reference of "latter"

1. Does the highlighted "latter" is referring to "city"?

2. Does the red sentence mean "on the basis of notions like simultaneity and quasi-instantaneity of communications it defines the conception of a totality that is constituted in the form of an electronic brain"?


On the other hand, he was fully aware even then that a neo-capitalist organisation of urban space ‘no longer gathers people and things, but data and knowledge. It inscribes in an eminently elaborated form of simultaneity the conception of the whole incorporated into an electronic brain, using the quasi-instantaneity of communications’. All the more reason perhaps to insist on keeping in view the body’s continuing functionality in the city. Moreover, as Tallack is quick to point out – in response to both Taylor, and to Jonathan Crary’s theoretical underpinning of the latter, in which he declares that ‘visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a “real”, optically perceived world’ and predicts that ‘visuality will be situated on a cybernetic and electromagnetic terrain [. . .] consumed, circulated and exchanged globally’ (in Tallack 2005: 9) – the questions precisely of ‘invisibility and shifting perspectives have always been a preoccupation
of visual artists’.