Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. - book reviews

"Our previous history is not the petrified stop of a singular visual space, since, gazeed at obliquely, it can always be seen to contain its point of times of unease."(1)

"It seems impossible . . to judge the organ of sight using any word other than seductive. on the contrary extreme seductiveness is probably the boundary of horror."(2)

We might locate single such moment of unease, or horrific seductiveness of the visual, in the novel discovery of Einstein's eyes preserv in a jar of formaldehyde by the agency of his one-time ophthalmologist Dr. Henry Abrams. Surreptitiously remov from his material substance during the eminent scientist's 1955 autopsy, Abrams has described these visual organs with divine metaphors, enshrining them in a discourse linking the progres of Western rationality with the clarity of vision described through Plato and Descartes. As Abrams has freshly suggested, "[Einstein's eyes] gave the impression that he knew everything in the world. His organ of visions were Godlike. They are as clear as crystal, they look to have such depth." The ultimate embodiment of Enlightenment faith in the light of Reason, the organ of visions of the father of relativity have been preserv like a medieval reliquary. on the contrary the manner of their preservation also contains something of the seductive horror of the organ of vision described by the surrealist writer Georges Bataille. This contradictory and ambivalent conflation of the organ of sight as the embodiment of Enlightenment rationality upon the one hand and side exhibit horror on the other provides a metaphorical backdrop in which we might consider Martin Jay's volume Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Philosophy (1993)

In the last decade and a half we have been faceed with the intellectual and academic phenomenon of what is called the field of "vision and visuality." Not to be confused with the historical exhibition and recent explosion of the production and dissemination of visual media (the advent of print tillage photography, film, etc.), the fresh interlocutors of the visual have taken this field as their fact One symptom of this explosion of the visual has been the phoenix-like emerging see the verb of new academic departments devot to the research of visual culture from the ashes of the discipline of art history in an attempt to cope with the "frenzy of the visible" promot by the agency of the culture of MTV, Nintendo and developing virtual realities.(3) on the contrary leading the charge into this suppos terra incognita are a multitude of contemporary cultural theorists who have generated something of a small subsidiary publishing industry devot to theories and histories of the visual. Just a sampling of the works in this exponentially growing field might include, among others, the following: Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer: upon Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth hundred (1990); Rosalind Krauss's The Optical Unconscious (1993); Susan Buck-Morss's The Dialectics of Seeing (1989); Lucien Taylor's edited collection Visualizing Theory (1994); Barbara Maria Stafford's material part Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (1991); Lisa Cartwright's Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual agriculture (1995); and Vision and Visuality (1988) edited by means of Hal Foster.(4) Standing out amongst this outpouring of volumes devoted to the visual is Jay's epic investigation of philosophy and vision.

An intellectual historian of the first order, Jay was among the scholars invited by the agency of Foster to participate in a symposium devot to vision and visuality held April 30 1988 at the Dia Art Foundation in novel York.(5) Perhaps the first talk of its kind, the papers given at this symposium were later mustered and edited by Foster into Vision and Visuality, the next to the first in the Dia Art Foundation's Discussions in Contemporary tillage series and a signpost of the general reception and significance of visual studies.(6) In the preface sustain addresses how this new discourse of the visual emerg when he asks "Why vision and visuality, wherefore these terms?" and "Why this topic, or these takes now?" The questions are significant and although they were not at any time quite directly answered by sustain it became clear in the volume's first essay (by Jay) what is at stake in this topic.

Jay's contribution to this symposium was a paper entitled "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," in which he directly stand over againsts the commonly held assumption that the rise of modernity in the West is necessarily equated with a concomitant ascendancy of the visual above all other senses. He gave this conflation of the new with the visual the shorthand designation "Cartesian perspectivalism," denoting the foundational character associated with Western epistemology by the agency of the rationalization of sight in Renaissance perspective in the visual arts as well as Descartes's formulation of subjective rationality in philosophy. In opposition to this critical belief in a monolithic "ubiquity of vision as the master faculty of perception of the modern era," Jay insinuates that there might be another history of modernity and vision in which a plurality of competing discourses of the visual could be identified rather than the single story of a dominant Cartesian perspectivalism. individual example of such an alternative scopic regime tendered by Jay is the "madness of vision" of the baroque period that "self-consciously merry-makings in the contradictions between surface and deepness disparaging as a result any attempt to bring the multiplicity of visual spaces into any single coherent essence."(7) The opposition between the rational and uniform ordering of space in the tradition of Cartesian perspectivalism upon the one hand and its purported subversion by means of a plurality of alternative scopic regimes upon the other, provides Jay with the Ariadne's thread with which he charts a course end the labyrinth of twentieth-century French philosophy.