The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic

Era (review)

Tom Conley

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 18, Number 2, October 1994, pp. 382-383
(Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.1994.0037

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/416187/summary

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382Philosophy and Literature

furioso divide the text into fragments that offer an opportunity to comment on
moral or philosophical questions. The commentaries are not primarily con-
cerned with literary criticism; they give no hint that there is anything to laugh
at in Ariosto's poem, but this can hardly be taken as evidence that the
annotatore lacked a sense of humor. Certainly it does not prove that the readers
who made Orlando furioso a sixteenth-century bestseller were blind to Ariosto's
comic vision. Similarly, the marginalia in the manuscripts of the Libro need not
represent a considered response to the Libro as a whole. The annotations are
limited to points their authors considered important as guides to conduct,
whether their own or that of other readers. They do not tell us thatJuan Ruiz's
contemporaries did not find his book funny, much less that we are wrong to
laugh at it.
University of OregonThomas R. Hart

The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic

Era, by WilliamJ. Mitchell; viii & 273 pp. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1992, $60.00.

In this study of electronic photography the author contends that the digital
image "shakes our faith" in referentiality and truth. Digital photography deals
less with the capture of reality than with a continuous processing or "mutation
and proliferation of variants" (p. 50). It shelves the Aristotelian notion that
there exists a "fabricator, impelled by an anticipatory idea," who "imposes form
on matter" (p. 51). Where classical theory dictated that the photograph was "a
window on the world," digital creations can be imagined as "windows with
filters" (p. 144) . Unlike photography, a medium that records intensities of light
chemically, electronic image-making transduces "radiant energy into patterns
of electric current" (p. 60) .
The computer records images by placing grids of pixels over pictures. In
what is called quantization, intensities are located and converted into integer
values. The latter can then be mathematically recombined, shifted, mixed, or
retouched. Digital processing thus transcribes surface-values. It can record
structures in simulation of three-dimensions (e.g., a CAT-scan or a mazzocchio)
by computing depths of field. These complex perspectival views can be shaded
with degrees of hue, saturation, and luminosity.
Five chapters take up the "electronic tools of the trade," which include the
digital brushstroke, the virtual camera, algorithmic image construction, syn-
thetic shading, and computer collage processing. The pixel, the basic unit of
measure, is invested witii "point" and "area" values defined by its position in
respect to surrounding pixels. The first two chapters document the shift from
 Reviews383

classical photography to scanning and digitalization, while "Intention and

Artifice," "Computer Collages," and "How to Do Things with Pictures" study
how ideology exploits electronic hardware. Digital photographs resemble
speech-acts: they are studied in respect not to a content but to the ways they
serve to create beliefs and desires. Agencies can endow pictures with illocutionary
force that varies according to context but always establishes "a powerful
orthodoxy of graphic communication" (p. 222).
The book suggests that a new ethics needs to account for digital imaging.
Three components can be considered. First, heeding Michel Foucault's view
that modern science treats facts as impersonal objects where scholasticism had
invested them with authority in reference to an origin, we must (1) fancy
images as processes that recombine and contort conventions, and (2) use the
technology to impugn claims of authenticity. New technologies tell us that
truth-effects, like the images that produce them, must be continually scanned.
A third component might derive from Mitchell's extraordinary picture on
the dustjacket (also fig. 10.1). A pictural variant on a sixteenth-century blason
du corps féminin, the image displays the Mona Lisa's left eye in an infinity of
sizes, the largest of which resembles a reversed comma laid on its dexter side.
The abstract cipher reveals a vanishing point of infinitely smaller pixels of the
same eye that reflect the outer world on the upper left side of the lady's pupil.
Eyes are within eyes that describe eyes emerging, disappearing, dissolving, but
also, when we squint, a unique eye with a sharp outline of a shaded comma.
The mass of pixels shows how digital photography, fabricating images from
increasingly smaller versions of themselves, yields an effect of visual analepsis
(p. 75), implying that no escape is possible from this new panopticism of
multiplicity, redundancy, and infinitesimal gridding. To stand clear of digital
imaging is to remain unaware of an acceleration and empowerment of
ideology. This is a decisive study in the history and philosophy of visual form.
University of MinnesotaTom Conley

Quixotic Desire: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Cervantes, ed-

ited by Ruth Anthony El Saffar and Diana de Armas
Wilson; xv & 332 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1993, $36.95 cloth, $15.95 paper.

Because one of the most striking characteristics of Cervantes's writings is a

profound concern with the mysterious workings of the human mind, and
because those writings almost uncannily anticipate so many of the theories and
insights of modern psychoanalysis (the first chapter in this book, byJuan Luis
Grinberg and Juan Francisco Fernández, makes a convincing case for Freud's