ABSTRACT
It is common in the literature of visual theory to invoke the Enlightenment as some kind of ground upon which modern conceptions of the visual field are constructed. In part this invocation derives from a certain philosophical inheritance that we might describe in shorthand as the line of sight between Hegel and Lacan via Sartre. This inheritance has it that the philosophical project of the modern, that is, enlightenment, is intimately caught up with and deeply implicated in the conceptual field of the visual. Insofar as this idea goes, and like all broad characterizations of a difficult set of arguments it goes only a very small way, it is correct. However, what is glaringly missing from this telescoped account is a specifically nuanced historical perspective on Enlightenment modes and modalities of visuality. This absence is compounded by the fact that where attention has been drawn to the general area of the visual it has either surfaced in the philosophy and history of science, a discipline that has not sought to investigate the sociocultural noise that colors and distorts vision in its construction of visuality, or in the history of philosophical discussions of optics. 1 In both the history of science and philosophical treatments of the visual field, therefore, we find optics taking center stage, as one might argue it did for the Enlightenment itself.
