The crux of Carpenter’s insight, I think, is that he isn’t just interested in a privileging of sight over other senses, but a particular way of thinking of sight as touch, of imagining that the things we see are real. On a certain level, of course, we do know that if we look at a row of trees, the “trees” are real while the “row” is imaginary, but — at the same time — Carpenter is not wrong to note that we do tend to act as if these mental bridges are real. Jonathan Edwards’ notion that what God “sees” produces reality gets secularized into practices we do without thinking about it: seeing is believing, we say, and despite all the evidence that seeing a thing is practically synonymous with seeing it wrong, we can still use phrases like “photographic evidence” as if it’s not an oxymoron.
