Optical Agencies

In “Scopic Regimes of Modernity”, Martin Jay asserts that the modern era was characterized by an attachment with sight and visual qualities. Within this dominance of optics in modernity there exists a differentiation of ocular subcultures that when expanded upon leads to a deeper understanding of the significance of sight in this particular era. These implications according to Jay may “well be the product of a radical reversal in the hierarchy of visual subcultures in the modern scopic regime” (4). The first of these subcultures that Jay presents is Cartesian pespectivalism which reigned due to its ideology of representation through rigid scientific world views. But even within this seemingly absolute system there lie discontinuous approaches as seen in artificial perspective and synthetic perspective.


With the grasp of these systems, Jay points out that perspectivalism in turn had several shortcomings in relation to the audience and the artist. Where the viewer loses all sense of self and is decomposed into a singular vision and the artist is no more concerned with the content but rather the space, Cartesian perspective in many ways characterized a detached methodology based on what was deemed higher thinking. Another scopic regime highlighted by Jay is that of Renaissance perspective practiced by those in the Low Countries during the seventeenth century. This form was based more on a narrative approach where objects were distinguishable and not defined by a single monocular subject.


The last mode of vision presented is the Baroque described by Jay as “patinerly, recessional, soft-focused, multiple, and open” (16). Where aggrandized complexity and the shadowing of reality characterize the Baroque, this ocular mode stands in sharp contrast to the previous forms of perspectival representation. The Baroque is also the regime that Jay perceives as emergent in our time, and through a level of sublimeness reaches the ideals being presented in postmodernism. Undoubtedly all three of these visual modes were important to the trajectory of art itself, and in its own way each visual form construed an aesthetic revolution in itself. Where art has and will see continual renovation and transformation, these scopic regimes are a part of modernity, yet they are in no way empirically confined to that era.