Review
Title: Seeing Things: Technologies of Vision and the Making of Mormonism
Author: Mason Kamana Allred
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Genre: Mormon Studies
Year Published: 2023
Number of Pages: 266
Binding: Hardback
ISBN13: 9781469672571
Price: $99.00
Reviewed by Cheryl L. Bruno for the Association for Mormon Letters
If you served a Mormon mission in the early 1980s, you may have read a piece that made the rounds as a fuzzily Xeroxed copy of a 1980 talk, “The Meaning of the Atonement,” by Cleon Skousen. The talk speaks of the material nature of spirit and plays on Orson Pratt’s early Mormon theology of matter. In this talk, the reader is introduced to “Intelligences”—diverse spirit beings at different stages of progression. These intelligences unite with human and animal bodies, plants, and even non-organic elements. Skousen’s talk leapt to my mind when I read Mason Allred’s introduction of his topic: “Early Latter-day Saints understood matter to be coeternal with God, to be dynamic, and to have some form of agency” (2):
In new Mormon scripture, “the Gods” created the world not out of nothing but by organizing existing matter. In fact, they ordered the world, including light, the earth, and the planets, and “watched those things which they had ordered until they obeyed.” Divine vision was met with material agency. The Gods saw everything into creation by watching intelligent matter choose to obey their command. (3)
This is the first time I have read much about the concept of intelligent matter since my mission. In Seeing Things: Technologies of Vision and the Making of Mormonism, Mason Kamana Allred puts forth a new take on this fascinating alternative idea from early Mormonism: “My focus on the materiality of the concepts of early Mormonism that might otherwise seem to defy perceptibility, such as revelation, spirit, and vision, seeks rather to highlight the networked interplay between matter and meaning” (7).
Allred’s introduction is highly theoretical, and he might lose you as he explores his topic in the first twenty-two pages of conversation with Foucault, Derrida, Nietzche, Barad, Coviello, and many others. But I want you to read this book! My advice? Put off the introduction until later and jump right into the first chapter on page 23. You’ll catch on to where Allred is going with his “media archaeology” as you read about Joseph Smith’s first vision as reproduced through print. Through the “magic” of mechanical print reproduction, Allred says, “foundational Mormon texts could translate subjective spiritual vision into objective textual vision and back, for an imagined or projected community of readers across the blossoming faith” (24). Early texts had the ability to transfer visions to the reader and encourage them to experience visions of their own. Allred compares this to the early horror theater of the day, where crude projectors were used to cast images of ghosts and demons onto semitransparent screens or smoke. In both instances, rational technology and the supernatural were combined. “If properly done, material practices of reading could enable reading ‘between letters and lines’ to provoke spiritual vision” (29).
It is thus that Allred presents Mormonism as “a culture of seeing,” and material media as an almost animate force through which the seeing happens. “Turning passive reading spectators into active visionary observers was the early Mormon project” (31), but with this came the necessity for discipline and management (44).
Following the first chapter, Allred continues the discussion of cultural media and revelatory experiences by considering panoramic paintings, photography, typewriting, motion pictures, microfilm, and television, each of which made its own contribution to the portrayal of the Mormon experience.
Huge, painted, panoramic displays, popular from the 1840s to the 1880s, gave viewers a shared vision of the past and future of Mormonism. They served to standardize the way early members viewed their Church and its history.
Photographers Elfie Huntington and Suza Young Gates focused on and critiqued men’s imaginations in order to broaden the vision of Latter-day Saints. These women “channelled patriarchal visions, through “canny mimicry,” by deliberately reproducing gender stereotypes in imperfect and amplified ways” (75).
Mormon-produced motion pictures, especially the film “One Hundred Years of Mormonism,” racialized Mormons into the pure white mainstream, and gave them a new sense of national belonging.
The widespread use of microfilm became a “Urim and Thummim” for LDS users. “Seated at the throne of the microfilm reader,” Church members “could experience the miracles and revelations of the magnified microrecords. This process structured the overall guiding vision of redeeming the dead but also focused it into literal visions” (141).
Television brought sight and sound from all over the earth and even outer space into each home. “Turning dials, raising hands, and attending meetings from afar gathered the flock under the standard of a clean-cut wholesome image of harmony” (181).
Seeing Things highlights the integral role that media practices and technologies have played in shaping the development of Mormonism. Rather than being a static religion, the author sees Mormonism as a series of evolving visions that have been enabled and propagated through media practices. These practices not only provided a means of disseminating information and creating community but also served to train and discipline members in how to see and interpret the world around them. By directing the focus of members toward certain subjects and perspectives, media practices have been instrumental in shaping the vision of Mormonism and ensuring its continued growth and evolution over time. In essence, the management of members’ vision has been a crucial factor in the formation and development of this dynamic religion.
After studying these ways of “seeing” Mormonism through the media, as well as the shadowy specters that the media ignored, stereotyped, or rejected, the reader is now ready to appreciate Allred’s insightful conclusion. New media environments in the digital age have become increasingly individualized and less unified. “It has gradually become clearer that looking away altogether is not sustainable in the age of Web 2.0” (188). Neither has the Church’s response of “look here, not there,” been working. Allred suggests that “by taking stock of their past and present media entanglements, Latter-day Saints might generate new horizons of inclusion and sever problematic ties to harmful or dangerously limited visions” (189).
From my vantage point of sixty-plus years, it does seem that LDS leaders are in a spot like never before where they just don’t know how to stem the onslaught of media influences pulling members away from the Church. Perhaps understanding how media has been used and misused in the past can indeed help. Allred’s is a highbrow, yet hopeful vision where Mormonism retains its spirit and peculiarity while simultaneously spanning divides and extending inclusivity. Now we need a companion volume that can outline the brass tacks of exactly how to transform these concepts and visualizations into reality.