Curious Visions of Modernity. Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred, David L. Martin Cambridge, Mass.

: MIT Press, 2011, 256 pp., 35 b & w illustrations $32.95/22.95 (CLOTH) ISBN-10:0-262-01606-0 ISBN-13:978-0-262-01606-3 Jan Baetens

Modernity is often called the age of disenchantment. As described by Max Weber and other sociologists of history, the process of rationalization implied a gradual abandonment of all forms of understanding reality through mystery, magic and, religion. The fading of the analogical thinking and, more generally, of any sense of the sacred, was then seen as both the condition and the consequence of mans scientific approach of nature and the real (or if one prefers of rationalized nature as the only possible real). In addition, this shift from enchantment to disenchantment can be described as well as a shift from a verbal culture, in which all phenomena were open to certain kinds of metaphorical interpretation such as the mutual link between microcosm and macrocosm, to a basically visually defined culture, in which truth had to be made visible as objectively as possible.

David L. Martins book, which belongs, one may suppose, to the same philosophical school as the media history unconventially rewritten by Siegfried Zielinskis Deep Time of the Media (MIT, 2006), proposes a fascinating new genealogy of the beginnings of our Western fascination with visuality. It focuses on three major fields in which the new cultural paradigm became rapidly visible after the rise of disenchanting thinking: the collection (i.e. the collection of items available for scientific display, and no longer as objects of awe and worship), the body (i.e. the body as fixed and opened as an object ready for inspection), and the mapping of spaces (i.e. the new forms of representing a world that had become not only much larger but also much more complex than before). Yet, what the author attempts (and quite convincingly achieves) to demonstrate in his genealogy of these new visual paradigms, is the lasting presence, explicit as well as implicit, of other forms of thinking that reveal a strong feeling of the magic, the enchantment, and the sacred. Not in the sense that he wants to impose a revisionist vision of modernity, stressing the deceiving and merely superficial progress of modernity and disenchantment, but in the sense that he refuses to analyze the cultural change in terms of either/or. Martin is not saying that we have never been modern, but neither is he saying that we ceased to be premodern. His is a vision of modernity that is
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curious. The book contains a highly stimulating analysis of the history of the notion of curiosity, which follows more or less the transition from enchantment to disenchantment. However, Martin does not conclude from this lexicological transformation that our sense of awe or admiration and our craving for a premodern contact with the magical and the sacred have disappeared from modern culture and its ambition to visually put on show the object of rational knowledge.

Martins method is, paradoxically enough, highly visual. The corpus he is working on is mainly visual, although visuality is never separated in his reading of other forms of knowledge and analysis. And it is definitely the techniques of visualization, at a moment when the existing non-visual knowledge was no longer judged satisfactory by the emerging scientific culture, that interest him most. Both dimensions of his work provide the reader with an amazing set of images as well as ways of interpreting images, and this in the three different domains under scrutiny. After a long and broad (but extremely challenging) introductory chapter in which he criticizes the modern refusal, if not the incapacity, to pay serious attention to the sphere of enchantment in visual representations, Martin devotes three well-informed and permanently surprising chapters to respectively collection (in which he valorizes the notion of lumen against any reductive analysis of meaning in terms of rational Enlightenment), bodies (in which he insists upon the religious and theological dimensions of images of dissection), and spaces (in which he successfully tackles the myth of an unchallenged reign of perspectivism). In all cases, Martin succeeds to unpack an astonishing heterogeneity of modern visual culture. Rather than making a plea for a vision of history that goes back to premodern sources and antimodern forms of thinking, Martin shows the inextricable relationships between the emergent and the residual, and the lasting merger of both in all kinds of representations and forms of thinking. His defence of enchantment is not at all a battle cry against disenchantment, but an invitation to accept new ways of thinking that make room for both rationalization and the sacred. Modern as well as premodern readers of this book should both take this invitation, and perhaps also this warning, very seriously. All readers should be grateful, however, for the exceptional iconography of the book, which offers the ideal example of a collection of images that is both extremely well chosen (hence the great homogeneity of the illustrations) and dizzyingly, overwhelmingly, magically miscellaneous (hence the salutary heterogeneity of the images). Jan Baetens is professor of cultural studies at KU Leuven and editor in chief of "Image (&) Narrative". E-mail: jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be
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