The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling

Abstract

Morgan, David. The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. 280 pp. pbk $29.95 (US). ISBN: 978-052027223-1 In The Embodied Eye, Morgan addresses the fields of religious studies and art history with a broad visual culture theory. For religious studies, visual culture shifts the focus from religious symbols to the configuration of power relations surrounding the religious symbols. For art history, the study of religious visual culture reveals sight as always grounded in the other senses. Despite the broad gesture to all art and all religion, Morgan jumps right into the modern West in what is more a series of essays than a totalizing theory. Beginning with visual culture's role in the formation of society and the self, Morgan argues that modernity was characterized by the elevation of sight. Objectivity privileged seeing at a distance, and the ideal of reason was based in the eye's ability to see without the burden of the observer's interests interfering with the truth of the eye's object. Morgan emphasizes that the disciplined eye was always encumbered by the individual and social body's contribution to the act of seeing. In chapter one, Vision and Embodiment, Morgan argues with philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre who put shame at the centre of sight's embodiment. Sartre's original look, which defined consciousness through sight, described an observer spying on the Other. When the spying observer is found out, the Other reciprocates the and shames the spying observer. Morgan disagrees with Sartre's description of sight's foundation in shame. Following Adam Smith, Morgan argues that through seeing we participate in a community of feeling and develop sympathy for other humans. The embodied state of humans makes seeing a social bond. For scholars of visual culture, Morgan usefully outlines some broad methodological approaches that focus on sight's embodiment. There are a number of gazes that scholars should look out for in their work, including the unilateral, occlusive, reciprocal, and devotional gazes. Religion tends toward certain modes of seeing, like the reciprocal gaze, best exemplified by the Sanskrit term darsan, and the devotional gaze, in which the observer looks at the image like a lover. It is unclear, however, how an analysis of the gaze engages with other categories like performance, ritual, and texts. In chapter four, Icon and Interface, Morgan turns to the specific tensions endemic to religious visual culture. …