Drink to me only with thine eyes
Note: If television’s a babysitter, the internet’s a drunk librarian who won’t shut up.
Must look for Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. It would be great to be able to cite Dr. Funkenstein in a paper someday.
Martin Jay gestures at Funkenstein in Downcast Eyes as a footnote following this passage:
Zeno’s paradox which so perplexed Greek thought, shows how beholden it was to a detemporalized notion of reality (a central target, as we will see, of the French antiocularcentric discourse that began with Bergson’s critique of Zeno). Greek science, which was crowned by optics, was also incapable of dealing successfully with motion, in particular with the problem of acceleration.
Funkenstein evidently discusses the attempts to revise Greek thought to account for different sorts of causality—which is also central to the problem of defining a phenomena in an Aristotelian sense. According to Jay, the thesis that Greek thought was occularcentric is contested by William Ivins. For once, I think I agree with Ivins.
Ivins was the first curator of prints at the Library of Congress. He suggested in Prints and Visual Communication that the halftone screen provided images with a “syntax”— I disagree violently. However, according to Jay, in Art and Geometry Ivins claims that the Greeks had a tactile rather than ocular bias. I think this has more merit.
About Face
On a gray afternoon in March 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the presidential oath of office and inherited a country in profound economic, social, and spiritual trouble. Roosevelt’s task that somber day was to convince a nation already three years into a great economic depression that there was a reason to hope for better times. In his inaugural address Roosevelt did not sugarcoat the situation; indeed, he pledged to “speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly.” While President Hoover had often resisted the use of federal sources to alleviate suffering in the states, Roosevelt made it clear that he would mobilize the resources of the federal government to address the economic and social problems of the nation.
Throughout the speech Roosevelt relied heavily on two terms with a distinctly visual inflection: “facing” and “recognizing.” In exhorting Americans to confront their anxieties about the Depression head on, Roosevelt observed that “we face common difficulties,” reminded the audience that “a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence,” suggested that the problem of unemployment is solvable “if we face it wisely and courageously,” and finally, warned that the nation must “face the arduous days that lie before us.” During the first few years of the Depression, many in government and business had buried their heads in the sand, but Roosevelt asked the American public to turn and “face” the problems of the Depression squarely and courageously. Only when Americans had faced the depression, Roosevelt explained, could they go on to “recognize” what would be necessary for recovery. Roosevelt argued that citizens needed to participate in the “recognition of the falsity of material wealth,” “recognize the overbalance of population in industrial centers,” and understand that national recovery would involve “recognition” of the necessity of interdependence.
Monuments
Wood s Lot posted a few links about monuments as I was sorting some photos. The World Monuments Watch site is certainly significant placed against the background of iconclasm/iconoclash the critical community has marketed in the post 9/11 climate. Monuments interest me, but for a wider range of possibilities.
I came of age in the 1970s, when Lee Friedlander was doing the American Monuments thing. It was influential for many reasons—the reversal of the spectator role (the spectator became the subject), the utter banality of monumental structures in American life, and their ubiquity. In a profound way, Friedlander cut monuments down to size—although for most Americans, they are already pretty diminutive. They are refrigerator magnets or desktop accessories.
During the 60s and 70s, photography made monumental banality a subject of choice. In the 00s, monuments have become just as cliché as a topic for political controversy. Whether discussing the explosive impact of the Taliban on Buddhist tradition, or the flag wavers toppling the monuments of Saddam, it seems as if monuments have been rediscovered. One might as well announce that noses have been discovered as the organizing locus of the face, or eyes as the mirror of the soul.
