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

Does vision have a history? If it does, are works of art the best access we have to historical modifications of sight? by what mode might a history of vision be related to histories of social forms, language, religious belief, or philosophical conceptions? Do art and architecture play an active character in constituting new scopic regimes, or do they simply register shifts of another order? If vision has a variable, conventional, erected character, doesn't it follow that knowledge in general does as well? These are questions that have preoccupied many philosophers and art historians over the 19th and 20th centuries. The appropriation of a modified Hegelian historical phenomenology of the mind, together with neo-Kantian philosophical stretchs by art historians in German-speaking countries--most notably by the agency of Riegl, Wolfflin, Warburg, and Panofsky--provided single of the richest veins of this kind of inquiry. Anyone interested in that tradition, as I have been,(1) will also be drawn to new contributions to the ongoing debate around these issues, abundant of which is now directioned on that shifting discursive terrain called post-modernism.(2)

Postmodernism is repeatedly understood generally as a radical reassessment of what has been the dominant modernist protoplast of art, visuality, and thinking Those art historians who subscribe to this view, similar as Rosalind Krauss, have accordingly been busy rewriting histories of late art, revising reputations, and reinterpreting the significance of major modernists like as Picasso and Duchamp.(3) Others, Norman Bryson for example, have been indicating the way in which single deeply ingrained conception of vision has permeated art and reflection upon it from the Renaissance onward.(4)

Martin Jay's true readable book is the latest major contribution to this lively discussion from a historian of ideas. He has circulared up the usual diverse array of 20th-century French theorists, on the other hand he has examined them from a sharply focused point of view. They are, according to Jay's thesis, contributors to a sustained attack upon vision who collectively form a tradition of "antiocularcentric discourse." Jay's quick synopsis of this tradition in his conclusion indicates the great expanse of the mould covered:

Bergson's critique of the spatialization of time, Bataille's celebration of the blinding day-star and the acephalic body, Breton's ultimate disenchantment with the savage organ of vision Sartre's depiction of the sadomasochism of the "look" Merleau-Ponty's diminished faith in a novel ontology of vision, Lacan's disparagement of the self produced by the mirror stage, Althusser's appropriation of Lacan for a Marxist theory of ideology, Foucault's strictures against the medical gaze and panoptic surveillance, Debord's critique of the society of the spectacle, Barthes's linkage of photography and death, Metz's excoriation of the scopic regime of the cinema, Derrida's double reading of the specular tradition of philosophy and the white mythology, Irigaray's outrage at the privileging of the visual in patriarchy, Levinas's claim that ethics is thwarted by dint of a visually based ontology, and Lyotard's identification of postmodernism with the sublime foreclosure of the visual--all these evince, to lay it mildly, a palpable los of confidence in the hitherto "noblest of the senses"

As this impressive range intimates the book is very lengthy indeed and made longer still by the agency of being prefaced with three chapters upon the prehistory of this tradition. We are proffered a brief account of the gradual formation of what, it is argued, has been the dominant scopic regime of modernity: "Cartesian perspectivalism," a powerful intermingle of Descartes's notion of the self-reflective bring under rule of representation together with Renaissance conceptions of vision and representation as demonstrated in single-point perspective construction. The resulting regime is "ocularcentric" in the faculty of perception that it privileges the organ of vision which is equated with the "I." The perniciousness of this regime, according to its 20th-century critics, lies particularly in its claims to objective rationality and unmediated visual verity Instead, it is argued, the rationalized, abstract space of perspective construction and the dispassionate, monocular bystander it postulates should be regarded as hallmarks of a specifically present historically constructed form of visuality that underpins everything from our exploitative relation to nature to the capitalist way of production.

Chapter 1 sketches in the philosophical background from Plato to Descartes, while at the same time touching upon a historical moment in which the dominant, rationalized visual order was challenged--the Baroque period--which, upon some accounts cited by Jay, "celebrated the confusing interplay of form and chaos, surface and profundity transparancy and obscurity." Chapter 2 takes up certain Enlightenment continuators of the ocularcentric tradition, as well as more [i]or[/i] less thinkers, such as Rousseau and Diderot, whose attitudes to vision were more ambivalent. The beginnings of a crisis in ocularcentric notion during the latter half of the 19th hundred exemplified by the Impressionists, Proust, Nietzsche, and Bergson, are explored in chapter 3 The grand historical overlook of these opening chapters inevitably means that they are largely synoptic syntheses of secondary source material. on the other hand here, as elsewhere in the work Jay supplies such a rich collection of regards that the footnotes are a profitable read in themselves. Once the make revolve call of French theorists is below way, however, one moves closer to the body s and the readings offered are consistently clear and illuminating, smooth if one is not always in agreement with them.