The sleep of reason begets monsters
Once the eye was perceived as a depository and source of clarity, the act of seeing, for Descartes and other seventeenth century thinkers, became tantamount to the act of knowing. The locus in which knowledge was formed was no longer a pathological garden where God enlightened the species. To see was sufficient to render everything transparent to the exercise of the mind. Freed from an obscuring darkness, such a purified and purifying gaze could illuminate all objects in a spotlight of objectivity. The sovereign power of an empirical gaze could turn the dank night of monarchical despotism and Christian superstition into the dawnlight of libertarianism. To bring to light was, in this ideology of transparency, to reveal the truth and to master the unknown. As Diderot's encyclopedia (Encyclopedie or A Classified Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Trades 1751-1772) became the cosmological model for an omnipotent knowledge which could be all-seeing and hence all-knowing, the human subject could be as emancipated as a God. But between the grid of this all seeing gaze, in the interstices of this all-knowing net which separated epistemology into disciplines and divided the social fabric into institutions, darkness again fell. What was immune to the empirical gaze, what was impenetrable to the positivist light of truth, what was impervious to the regime of reason and unfathomable within the discourses of rationalism became the unknown. The unknown, the unknowable and their realms of unreason were the subject of Bonita Ely's recent installation at Annandale Galleries, Sydney.!
Shafts of light dissected the black velvet void of darkness across the white spaces of the gallery. Unlike the omnipotent light of the Enlightenment, these wedges did not form an... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline