ABSTRACT
The early modern visual turbulence signaled by S. Clark in Vanities of the Eye accounts for an unsettled paradigm in search of stability. As Norman Bryson pointed out in The Gaze in the Expanded Field, vision is socially constructed: For human beings collectively to orchestrate their visual experience together it is required that each submit his or her retinal experience to the socially agreed description(s) of an intelligible world. Vision is socialized, and thereafter deviation from this social construction of visual reality can be measured and named, variously, as hallucination, misrecognition, or "visual disturbance". The dynamics of disclosure and concealment is primarily a visual matter. Visual arts developed various styles, moving in painting from Masaccio's central perspective to Andrea Pozzo's illusionistic one. In the interface between the visible and the invisible, language is a powerful instrument of disclosure, but at the same time it is inevitably an instrument of creation.
