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THE LIMITS FOR THE VISUAL REGIME OF MODERNITY: THE SYNCRETIС IMAGERY AGAINST THE UNIFORMITY OF SEEING // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2020. Issue 1 (23). P. 12-30

The paper retraces the formation of the way of seeing of modernity with a view to identifying its limits and thereby the contact zones as the social spaces where it engages with other ways of seeing. The starting point of the analysis is the statement that modernity in the aspect under consideration should be defined by means of pointing at the centrality and even the hegemony of the sight, but only taking into account the peculiarities of man and society that have been transformed by the modernization. The shift from immediacy of societal relations to prevalence of mediation in modernity discloses the fact of social and cultural construction of vision that becomes entangled in a network of mediating structures and turns into visuality as a way of seeing which depends on them. The consideration focuses on the concept of visuality as a representation that, albeit it presupposes the dualism of the signified and the signifier, cannot be interpreted as barely reflecting, imitating, or copying reality. What is at issue in the construal of representation is not the quiet and relaxed relation between the signified and the signifier, but the pervasive ordering of reality to be represented. Just the assumption that the subject coercively frames reality from a certain point of view makes it possible to construe the modernity in tune with Martin Heidegger’s understanding as the age of the dominance of representation. In the issue, the admission of the coercive element of representation makes it possible to specify the way of seeing in modernity as the visual regime. Such approach opens up possibilities, on the one hand, for specifying the ways of seeing which precede modernity and, on the other hand, for the detection of similarities between the theory of the linear perspective and the concept of subjectivity. The consideration proceeds from the point that the imagery of the pre-modern ways of seeing that is characterized by the insufficient structural order contains the syncretic combination of heterogeneous entities or “bricolage” as such random multitude was designated by Claude Levi-Strauss. The transition from the pre-modern way of seeing to the rudiments of the visual regime of modernity is regarded as comparable to the emergence of metaphysics and logic. They had embedded the coercive element in unorganized thinking and besides opened the door for the dominance of representation. The invention of linear perspective is interpreted as the climax of the concept of representation and in the same vein as the counterpart of the formation of subjectivity. It is also pointed out that the linear perspective underlies the only visual regime which seems to be compatible with the philosophy of modernity without reserve and therefore this visual regime is often called “Cartesian perspectivism”. Nevertheless, the question of other ways of seeing does not look as if it is closed and the visual regimes of Northern Renaissance and Baroque as often as not also have a claim on belonging to modernity. In the paper it is argued in favor of the plausibility of another trying to find the sense of alternative visual regimes and hence to decide the issue of the relevance of their attribution to modernity. In fine the concept of baroque in the wide sense is supposed to be the research tool through which the syncretic visual regimes could be studied as the limits for the visual regime of modernity.

Keywords: modernity, visuality, representation, subject, visual regime, linear perspective, Cartesian perspectivism, baroque, syncretism.