Eye Witness

Sam Smiles

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138737099
• eBook ISBN: 9781351734455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2000: This study examines the ways in which very different visual fields might be said to have shared certain working assumptions concerning the truth of representation. It concentrates particularly on prints.

1
The testimony of the eyes

Within the British intellectual tradition of the seventeenth century, John Locke, in particular, has been associated with the emergence of an empiricism which took sense data as an unarguable given. Even though the occurrence of such data could not be as certain as intuitive knowledge, or the deductions of reason concerning abstract ideas, it nevertheless could be classed 'as an assurance that deserves the name of knowledge' by virtue of its immediacy. Sensations, for Locke, provided legitimate philosophical grounds for asserting the existence of the world.

It is therefore the actual receiving of ideas from without that gives us notice of the existence of other things, and makes us know that something doth exist at that time without us, which causes that idea in us, though perhaps we neither know nor consider how it does it. For it takes not from the certainty of our senses, and the ideas we receive by them, that we know not the manner wherein they are produced: v.g. whilst I write this, I have, by the paper affecting my eyes, that idea produced in my mind, which, whatever object causes, I call white; by which I know that the quality or accident (i.e. whose appearance before my eyes always causes that idea) doth really exist and hath a being without me.¹

In arguing this, Locke goes on to assert the primacy of the eye in this instance as a witness of the world, whose testimony cannot be doubted and whose direct experience provides a form of knowledge which is superior to ideas in memory or supported by hearsay. It is the contiguity of the object which causes the idea of the white paper, and this first-hand knowledge is secured by unmediated sensation.

And of this the greatest assurance I can possibly have, and to which my faculties can attain, is the testimony of my eyes, which are the proper and sole judges of this thing: whose testimony I have reason to rely on as so certain, that I can no more doubt, whilst I write this, that I see black and white, and that something really exists that causes this sensation in me, than I can write or move my hand.²

Locke's invocation of the testimony of the eyes is itself a notion that had some currency in the seventeenth century. As Judith Adler has shown, the relative merits of hearing and seeing had been a matter of some debate from as far back as the sixteenth century. English handbooks for European travel stressed the need to avoid false report and how, in such circumstances, the eye was less prone to misjudgement than the ear. This Baconian emphasis on sight as an irrefutable witness grows through the seventeenth century, as instanced by James Howell's Instructions for forreine Travell (1642).

I say the eye ... taketh in farre deeper Ideas, and so makes firmer and more lasting impressions. And although one should reade all the Topographers that ever writ of, or anatomized a ... Country, and mingle Discourse with the most exact observers ... Yet one's own ocular view, and personall conversation will still find something new and unpointed at by any other ... It being an Act of Parliament among all Nations that one eye-witness is of more validity than ten Auricular ... a collation of his own optique observations ... is the prime use of Peregrination.³

This comparison from common law, where eyewitness is always taken as reliable evidence whereas hearsay is not, indicates at once that the presupposition of such 'optique observations' assumes the possibility of direct comprehension of phenomena, without the mediation of words. As Adler indicates, this quality of observation implies that looking should be a disciplined activity, disinterested, emotionally detached and objective, if sight is to become a measure of truth.⁴

Thus, although Locke's empiricism would be subjected to sceptical attack in eighteenth-century philosophy, the idea of disciplined observation as a preliminary to theoretical enquiry did not lose ground. To that extent, debates on the epistemological status of sensations were developed in arguments of increasing philosophical refinement elsewhere and were not directly implicated in the illustrative practices this book sets out to examine. Making a visual record, as a practical activity, was sanctioned by the empirical project of the Royal Society and the need to collect data, which project continued throughout this period, notwithstanding philosophical scepticism about empirical data as such. A printseller's advertisement in 1720, for example, is evidence of the ways in which some engravings were produced to function almost entirely as compendia of data.

... a Man of war at Anchor, Rigged with Stumps, shewing several parts of the Hull, with names of all the Masts, and Rigging &c. and also the Section of a First rate Ship; being cut or divided by the middle of the Keele, from the Stem to the stern, at one view; discovering the several Decks, Cabins, State-Rooms, Galleries, Gun Room, and Ward Room; with the Mariners Compass; and a view of the Flags, which several Nations bear at Sea, being very useful for all gentlemen and others who use the Seas.⁵

The visual survey of antiquities and the collection of visual compendia might be seen as an extension of that same impetus. Locke's empiricism, with its appeal to the eyes, may thus be said to characterize the arguments put forward by proponents of the visual record as a form of knowledge. Their reliance on vision as a legitimate source of information was maintained despite the full-blooded philosophical scepticism which had questioned the cognitive status of sensations.⁶ The comments passed on such surveys thus dilate on the business of representation, and especially on visual fidelity, in terms whose empirical underpinning is never in doubt. What appears to the eye can be relied upon as legitimate information from which reasonable inferences might be drawn. As a typical example of such ruminations I adduce a review of an illustrated costume book, published in 1802. The critic's fundamental question is straightforward enough, even banal: 'When accounts or pictures of the inhabitants of foreign countries are exhibited, almost the first question generally proposed is, what is the degree of credit to be attached to them? Hence it is of importance to afford the public some satisfaction on this head.' In making more general comments on the veracity of similar publications, he is led on to propose a series of remarks whose tenor is unmistakedly empirical and naively confident, perhaps, in the possibility of unmediated representation.

Truth of representation is a matter of the first importance in all works which profess to convey instruction. The artist who undertakes to give ideas of the dress and manners of a people, by delineations of the pencil, is as strictly required to be faithful, as the historian or traveller who attempts to describe with his pen. Indeed, inaccuracy in the former is less excusable than in the latter, since the painter is required only to copy fairly that which is before him.⁷

Knowing how to see, then, meant knowing how to collect data, and how to analyse it rigorously once collected. Disseminating the results of that enquiry, so that others might scrutinize the visual record with the same attention, was more problematic. The difficulty was largely overcome by the use of taxonomic series, binding individual images together within an overall cognitive system which guided the learning process. It is the use of the series, I would contend, that distinguishes these observations from the individual images which normally occupy our attention. As soon as we start to think in terms of series, however, the system which organizes the series becomes as important as, or more important than, each element within it. A series of images might thus be treated metaphorically as a set of propositions, even as a determinate language, whose meaning lies not so much in the relationship between each image and the world it purports to describe, but in the relationship between all of the images as a total signifying system. The presumed empiricism of the individual 'utterance' (the isolated image) is thus undercut by the theoretical or methodological discourse in which that utterance is situated (the system).

The essence of this distinction can, perhaps, be clarified by analogy with documentary, which attempts to function as an objective witness, and fiction, which is open to more creative strategies. We presume that a documentary propounds an argument and that its text is essentially metonymic, that its constituents are parts of a whole, selected for clarity of exposition but nonetheless representative of the situation the documentary sets out to describe. The documentary addresses us directly, endorsing the tradition of disembodied, universalized knowledge which proposes an unmediated representation of the facts. That proposition is guaranteed by the provision of hard data whose reality cannot be gainsaid. Realism in documentary is thus signalled primarily by its economy of logic, its argument. Its central proposition is always 'This is so'. Fiction, on the other hand, does not propound an argument, but instead asks us to comprehend a story. Its text is metaphoric, rather than metonymic, which is to say that we do not expect its constituents to be coextensive, necessarily, with the real world. If fiction is to be realistic it can achieve this aesthetically, by means of sensibility and tone, but its central proposition can only be 'If this were so.'⁸ Scientific illustration, on this analysis, is essentially documentary, organizing its elements to clarify our understanding of the world ('This is so'). Titian's poesie, in contrast, notwithstanding the artist's descriptive powers in conjuring up a possible world, do not proffer metonymic understandings of the world, but metaphorical ones.

Yet, in its reliance on a detached and objective gaze, documentary has been accused of fetishizing the visual as though the visual were self-evident. Thus, the visual organization of the documentary's propositional case has become a rhetorical device, rather than a logical procedure. As Roland Barthes has pointed out, the attempt to avoid subjectivity and to elaborate a form of presentation which is scrupulously objective can only call attention to its own methods, '... for just when these details are reputed to denote the real directly, all that they do – without saying so – is signify it ... it is the category of "the real" (and not its contingent contents) which is then signified ...'⁹ Thus, what asserts itself as denotation (a pure fact) is actually a form of connotation (a witness of the documentary's detachment). The ideology which underpins documentary thus manifests itself at every point of its detached and objective record.

In effect, of course, I am merely reiterating here a critique which has been applied throughout our century to information-gathering activities, such as ethnography, and to theories of language itself. Roy Harris has an interesting discussion of language and representation which bears on these issues and which might profitably be extended to a discussion of images and discursive knowledge. From Graeco-Roman times, as he points out, language in the West has traditionally been understood as a surrogational system, where words stand for things, and two of the key literary moments exemplifying this understanding are Genesis, when Adam names the beasts, and Plato's Cratylus. Both imply the existence of a pre-existent domain of objects which are to be named. In the twentieth century both Saussure and Wittgenstein, among others, have challenged this view, proposing that language cannot be seen as simply replicating the order of what lies 'out there' in the world, but instead operates as a conceptual system which creates an essentially arbitrary order in language itself.¹⁰ Harris believes that the surrogational understanding has tended to survive, notwithstanding these assaults from philosophy and linguistics, in what he calls 'reocentric' theories, working with the belief that the things words stand for are to be located out there, in the world. Reocentrism is still the mainstay of experimental science, even if the union of names with things has been subjected to damaging critique.

In the light of such thinking, our examination of images must attempt a like awareness of institutional and discursive pressures. For images which declare their fidelity to appearance are, in Harris's terms, surrogates for what they depict, operating as though what is pictured can be simply located in the real world. Given their authors' understanding of the implications of producing illustrated surveys, the task of this book is to follow those implications through. One of the most important of these must concern the status of this knowledge, especially when it is making claims for better understanding by virtue of its visual accuracy. Visual accuracy, after all, is empirically tested by comparison with the thing itself, but this can only happen if the reocentric agenda of the visual representation is accepted, and if we accede to that class of evidence as legitimate and comprehensive. Seen from other standpoints, of course, the evidence, its organizing system, and the uses to which both are put, require analysis themselves. Like documentary, what seems to be pure denotation is actually connotation. What purports to be a surrogational system, therefore, where images stand reocentrically for things or activities, can be seen, on closer inspection, to be caught up in many of the same problems as beset empirical disciplines such as ethnography, where the conceptual underpinning of what is to be classed as evidence requires just as much, if not more examination as the evidence itself. Information-gathering activities are prone to concentrate on the exotic and to overlook the everyday, precisely because what is too familiar may be conceptually invisible; they may omit aspects which do not conform to the pre-given methodologies of their reporters; they may dispense with 'trivial' details for fear of boring readers. The status of such reports as veridical evidence is thus compromised by virtue of the reporter's position within a complex web of institutional expectations.¹¹

In one sense, then, this study may be seen as a local variant of the much larger phenomenon analysed by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things.¹² Foucault's concern was more with the natural sciences, of course, than with antiquarian studies of architecture and costume, but many of his more theoretical conclusions are extremely pertinent, especially his demonstration of the power of systematic organization to make the world conformable to its own logic.

To observe, then, is to be content with seeing – with seeing a few things systematically. With seeing what, in the rather confused wealth of representation, can be analysed, recognised by all, and thus given a name that everyone will be able to understand.¹³

The application of Foucault's conclusions to this study is revealing, however, for it is this period, roughly the 1770s to the 1820s, which he sees as marking a major epistemic shift. The hybridized nature of much of what we shall be examining, and the hesitancies which mark the authors' understanding of their enterprise, would, on Foucault's analysis, be expected in such a period of cognitive change.¹⁴

Where this study differs most from Foucault, perhaps, is in its narrower focus and separate intentions, as a contribution to art history. Foucault explored the interplay of things, language and representation over a vast range of texts, as a contribution to the historiography of the human sciences. Although he referred to illustration, he did not privilege its participation in the representation of the world. This book, in contrast, working within a much narrower compass, pays explicit attention to the visual as a form of representation which challenges conventional textual discourse at the same time as aspiring to the condition of text in its cognitive possibilities. The appeal to the eye, on this analysis, is significant precisely because it held out the offer of an experience which was simultaneously unmediated (direct perception of the phenomenon under review) and yet highly structured (a sequences of images whose overall logic controlled the approach taken to each of them). Visual display thus functioned analogously to language, creating meaning via differentiation within a closed system, while seeming to suggest that seeing was a direct, reocentric route to deep comprehension of the phenomenon under scrutiny.

The process of rendering complex, multiform activities, objects and experiences into images necessarily involved decisions regarding focus, slant or omission. Despite their authors' claims of visual accuracy, what was presented in these prints and drawings was not simply a visual record of what lay 'out there' but a highly nuanced, and institutionalized, reduction of that experience to an ordering process. That process itself dictates the terms on which the images can be understood. But the reduction of experience to systematic order can only falsify the encounter, looking for regularities and stable quantities, discarding the idiosyncratic and the mutable. There is a sense, then, in which the cognition offered by these series was inevitably reductive, abstracted from lived experience to become a regulated virtual encounter.

Thus, notwithstanding the claims made for accuracy, such that the image stood in for what it represented and could be scrutinized for information, its reductive status could only compromise that accuracy. Indeed, we might say that the image, although buttressed with an empirical rationale and working with sophisticated techniques of representation, can be seen not as replicating but as usurping the role of direct encounter with its object. This is especially true when experience mediated through images becomes preferable, because more ordered and abstract, than the indeterminate lived experience it purports to explain or illustrate.

This is a pretty gloomy conclusion and should not be allowed to stand without further comment. Although I would suggest that all the activities to be discussed here share epistemological features in common, we can also, I believe, make some provisional separations of the material at the outset, which will mitigate some of the more critical reservations noted above. For antiquarian artists, concerned to make accurate records of the material evidence surviving from the past, the a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The testimony of the eyes
• 2 Material evidence: delineation as knowledge
• 3 Recording the Gothic: art and information
• 4 Ordering the realm: costume books and social understanding
• 5 The working scene and the visual arts
• 6 Turner's challenge: perception and the creation of meaning
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index