Seeing Things: Technologies of Vision and the Making of Mormonism

Mason Kamana Allred's Seeing Things illuminates the interconnectedness of nonhuman and supernatural worlds and the formation of Mormon religious identities. In Allred's trenchant phrase, "Mormons are fashioned by looking at stuff to see things" (185). Drawing on diverse theoretical literature ranging from feminist new materialism to German media theory, Allred introduces Latter-day Saint studies to new critical idioms and terms while maintaining an accessible tone and vocabulary.As with another recent work in Mormon art history by Nathan Rees, Allred's paradigmatic story is that of Joseph Smith's visions. From the seer stone-in-hat depicted on the original cover art by Jack Soren to the spectacular vision afforded by the Urim and Thummim, the book characterizes Mormon sight as mediated by "technologies of vision." But as Allred is careful to point out, what characterizes this special seeing is an active participation on the part of the observer: "Turning passive reading spectators into active visionary observers was the early Mormon project" (31).For Mormons, as for "Joseph Smith, seeing . . . things was not just believing them. It was productive. Seeing was a form of becoming" (1). The "agency" of matter and its entanglement with human beholding thus choreographed the revelation of "things" in "stuff"—invisible words on darkened stones, dead prophets raised to life on painted panorama, spirit-helpers whispering through the filmy veil of microphotographed vital records. However, for Allred, seeing is not only revelatory of metaphysical realities for Mormons but simultaneously functions as a metonym for the entire human sensorium. "According to Joseph Smith," writes Allred, "we can know God as a material embodied being only through our own bodies" (3).As vital as the material aspect of reality is to Allred's "media archeology," he follows philosopher Karen Barad in referring to meaning and material as "mutually articulated." Barad refers to this entangled dimension as the "material-discursive." In Allred's words, "concepts are created through their doing" (8). Using this framework, Allred centers the body as the "indispensable medium" through which the technologized, "repeatable . . . experiences" of lived Mormonism "created and processed boundaries and distinctions" (5).Over six chapters, Allred explores different modes of Mormon-media entanglement. Chapter 1, "Circulating Specters," assesses Mormon print media as a way of "reverse engineering Smith's vision by putting it into texts to be read, in order to bring it right back out" (44). Reading, in this sense, was a matter of "hallucinating between the lines" to "construct a visionary community rising above deception and toward acquiring celestial knowledge" (43). Early Mormon access to spirits necessitated rational ways of adjudicating and disciplining vision. "Proper techniques could transfer visions as serial data from reader to reader and convert reading spectators into observers with their own visions" (37).Chapter 2 discusses how Mormon-history themed panorama painted by Philo Dibble and C. C. A. Christensen allowed for embodied experiences that guided gatherings of viewers to "see each other seeing the same sight" (55). At historical junctions like the succession crisis after Smith's martyrdom, "the situation required a shared vision of the future by giving meaning and form to the past" (55). By resurrecting the visage of the departed prophet on panorama, Dibble helped consolidate "leadership around an image of Smith" in a way that allowed Brigham Young to "manufacture consent and a feeling of trajectory" for the church (59). This sense of movement and unity of vision would only multiply with C. C. A. Christensen's moving panorama.Chapter 3 explores how machines such as the typewriter and the camera facilitated Mormon women's agency and allowed them to simultaneously reproduce and critically re-channel "patriarchal visions" (75). As the church transitioned away from polygamy, typing and photography became one answer to the question of how to deploy unmarried women in society. Photographer Elfie Huntington explicitly thematized the male gaze in her series "A Bachelor's Dream," highlighting the historical divergence of male desire and women's identity (77–79). "Through her typewriter," Susa Young Gates re-visioned for The Improvement Era Joseph Smith's own account of seeing God in 1820 as one of "the divine Mother, side by side with the divine Father" (99).Chapter 4 examines how early twentieth-century films about and by the church highlighted the power of visual "traffic" to integrate or segregate Mormons from American modernity. With the creation of the film One Hundred Years of Mormonism, the church aimed to "control their image" by "warding off slanderous doubles" that had portrayed them as vampirical, white-slave-trafficking non-Whites (120). "As Latter-day Saints translated their vision of history into an American film, they also structured themselves as modern white Americans" (131).Chapter 5 illustrates how Mormonism's drive to redeem the dead vicariously became entangled with "the global promise of networking the world's 'brain'" with the rise of microphotography (and cybernetics) just before World War II as a viable way to preserve vast amounts of information (144). Urgently sensing the need to preserve humanity's genealogical records as war loomed, Mormon bodies became disciplined to spiritual feedback loops of spirits on scrolling screens.Chapter 6 argues that "televisual Mormonism" worked to consolidate standards of appearance and bodily comportment that not only aligned Latter-day Saints with the emerging ambitions of church correlation but also helped create Mormons as "good, harmless American patriots" by being "gathered at a distance" (182).With enviable clarity and insight, Allred has given us a valuable, layered book that rewards multiple readings. In his Conclusion, Allred makes clear that "this shift in media visions is not a secularization narrative" (190). Rather, echoing Peter Coviello in a media-oriented key, Allred sees Mormonism as emblematic of the filtering processes of American society, which always "takes place by and through media" (190). "There is no Mormonism before media, and there is no message of Mormonism without media" (13).