Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Centennial Book)

522 Pages·1994·0.91 MB·English

by  Martin Jay

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title: Downcast Eyes : The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-century French Thought
author: Jay, Martin.
publisher: University of California Press
isbn10 | asin: 0520081544
print isbn13: 9780520081543
ebook isbn13: 9780585200460
language: English
subject Vision, Cognition and culture, Philosophy,
French--20th century, France--Civilization--20th
century, France--Intellectual life--20th century.
publication date: 1993
lcc: B2424.P45J39 1993eb
ddc: 194
subject: Vision, Cognition and culture, Philosophy,
French--20th century, France--Civilization--20th
century, France--Intellectual life--20th century.
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Downcast Eyes
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The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought

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A Centennial Book
One hundred books published between 1990 and 1995 bear this special imprint of the
University of California Press. We have chosen each Centennial Book as an example of the
Press's finest publishing and bookmaking traditions as we celebrate the beginning of our
second century.
University of California Press
Founded in 1893

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Downcast Eyes
The Denigration of vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought
Martin Jay
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkley Los Angeles London

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University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
First Paperback Printing 1994
Copyright © 1993 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jay, Martin, 1944-
Downcast eyes: the denigration of vision in twentieth-century
French thought / Martin Jay.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-520-08154-4 (alk. paper)
ISBN 0-520-08885-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Vision. 2. Cognition and culture. 3. Philosophy, French20th
century. 4. FranceCivilization20th century. 5. Franceintellectual
life20th century. I. Title.
B2424. P45J39 1993
194dc20 93-347
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
4 5 6 7 8 9
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI
Z39.48-1984.

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For Beth

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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Chapter One: The Noblest of the Senses: Vision from Plato to Descartes 21
Chapter Two: Dialectic of EnLIGHTenment 83
Chapter Three: The Crisis of the Ancien Scopic Régime: From the Impressionists to 149
Bergson
Chapter Four: The Disenchantment of the Eye: Bataille and the Surrealists 211
Chapter Five: Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and the Search for a New Ontology of Sight 263
Chapter Six: Lacan, Althusser, and the Specular Subject of Ideology 329
Chapter Seven: From the Empire of the Gaze to the Society of the Spectacle: Foucault381
and Debord
Chapter Eight: The Camera as Memento Mori: Barthes, Metz, and the Cahiers du 435
Cinéma
Chapter Nine: "Phallogocularcentrism": Derrida and Irigaray 493
Chapter Ten: The Ethics of Blindness and the Postmodern Sublime: Levinas and 543
Lyotard
Conclusion 587
Index 595

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Acknowledgments
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Registering the many acts of generosity that made this book possible is both a pleasant and
melancholy activity. Its pleasure follows from the fond recollection of the people and
institutions who were so supportive of the project from the beginning. It is difficult to imagine
a warmer or more constructive response to a scholarly enterprise than was forthcoming in this
instance. Because the scope of the book is so wide, I have had to rely on the expert knowledge
of many people in a multitude of disciplines, all of whom were remarkably willing to share
with me the fruits of their own research and learning. The melancholy flows no less inexorably
from the fact that several of their number are no longer alive and able to know how deeply I
benefited from and appreciated their help.
I would not have been in a position to solicit such aid without the support of the more
anonymous benefactors who made the institutional decisions that allowed this project to
prosper. Let me thank them first. I was given financial sustenance by the Rockefeller
Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of California Center
for Germanic and European Studies, and the University of California Committee on Research.
Clare Hall, Cambridge University kindly provided me a visiting membership while I was
engaged in writing the manuscript. And three institutions allowed me to teach courses on its
theme: the Collège international de philosophie of Paris in 1985, the School of

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Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth College in 1986, and Tulane University, where I was
Mellon Professor in the summer of 1990. There can be no better preparation for writing a book
of this kind than testing its ideas out in seminars comprising both faculty and advanced
graduate student participants, who taught me far more than I taught them. Only they will know
how much this book is a collaborative effort. Special thanks are due to Bernard Pulman,
Geoffrey Hartman, and Geoffrey Gait Harpham for their respective invitations to conduct
those seminars.
During the year I spent in Paris, I also was greatly abetted by the kindnesses of many French
scholars, whose names will often be found in the pages that follow. Let me acknowledge them
with genuine gratitude: Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Cornelius Castoriadis, the late Michel de
Certeau, Daniel Defert, Luce Giard, Jean-Joseph Goux, Luce Irigaray, Sarah Kofman, Claude
Lefort, Michel Löwy, Jean-François Lyotard, Gerard Raulet, Jacob Rogozinski, and Philippe
Soulez. I have also deeply benefited from conversations with Jacques Derrida, Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, and the late Michel Foucault during their visits to America.
I also owe an enormous debt to the following friends and colleagues, who in a variety of ways
left their mark on this book: Svetlana Alpers, Mitchell Ash, Ann Banfield, Susanna Barrows,
William Bouwsma, Teresa Brennan, Carolyn Burke, Drucilla Cornell, Carolyn Dean, John
Forrester, Hal Foster, Michael Fried, Amos Funkenstein, Claude Gandelman, Alexander Gelly,
John Glenn, Joseph Graham, Richard Gringeri, Sabine Gross, Robert Harvey, Joan Hart,
Frederike Hassauer, Eloise Knapp Hay, Denis Hollier, Michael Ann Holly, Axel Honneth,
Karen Jacobs, Michael Janover, Dalia Judovitz, Anton Kaes, Kent Kraft, Rosalind Krauss,
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Dominick LaCapra, Thomas Laqueur, David Michael Levin, the late Eugene Lunn, Jane
Malmo, Greil Marcus, Irving Massey, Jann Matlock, Françoise Meltzer, Stephen Melville,
Juliet Mitchell, John Durham Peters, Mark Poster, Christopher Prendergast, Anson Rabinbach,
Paul Rabinow, John Rajchman, Bill Readings, Eric Rentschler, Irit Rogoff, Michael Rosen,
Michael Roth, Michael Schudsen, Joel Snyder, Kristine Stiles, Sidra Stich, Marx Wartofsky,
John Welchman, J. M.

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Winter, Richard Wolin, Eli Zaretsky, and Jack Zipes. Skilled research assistance was supplied
by Berkeley graduate students Alice Bullard, Lawrence Frohman, Nicolleta Gullace, Gerd
Horten, and Darrin Zook. It has also been my great good fortune to be able to lecture on
aspects of this project to audiences from many different disciplines in Australia, Belgium,
Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, Hungary, India, and Yugoslavia,
as well as throughout the United States. I want those who invited me and those who responded
with questions I am still struggling to answer to know how much I value their hospitality. I
would also like to thank the editors of the journals and volumes in which earlier versions of
several chapters or parts of chapters appeared: chapter 4 in the Visual Anthropology Review, 7,
1 (Spring, 1991); chapter 5 in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael
Levin (Berkeley, 1993), chapter 7 in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy
(London, 1986), ICA Documents (London, 1986), and chapter 10 in Thesis Eleven, 31 (1992).
James Clark and Edward Dimendberg of the University of California Press have supported the
book with great vigor and generosity. The readings they provided by Rosalind Krauss and
Allan Megill were invaluable. So too were the ones solicited by Harvard University Press from
Walter Adamson and Paul Robinson; Aida Donald's efforts on behalf of the manuscript were in
this sense not in vain, and I want to express my appreciation for her enthusiasm and
understanding. I have also benefited from the computer assistance of Gail Phillips, the
copyediting of Lisa Chisholm, and the indexing of Rita Chin.
As always, I am privileged to be able to acknowledge the relentless scrutiny of a pair of very
special readers: my wife, Catherine Gallagher and the late Leo Lowenthal. Leo's death at the
age of ninety-two earlier this year ended a remarkable friendship, the like of which I will never
enjoy again. Two more eagle-eyed critics are hard to imagine. Finally, no acknowledgment
section would be complete without mentioning my daughters, Shana Gallagher and Rebecca
Jay, who know how to roll their eyes when their father, like George Bush, bemoans yet again
his problems with "the vision thing."

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Introduction
Even a rapid glance at the language we commonly use will demonstrate the ubiquity of visual
metaphors. 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. 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. 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. And our prospects for escaping their thrall, if indeed that is even a
foreseeable goal, will be greatly dimmed. 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. I hope
by now that you, optique lecteur, can see what I mean.1
1. There are some twenty-one visual metaphors in this paragraph, many of them
embedded in words that no longer seem directly dependent on them. Thus, for
example, vigilant is derived from the Latin vigilare, to watch, which in its French form
veiller is the root of surveillance. Demonstrate comes from the Latin monstrare, to
show. Inspect, prospect, introspect (and other words like aspect or circumspect) all
derive from the Latin specere, to look at or observe. Speculate has the same root. Scope
comes from the Latin scopium, a translation of a Greek word for to look at or examine.
Synopsis is from the Greek word for general view. These are latent or dead metaphors,
(Footnote continued on next page)

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Other Western languages also contain a wealth of examples to buttress the point. 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.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. 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 metaphors3
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. 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.4 On a more
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modest level, anthropologists and sociolo-
(Footnote continued from previous page)
but they still express the sedimented importance of the visual in the English language.
For a discussion of dormant visual metaphors, see Colin Murray Turbayne, The Myth of
Metaphor (Columbia, S.C., 1971).
2. The French etymologies for these words are, to be sure, differentvoir coming from the
Latin videre, savoir from sapere, and pouvoir from potere. But sometimes imagined
etymologies reveal as much as real ones. For a consideration of this theme, see Derek
Attridge, "Language as History/History as Language: Saussure and the Romance of
Etymology," in Post-structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff
Bennington, and Robert Young (Cambridge, 1987). That the connections were made is
shown by the film theorist Thierry Kuntzel's essay "Savoir, pouvoir, voir," Ça Cinéma, 7-8
(May, 1975).
3. Ian Hacking, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (Cambridge, 1975); Richard
Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979). For a discussion of the link
between knowledge and sight in all Indo-European tongues, see Stephen A. Tyler, "The
Vision Quest in the West, or What the Mind's Eye Sees," Journal of Anthropological
Research, 40, 1 (Spring, 1984), pp. 23-39. He shows that at least one other language
family, Dravidian, lacks this linkage.
4. For arguments of this kind, see Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven,
1967); Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, 1977); and
Donald M. Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (Chicago, 1982).

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gists 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. What has been called the expansion of our "exosomatic organs"6 has meant above all
extending the range of our vision, compensating for its imperfections, or finding substitutes for
its limited powers. These expansions have themselves been linked in complicated ways to the
practices of surveillance and spectacle, which they often abet.
Because 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. For them, what may seem a function of our
physiology or evolution is best understood in historical terms, with the obvious conclusion
often drawn that we can reverse the effects of that domination. Anthropological evidence of
radical variations in the intersensory mix of different cultures has been adduced to encourage
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such an outcome.8
But as in so many other similar debates, the threshold between what is "natural" and what is
"cultural" is by no means easy to fix with any cer-
5. For recent studies of the evil eye, see Clarence Maloney, ed., The Evil Eye (New
York, 1976); Lawrence Di Stasi, Mal Occhio: The Underside of Vision (San Francisco,
1981); and Tobin Siebers, The Mirror of Medusa (Berkeley, 1983). For an account of
apotropaic responses to it, see Albert M. Potts, The World's Eye (Lexington, Ky., 1982).
6. Robert E. Innis, "Technics and the Bias of Perception," Philosophy and Social Criticism,
10, 1 (Summer, 1984), p. 67. Although visual "prostheses" appear to be the most
significant extension of human sense organs, such inventions as the telephone,
loudspeaker, stethoscope, and sonar demonstrate that hearing has also been exosomatically
enhanced. The other senses have perhaps not been as fortunate.
7. As is the case with many neologisms, "ocularcentric" or "ocularcentrism" is sometimes
spelled differently in the literature. Often it is rendered "oculocentric," or less frequently
"ocularocentric." In previous publications I have followed the first of these usages and will
remain with it here.
8. See, for example, the essays in David Howes, ed., The Varieties of Sensory Experience:
A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses (Toronto, 1991).

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tainty. For example, the psychologists Michael Argyle and Mark Cook have recently
concluded that "the use of the gaze in human social behavior does not vary much between
cultures: it is a cultural universal."9 But the implications of the work of another psychologist,
James Gibson, suggests otherwise. Gibson contrasts two basic visual practices, which produce
what he calls "the visual world" and the "visual field."10 In the former, sight is ecologically
intertwined with the other senses to generate the experience of "depth shapes," whereas in the
latter, sight is detached by fixating the eyes to produce "projected shapes'' instead. A plate, for
example, will be experienced as round in the visual world, but as an ellipse in the visual field,
where the rules of perspectival representation prevail. The implication of Gibson's argument is
that vision is normally crossed with the other senses, but it can be artificially separated out.
Thus, cultures might be differentiated according to how radically they distinguish between the
visual field and the visual world.
But whether we identify the latter with "natural" vision is not self-evident. In a series of
essays, the philosopher Marx Wartofsky has argued for a radically culturalist reading of all
visual experience, including Gibson's two dominant modes.11 Alternately talking about "visual
postures," "visual scenarios," "styles of seeing," or "cultural optics," he concludes that
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9. Michael Argyle and Mark Cook, Gaze and Mutual Gaze (Cambridge, 1976), p. 169.
It should be noted that they use the term "gaze" in a general sense to mean any kind of
visual interaction. Unlike some of the authors cited later, they do not contrast it with
the less fixating glance.
10. James J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (Boston, 1950); Senses
Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston, 1966); The Ecological Approach to Visual
Perception (Boston, 1979). For a recent defense of Gibson, see John Hell, Perception and
Cognition (Berkeley, 1983).
11. Marx W. Wartofsky, "Pictures, Representations and the Understanding," in Logic and
Art: Essays in Honor of Nelson Goodman, ed. R. Rudner and I. Scheffler (Indianapolis,
1972); "Perception, Representation and the Forms of Action: Towards an Historical
Epistemology," in his Models: Representation and the Scientific Understanding (Boston,
1979); "Picturing and Representing," in Perception and Pictorial Representation, ed.
Calvin F. Nodine and Dennis E Fisher (New York, 1979); "Visual Scenarios: The Role of
Representation in Visual Perception," in The Perception of Pictures, ed. M. Hagen, vol. 2
(New York, 1980); "Cameras Can't See: Representa-
(Footnote continued on next page)

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"human vision is itself an artifact, produced by other artifacts, namely pictures."12 All
perception, he contends, is the result of historical changes in representation. Wartofsky thus
presents an intentionalist account of visuality, which verges on making it a product of
collective human will.
Judging from the current state of scientific research on sight, which helps in conceptualizing
the "natural" capacities and limitations of the eye, Wartofsky's hostility to any physiological
explanation of human visual experience may, however, be excessive.13 Certain fairly
fundamental characteristics seem to exist, which no amount of cultural mediation can radically
alter. As a diurnal animal standing on its hind legs, the early human being developed its
sensorium in such a way as to give sight an ability to differentiate and assimilate most external
stimuli in a way superior to the other four senses.14 Smell, which is so important for animals
on
(Footnote continued from previous page)
tion, Photography and Human Vision," Afterimage, 7, 9 (1980), pp. 8-9; "Sight,
Symbol and Society: Toward a History of Visual Perception," Philosophic Exchange, 3
(1981), pp. 23-38; "The Paradox of Painting: Pictorial Representation and the
Dimensionality of Visual Space," Social Research, 51, 4 (Winter, 1984), pp. 863-883.
For a similar plea for a culturalist position, see Robert D. Romanyshyn, ''The Despotic
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