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

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

"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.

The example of the baroque, with its celebration of a disorienting and ecstatic surplus of images and its rejection of the "monocular geometricalization" of the Cartesian world view, provides Jay with but one of Jacqueline Rose's "moments of unease" within this history of Western visuality. Downcast Eyes devotes itself to a discussion of such moments of unease with the visual in the discourse of twentieth-century French philosophy. Its central premise is quite simple: within contemporary French philosophy one can identify not only a concern with the assumed ocularcentrism of the modern world, but a profound hostility to vision as well. As Jay puts it, "a great deal of recent French thought in a wide variety of fields, is in one way or another imbued with a profound suspicion of vision and its hegemonic role in the modern era."(8) Jay traces this legacy of ocularphobia as it weaves its way through the twentieth century in the writings of, among others, Bataille, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Guy Debord, Roland Barthes, Christian Metz, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Emanuel Levinas and finally, Jean-Francois Lyotard. The line up is formidable, constituting a powerful genealogy of contemporary critical theory which, in the end, is the underlying target of his analysis. Nonetheless, the surprising revelation of the book is the fact that all of the philosophers were to some extent obsessed with the visual in a critical manner.

Early on in Jay's narrative it is clear that the author is uneasy with many of these theorists, especially Bataille and Sartre. The chapter devoted to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty is the fulcrum of his argument in which Jay casts Sartre as a paranoid ocularphobe in contrast with Merleau-Ponty who enacts "a heroic attempt to reaffirm the nobility of vision on new and firmer grounds than those provided by the discredited Cartesian perspectivalist tradition."(9) The basis of his condemnation of Sartre was his claim that "the gaze," the act of looking itself, was necessarily a hostile activity in which the subject looked at is inevitably reified or rendered an object that cannot provide a mutual reciprocity or dialogue with the viewer. The same held true for intersubjective relations in Sartre's philosophy: looking was always an imperialistic act destined to colonize the "other." Sartre's solution to the problem was to "denigrate" vision as Jay puts it, to condemn it politically, artistically and philosophically to eliminate the possibility that vision could have the redemptive value attributed to it by the Enlightenment philosophers. This is the crux of the problem for Jay, for as he suggests, he unapologetically believes in the Enlightenment principles of rationality and reason that many of the critics he mentioned questioned in their writings on the Cartesian perspectivalism of the modern scopic regime.

In the case of Bataille, ocularphobic infamy takes a violent turn with his invocation of visceral images of blindness that opposed notions of Enlightenment reason or redemptive vision. According to Jay, Bataille's occasionally transgressive pornographic celebration of the destruction of vision in general and the metaphor of the eye in particular, contributed greatly to the ongoing "crisis of ocularcentrism." Bataille's highly controversial Story of the Eye (1927), for example, opposed the clear embodiment of Western rationality in the eye metaphor with an excessively destructive valorization of feces, urine, blood and enucleation of the "eye." For Bataille the "labyrinth" was also a primary metaphor, with its tangle of internecine passageways denying any Archimedean point from which one might acquire a God's eye view. Bataille's position opposes that of Jay, who, as an intellectual historian, has placed himself in an Icarian position above and outside of the field of the discourse he surveys. Bataille threatens to destabilize the foundations of Jay's attempt to carefully redeem vision in its Enlightenment formulation, thereby condemning the historian to inhabit the labyrinth without the benefit of an Ariadne's thread.

In the end, Jay gives Bataille the almost singular honor of providing an entire postwar generation of critics with vital inspiration toward their "counter-Enlightenment" thought. This consideration of a generation of French thinkers betrays the problematic nature of weaving a singular narrative throughout over 100 years of philosophical thought. A sampling of Jay's reconstruction of this ocularphobic history suggests the far-reaching implications of his argument. Lacan is called to task for his indictment of the "mirror stage" as an illusory ego-construct. The structuralist Marxist Althusser was faulted for drawing on Lacan to suggest that there is no "outside" to ideology. Foucault's work is perhaps most unfairly criticized for its alleged equivalence of vision with domination tout court in the use of the metaphor of the panopticon and is also singled out for his reticence to provide any redemptive alternatives to the panoptic society he describes in Discipline and Punish (1975). Barthes is seen to equate photography with an unrecuperable loss. Metz and the Cahiers du Cinema group too readily associate the cinematic apparatus with ideological domination. Derrida challenges the Cartesian and Platonic visual foundation of Western metaphysics while Irigaray rejects the visual as a male mode and valorizes touch as a "female" sense. Such examples are completely operative in these works, and Jay is correct in pointing out the strange consistency of the visual throughout such writings.

Given this acknowledgment, it is also clear that what comes to the surface almost symptomatically in Jay's narrative are the signposts of an intense ambivalence towards the visual that in some ways undercuts his argument. Nearly all of the philosophers under consideration manifest an ambivalence regarding their purported ocularphobic tendencies. For example, although Jay points to Lacan's widely read 1949 essay "The Mirror State as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," as instrumental in the formulation of a number of thinkers' ocularphobic tendencies (notably those of Althusser and Metz), he also points appreciatively in more than one passage to Lacan's complex discussion of the gaze and the overlapping fields of reciprocal vision in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1979). Similarly, Derrida's carefully constructed and finely textured cartography of the metaphysical economy of Western philosophy is rendered mute by the overpowering metaphors of ocularphobia and, in Jay's view it becomes clear that the arguments made are not unimportant. Ambivalence is a key concept of psychoanalysis, suggesting a simultaneous maintenance of contradictory tendencies. Jay's earlier formulation of his argument in "Scopic Regimes of Modernity" suggested the operative character of the structure of ambivalence for confronting a singular and monolithic view of the modern scopic regime. The power of his narrative in Downcast Eyes, and his adoption of the Icarian position of ascendancy over the labyrinthine field of the visual, has revealed a blind spot in his thinking in which the multivalent and ambivalent presence of the visual in modern French philosophy is overshadowed by a totalizing construct of philosophical ocularphobia that erases all differences in the glaring light of modernist rationality.

But it would be wrong to construct so totalizing an assessment of Jay's project as well. He has clearly identified an overarching philosophical trope in modern philosophical discourse, and has brought the question of the visual to the forefront of critical thinking. In doing so, Jay has produced an exhaustively researched study that provides the student of the visual with a useful introduction to this topic. In the end, Downcast Eyes is a symptomatic documentation of the constitutive tension between the visual as embodied vision and the cultural construction of the visual known as "visuality." This discussion is crucial to the illumination of the almost rabid faith in Enlightenment rationality that would drive an ophthalmologist to remove and preserve the eyes of Einstein. Such a story brings into perverse proximity the poles of ocularphilia and ocularphobia that Jay's narrative seeks to delineate, generating in itself an ambivalence comparable to the seductive horror of the eye described by Bataille. It is these moments of unease in the history of visuality that call for further illumination.

NOTES

1. Jacqueline Rose, "sexuality in the Field of Vision," in Sexuality in the Field of Vision, (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 232-233.

2. Georges Bataille, "Eye," in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, ed. and trans. by Allan Stoekl, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 17.

3. Indeed, one wonders if this institutional transmogrification is akin to the use of images in the baroque period to seduce worshippers back to Catholicism in a post-Reformation world. On this point see Jay's discussion of the Baroque in Downcast Eyes, pp. 45-48 and passim. As Jay puts it: "Rejecting the Reformation's suspicion of vision and its trust only in the unmediated word of God, the baroque Church, after a moment of hesitation, self-consciously resorted to sensual seduction in order to win back the masses."

4. In his review of Jay's book, W.J.T. Mitchell mentions a number of other books devoted to the visual including Norman Bryson, Micheal Ann Holly and Keith Moxey's Visual Theory, Ellen Esrock's The Reader's Eye and Frederic Jameson's Signatures of the Visible. See W.J.T. Mitchell, "'The Eyes Have it," Artforum (January 1994), pp. 9-10.

5. Jay is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking research on the Frankfurt school critics in his book The Dialectical Imagination, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), a rigorous historical examination of the Institute of Social Research.

6. Significantly, the papers presented in this conference evolved into at least three of the books on vision mentioned earlier: Crary's Techniques of the Observer; Krauss's The Optical Unconscious; and of course Jay's Downcast Eyes. The other participants included Norman Bryson and Jacqueline Rose.

7. Martin Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," in Hal Foster, ed., Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), p. 17. The "madness of vision" is a term that Jay borrowed from the French philosopher Christine Buci-Glucksmann who described the baroque in this way in her books La raison baroque (1984) and La folie du voir (1986).

8. Jay, Downcast Eyes, p. 14.

9. Ibid, p. 298.

DOUGLAS FOGLE is a National Endowment for the Arts fellow in the visual arts department of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.