The Eye's Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture (review)

This book's title may be misleading to readers of Leonardo. Jacobs' book has nothing to do with the processing of visual information by the brain and everything to do with the so-called "modernist novel." It borrows heavily from the language of science, but those with a background in high-school science or more will suffer a modicum of stress at being thrown into the deep end of a pool of unfamiliar word usage. For example, page one: "On the one side resides the subject lens, whose cultural transparency and symbolic agency are conjoined in the union of look and word; on the other side lingers the silent object to which it is wedded, the precarious but necessary body destined to disappear." In a footnote on the same page, Jacobs declares that she "follows Homi Bhaba in equating 'transparency' with the successful naturalization of a discourse of power."

I made several attempts to get into the volume by scanning the table of contents. The subject of perspective machines (page 18) caught my eye because of all the recent talk about Vermeer, but instead I was bombarded with aspects of "interior gaze." Elsewhere (page 116) we are told that "Relative to its contemporaries in the hard sciences, for example, which had to contend with the relativization of observable postures previously conceived of as neutral in such theories as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Boasian anthropology kept faith with a doctrine of observable truths made possible by proper field-work methodology." For readers who may be worried about the potential threats to objective science I recommend The Flight from Science and Reason, edited by Paul Gross, Norman Levitt and Martin Wise.

The Eye's Mind will be difficult for anyone outside the field. Words of praise on the back cover include the statement that this is "a fine book on a topic of importance, and full of smart prose and ingenious arguments." I was not encouraged by the encounter.