, because there is no frame."

Here, in short, we have a visual machine in which the viewing self is reduced to a seeing eye able to look at, but not enter or touch, the surrounding landscape. Although the viewer could move and thus, in Norman Bryson's well-known terminology, "glance" with two eyes rather than "gaze" with a disincarnated single eye at the environment, there was no corresponding movement in the scene itself. This lack was understood very early on in the history of the medium, especially when human figures were portrayed, figures whose immobility undermined the sought-after realism of the experience. A number of ingenious attempts were, in fact, made to set the panorama in motion, most notably the scrolling of an extended scene past a stationary viewer in a simulacrum of a railway journey or a boat ride. But the integration of temporal and spatial verisimilitude never really worked, as parallax effects were impossible to achieve.

Oettermann compares the decline of the panorama to that of the hot-air balloon, which by the end of the nineteenth century was no longer a symbol of Enlightenment hope, but rather a vaguely menacing presentiment of the society of surveillance - and perhaps the horror of aerial warfare - in the century to come. At one point, Oettermann even mysteriously claims that as an emblem of liberal, progressive thought, the panorama was already "obsolete with its first appearance. It concealed its anachronism by reproducing itself in countless and seemingly new variations with the most up-to-date subjects."

Since the German publication of The Panorama, more complicated explanations for the medium's decline have been suggested by historians of visual culture. Jonathan Crary's 1990 Techniques of the Observer, although never actually mentioning the panorama, draws attention to the increasing importance of the embodied physiology of the eye in the nineteenth century, which undermined the assumed distance between viewer and viewed in both the camera obscura model of one-directional sight and the 360-degree circumambient view of Barker's invention. As the body of the viewer demanded its due against ocularcentric privilege, it became increasingly difficult to accept a transcendent, God's-eye view, however democratized the subject position might be. Another recent commentator, Lieven de Cauter, suggests that the twentieth century soon came to favor "vertigo machines." The roller coasters and loop-the-loops that began to outnumber educational pavilions in the great world fairs of the second half of the nineteenth century were literally the wave of the future. Aping the rapidity of motion in new inventions such as the bicycle, the car, and the airplane, these devices fostered dizziness and intensity in the place of the contemplative thrill of the panoramic gaze. The body returned as a locus of giddiness, shock, and disorientation, producing the physical, ecstatic "kicks" that the sedate panorama so sorely lacked.

Now, we are not even sure where the horizon is, let alone of our ability to command it. Our spectacle is increasingly defined by the interactive technologies of virtual reality that put us in the midst of the phantasmagorical whirl rather than serenely outside it. We may be in as much of a prison as that enclosed by the frameless panoramic canvas, but at least we feel we can rattle the bars by jiggling our aptly named joysticks. If the "real" is on the verge of returning, as Hal Foster has recently claimed, it certainly will not come back in the form of panoramic representations of a static and frozen world, the world of a bourgeoisie confident about its mastery of all it surveys.

Since the initial publication of The Panorama, new ones have been built - interestingly, often for state-glorifying purposes in countries like China, North Korea, Egypt, Israel, and Iraq - and older ones, such as the Battle of Raclawice in Wroclaw or Mesdag's beautiful seaside vista in The Hague, have been successfully refurbished. But the experience they provide is that of a nostalgic reversion to an era of comparative equipoise in which, Marx notwithstanding, all that is solid has not yet melted into air. Stephan Oettermann's wonderful book may therefore be as much about time as space, a time that still had time for moments of arrested motion and visual contemplation, a time before the eye was thrust back into a libidinally charged body continuous with networks of information and stimulation, where all terrains seem equally false.

Martin Jay is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley. His latest book, Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time, has just been published by the University of Massachusetts Press.