309 REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY © BERG 2012 PRINTED IN THE UK Senses & Society VOLUME 7, ISSUE 3 PP 309–328 Senses & Society DOI: 10.2752/174589312X13394219653680 Groping in the Dark The Scotopic Space of Blackouts Sandy Isenstadt ABSTRACT Government mandated blackouts precipitated a crisis in the optical consciousness of the American public in the first years of the Second World War. In an effort to foil potential aerial bombardment, citizens were asked to turn off their lights and so break an otherwise unqualified promise of modernization: ubiquitous illumination. After decades of constantly increasing levels of artificial light, blackouts challenged not only nighttime visibility, but spatial perception more generally. Americans discussed ways to adjust to dimmer surroundings, to infer spatial information from non-visual senses and familiarize themselves with nightscapes based on specular rather than geometric properties of surfaces. Although the blackouts lasted only a few years in the USA, they reveal the profile, albeit in negative terms, of how the nation’s visual environment was imagined around 1940. KEYWORDS: electric light, blackout, space perception, senses and sensation – social aspects Sandy Isenstadt teaches the history of modern architecture at the University of Delaware. This article is part of a larger project examining the novel spaces produced by electric light. sandy.isenstadt@gmail.com