12/20/2025. Sight as Sacrament: Reclaiming the Senses and Building an Aesthetic of Resistance

“…the apprehensive faculty must be scrutinized in action.” – Stephen Hero, James Joyce 
 
In our last gathering we explored the tools of perception that modern life depends on (screens, the internet, algorithms, 24-hour siloed news cycles, etc.), the modes of sight they privilege (voyeurism, surveillance, partisan perspectives, objectification, etc.), and the shaping power that all of this exerts on civic and private life. 

Further, when we scrutinize our “apprehensive faculties in action”, we find that we’re not just victims of de-humanizing modes of sight, but actors in de-humanizing modes of sight. Jesus responds, “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness…”

The question is, now what?  How do we heal? How do repair our perceptive and apprehensive faculties, never mind the perceptual frameworks (aesthetics) by which we make sense of ourselves and the world?

Hiddenness and revelation

The proverb says, “It is the glory of God to conceal, and the glory of kings to seek things out.” The dance between hiddenness and revelation, of concealment and unconcealment, is a feature of reality, of the world, of one another, of God, even of ourselves.

I think what is important to reckon with here, is the quality of this seeking out. That this seeking out is done primarily with our senses, perception plays a key role.

Poetics is defined as the creative principles that govern the construction of a thing, be it in the realm of science, politics, humanities, the arts. It’s about the theory of form – how a thing comes to be.

A related word is poiesis, which is about the process of emergence of something that didn’t exist before. It’s derived from an Ancient Greek word meaning ‘to make’. Unsurprisingly, ‘poesis’ and ‘poetry’ share this etymology.

Martin Heidegger describes poiesis as a “bringing forth”: a blossoming, a bloom. It’s the wave that crests, the flower that erupts in spring, the egg that hatches. In particular, he describes ‘threshold moments’, where something becomes something different than it was before. Poeisis is about the ‘unfolding of a thing out of itself.’

In contrast, techne, from which we get the words “technique” and “technology”. Here, we have a different kind of bringing forth. It is a challenging, the revealing of a thing that has not offered itself up. In this, it is fundamentally antagonistic. Heidegger describes techne as that “which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be stored.”

So here we have a bringing forth that is not a blooming, not a graceful opening out in the fullness of time, but an aggressive exposure, a forced entry. The breaking of the lock.

It sets upon nature. Coal and ore are hauled out of the ground. Mass agro-industries set upon animals and the soil with machines and industrial chemicals to extract higher yield.

Resources are coerced through stresses and pressures, and then ordered and directed to keep the factory running and the systems operational.

“Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing are all forms of revealing. But the revealing never simply comes to an end. “

Unconcealment. It’s notable that one of our primary mining practices is called “strip-mining”.  Man-made means toward a man-established end.

Technology itself conditions every attempt to bring human beings into right relationship with technology. It is a way of revealing, one predicated on technological mastery and human self-sufficiency.

But it’s manifestly obvious that the technology we have deployed to master our world and our lives, has in fact mastered us. As Marshall McLuhan states, we become the servile mechanism of whatever tool or technology we set our hand to.

We learned last time that the original word from truth is “unhiddenness”. Similarly, The etymology of “apocalypse”, by way of Old English, Old French, ecclesiastical Latin, and Greek, is ‘uncover’ or ‘reveal’. It’s notable that a word that benignly began as ‘uncover’ is now synonymous with the very end of the world. That moment when every hidden thing is revealed is the same moment as our undoing.

Might this be because we cannot imagine the truth being told without it being antagonistic? A challenging? Being caught in the lie? A sort of Divine Gotcha-Journalism? How many of our modern modes of sight about involuntary exposure and the loss of agency?

Digitized curtains that separate me from reality.

Ivan Illich

The question, “What are our tools doing to our bodies” gives way to the question of “what are our systems doing to our bodies”?

Where a tool is a means by which some human agency is mediated. The tool can be managed if we take the right view of it. Motives are primary. This is the common defense of AI. Or of guns. It’s not the gun that kills people, it’s people that kill people. But I’m pretty sure the gun helps.

Illich began to see this thought as a deficiency. And began to think about moving from an age of tools to an age of systems. What is the difference?

The system, unlike the tool, incorporates the user. If there’s no clear dividing line with our tools, if I am part of the system which incorporates me, the problem of technology changes. Tool becomes environment.

We even talk about our bodies as systems of control and regulation, of our minds as fundamentally about information processing.

Wherever the system extends, it distributes agency, which raises the question, who controls what?

We have been given consumer systems that promise some measure of control over some aspect of the human experience, but what happens when we become integrated into these systems and we lose control over the data that these systems generate?

“The price we pay for our own technology is obedience to our own technology… We are the servile mechanisms. You see, if you make a canoe, the paddler of the canoe becomes not the master but the servile mechanism of the canoe. And, so, if you, in the same way you make a business, the man who runs the business is the servile mechanism of the business. Every technology exacts that price of conformity from the user.”

“Not a year passes […] that I do not detect an unperceived propensity to deny the reality of living in service to the techno-Molech. Existence in a society that has become a system finds the senses useless precisely because of the very instruments designed for their extension. One is prevented from touching and embracing reality. Further one is programmed for interactive communication. One’s whole being is sucked into the system. It is this radical subversion of sensation that humiliates and then replaces perception.”

What does all of this do to our perception?

“We submit ourselves to fantastic degradations of image and sound consumption in order to anesthetize the pain resulting from having lost reality. To grasp this humiliation of sight, smell, touch, and hearing, it was necessary for me to study the history of bodily acts of perception…”

Ancient classical and early medieval understanding of sight:

“the eyes emitted a visual cone, which like a luminous organ, seized and embraced reality…” Our eyes ravished reality.

The eye reached out into the world in order to make contact with it. A “fingering gaze” to receive the light that it gives and brings it back into the eye.

Our modern scientifically informed understanding of sight is much more passive. It’s just receiving light.

Resistance

Illich: ‘Guarding the eye in the age of show’.

“The ethics of the gaze is important because the character of the person is dependent on the way a person acts, and so how we habitually exercise our vision ends up shaping us, morally forming us, and determines the kind of people we become.”

[The regime of the spectacle.]

“Therefore, it appears to me that we cannot neglect the disciplined recovery, the asceticism of a sensual praxis in a society of techno-genic mirages. This reclaiming of the senses, this promptitude to obey experience [to resist the multitude of mediated forms through which we tend to receive experience]. The chaste look that the rule of St. Benedict proposes to the lust of the eyes seems to me to be the fundamental condition for renouncing that technique which sets up a definitive obstacle to friendship.”

The show = the loss of reality, the degradation of our senses

Theory of asceticism – learning presupposes both critical and ascetical habits.

Our usual responses to these problems are essentially feeble: the need for critical thinking, for more fact-checkers, for media literacy, for warnings in social-media feeds on the veracity of advertised content.

“When I speak of the asceticism of the training of the eye, I mean much more than the apprenticeship of Zen-archers, skeet-shooters, mystical naval-gazers, or the downcast eye of Victorian spinsters. My grandmother learned to use aquarelle [watercolor], in order to open her eyes in preparation for her first trip to Italy. Prussian civil servants, no matter their profession, had to pass tests in calligraphy and draftsmanship. Even in my own childhood, drawing was still part of the distinguishing skills. It trained the eye, as music the ear, and dancing the gait. Under the tutorship from a widow from Bremen, I had to paint flowers and views to prove my attention. Each age, craft, and milieu, places its own demands on ocular techniques. Not only the acuity, but also the moral quality of the gaze was trained.”

Asceticism as a response to the mandate of empire: take, consume. We do it because we can. It’s there for the taking, ripe for the plucking. In this, we are always rehearsing the moment of the fall: the reach for the fruit in the center of Eden. A reach that resulted in less knowing, not more.

Sight as sacrament

Sacrament: an earthly symbol of the reality of God. “Signs and seals of the covenant of Grace.”

The Westminster Confession describes “a sacramental relation, a sacramental union, between the sign and the thing signified; whence it comes to pass that the names and efforts of the one are attributed to the other”.

In other words, bread and wine reveal something fundamental about the character of God. Grains gathered from many fields to one loaf. Many Grapes gathered from many hills to one cup. Then redistributed. Flowing out and unfolding to the community of God and the whole of humankind. Love is relational. Love also involves crushing, testing, sifting, fire, pressure, cooling – as a pre-condition of love, a pre-condition of sharing.

The water of baptism that envelopes, buries, cleans, sustains.

Sight as sacrament – “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out”, which suggests that the playful dance between what is understood and what is obscured, between hiddenness and revelation is good and right and as intended.

Hiddenness and revelation.

How?

Agnes Martin said, “their lives [our lives] are broader than they think…”

Stopping. Lingering. Decision.

“The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible.”

— Lewis Hyde, The Gift