Jay's emphasis on the negation of the visual, on phenomena like "iconophobia" and "ocularphobia," is at once the most original and problematic aspect of his book.
As the metaphor of the "hidden continent" suggests, Jay treats the phenomena of visuality in terms reminiscent of the Freudian unconscious, as a terrain of ambivalence, an ensemble of forces to be contained or censored, an alien species to be "denigrated."(3) Among its achievements, the book makes it clear that visuality is not to be understood merely in terms of physical vision or visual representation literally understood, but as a "hidden discursive continent" (my emphasis), a phenomenon that surfaces in language and in all the specific "languages" of theology, philosophy, psychology, rhetoric, and poetics.
Like any ambitious and encyclopedic treatment of a complex phenomenon, it has its limitations and blind spots, but it will certainly be an indispensable tool for students of the history or theory of visual culture. Offering a "synoptic survey" of what he calls "ocularcentric discourse" from the Greeks to the present day, and focusing with special care on the intricate elaboration of visual problematics in modern French philosophy, Downcast Eyes is the most comprehensive treatment of Western visuality now available. Martin Jay's Downcast Eyes is surely destined to be one of the basic books in the new history of visuality. Visuality today occupies a position similar to that of language earlier in this century, presenting itself (to use Thomas Kuhn's terms in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) both as a paradigm for research and as an anomaly to be solved. I've discussed this transformation in these pages before and won't repeat myself, except to suggest that what I've called a "pictorial turn" is taking place in the human sciences, a movement that promises to supplant the "linguistic turn" that Richard Rorty has identified as the fundamental issue in modern philosophy.(2) The picture, understood as a synecdoche for the entire circuit of production and consumption in visually dominated multimedia, is now emerging as the central topic of discussion in the study of culture, and in something like the way language did: that is, both as a kind of model or figure for other things (economics, politics, social theory) and as an unresolved problem. The more fundamental development, in my view, is a growing realization that the frontiers in the study of culture have shifted from the terrain of language to the sphere of vision and visuality. This account, which is reminiscent of the movement in literary studies some years ago from an emphasis on authors and texts to a focus on reader response, is not so much wrong as it is partial. It is tempting to characterize this development as a shift from an emphasis on "image culture" to "visual culture," a transfer of attention from the object of vision to the subject, the experience of the beholder or spectator. Books with such titles as The Dialectics of Seeing, Visual Theory, The Optical Unconscious, Vision and Visuality, Techniques of the Observer, The Reader's Eye, and Signatures of the Visible line the shelves in bookstores, and refuse to remain in traditional locations like "art history," "literary criticism," or "media."(1)
What are we to make of the recent outpouring of books on the subjects of visuality and visual culture? No longer confined to studies of visual art, or to specific visual media such as film, photography, video, or TV, the new studies survey literary and philosophical texts, psychosocial constructions of visual experience, and what might be called "vernacular practices" of the visual in public and private life.
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