Externalization of Vision

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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World
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The nature of the sense of sight has created a human culture of expanding and improving on our capacities for vision. The organ of sight, the eye, is “inherited from the common fund of species;” our vision is relatively similar to other animals (Leroi-Gourhan 296). An average visual capacity is insufficient for a species which attempts to differentiate itself from other animals. In order to surpass the ordinary visual capacity, humans exploit their motor and tactile capacities which enable them to handle the magnifying glass. In turn, the magnifying glass acts as an “exteriorization of the organs” of sight, and through this externalization humans are able to improve upon these capacities more efficiently than the ordinary biological evolution of the organs of vision (Leroi-Gourhan 257). This allows humans to "place outside ourselves what in the rest of the animal world is achieved inside by species adaptation," to externalize our visual capacities (Leroi-Gourhan 235). The ability to externalize and extend vision is therefore significant, allowing for improvement on sight at a faster rate and utilizing increasingly advanced technology and materials.

The magnifying glass's exploitation of vision enabled it to develop symbolic and observational power. Nonetheless, it also contributed to its materiality; in the words of Leroi-Gourhan, “tools (are) a ‘secretion’ of the antrhopoid’s body and brain;" in the case of the magnifying glass, it is an externalization of vision. Leroi-Gourhan asserts that the standards applied to the natural organ of sight should be applied to a tool which is an extension of that sense; constancy of form and fixed nature which establishes a stereotype of the magnifying glass. Like the function of the eye from which optics are derived, the magnifying glass has retained a consistent form over the course of history. A stereotypical magnifying glass has emerged as a result. The constancy allotted to the magnifying glass as an external eye has allowed it to persist as a symbol throughout history. By exploiting the property of vision, the magnifying glass is able to enlist the authority of vision, attributing accuracy to its utilization.

Back to Vision and the Magnifying Glass.