Seeing Worth and Worth Seeing: Capitalism, Race, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century America

Does every age have a corresponding body part, a piece of us that represents the times through its physical and symbolic significance? If so, some observers think ours is the age of the thumb. The silent dance of our digits across the glowing portals of our phones now denotes our connections with the world, each other, and ourselves. We laugh at cartoons that show us with enlarged, elongated thumbs, even as we fear the effects of such technological transformations. How will they change our communities, identities, and notions of truth? Such questions are, of course, not new. In two new books exploring the visual culture of antebellum America in fascinating ways, we are clearly shown that the nineteenth century was the age of the eye. Their technological leaps encompassed American-made eyeglasses, the printed broadside, the daguerreotype, and the carte-de-visite. Each new object demanded that Americans reconsider the power of vision, and their histories show us that how Americans came to think about sight helped to transform the world they saw.

Opening with Emerson’s observation that his was an “an ocular age,” (p. 1) Peter John Brownlee’s The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America identifies the early nineteenth century as a moment of profound change for theories of sight and the understanding of the observer. As antebellum Americans began to investigate the capacity of the human eye, they recognised that sight was not a stable, objective, or “monocular” sense. Instead, it was often flawed, fleeting, subjective, and individual. Yet Brownlee argues, urban white-collar Americans who daily faced the visual assaults of the marketplace—broadsides, shop signs, accounting columns, and newspaper advertisements—were quick to see that sight was a crucial requirement for navigating commercial life. The tension between this newfound acceptance of sight’s fallibility on the one hand and its necessity on the other spawned what Brownlee calls a new “culturing of vision,” in which Americans sought to perfect sight in pursuit of profit (p. 12). How they did this and with what consequences is the subject of the book.

The Commerce of Vision begins by building on the influential insights of Jonathan Crary, who argues in the Techniques of the Observer (1992) that the early nineteenth century was a moment in which perceptions of vision altered, paving the way for modern visual culture.¹ As new experiments in sight proliferated, scientists and philosophers revised their understanding of vision: shifting it from an objective, stable sense to one that was “relocated in the human body,” a subjective and idiosyncratic mode of perception.² This recognition enabled men and women to think about sight differently: now a fallible and embodied sense, it could be subjected to techniques of improvement and discipline. Thus, these scientists and philosophers helped to create a new modern subject, that of the observer.

As Crary notes, the creation of the observer grew out of and was essential to the development of capitalist modernity. Just as the observer must learn to see clearly the bodies, the signs, and the images that circulate within the uprooted and fluctuating world of global capital, so too must the world be rendered into commodities that can be observed and measured against one another. Quoting Jean Baudrilliard, Crary observes, “Happiness had to be ‘measurable in terms of objects and signs,’ something that would be evident to the eye in terms of ‘visible criteria.’”³ Crary thus illuminates a visual culture of modernity that not only trained the observer to see capital, but also rendered capital visible to the human eye.

Crary’s work examines the scientific and philosophical discourses through which this change took place, locating the mechanics of the...