The eye and I: A sociology of sight

Abstract

Ours is a visual age. We are bombarded with pictures from morning till night. Open? ing our newspaper at breakfast we see photographs of men and women in the news, and raising our eyes from the paper, we encounter the picture on the cereal pack? age. The mail arrives and one envelope after the other discloses glossy folders with pictures of alluring landscapes and sunbathing girls to entice us to take a holiday cruise, or of elegant menswear to tempt us to have a suit made to measure. Leaving our house, we pass billboards along the road that try to catch our eye and play on our desire to smoke, drink, or eat. At work it is more than likely that we have to deal with some kind of pictorial information, photographs, sketches, catalogues, blueprints, maps or at least graphs. Relaxing in the evening we sit in front of the television set, the new window of the world, and watch moving images of pleasures and horrors flit by. Even the images created in times gone by or in distant lands are more easily accessible to us than they ever were to the public for which they were created. Picture books, picture postcards and color slides accumulate in our homes as souvenirs of travel, as do the private mementos of our family snapshots (Gombrich, 1972:82). Ours is indeed a visual age. It would be difficult to say that it is an olfactory or tactile or oral or aural age; if not impossible. Sight is supreme. How is sight constructed: what does seeing mean? or, rephrasing this in more hegemonic terms, how is seeing seen? What are the implications of the supremacy of sight in the sensory hierarchy? The essay is divided into three parts. First we consider the dimensions of visual supremacy in our language, proverbs and literature, and its roots in the ancient Greek and Christian traditions. Yet there is an opposing and negative tradition also; and in the second part we consider the notion of the evil eye and the ascetic distrust of sight; more recent critiques include those of Sartre, Foucault and the women's movement, from very different perspectives. In the third part we view the semiotics of the eye as symbolic of the self, the I. The eye is the I; and the I is the eye. In the conclusion we explore some of the theoretical and practical implications of these alternative construc? tions.