THE POLITICS OF VISION

How do we see? What do we see? The centrality of vision in social theory and thinking has only more recently been fully registered, not least of all in Martin Jay's magisterial survey, Downcast Eyes and, differently, in Terry Smith's extraordinary study, Making the Modern. Light, vision, the obscure and dark, these kinds of image have char-acterised human consciousness in the west since the Bible (one of Smith's major formative texts) and even more emphatically since the Enlightenment. The hegemony of vision should not be overstated; the eye has always had to compete with the word and deed, and as we have had cause to observe above, the visual appreciation of art has certainly been dominated to some extent by the power of the word, as though art were an illustration of some philosophy or text rather than a realm of its own.

Alongside the intellectual analysis of the respective merits or powers of word, eye, and deed, there are the more ubiquitous ordinary usages of vision which crowd everyday life. We use seeing as a synonym for understanding (‘can't you see?’), we readily manipulate images of blindness and insight, and so on. The problem of vision in the work of Bernard Smith shifts across these two usages, theoretical and everyday. Smith does not develop a theory of vision or optics so much as a theory of culture which, given his interest in art, is primarily visual.