When Pictures Are Present: Arthur Danto and the Historicity of the Eye

"The eye is not historical," writes Arthur Danto, "but we are."' Since we cannot readily imagine the "eye," human visual perception, without its historically being in and of us, it must be as difficult to evaluate this claim as its converse, the cultural-relativist historicism-it urges that the eye is historical-that Danto rejects.2 For a natural historian of human Lebensformen, it might be that our historicity-the intraspecific variation of our knowledge and our systems for representing it-might partly be due to the history of the eye. But for Danto, it is a condition of "our" history that the eye is not historical in any sense. For him, during the historical period in which the eye was not a function of socioculturally varying practices and styles of representation, it was also not evolving. As he puts it in a discussion of Heinrich Woelfflin's philosophy of art history, "vision has a history" only in the sense that "visual representations belong to forms of life that are themselves related to one another historically."3 By contrast, "modes of our visual cognition," Wartofsky writes, "change with changes in the modes of our pictorial representation." Human vision "has a history which goes beyond the biological evolution of the hominid visual system and is part of that activity of self-creation and self-transformation which we call cultural evolution."4 In his bottom-line proposal, Wartofsky argues that "canonical styles of representing the seen world change . . . and introduce transformations of vision."5 In the end, then, he would advance an "art-historical theory of style-change" for, or as, the history of vision.6 Both Wartofsky and Danto would solve the problem of interconnecting the histories of the eye and of representational practices essentially by fiat. For Wartofsky, in the end "the eye" simply is socioculturally varying representational systems and practices. And for Danto, in the end "we" simply are that phase or product of hominid evolution in which the mechanisms of the eye-including its natural variation if any-are impermeable to those systems and practices as they vary historically. In both cases, these correlations have to be secured in part by tendentious natural histories: while Wartofsky must urge that the eye is historically different wherever a representational system or practice changes historically, Danto must urge that the evolution of the eye-the history of its natural selection-has "stopped." Whether pigeons, sheep, or other nonhuman creatures can do "more than exhibit recognitional dispositions upon presentation of pictures," as Danto has concluded they can,7 is beside the issue here. If they can see (what is depicted in) pictures, this "competence" must have an ongoing evolutionary history-which Danto denies for human beings. Or it must be directed by some culture or cultivation that they have-but which Danto denies for them. In their forms of life, such culture-revealing their competence-is not a natural-historical reality; it must be introduced to them artificially. It is a human form of life naturally to have languages and systems of representation. In turn, then, the putative invariance of human perception might be the precipitate of the spreading of depictive culture (and perhaps even its modes or styles) throughout our forms of life. But as this is just the issue between Danto and Wartofsky, we are back where we started with little help from the pigeons or the sheep. I want to suggest that no matter what mode or style of pictures might be produced historically, depicting as such introduces new causal contexts for-an emergent new ecology of-vision as a longterm biocultural event spread out over many millennia, penetrating or pervading any individual form of life in variable degrees and with variable importance depending on the historical presence of pictures therein. But to admit the evolution of the eye in "our" natural history and as a possible factor in the differences between our Lebensformen, as I want to do contra Danto, is not necessarily to endorse an extreme cultural-relativist thesis. For Danto, any interaction between "see-