What Do We See in the Discourse of Vision
Craig Calhoun
Journal article · 1996 · Comparative Studies in Society and History
Abstract
From the cascading puns on visual language with which it opens, through its reports on the violent imagery of the College de Sociologie and the abstract antiocularcentrism of structuralists and poststructuralists, Martin Jay's book, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, is about writing as well as seeing, the discourse of vision more than visuality itself, and the centrality of vision as well as its denigration.It is a big book and a learned one, full of fascinating connections and informative recoveries of half-forgotten work.The book opens insights (one of many words that reading it makes difficult to use unself-consciously afterwards) into the work of an extremely wide range of late-nineteenth-and twentieth-century French thinkers.It refocuses our view of theories, old and new.It points to something pervasive that we may not have noticed adequately but ultimately fails to explain why this is so important.Put another way, this is a work of intellectual history, focused on cultural theory, written with great theoretical acuity.Its intent seems to be theoretical and analytical, not only narrative, but its point is unclear.What Jay has done is to notice how issues of vision (including vision's violence and capacity to mislead) figure in an almost astonishing range of cultural analyses, theories, fictions, and related works.The issues of vision figure sometimes as tropes, sometimes as themes, sometimes as obsessions.They are occasionally linked by the influences that earlier works have on later ones and by the reaction formations so characteristic of French intellectual life.Jay identifies all he can, catalogues them, and uses them to help us grasp better the thoughts of these various thinkers, many well-known, a few obscure.But he also weaves them together, attempts to make of them a story of something happening in twentieth-century French thought, and here it is not clear whether there is any real unity.Did vision, or animosity to the centrality of vision to intellectual orientation, really shape the development of a coherent intellectual tradition in a basic way; or was it simply coincidentally prevalent throughout the last hundred years?It was clearly central to some thinkers, like Bataille, but for many others-denigrators as well as celebrants-it seems to have been as much a convenient figure for making points motivated elsewhere.