The Visibility of Social Systems

The role of the senses in social life is a neglected theme in social analysis. Despite the philosopher Whitehead’s (1938) early call for systematic study of the ‘organization of the sensorium’ in human communication, it is only recently that this has been taken up as a serious challenge by the human sciences. Much of this work has focused on the dominance of vision, especially in modern social systems subjected to ‘bureaucratization’ and the processes of formal organization more generally. As Rorty (1980) has reminded us, modern thought has privileged the eye as the sense organ by which we may represent the world to ourselves most effectively. Yet it was not always like this. The historian Lucien Febvre (1982), in a study of sixteenth century social life, comments on the underdevelopment of sight in that period: ’Like their acute hearing and sharp sense of smell, the men of that time doubtless had keen sight. But that was just it. They had not yet set it apart from the other senses. They had not yet tied its information in particular in a necessary link with their need to know’ (p.437). Consequently, they lived in a fluid world ’where nothing was strictly defined, where entities lost their boundaries and, in the twinkling of an eye, without causing much protest, changed shape, appearance, size….’(p.438). The stabilization of the world required a specialized training of the visual sense and its elevation over the other senses. The process of stabilization called for quantification and calculation and this necessarily involved the eye: ‘The passage from the qualitative to the quantitative is essentially linked to advances in the predominance of visual perception’ (Rey quoted in Febvre, 1982, p.432).