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The Victorian Eye is a rich history full of previously understudied spaces, objects and connections. These range from the history of reading glasses to the organization of visual space in libraries, from the arrangement of lighting in the home to the use of electrical switches within it, from the banking practices of the social classes that adopted these systems to the manners required of inspectors. All of these topics are drawn together in an innovative exploration of the role played by liberal government in the creation of a networked, technological society.
Chris Otter has a lot of negative things to say in The Victorian Eye. He dislikes the two dominant tropes of most work on visual culture - surveillance and spectacle - which he finds 'largely useless' (p. 254). He equally disparages the pervasive focus on other elements associated with those tropes, such as the panopticon and the flâneur, discipline and capital, coercion and seduction. He identifies the obsession pertaining to the first of these themes as commencing with Michel Foucault and that pertaining to the second as due to the influence of Walter Benjamin (he does not mention Guy Debord). Otter's reason for moving beyond these 'monolithic abstractions' (p. 21) is a conviction that they rarely appear as concrete concerns for the historical actors involved, and are not in any case actual actors' categories of the time and...