Using evidence from the writings of major 17th and 18th century philosophers, including Locke and Descartes, Crary explains that the camera obscura defined and was defined by the relationship between an isolated internal viewer and an external world.   The camera obscura is also characterized by geometric order and a consistent point of view, in keeping with classical tradition.

The camera obscura exemplifies, for Crary, simultaneity with an exterior object and knowledge situated within the mind.  The body is merely a conduit between the two.  The thaumatrope, on the other hand, represents an entirely different understanding of vision, based on the retinal afterimage.  Crary identifies the beginning of the modern reorganization of vision with Goethe’s Theory of Colors, which was the first philosophical work that paid close attention to the workings of the retinal afterimage.  The afterimage proved that ‘optical experience was produced by and within the subject’.  Visual perception was not the direct reflection of an external ‘reality.’ This is the key to the resituated observer; vision was corporialized in a way inconceivable in the 17th and 18th century.

Crary refers to the work of Diderot to explain that in the 17th and 18th centuries vision did not stand on its own, but was seen as analogous to the sense of touch.  The separation of the senses theorized by Mueller and exemplified by the stereoscope, abstracted vision.  The stereoscope’s “reality effect” depended on a purely visual experience, the real and the optical became one.  The haptic was unnecessary to the experience.

In Crime and Punishment Foucault explains that in the 17th and 18th centuries criminals were punished in public and their bodies were the site of punishment, this constitutes the society of the spectacle.  Foucault's metaphoric and literal depiction of the society surveillance is the panopticon.  Bentham's panopticon is a architectural construct originally designed for prisons, but later used in schools, asylums and hospitals.  Before the panopticon, prisoners were shut away in the dark, but with Bentham's design they are always illuminated.  “Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected.  Visibility is a trap.”   The darkness became depicted by twelve sided polygon situated in the middle of the room.  There is no way of knowing when of if the guard is there or where he is looking, so prisoners are always imagined to be watched.   “The Panopticon is a machine for disassociating  the see/being dyad:  in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing: in the central tower, one sees everything without being seen.”  
In contrast to power relationships where the state showed its power, the new power structures operated without direct coercion.  “Inspection functions ceaselessly.  The gaze is alert everywhere.”   In contrast to Benjamin’s flaneur, the mobilized viewer, Foucault’s new subjective observer, who inhabits the panopticon, is stationary and his vision is concentrated.  Both authors use literal and metaphoric vision to explain the development of historically constructed ways of seeing.  Foucault’s panopticon is not only a metaphor for the control of inmates but can also be used to understand new power relations between the state and its subjects.  Also, with the society of surveillance, the modern subject became the object of observation.  Foucault identifies that these new power dynamics and shifting ways of seeing and being seen were not only the result of increasing industrialization and the search for efficient production but also contributed to their development in turn.  The new subjects of observation were used to test the limits of human production and to surmise the best strategies for controlling and making them useful.