The senses of modernism: technology, perception, and aesthetics Sara Danius Cornell University Press 2002

p.2   the emergence of modernist aesthetics signifies the increasing internalization of technological matrices of perception

p. 3 The basic propositions of my inquiry thus revolve around questions of sensory perception or, to be more precise, around the specific ways in which categories of perceiving and knowing are reconfigured in a historical situation in which technological devices are capable of storing, transmitting, and reproducing sense data, at the same time articulating new perceptual and epistemic realms.

.... they describe a general transition from technological prosthesis to technological aisthesis, thus moving from externalization to internalization.

note 4    On the discrepancy between seeing and knowing in the wake of photography and cinema, see Karen Jacob's study of modernist representations of the observer, The Eye's mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture (2001)

p.4  synaesthetic ideal vs sensory dissociation and reification
In the age of sensory dissociation and reification, such a synaesthetic ideal is no coincidence. This essentially formal aspect alone motivates a historicizing approach. Indeed, the sheer attempt to turn the novel into an encyclopedic, totalizing, all-inclusive work of art is a symptom of the profound crisis that the genre is facing in this period.

p.5 about aesthetics
Modern theories of the aesthetic, Terry Eagleton reminds us, begin as a "discourse of the body." As originally conceived by the eighteenth-century philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, aesthetics is primarily concerned with the sensory infrastructure of the human body and only secondarily with the essence of art.
It is in the nature of aesthetics to be concerned with the ways in which the human body, through the senses, may derive gratification from certain artifacts and activities that belong to the phenomenal order.
Terry Eagleton     The Ideology of the Aesthetic  (1990   Basil Blackwell)


p.10  A different matrix of perceptual possibilities has been put in place, hence also a new signifying system,
I propose to conceive of technology in terms of conditions of possibility...
Specific technoscientific configurations and their conceptual environments enter into and become part of the aesthetic strategies, problems, and matters they help constitute.

Paul Virilio            technologies of speed and organization of the human sensorium

p.19   discrepancy btw scientific vision and bodily vision
===>   perception for perception's sake