Blind Spots: Thoughts for Visual Sociology. Upon Reading Martin Jay's Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.

[Author's Introduction: ]
Ranging from Plato to Lyotard, Jay’s remarkable book is a 600 page introduction to the role of vision in western thought focusing on 20th century French philosophy. Among many other themes, the investigation chronicles the systematic interrogation of visible evidence and the disinterested observer that is the ground of every social science. Jay is the perfect guide. While admitting an affinity to the Enlightenment “ideal of illumination,” and recognizing the distancing and pitfalls of the totalizing gaze, (17-18) Jay remains agnostic, neither worshiping nor denigrating vision, but like Dante’s Virgil, he makes it clear to readers that the only path is to go through hell itself. He examines writers, artists and thinkers who doubt the centrality and trustworthiness of vision: “French thought in a wide variety of fields is in one way or another imbued with a profound suspicion of vision and its hegemonic role in the modern era” (14). Yet, in the end, Jay concluded that “...it cannot be denied that for all its hyperbolic rhetoric, for all its inclination to demonize, the antiocularcentric discourse has successfully posed substantial and troubling questions about the status of visuality in the dominant cultural traditions of the west” (589). In my reading of Jay’s book I will try to address some of the questions that are most troubling for visual sociologists. We visualistas, sociologists who look the world straight in the face, who gather it as data with our eyes and cameras, have a lot to learn from those for whom seeing is not believing, who are not from Missouri, who denegrate vision and view the world through downcast eyes. In approaching Jay’s book through the eyes of a visual sociologist I will look specifically at four themes raised repeatedly in this history of ideas: The centrality of vision, looking at and being looked at by others, surveillance, and photography. At the end I’ll briefly consider the image world.