Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision

by David Michael Kleinberg-Levin

This collection of original essays by preeminent interpreters of continental philosophy explores the question of whether Western thought and culture have been dominated by a vision-centered paradigm of knowledge, ethics, and power. It focuses on the character of vision in modern philosophy and on arguments for and against the view that contemporary life and thought are distinctively "ocularcentric." The authors examine these ideas in the context of the history of philosophy and consider the character of visual discourse in the writings of Plato, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and Habermas. With essays on television, the visual arts, and feminism, the book will interest readers in cultural studies, gender studies, and art history as well as philosophers.

Genres: Philosophy

424 pages, Paperback

First published October 9, 1993

About the author

Dr. David Kleinberg-Levin (known, in earlier years as David Michael Levin) graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover and went on to study philosophy at Harvard University, graduating in 1961. He spent a year as Fulbright Exchange Fellow at the Sorbonne in Paris and undertook research, mostly on Fichte and Schelling, at the university in Freiburg im Breisgau. In 1967, he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, writing a dissertation on Husserl's phenomenology under the guidance of Aron Gurwitsch of the New School for Social Research. He taught in the Humanities Department at MIT (1968-1972), and then joined the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University, from which he retired in 2005.

Reviews

[Philip Cherny · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of scholarly essays mostly steeped in the continental tradition that address the complex issues of "ocularcentricism" in modern society. Needless to say, the essays feel a bit dated (amassed in 1993, lacking critical essays addressing the concerns of our increasingly Internet-laden culture), though they still address a few pertinent issues that merit further discourse. My #1 complaint: the collection feels very insular in the breadth of scholars included, only consisting of David Levin's compatriots, save Blumeberg. Many of the scholars are in dialogue with each other, which means a few redundancies. I wish the book diversified a little by including scholars outside the circle—scholars like W.J.T. Mitchell and Johnathan Crary would make a perfect fit.

I read this book because I hoped it would (pardon my pun of a visual metaphor:) "shed light" on concerns many critical modern artists expressed in distancing themselves from art as a practice of visual consumption (i.e. the whole "look, but don't touch" authority of art objects in a museum that sanctifies them as sacred objects.) Of particular interest is whether these problems associated with vision say something particular of sight per se, or is it symptomatic of something more inveterate in human culture? E.g. without sight as our dominant mode of perception would we simply replace the visual "gaze" with a bias of touch or sound, or does the intimacy of touch and the ephemeral nature of sound require us to engage the world in an entirely different manner? Perhaps we can only turn to anomalous cases like Kasper Hauser and Hellen Keller to address such questions, and even then we remain extremely limited in what, if anything, we can actually learn. Ultimately any claim to human nature (to which all critiques of vision fall prey) suffers from sweeping generalizations that tend to overlook the singular case of the individual. Perhaps there is no single vision, but a plurality of visions as espoused by Nietzsche.

The arguments are scattered, but here are the general cases that most philosophers seems to make against the "hegemony" of vision:

1. Distanciation - the "viewer" need not interact or participate with the "viewed," which allows room for disengaged voyeurism, or a passive removal that estranges the spectator from the world, as in the the case of theoria for the stoic observers. Even the listener must hide from sight to become a solipsistic "eavesdropper."

2. Stability - unlike the temporal nature sound, which "disappears as it arises" (243) objects of vision remain lingering in view, permitting the viewer to fixate upon the objects present before the eyes. Vision thus serves as "the mode of perception which, more than any other, perceives things in the world as objects that are clearly there, present, and available for use." (96) Sight inevitably frames images as "wholes" or forms (eidos): one views an object "independent of its temporal context—and hence of all context. It is self-sufficient, then, against the flux of time. It is—form: 'Form is a presence itself. Formality is that which presents itself in the thing in general, allows itself to be seen, gives itself to thought.'…If vision is knowledge and vision delivers forms, then (as Aristotle argued in much detail) the thing can be known only insofar as it is form." (236).

3. Reification - the seer/seen relationship reifies metaphysical conceptions of knower/known, subject/object distinctions that have long prevailed Western culture. The vision of reflection "views objects as something negative: either as something which is distinct from, and therefore not, me, or as something which, in comparison with myself, is of no value in itself." (112) The previous two critiques (the ability to perceive objects consistently [2] and from a distance [1]) connotes a relative ease of consumption of visual images. Images circulated in consumer industry serve to intensify the interpellation of subjects as consumer/producers, thus with the glut of images that came with new technologies, "the key to the new urban phantasmagoria was not so much commodity-in-the-market as the commodity-on-display, where exchange value no less than use value lost practical meaning, and purely representational value came to the fore." (311) More extreme arguments against this reification entail not just over-consumption of spectacle but a reduction of vision to "the subject-object relationship…driven by a will to power, generated by possessive, predatory, and calculative desires." (203) Most evident examples of such power perhaps can be found in chapter 10, in Flynn's discussion of Foucault.

4. Metaphysics of presence - "seeing is believing" mentality in the correlation between sight and knowledge has confined ontology to mere presence: "it presumes that any understanding of Being as depends upon our perceiving some thing or entity which is always already standing before us and hence constituted prior to any reflection we might be able to undertake with respect to the coming to appearance of beings or things." (222)

5. The gaze - the penetrating, possessive, normalizing power of the gaze (i.e. the viewer/viewed relation) lends itself to social critique in self-other relations, such as the feminist critique of the "male gaze." Hierarchical judgements of ugliness or beauty, discrimination of another based on superficial appearances all come into play in the gaze, or perhaps instead a cold, disinterested, "inhuman" gaze of the observer, or the unresponsive gaze of the catatonic, the asocial gaze of the severely autistic, etc. Vision might reduce the other to an image or idealization that preoccupied the self-conscious Sartre, who often "felt defined by being caught in a field of gazes." (150) Of course Merleau-Ponty was more generous than Sartre at finding room in the gaze for mutual inter-subjectivity, and Levinas went so far as to claim that the face of the Other revokes one of their subjectivity: "The face comes to me as the very limit of humanity, as humanity in and at the extreme, an extremity which denies me a reassuring humanism, that is, a humanism of the self." (271)

6. Disembodied - unlike sound, which "arises as the vibration of part of a body" (243), sight "seems to operate at a distance and through the most etherial of mediums, light. In fact, an entire metaphysics of light permeated Occidental philosophy in the Middle Ages, sustained not only by Biblical texts by by light's own 'imponderable materiality.'" (274) Because sight seems to lack the intimacy of the physical body, individuals have traditionally relegated it from ontological to ontic status of mere surfaces of objects whose opacity belies their inner essence.

These six points are not comprehensive, but they provide you with the basic problems that many philosophers have expressed with vision.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just picked this one up from DU's Penrose Library. I nearly drowned in this heavy philosophical work centered in on language.