Eye and Book: Species and Spectacle

My things, the eye and the book, uneasily transgress the boundary between objects and media. Following Bruno Latour’s call to investigate the ways objects “block, render possible,” or “forbid” rather than merely structure our experiences, this essay explores how visual perception com-plicated early modern encounters with the book as object.1 I situate the relation between eye and book within a historically specific early modern material and intellectual environment. Material things shape, to cite gra-ham Harman, how we perceive perception. Even so, our cultural models of perception necessarily color how we approach these things. A focus on objects’ environs implies an ecological, networked reading of objects and, I would argue, a historical one. Historical phenomenology can link objects with their temporal as well as spatial environs. Rather than fol-lowing Husserl and Heidegger’s model of a transcendent human con-sciousness that intentionally “brackets” off the object from its environs, I here adopt phenomenology as a method for discovering co-habitations and disturbances between body and object. Traditional phenomenology often removes perception from a historical and spatial index in order to determine first principles. Instead, as I will explore with the eye, the body manifested as part of a network of objects that continuously patterned and altered perception in early modern thought. This characterization of the human body and its parts as objects as well as perceptual media draws in part from Rosalyn Diprose’s claim that phenomenology acts as an “interworld” between the human body and the external object,2 as well as from Sarah Ahmed’s claim that objects and spaces “impress” themselves on the body to the point where they become a “second skin.”3 Perception is here not transcendent, but physically situated; the percipient-object relationship is not static, but mutually dynamic.