The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 by Chris Otter
The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 by Chris Otter
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《维多利亚时代的眼睛：英国光与视觉的政治史，1800-1910》克里斯·奥特 (Chris Otter)
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发表时间：
2011
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P. Israel
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作者：
P. Israel
克里斯·奥特（Chris Otter）希望他的书《维多利亚之眼》（The Victorian Eye）成为19世纪英国视觉文化的政治史。但他对政治甚至政治经济学都不感兴趣。更准确地说，他创造了一部政治文化史（借用了他使用但没有发展的一个词），讲述了英国自由主义政治意识形态塑造光和视觉的物质文化的多种方式。通过使用自由主义作为他的框架，奥特为我们理解19世纪英国的视觉文化做出了重大贡献。特别是，他重建了一系列基于自由主体性的视觉实践，这些实践渗透到文化中，并展示了这些实践如何帮助重塑建筑环境。奥特的自主自由主义主体（通常是激进的中产阶级个体）“被期望拥有许多不同的视觉能力：注意力、观察力、识别力、内省力、辨别力、识字力”（第46页）。这些能力使他们能够客观地观察自己和他人，以便阅读性格并在城市中自主移动。尽管如此，由于工业城市的建筑环境“被认为是闭塞的，阴沉的，肮脏的，和士气低落的”，这成为他的自由主义主题的一个“政治视觉问题”（pido53）。他们对这个问题的解决方案是通过奥特所说的“无数的市政工程小动作”（p.61）来重新配置建筑环境的。奥特在书的开头追溯了眼科科学的发展，以及旨在培养更好的视觉习惯的新实践的出现，包括防止现代文明和自由主观性的视觉严酷所带来的近视的努力。然后，他讨论了这些视觉实践如何体现在寡头空间中，在这种空间中，自由主体之间可以相互监督，而个人也可以退出视野。这些空间是由一系列市政工程和建筑项目产生的，其中包括拓宽街道和隔音、减少烟雾和在建筑物中越来越多地使用玻璃。奥特用一章专门论述了这一问题，他认为特别重要的是建立了新的检查制度。他做了一个了不起的工作，详细介绍了市政府进行的多种形式的检查，特别注意检查员使用的新的便携式工具，以及街道标志，门牌号和交通灯使检查，使其更有效的方式。这些新的检查制度还得益于创造新的空间，旨在使检查能够进行，同时也使某些事情，如死亡和动物痛苦，远离公众视线。这些新空间包括现代医院、屠宰场和技术系统的入口管道。与此同时，家庭空间也在重新配置，
Chris Otter intends his book The Victorian Eye to be a political history of visual culture in nineteenth-century Britain. But he is little interested in politics or even political economy. It would be more accurate to say that that he has produced (drawing on a word he uses but does not develop) a politico-cultural history of the multitude of ways in which the material culture of light and vision was shaped by the political ideology of British liberalism. By using liberalism as his framework, Otter makes a significant contribution to our understanding of visual culture in nineteenth-century Britain. In particular he reconstructs a range of visual practices based on the liberal subjectivity that permeated the culture and shows how these helped to reshape the built environment. Otter’s self-governed liberal subjects (usually upperor middle-class individuals) were ‘expected to possess many different visual capacities: attention, observation, recognition, introspection, discernment, literacy’ (p.46). These capacities gave them the ability to observe themselves as well as others objectively in order to read character and to move autonomously about the city. Nonetheless, because the built environment of the industrial city ‘was perceived as blocked, gloomy, filthy, and demoralizing’ it became for his liberal subjects a ‘politicovisual problem’ (p.53). Their solutions to this problem emerged through what Otter calls ‘numberless little acts of municipal engineering’ (p.61) that reconfigured the built environment. Otter begins his book by tracing the development of ophthalmological science and the emergence of new practices designed to produce better visual habits, including efforts to protect against the myopia brought on by the visual rigours of modern civilization and liberal subjectivity. He then discusses how these visual practices were embodied in oligoptic spaces in which mutual oversight between liberal subjects could take place while individuals were also enabled to withdraw from view. Such spaces were produced by a range of municipal engineering and architectural projects that included street widening and soundproofing, smoke abatement and the growing use of glass in buildings. Especially important, according to Otter, who devotes a chapter to the subject, was the creation of new regimes of inspection. He does a terrific job of detailing the many forms of inspection undertaken by municipal governments, paying special attention to new portable tools used by inspectors as well as the ways that street signs, house numbers and traffic lights enabled inspection and made it more efficient. These new inspection regimes were also aided by the creation of new spaces designed to enable inspection while also keeping certain things, such as death and animal suffering, out of public view. Among these new spaces were the modern hospital, the abattoir and the access pipe for technological systems. At the same time, domestic spaces were also being reconfigured to increase