The pictorial turn ---the historical development and recent explosion of the production and dissemination of visual media (the advent of photography, film, digital imagery etc.)--- is associated with the new interlocutors of the visual, who have taken this visual cultural field as their object. One expression of this critical discourse is the emergence of new academic departments devoted to the study of visual culture from the ashes of the discipline of art history in an attempt to cope with the pictorial turn.

A sampling of the books in this exponentially growing field might include, among others, the following: Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990); Rosalind Krauss's The Optical Unconscious (1993); Susan Buck-Morss's The Dialectics of Seeing (1989); Lucien Taylor's edited collection Visualizing Theory (1994); Barbara Maria Stafford's Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (1991); Lisa Cartwright's Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture (1995); and Vision and Visuality (1988) edited by Hal Foster) and Martin Jays' Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.

The latter shows that a great deal of recent French thought in a wide variety of fields, is in one way or another imbued with a profound suspicion of vision and its hegemonic role in the modern era- the clear embodiment of Western Enlightenment rationality in the eye metaphor. The reference is to as the Cartesian perspectivalism of the modern scopic regime, and the Renaissance perspective in the visual arts. In doing so Jay has brought the question of the visual to the forefront of critical thinking.

Cartesian perspectivalism is the e dominant scopic regime of modernity, and this scopic regime combines Descartes’ self-reflexive subject of representation—the I of ‘I think therefore I am’—with the Renaissance notion of vision and representation demonstrated in single-point perspective (whereby the world is seen as though through a single unblinking eye). The result is an ‘ocularcentric’ world view that privileges and equates the I with the eye. In Jay’s analysis, knowledge, perception, identity, language and vision are shown to be intricately related.

Jay has argued that modernity's culture of vision is not as homogeneous as has been thought. Although perspectivalism dominates, there are at least two very different "scopic regimes" that we inherited from the past: the "art of describing," as Svetlana Alpers has called it, and which comes to us from the seventeenth- century Dutch painters, as well as a way of seeing akin to the baroque. While it is easy to see Descartes behind the hegemony of perspectivalism, Jay correlates descriptive artistic practice with Baconian empiricism.

The other different scopic regime that rejects the "monocular geometricalization" of the Cartesian regime is the baroque with its aesthetics of the sublime and unrepresentability. The "madness of vision" of the baroque period "self-consciously revels in the contradictions between surface and depth, disparaging as a result any attempt to reduce the multiplicity of visual spaces into any one coherent essence" and its celebration of a disorienting and ecstatic surplus of images. Jay correlates the baroque manner of envisioning vision to the multiplicity of viewpoints in Leibniz's theory of monads, to Pascal's thoughts on paradox, and to Counter-Reformation mystics' openness to rapture.