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

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 1995 by Douglas Fogle

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

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

In the last decade and a half we have been confronted with the intellectual and academic phenomenon of what is called the field of "vision and visuality." Not to be confused with the historical development and recent explosion of the production and dissemination of visual media (the advent of print culture, photography, film, etc.), the new interlocutors of the visual have taken this field as their object. One symptom of this explosion of the visual has been the phoenix-like emergence of new academic departments devoted to the study of visual culture from the ashes of the discipline of art history in an attempt to cope with the "frenzy of the visible" promoted by the culture of MTV, Nintendo and developing virtual realities.(3) But leading the charge into this supposed terra incognita are a multitude of contemporary cultural theorists who have generated something of a small subsidiary publishing industry devoted to theories and histories of the visual. Just a sampling of the books in this exponentially growing field might include, among others, the following: Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (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 Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (1991); Lisa Cartwright's Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture (1995); and Vision and Visuality (1988) edited by Hal Foster.(4) Standing out amongst this outpouring of books devoted to the visual is Jay's epic study of philosophy and vision.

An intellectual historian of the first order, Jay was among the scholars invited by Foster to participate in a symposium devoted to vision and visuality held April 30, 1988 at the Dia Art Foundation in New York.(5) Perhaps the first conference of its kind, the papers given at this symposium were later collected and edited by Foster into Vision and Visuality, the second in the Dia Art Foundation's Discussions in Contemporary Culture series and a signpost of the currency and significance of visual studies.(6) In the preface Foster addresses how this new discourse of the visual emerged when he asks "Why vision and visuality, why these terms?" and "Why this topic, or these takes now?" The questions are significant and although they were never quite directly answered by Foster, 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 confronts the commonly held assumption that the rise of modernity in the West is necessarily equated with a concomitant ascendancy of the visual over all other senses. He gave this conflation of the modern with the visual the shorthand designation "Cartesian perspectivalism," denoting the foundational role associated with Western epistemology by 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 sense of the modern era," Jay suggests 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. One example of such an alternative scopic regime offered by Jay is the "madness of vision" of the baroque period that "self-consciously revels in the contradictions between surface and depth, disparaging as a result any attempt to reduce the multiplicity of visual spaces into any one coherent essence."(7) The opposition between the rational and uniform ordering of space in the tradition of Cartesian perspectivalism on the one hand and its purported subversion by a plurality of alternative scopic regimes on the other, provides Jay with the Ariadne's thread with which he charts a course through the labyrinth of twentieth-century French philosophy.