Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight PDF
Preview Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight
VISION IN CONTEXT (cid:9)(cid:9) Published in 1996 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016 www.routledge-ny. corn Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN www.routledge.co.uk Copyright © 1996 by Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Transferred to Digital Printing 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vision in context: historical and contemporary perspectives on sight / edited by Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-91474-4 (hbk.), ISBN 0-415-91475-2 (pbk.) 1. Image (Philosophy). 2.Vision. 3. Gaze. I. Brennan, Teresa, 1952–. II. Jay, Martin, 1944–. B105.147v57 1995 95-42441 128.3—dc20 CIP Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent. ACKNOWI Fr)GMFNTS The editors would like to thank the Belle van Zuylen Institute of the University of Amsterdam, which organized the conference and lectures on which this book is based. We also thank the rector magnificus of the University of Amsterdam, Professor Peter de Meijer, for his personal vision in this and other projects and Elisabeth Lissenberg for many kinds of support. Special thanks to Kate Brennan and Kwok Wei Leng, for their intelligent and tireless assistance in preparing the manu- script, and to Kevin Bruyneel. We would like to thank Cathy Gallagher, who has contributed to this book in many intangible ways and Tom Conley who, apart from being an exemplary contributor, selected and took most of the photographs in this volume. Teresa Brennan would also like to thank the Institute of Commonwealth Studies of the University of London for a Robert Gordon Menzies Fellowship and the Philosophy Department of Melbourne University for its collegiate hospitality. All photos for chapters 4, 6, 14, and 15 were taken by Tom Conley. Acknowledgments v Introduction , Vision in Context: Reflections and Refractions 1 Martin Jay P_A_RT ONE: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES 2 Refracting Classical Vision: Changing Cultures of Viewing is Simon Goldhill 3 Sight and Vision in Medieval Christian Thought 29 Janet Martin Soskice 4 The Wit of the Letter: Holbein's Lacan 45 Tom Conley 5 The Visibility of Visuality 63 Peter de Bolla 6 "Authentic Tidings of Invisible Things": Vision and the Invisible in the Later Nineteenth Century 83 Gillian Beer PART TWO: CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES 7 Division of the Gaze, or, Remarks on the Color and Tenor of Contemporary "Theory" ioi Stephen Melville FEMINISM, NATIONSPACE 8 Imaginary Identity: Space, Gender, Nation 117 Helga GeyerRyan - 9 Illuminating Passion: Irigaray's Transfiguration of Night 127 Cathryn Vasseleu SEXUAL ORIENTATION AND THE GAZE ,o The Gaze in the Closet 139 Mieke Bal II The Gaze of Inversion: The Lesbian as Visionary 155 renee c. hoogland 12 The Homosocial Gaze According to Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers 169 Ernst van Alphen FILM/ART: REDEFINITIONS 13 "Other's Others": Spectatorship and Difference 187 Irit Rogoff 14 "Father, Can't You See I'm Filming?" 203 Parveen Adams Conclusion 15 "The Contexts of Vision" from a Specific Standpoint 217 Teresa Brennan Contributors 231 Index 233 Vision in Context: Reflections and Refractions I Martin jay Jay The new fascination with modes of seeing and the enigmas of visual experience evident in a wide variety of fields may well betoken a para- digm shift in the cultural imaginary of our age. What has been called "the pictorial turn" bids fair to succeed the earlier "linguistic turn" so loudly trumpeted by twentieth-century philoso- phers.1 The model of "reading texts," which served productively as the master metaphor for postobjectivist interpretations of many different phenomena, is now giving way to models of spectatorship and visuality, which refuse to be redescribed in entirely linguistic terms. The figural is resisting subsumption under the rubric of discursivity; the image is demanding its own unique mode of analysis. The linguistic and the discursive have not, to be sure, been simply replaced by the pictorial and the figural but rather in complicated ways infiltrat- ed by them. As the title of a recent book suggests, "viewing texts" and "reading pictures" are now chiasmically intertwined.2 No longer is it possible for psychoanalysts and those influenced by them to say, as Lacan famously once did, that "the unconscious is structured like a language," for Lacan's own later ruminations on vision can be mobilized to undermine or at least radically add nuance to this claim. What has been called "the optical unconscious" now appears as a new dark continent ripe for exploration.3 The "other" of textuality, the referential object supposedly banished by self- sufficient diacritical systems, has returned to haunt many texts. Perception, in short, has come back in postobjectivist, postpositivist, even postphenomenological forms. These forms reflect, however, the lessons of the linguistic turn, which taught us to attend to the constituted rather than the found quality of seemingly "natural" phenomena. Naive mimesis has been displaced by a far more sophisticated version, which goes beyond the simple notion of imitative mirroring or specular duplication.4 At a time when the constructed nature of the body in general has become a commonplace of contemporary scholarship, "the eye" and "the gaze" (or "the look") have been opened to historical and cultural interpretations, which undermine their alleged- ly universal character. Whole theories have been built on distinctions between "the gaze" and oth- er types of seeing, such as "the glance," or on distinctions between "panoptic," "virtual," and mobilized" gazes.5 Culturally specific "visuality"—or what the French film critic Christian Metz " called different "scopic regimes"—has displaced "vision" per se as the central concern of scholars in many different disciplines.6 New attention has been paid to scientifically and technologically gen- erated "techniques of observation," which are shown to be dependent on culturally inflected visu- al practices and able in turn to influence later ones.? Scholars in fields as disparate as philosophy and anthropology now probe their disciplines' past and interrogate their present to unveil the hid- den effects of visual metaphors and visual practices on their most fundamental assumptions. 8 More obviously visually oriented disciplines such as art history, film studies, and the history of photog- raphy have suddenly gained a central place in the humanities as a whole as their lessons seem applicable to issues far from their original field of inquiry. 9 The work of leading critics in these fields, such as Rosalind Krauss, Michael Fried, Victor Burgin, Stephen Heath, Benjamin Buchloh, Kaja Silverman, Craig Owens, Hal Foster, Miriam Hansen, and Joel Snyder, now rapidly produces a ripple effect through neighboring disciplines. The pictorial turn has taken place, observers have been quick to note, against the backdrop Vision in Context of the seemingly exponential increase of images in Western culture, an increase that has unleashed panegyrics of postmodernist praise and jeremiads of antimodernist anxiety. 10 The rehearsing of ancient iconoclastic polemics over the seductive power of images has been widely remarked." The political implications of this hypertrophy of visual stimulation have engendered vigorous debate, which has led to historical investigations of the entanglement of the political and the visual in many previous eras and cultural contexts. One need only mention Michel Foucault's work on sur- veillance and the panopticon, Guy Debora critique of the "society of the spectacle," and John Berger's exploration of the "ways of seeing" to signal the widespread fascination with this theme, 2 which has informed disciplines from political theory to postcolonial studies.' Perhaps nowhere have the problematic implications of certain scopic regimes been as rigor- ously probed as in the area of gender, where the notion of the objectifying "male gaze" emerged only a few years ago in the work of critics like Laura Mulvey, Griselda Pollock, and Mary Ann Doane as one of the primary mechanisms by which oppressive patriarchal relations seemed to be maintained. It is a mark of the rapid and proliferating discussion of visuality that these relatively recent efforts now seem somewhat dated as more complicated and nuanced notions of gendered spectatorship have been advanced. If anything is clear about the vigorous and ongoing discussion of how to situate "sexuality in the field of vision," to borrow the title of Jacqueline Rose's influen- tial book," it is that we are still very much at the dawn of a collective exploration that shows no signs of reaching an easy consensus. Indeed, as the chapters in this collection powerfully demonstrate, the pictorial turn is only now beginning to produce work that complicates and adds nuance to the conclusions reached by pioneering efforts in this area. First, we must remark the attention to historical specificity that informs several—if not all—of the contributions. Rather than offering sweeping generalizations about the ocularcentric character of all of "Western culture" or the "Cartesian perspectivalism" that dominates the modern era, they carefully discriminate among discrete and often contradictory moments in that heterogeneous history. Thus, Simon Goldhill successfully challenges the conven- tional assumption that the privileging of ekphrasis, the picturing of set pieces from another medi- um such as poetry, defined virtually all of classical visual practice. He shows instead that at least three distinct moments can be discerned in which alternative scopic regimes—or at least discours- es of viewing—prevailed: the democratic city-state of fifth and fourth century b.c.e., in which the viewer was identified with the collective gaze of citizens participating in the polis; the Hellenistic Alexandria of the ca. third to first centuries b.c.e., in which the individual expert (sophos) analyti- cally viewed art from the past based on the exercise of a capacity for knowledge-producing phanta- sia; and the Second Sophistic Era of the Roman Empire (ca. the second to fourth centuries c.e.), in which the desiring eye came to be the source of serious concern, a concern that later had its impact on the Christian suspicion of the eye. In all of these cases, Goldhill demonstrates the complex imbrication not only of the visual and the rhetorical but also of the visual and larger institutional structures of the ancient world. Similarly, Janet Martin Soskice shows that the medieval church's ambivalent reservations toward the physiological vision of the actual eyes in comparison to the "intellectual visions" of the soul drew on an implicit hostility to the body, which had roots in gnostic thought and carried explicit gender implications. Insofar as women were generally associated with "lower" corporeal functions than men, the distrust of visual experience was a sign of patriarchal bias. Interestingly, it also betokened a diminution of the importance of the Incarnation, in which God had taken on the fleshly identity associated primarily with women. Although Soskice acknowledges the continuing importance of visual stimulation in Christian worship during the Middle Ages, 14 her analysis of devotional writings demonstrates the abiding power of the iconoclastic impulse inherited from cer- tain gnostic sources. Soskice concludes that modern feminists might need to rethink their general
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