Photo-unrealism: The Contribution of the Camera to the Crisis of Ocularcentrism

Let me begin by asking you to accept on faith a premise that I will not have the time to defend or even elaborate here, but which I have discussed elsewhere at length.1 That premise is the hitherto unremarked existence of a pervasive and deeply-rooted rejection of the ocularcentric bias of Western culture on the part of a wide variety of French intellectuals in the twentieth century. Whereas our dominant philosophical, scientific and aesthetic traditions have generally celebrated the ‘nobility of sight’,2 innumerable French thinkers from at least the time of Bergson have come increasingly to distrust its hegemonic role in modern epistemology, aesthetics and even social life. Beginning with a suspicion of the dominant scopic regime of the modern era, which combined Albertian perspectivalism with a Cartesian faith in the monocular gaze in the mind’s eye at ‘clear and distinct ideas’, their critique often widened to embrace any variant of visual primacy, whether it be dependent on speculation, observation or revelatory illumination.