Aesthetic Engagements of Science

AT ONE POINT in this fascinating book, Christina Walter considers D. H. Lawrence’s label “kodak-vision” from his “Art and Morality.” What Lawrence appears to mean by “kodak” seems clear and all of a piece with his characteristic critique of disembodied modern science. Not so fast, Walter demonstrates. First, she links the words to the company’s own visual discourse. (A 1921 ad is reprinted.) Second, she argues for a common valorization of identity on the part of both company and artist, which in Lawrence’s case includes an incipiently conservative politics and a more subtle, wider “visual-scientific vernacular” in which we can locate “a more destabilizing model of impersonality.” Walter is quickly off to Lawrence on Cezanne, his two books on psychoanalysis, and finally Lady Chatterley’s Lover, tracing how impersonality both does and does not imply an authoritarian politics as well as provide a model for the recuperation of individuality.

We of course have long been accustomed to thinking of impersonality in terms of the extinction of personality. Optical Impersonality is distinctive in discussing something quite different about impersonality: the preservation of personality, or at least its exploration in terms of the vernacular cited above, by which we have, as she states at the end, “the complex incoherence of the social, which is itself a site of intensity rather than just the routing of intensity along a peculiar path.” In part, the book simply argues for an expanded study of aesthetic engagements of science, grounded in important shifts in the science of vision at the outset of the twentieth century. In larger part, however, Optical Impersonality engages the social, scientific, and philosophical issues that go into the nature of human personality, however broadly conceived or intersubjectively open to new configurations.

There are five chapters. One, unsurprisingly, is on Lawrence. Another, even less surprisingly, is on Eliot. The first three chapters are another matter—each far more original and provocative. The first is on Walter Pater and the two late-Victorian women artists, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote and performed under the pen name Michael Field. A second chapter is on H.D. as novelist and cinema pamphleteer as well as poet. A third chapter concerns the American feminist critic, poet, and artist, Mina Loy. Each of these chapters allows Walter to develop her notion of an “optic vernacular” that came about in the modernist period through an intersection with the history of modern science, the history of image-text relations, and the history of personality.

In no one figure were the results of this intersection simple or even completely coherent either in formal, epistemological, or political terms. We begin with Pater, specifically the Pater of The Renaissance, in whom the image-text divide is blurred to bring about a new order of vision that “exceeds the self.” Leonardo is particularly central to this project, which is developed twenty years later in Pater’s “Proper Merimee” lecture as well as in the “instabilities” of the ekphrastic hope and female agency as repeatedly staged in Sight and Song, the volume of poetry published by Michael Field. The “loose ends” of this project were taken up by later modernists, who either drew out its “liberating” potential or turned its opacity to more conservative ends. H.D. becomes a case study in how to determine and to make use of the difference.

Her commitment to imagism is well known. Less well known are her explorations of the material limits of perception through a study of modern physiological films. H.D.’s ideal film, Walter writes, “not only supports the spectator’s attentive effort to register the mediated nature of perception but also promotes the kind of hypnotic state that marks the limits of vision and functions similarly to the dream state.” H.D. was enthralled by how film captures both the constructed nature and the flux of experience, uniting the common perception of artist and audience alike. Modernists who came after her did not, however, necessarily...