Edited by Chris Jenks - carlosmoreno.info

AN INTRODUCTION
Our contemporary views on epistemology were, Rorty informed us, shaped
by a combination of Cartesian ideas concerning ‘mental substance’ and
Lockean ideas concerning ‘mental processes’. Descartes’s cogito centred
understanding on an independent, located and subjective mind—a finite
capacity and disposition—waiting to be unified with Locke’s conception of
active ‘mentalism’, or what we might describe as the practices by which
we come to know. This powerful combination, that is, this now ‘active’
‘mind’, was latterly situated by Kantian philosophy within a total and
unified cosmos which was both organised through and knowable in terms
of pure reason itself.
The metaphysical questions addressing the real characteristics of the
‘outside’ nature and the ‘inside’ mind were seemingly held in abeyance (or
just taken for granted) and philosophy’s project became dedicated to the
‘rigorous’ and ‘scientific’ divination of the accurate and most appropriate
transportation of the ‘outside’ into the ‘inside’. 9 The conventional highway
for this transport has been the senses, but primarily ‘sight’. Such empirical
rather than intuitive theories of knowing have marked out the epoch of
modernity: a period we might describe as the ‘opening of vision’.
This historical scenario established an absurd dichotomy in the relation
between ‘self’ and ‘other’, two moments which could now be more
appositely reformed as ‘the receptacle’ and ‘the spectacle’; 10 or perhaps
‘the vision’ and ‘the ultimately visual’. This scenario also fostered the
emergence of the ‘mind’-less empiricism and ‘value’-less positivism as the
methodological strategies that were to both dominate and, unintentionally,
retard the development of modern social theory.
Our contemporary realisation of this inquisitorial dichotomy between
‘self’ and ‘other’ in sociological work has subsequently settled into the
sanitised methodological form of ‘observation’. ‘Observation’ has become
a root metaphor within social and cultural research, and an extensive
vocabulary of ‘visuality’, applied in an almost wholly unreflexive manner,
has become instrumental in our manoeuvres for gaining access to and
understanding the concerted practices of human communities. 11 As Lowe
has stated: The perceptual field thus constituted…was fundamentally
nonreflexive, visual and quantitative.’ 12 The implementation of the concept
of ‘observation’ in socio-cultural research, and its obvious general
acceptability, are by no means accidental or arbitrary. Such usage and its
institutionalisation are refinements of the conventional ‘ocularcentrism’
abroad within the wider culture. 13 We daily experience and perpetuate the
conflation of the ‘seen’ with the ‘known’ in conversation through the
commonplace linguistic appendage of ‘do you see?’ or ‘see what I mean?’
to utterances that seem to require confirmation, or, when seeking opinion,
by inquiring after people’s ‘views’. (For the pedagogue such habitual
interrogative phrasing can assume the form and regularity of punctuation:
a habit radically, and poignantly, arrested in myown experience after
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