Optical Impersonality: Science, Images, and Literary Modernism by Christina Walter

Optical Impersonality: Science, Images, and Literary Modernism, by Christina Walter. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 352 pages. Fashioning a foundational book within contemporary modernist studies is a rare occurrence, especially when the text relates to a well-known concept such as modernist impersonality--yet Christina Walter has fashioned just such a text. She issues a call for scholars to reevaluate the traditional understanding that impersonality is merely a negation of personality, a view that "align[s] modernism with an old notion of personality" (25). She then insists that modernist impersonality has more to do with exploring the essence of personality and directs scholars to consider the modernists' turn toward optical science and the visual-scientific vernacular as a means of creating what she describes as optical impersonality. Walter explicitly defines optical impersonality as the "combination of embodied subjectivity and its social consequences" (6). In other words, modernists used impersonality to "ask how the new physiology of vision" challenged their notions of material, bodily, human subjects and how this vision "applied across the gender, racial, and class distinctions that had long distinguished a supposedly disembodied male subject from everyone else" (27). Walter explains that modernists experimented with optical impersonality through "imagetextuality"--that is, the blurring of the line between the seeable and the sayable--a term that Walter borrows from W. J. T. Mitchell, who uses it to help explain postmodernity. Yet, Walter wishes to write "a different history of the imagetext's appearance" in modernist studies (13). Through an exploration that spans art history, literature, gender and queer studies, physics, and contemporary affect theory, Walter sets out to demonstrate that optical impersonality, which was produced by a new understanding of the physiology of vision, allowed modernist writers to examine "the making and unmaking of personality" (27). Indeed, Walter's book presents a scientific perspective that has been missing from much work in modernist studies, but such a perspective is necessary if future scholars are to engage productively in the multiplicity of discourses surrounding gender, race, and identity in modernism. In her introduction, Walter sets up a conceptual framework that considers three cultural and historical realms that figure in her study of optical impersonality: the history of optical science, the history of image-text relations, and the history of personality (7). A brief history of optical science, from the Cartesian notion of sight as a faithful record for the autonomous mind to Helmholtz's suggestion of an embodied observer, helps readers to contextualize the rest of Walter's argument according to its relation to modernists' evaluation and rejection of the mind/body duality. Just as optics blurs the line between subject and object, Walter allows the concept of imagetextuality to blur the line between image and text. Finally, Walter previews the historical evolution of personality from a marker of individuality into a performance of constructed identity. Imagetextuality moves to the forefront of Walter's agenda in chapter 1, in which she evaluates Walter Pater, a nineteenth-century philosopher and art historian. Walter explains that one of Pater's most famous art history texts, The Renaissance (1873), "play [s] on the inseparability of word and image"; for her, Pater's conception of imagetext is of an opaque and fragmented structure that leaves "the reader always desiring to know, and always faced with the limits of knowing" (35, 46). For Walter, this prophetic notion of imagetext also points to Pater's presentation of "embodied vision" (40); that is, by continually pointing to the limits of vision, Pater calls attention to bodily limitations in experiencing art. Though Pater's experimentation with the image/text binary challenges identity, he never attempted to resolve issues of identity and personality. …