What if we were to take the expression “visual culture” literally? By tracing two centuries of optical inventions and reflections on the eye as a machine, this richly illustrated anthology shows us how modern Westerners learned to see.
There is no pure gaze, but only embodied modalities of presence. The sensible is the common function of the living. Men do not see like flies, nor dogs, nor trout, nor eagles. The world is the diversified edifice of the sensible according to its occupants. And, among men, latecomers to the landscape, a new principle of variety: that of stories, times, narratives, cultures. There is, downstream from the long conditions of the species, for man especially, if not for man only, the historical variety of forms of the sensible and of perception.
What is seeing? A history of the gaze is a history of the answers given to this question, but also of the experiences to which they bear witness or which they make possible. We do not see in exactly the same way depending on the society in which, from a tender age, we learn to see.
An instrumented look
How did we learn to see? The very fine anthology published by the Presses universitaires de Lyon by Delphine Gleizes and Denis Reynaud provides valuable elements of an answer, enriched by numerous illustrations: it includes no fewer than 180 authors and more than 200 extracts whose arrangement and commentary are supported by a very sure and fortunately implemented erudition. The texts of the anthology, belonging essentially to the French domain, have the advantage of being borrowed from very diverse forms of discourse in which is each time considered, outside of the hierarchy of knowledge or expression, the sole power of signifying – literary, philosophical or scholarly texts, popular texts, educational treatises, newspaper articles, advertisements, etc.: the “bric-a-brac” of optical machines is deployed there which, since the XVIIe century and, for the present volume, until the end of the XIXe century, have so profoundly marked our visual cultures. Real machines or imaginary machines, the “machines for seeing” are also – and perhaps first and foremost in the eyes of the authors of this anthology, both literature teachers – “literary objects”, thus fully responding to the project of a true cultural history. In this sense, Machines to seewhatever its interest on this point, does not contribute so much to a history of optical machines, as “to a history of the gaze or more precisely to a history of instrumented look » (p. 6).
From the invention of the telescope, at the beginning of the XVIIe century, to that of the Röntgen rays, at the end of the XIXeit is a dizzying collection of machines, sometimes the product of the writers’ imagination alone, whose authors rigorously establish an inventory and reveal the singular poetry: telescope, microscope, magic lantern, camera obscura, phantasmagoria, divinatory mirrors, ocular harpsichord, phenakistiscope, praxinoscope, shadow theater, pleasure glasses, panorama, diorama, daguerreotype, historioscope, optograms, zoetrope, phekistiscope, telephoto or this extraordinary and very ironic telechromophotophonotetroscope which appears at the end of the XIXe century, in a futuristic novel by the mysterious Count Didier de Chousy… Aids to vision, devices for spectacle or recording, dreams or realities that are always conceived, more or less, by one another, technical, literary, moral, philosophical or political uses: everyone will do their shopping at the store of seeing machines. The stalls are quite freely arranged, establishing contiguities of meaning, intention and uses which, beyond simple chronology and the genres or functions of discourse, ideally give an understanding of the powers and all the imaginaries, in our cultures, of instrumented vision. Machines to see is a large kaleidoscope where the spectacle of machines is organized and constantly reorganized, in the unrigid succession of paragraphs and chapters: the anthology is itself a “machine for seeing”!
What is seeing?
And what it almost reveals, beyond itself, in the abundance and very relative disorder of machines, are the very conditions of the gaze as they were invented and gradually instituted by our first modernity, these conditions whose effects we never cease to experience, diversify, modify or inflect. If we had to, in one go, identify the model of the gaze of which our societies are the most direct heirs, we would not risk being mistaken, in fact, in using this expression, machine to see. Because the eye, of the XVe At XVIIe century, from the invention of perspective to that of the retinal image, has been culturally instituted on the model of a machine, the table Brunelleschi’s brush, the anatomist’s scalpel, the astronomer’s telescope and the camera obscura who, finally, in Kepler’s extraordinary synthesis, invents the eye as a machine for seeing. We will not stop, from then on, from the anamorphoses of Father Nicéron to the photographs of the invisible at the end of the XIXe century, to signify it, to deploy it, to instrument it, to move it and to dream of its uses, whether, moreover, to celebrate its power or to insult its pretensions; whether, equally, to state its limits and to seek to signify differently the sensitive presence of man in the world.
“Our own eyes are (…) only natural glasses” (p. 33), writes Malebranche in The Search for Truth ; “The humors of the eye are the lens of the dark room; the canvas or the retina are its cardboard. The black skin which lines the inside of the globe acts as a shutter that keeps out the day,” wrote Charles Bonnet a century later (p. 54); and, in 1877, one of the proponents of optograms, this photography technique which was in vogue for a moment and which aimed, by anatomizing the eye of corpses, to show on the retina the last scene seen by the subject:
The fundus and retina constitute a complete photography workshop. (p. 79)
We can infinitely multiply the illustration, and up to today, in contrasting cultural contexts, in common language as much as in scholarly language. We can also consider, from the beginning, the abundance of cultural uses of the model of the eye as a machine for seeing — moral, philosophical, narrative, poetic or religious uses. These, it seems to me, immediately exceed the sole register of metaphor. I mean by that that they are not really or not only secondary, but immediately inscribed — with what force — in the renewed experience of seeing in which our modernity is tested and, for better or for worse, between presence and loss, between criticism and melancholy, is perpetuated. Literary inspiration gives us a perception of the incarnate truth, located in the experience of each person, according to the order of times and places. So it is enough to read and find in the diversity of figures suggested by the great kaleidoscope of Machines to see something in common. Could it be the idea that we only learn to see with the instruments of experience and language that are secretly transmitted to us by the succession of generations?
See, describe
Could it be that each time, seeing or describing, we reproduce, move, reinvent the inaugural gestures thanks to which the world, little by little, was given to us to see? I do not take my eyes off this magnificent text by Victor Hugo, almost at the beginning of Machines to see. It is 1834. Hugo is at the Paris Observatory, in the company of François Arago, who introduces him to telescopic observation. He looks through the telescope and witnesses what he already knows to be a sunrise on the moon, while the light gradually wins over the masses of shadows and darkness:
It is a chain of lunar Alps, Arago told me. However, the circles grew larger, wider, mingled at the edges, exaggerated until they all merged together; valleys were hollowed out, precipices opened, gaps parted their lips overflowed by a foam of shadow, spirals sank, descents frightening to the eye, immense cones of darkness were projected, the shadows moved, bands of rays were placed like architraves from one peak to another, knots of craters made froths around the peaks, all sorts of furnace profiles emerged pell-mell, some smoke, others light; capes, promontories, gorges, passes, plateaus, vast inclined planes, escarpments, cuts, intertwined, mixing their curves and angles; one could see the shape of the mountains. It existed magnificently. There too the great word had just been said: fiat lux. The light had made of all this suddenly living shadow something like a mask that becomes a face. Everywhere, scarlet gold, avalanches of rubies, a stream of flame. One would have said that the dawn had suddenly set fire to this world of darkness. (p. 21)
Hugo’s visual experience, which would require a lengthy commentary, reveals, I believe, something essential, the paths of the instrumented gaze and their obligatory passage through words. There is no pure gaze, but the sovereign mediation of stories, of the sensible and of words. What does Hugo see, in the half-light of the Observatory, alongside Arago, his eye glued to the large telescope whose prestige the scholar tells him? He sees, in the indecisive clarity of a world that is rising, fractures of shadow and light, then mountains, valleys and lakes; he anticipates gazes, cities, beings, questions; he sees himself seeing and imagines himself seen by those whom he guesses in the distance. These words, these paths that Hugo travels, above all, are not without anchors. They are heirs, without knowing it, perhaps. Heirs, at least, directly, of the description that Galileo, more than two centuries before, in 1610, in the Sidereus Nunciushad given a first lunar sunrise.
It was at the dawn of the use of optical machines and the immense cultural significance with which they were to be invested. How can we account for appearances? Nothing is given, everything has to be constructed. How can we learn to see, if not by assembling the experience of the known with the anticipation of the unknown, the near with the far, the visible with the invisible? Galileo too, Galileo first, sees in the inseparable test of the eye and words. What are these blackish spots that we discern on the illuminated part of the moon, at the edge of the shadow, in the unreality of telescopic vision, these spots “crowned, on the side opposite the Sun, with lighter extremities, like crests of a dazzling whiteness”? What are they, if not the visual analogue, exactly, of what we see, on earth, when the sun rises, “when we look at the valleys, which are not yet bathed in light, and at the mountains which surround them on the side opposite the Sun and which, in an instant, will shine with a dazzling brilliance”? Galileo invents for the telescope, through the mediation of words, the pictorial experience of landscapes in perspective gained by the mastery of the play of shadow and light. And for the eye which sees, it invents this extraordinary quality of being a machine of which Kepler, almost at the same time, will speak of the device, Descartes of the power and the vertigo. It is the beginning or the great tipping point of a history whose machines for seeing, the eye in mind, between visible and invisible, between reality and illusion, between conquest and abandonment, will never cease to deploy the effects. The anthology by Delphine Gleizes and Denis Reynaud makes a major and profoundly original contribution to the understanding of this long-term story.