ABSTRACT
The American philosopher Richard Rorty has argued that the experience of modernity derives from ‘chance’ and ‘mere contingency’, in contrast to the ‘necessary, essential, telic, constitutive’ impress optimizing the social coherence of classical Greek culture and the neo-classical Enlightenment.2 If classical philosophy is characterized by ideas of necessity and wholeness, then the ‘fallen’ condition of modernity can be described as a ‘blind impress’ in which the ‘fragmented’ self is cursed with imperfect and limited vision. Rorty goes on to describe the term in two precise ways which differentiate the modem condition from Romanticism: first, ‘blind impress’ represents a post-Darwinian awareness that there is no universal design, as distinct from the Romantic belief in intrinsic natural order and, second, the term suggests that the modem individual is unable to see outside his or her narrow perspective, whereas Romantic thinkers emphasized the primacy of emotional openness and pathos. For Rorty, the ‘blind impress’ marks a shift from the scientific precision of the microscope to what Gillian Beer calls the ‘imperfect vision’ and ‘extreme tenuity’ of modem perception.3 The visual theorist Victor Burgin translates this contingent experience into an explicitly optical language. He argues that whereas classical theories of representation offered ‘the image’ as ‘a mirror’ of ‘an ordered reality’, the ‘fragments’ of the modem mirror are ‘perpetually in motion’ and ‘reflect nothing reassuring’.4
