11/1/2022 0 Comments Equally downcast![]() These expansions have themselves been linked in complicated ways to the practices of surveillance and spectacle, which they often abet.īecause of the remarkable range and variability of visual practices, many commentators have been tempted, in ways that we will examine shortly, to claim certain cultures or ages have been ocularcentric, ⁷ or dominated by vision. What has been called the expansion of our exosomatic organs⁶ has meant above all extending the range of our vision, compensating for its imperfections, or finding substitutes for its limited powers. #Equally downcast series#⁴ On a more modest level, anthropologists and sociologists have examined such visually fraught phenomena as the widespread belief in the evil eye, which has given rise to a no less popular series of countervailing apotropaic remedies.⁵ Somewhere in between, historians of technology have pondered the implications of our expanded capacity to see through such devices as the telescope, microscope, camera, or cinema. Sometimes these can be construed in grandiose terms, such as a massive shift from an oral culture to a chirographic one based on writing and then a typographic one in which the visual bias of the intermediate stage is even more firmly entrenched. In addition to the ocular permeation of language, there exists a wealth of what might be called visually imbued cultural and social practices, which may vary from culture to culture and epoch to epoch. As Ian Hacking and Richard Rorty have recently emphasized, even Western philosophy at its most putatively disinterested and neutral can be shown to be deeply dependent on occluded visual metaphors.³ ² And if this is so with ordinary language, it is no less the case with the specialized languages intellectuals have designed to lift us out of the commonsensical understanding of the world around us. No German, for instance, can miss the Augen in Augenblick or the Schau in Anschauung, nor can a Frenchman fail to hear the voir in both savoir and pouvoir. Other Western languages also contain a wealth of examples to buttress the point. I hope by now that you, optique lecteur, can see what I mean. In lieu of an exhaustive survey of such metaphors, whose scope is far too broad to allow an easy synopsis, this opening paragraph should suggest how ineluctable the modality of the visual actually is, at least in our linguistic practice. ![]() And our prospects for escaping their thrall, if indeed that is even a foreseeable goal, will be greatly dimmed. It is, however, no idle speculation or figment of imagination to claim that if blinded to their importance, we will damage our ability to inspect the world outside and introspect the world within. Depending, of course, on one’s outlook or point of view, the prevalence of such metaphors will be accounted an obstacle or an aid to our knowledge of reality. If we actively focus our attention on them, vigilantly keeping an eye out for those deeply embedded as well as those on the surface, we can gain an illuminating insight into the complex mirroring of perception and language. Read moreĮven a rapid glance at the language we commonly use will demonstrate the ubiquity of visual metaphors. ![]() Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, Downcast Eyes will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians. His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. ![]()
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