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Seeing the Visual in U.S. History
James W. Cook
| Seeing currently occupies a paradoxical position in the new sensory history. On the one hand, it is the most familiar of the five senses, the perceptual register that comes to mind most readily and easily. It is also the sense with the longest and deepest historiographical paper trail. Whereas smells, touches, tastes, and sounds have only recently begun to emerge as explicit topics of historical analysis, visual images now constitute a thoroughly conventional evidentiary resource (and not just in the highly circumscribed sense of images as illustrations). Starting in the 1970s, moreover, major scholarly debates on the dynamics of gazing, the proliferation of surveillance, and the production of spectacle made it easier to appreciate that the province of seeing extends well beyond images. By the early 1990s, this innovative but still-fragmented body of work had coalesced into a recognizable field of historical inquiry. No longer was seeing something that could be taken for granted as a mere condition of sentience or treated in vaguely universalist terms. The act of looking, we had come to realize, varied considerably across eras, institutions, media, social groups, and even nations.1 |
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One might thus expect seeing to occupy a privileged place in a broader history of the senses. After all, vision was the acknowledged starting point, the perceptual register that generated the first questions about context and change over time. Yet it is precisely vision's privileged status that has come under attack in much of the best recent scholarship. In his 2006 book, How Race Is Made, Mark M. Smith argued, "We have lost sight of other ways to understand beyond vision and, in the process, have quietly endorsed the longstanding tendency to denigrate the nonvisual, 'lower' senses. As the growing literature on the anthropology of the senses suggests, there is no compelling reason for historians to fixate on what was seen rather than heard, smelled, tasted, and touched." David Howes's 2005 essay, "Empires of the Senses," pushes further, applauding the "ideological revolution" that has turned the tables on Western "ocularcentrism" and "the tyranny of the science of signs." For Howes, vision's centrality is above all a methodological obstacle to be overcome en route to a more "full-bodied" and "cross-cultural" understanding of sensory experience.2 |
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My point here is not to disparage the critical impulses running through such recent scholarship, much of which I admire. The move to a broader, multisensory history has productively complicated matters in at least three major respects: first, by pushing against our older habit of treating vision as a synecdoche for human perception; second, by opening up new areas of historical inquiry largely inconceivable in visual terms; and third, by demonstrating that seeing is always mediated by and through other forms of sensory experience. |
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Still, I find myself less persuaded by some of the accompanying efforts to cast our ongoing fascination with the visual as a source of "heuristic poverty"; or as part of the dominant Western episteme from which we now need to "liberate ourselves."3 What concerns me about such rhetorical gestures is not so much the desire to knock vision down a peg as the tendency to reduce vision's role and function to those of historiographical hegemon. In my experience, the collective project of historicizing vision has never involved uncritical celebrations or totalizing claims. On the contrary, my earliest training proceeded from the assumption that seeing is always culturally mediated, chronologically contingent, and interwoven with structures of power. The insight that ocularcentrism has a long Western history would come as no surprise to most of the scholars who helped to build visual studies over two decades ago. In fact, it was historians of visuality who introduced this line of critique to a broader academic readership during the late 1980s.4 |
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