In a visually encoded world, it is not surprising that the perception of the heard is considered secondary to that of the seen, and that the sonic is thought of as an attribute to a visual object. However, sounds and voices are of equal presence and significance in our realities. In receptive terms –hearing– the role of sound is almost obvious. We orient ourselves in the world sonically; a quiet place triggers immediate alertness in us, and in a louder space the sound of our names will most likely catch our attention. Yet, sound does not only function receptively in our realities. Appearance is not only visual, and we appear sonically just as much as we do visually. Sonic appearance is not physiognomic; it is not a fixed, innate condition of identity, but rather it is an active doing. With the ability to appear sonically comes the ability to be perceived sonically, and so I would like to take this space to reflect on the gaze from the lens of sound studies. In an article titled “Listening” from the volume The Responsibility of Forms, Roland Barthes distinguishes between three modes of listening. His thinking of listening relies on a strict differentiation between the physiological phenomenon of hearing, and the psychological phenomenon of listening, which for him means an intentional engagement with sonic content. Barthes credits this ability only to human ears (a somewhat problematic statement when thinking of other accounts of sonic realities, but that is a whole different conversation), which separates human beings form animals. The first mode of listening he presents is the only one we share with animals: “alert” listening through which we orient ourselves in the world. The second mode, Barthes names “deciphering”; a mode in which “the human begins” (Barthes, 245) and listening is used in order to analyze semantic content. Finally, the third mode is nameless. This is a mode that concentrates on the “who” which speaks, instead of “what” is said. Barthes writes:
The third listening […] does not aim – or await – certain determined, classified signs: not what is said or emitted, but who speaks, who emits: such listening is supposed to develop in an inter-subjective space where “I am listening” also means “listen to me”; what seizes upon – in order to transform and restore to the endless interplay of transference –is a general “signifying” no longer considerable without the determination of the unconscious. (Barthes, 246)
Even if the semantic layer is dissected and the listening is focused solely on the “who” there exists still a layer of “what” that informs this listening. Sonic content such as intonation, speed, stability of the voice and other subtle vocal cues can reveal aspects of the state of the “who” that speaks. However, listening is not blind, and unconsciously we hold a massive database of sonic bias; we hear nationality, class, race, gender and education just as clearly as we do words. Thus, while listening to the who may (and does) tell us things that go beyond the semantic content, the ability of the “who” that speaks to be affected by the “who” that listens is in and of itself a condition of heardness.
At this point it is useful to consider further accounts of listening practices, such as those proposed by sound theorist Michel Chion. Chion’s account of listening comes from the tradition of Musique Concréte, a stream of electroacoustic music developed in France in the 1940s, and most notably recognized with the composer Pierre Schaeffer. This tradition aimed to emancipate sound from its’ perceptive conditions as a secondary value of an object, and considered it as an object itself. As such, sound becomes more than a mere signifier of an action and is now able exist independently. Although Chion is concerned with contextualized listening practices in relation to music and film, similarly to Barthes he also divides listening into three categories. For the purposes of this writing, I will only focus on Chion’s second listening category, reduced listening. A mode of listening that “attend[s] to sounds in themselves, and analyz[es] sounds strictly in terms of their formal attributes rather than in relation to cause, context, or semantic information.” (Sound Objects, 7) However, listening to “disembodied” sounds in general, and voices in particular, is never this simple. I believe it is actually not much different from considerations of visuality and the gaze in more traditional senses. In “The Lived Experience of The Black Man” Fanon opens by saying: “I am an object among objects” (Fanon, 89), a being that is independent and is not yet subjected. When encountered with the white gaze, Fanon writes: “I cast an objective gaze over myself, discovered my blackness, my ethnic features; deafened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders, and above all, yes, above all, the grinning Y a bon Banania.”(Fanon, 92) Fanon’s interaction with the white gaze reduced him to his formal attribute(s)- his race. Would a recording of Fanon’s voice, detached from the visuality of his body, access this database as well? My answer would be yes, absolutely. Considering that, could we think of listening as the gaze of the sonic realm? The current discourse about the emancipation of sound has taken another groundbreaking turn with the rise of new materialism. Authors such as Christoph Cox, Brandon Labelle and Salomé Voegelin have begun to raise questions about sonic agency, and to consider sounds as active, sounding beings. The sounding being refuses the definition of neither an object nor a subject, as it is a continuous doing. It is a being that appears and is perceived simultaneously. The conditions of heardness that impact the ways in which a sounding being is listened to does not define it’s ability to sound (if a tree falls in the forest and no one was there to hear it, it did make a sound.), but rather it defines the ways in which it is perceived as a subject. In an essay titled “Ethics of Listening”, Salomé Voegelin echoes my understanding of a sounding being as a doing, and speaks to the constant interplay between the appearance and subjection in the life of a sounding being:
The being as doing foregrounds existence in general, ignoring whether the being is an object or a subject; and it comes to meaning from this non-distinct equivalence, through its process rather than as an entity. At the same time it challenges the notion of doing as inherently better than being, as it is being, but being not as object but as thing, thinging existence continually, fluidly, in passing. The object as thing is an activity, it is to do: being as the production of possibilities rather than the appearance of totality. (Voegelin, “Ethics of Listening”)
The consideration of possibilities as opposed to an “appearance of totality” is bound to the same significations that exist in the unconscious “interplay of transference” between that who speaks and that who listens. In her most recent publication, The Race of Sound, Nina Sun Eidsheim discusses the case of Charles Clifford, an African-American man who was convicted in 1999 for selling drugs only based on a recording of his voice. The Clifford example shows us that the sounding identity is subjected to the same gaze. The reduction of the white gaze as experienced equally by both Clifford and Fanon, while it reduced both of their identities through a subjection of another, the reduction itself was overloaded with the same unconscious database of bias that is expressed visually in Fanon’s case, and sonically in Clifford’s. The understanding of listening as a sonic gaze is an understanding of our ears’ ability to hear beyond semantic content. Concentrating on the “who” as opposed to the “what” is an act of reduced listening that hears the voice as an independent object, one that may be detached from the body, but is not at all disembodied. A voice is a continuation of a body; it is a sonic manifestation of identity. In the context of the gaze, reduced listening by the “who” that listens, is informed by unconscious layers of signification that “pollute” it’s listening and affects it’s ability to listen of this voice purely in terms of the “who” which speaks.
Response to readings: The readings this week made me think the formation of an identity and the implications of a lack of an identity. In music and sound studies, a sonic identity is defined by “timbre”: when two instruments play the same note, we go to timbre to tell us which instruments they are. Timbre is the thing differentiates one sound from another and creates a class of sounds. However, the ways in which it does the differentiation work against the consideration of a sonic identity, because timbre almost always belongs to the listener, the perceiver of a sound. I find it interesting to consider timbre alongside Ellison’s work. In his writing on Wright in the article Richard Wright’s Blues, Ellison claims that the formation of identity or individuality is always a process: Man cannot express that which does not exist – either in the form of dreams, ideas, or realities- in his environment. Neither his thoughts nor his feelings, his sensibility nor his intellect are fixed, innate qualities. They are processes that arise out of the interpretation of human instinct with environment, through the process called experience; each changing and being changed by others. (Ellison, 270-271) Ellison’s consideration of experience and the formation of an identity as a process, echoes Judith Butler’s understanding of identity as performative, as opposed to a fixed quality. The expression of these processes depends on their existence in reality. Going back to timbre, if the perceiver defines the timbre of Black American identity, what reality does it express? Does this reality actually exist in the person’s environment? Or does it only exist in the eyes of the perceiver? What does the ability dictate someone else’s identity impose on the subject of this identity? In Harlem Is Nowhere, Ellison’s ‘nowhere man’ who is “in a constant search of an identity” (Ellison and Parks, 4) has to always fight against the social factors that are supposed to shape the black American identity (Ellison and Parks, 1). Is it possible to think of the search after the black American identity as a search for self-definition that is not dictated by perception? In the opening paragraph of “12 Million Black Voices”, Wright writes: “you usually take us for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem” (Wright, 10). The timbre of Black American identities is a result of processes that took (and are still taking) place throughout history, that managed to morph and change it, while still maintaining the same core sonic identity, which becomes inaudible through the saturation of perception. The discussion about knowledge as power, and the use of language as resistance in part two of “12 Million Black Voices”, “Inheritors of Slavery”, speaks to the role of the voice and language in the formation of an identity, it’s ability to appear, and the required conditions of heardness that are necessary in order to participate in any sort of resistance. Wright describes situations in which the slaves’ ability to “steal” the language of the Lords of the Land, and to learn ways to use it as if it was their own has created a sense of victory and freedom: We stole words from the guarding lips of the Lords of the Land, who didn’t want us to know too many of them and their meaning. […] We proceeded to build a language in inflections of voice, through tonal variety, by hurried speech, in honeyed drawls, by rolling our eyes, by flourishing our hands, by assigning common, simple words new meanings, meanings which enabled us to speak of revolt in the actual presence of the Lords of the Land without their being aware! (Wright, 40) In this description we learn a lot on a formation of a sonic identity through voice contours and language. The instrumentalization of language that is expressed in this passage creates a mask through two conditions of heardness: the one the Lords of the Land hear, and the one that the slaves hear in their own reality, which allows them to resist and claim their sonic identity as their own.
As we consider the im/possibility of a black gaze, we can look to yet ultimately depart from varied understandings of the gaze writ large. Many (in film theory at least) deploy this term in relation to Laura Mulvey, whose notion of the male gaze in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” identifies scopophilia at the base of Hollywood viewing practices. Objectification of the female body onscreen, what she describes as “to-be-looked-at-ness”, secures the position and pleasure of the male spectator who looks. While subsequent theorists, including feminist ones and many of color, question her assumption that male spectatorship is given in any audience, her idea that objectification of whomever a medium represents operates as pleasurable for the one who looks continues to be relevant even if schematic. This assumption similarly belies, however, the way in which (as I understand) Foucault, Sartre, and Lacan, have theorized the gaze as non-localizable and certainly not gendered in any particular sense:
With Foucault, the panopticon describes an imagined gaze and structure of power that entails the process of subjectivation. The subject is produced by this structure insofar as one internalizes the panoptic gaze and behaves in conformity to its law. In this conception of the gaze, which Foucault redressed after criticism, the subject remains powerless and cannot necessarily resist.
For Sartre in Being and Nothingness, the gaze of a subject involves both looking and in turn being looked at. Here the look operates as a pure and disembodied act of looking, as in a voyeur who stares through a keyhole at someone. The rustling of leaves, of sound, interestingly, then provokes the feeling of being watched or the presence of another, or in other words a sound makes the subject imagine the gaze of another person as a threat. The threat is that you cannot locate the sound or the one who watches. At this moment the subject is no longer a subject, but the object of a gaze in a visual field.
Lacan extends the ideas of Sartre: This presence and feeling of another stems not necessarily from the other but from our own act of looking. For Lacan, the gaze is still imagined but it does not necessarily belong to another person. Rather, my ability to see leaves me open to being seen. Lacan uses the anecdote of a fishing boat, where he is asked by a friend if he can spot a sardine can in the distance. He replies that he cannot, to which his friend responds, “Well, it can see you!” Put differently, awareness emerges therefore of a possibility that others can see me at any point and from any point. This stems though from my ability to see in the first place. Here the gaze implies a subject but not necessarily as the product of an internalized Foucauldian law, rather as the condition of the possibility of seeing for the subject in the first place.
While these ideas do not necessarily include subjects of color, we might recall Sartre again and posit that the gaze disappears when you see that someone truly is watching. In other words, the eyes annihilate the gaze when you locate it. In this sense we can turn finally to bell hooks, whose “oppositional gaze” of black female spectatorship stages the aforementioned critique of Mulvey. By recognizing the panoptic structuration of power that attends visual representation/objectification, especially in terms of racialization, by locating the gaze of the other and returning it, the possibility and resistance of a black gaze might emerge in contest. As the Kitchen Table Series of Carrie Mae Weems reveals, the ability to look back and at the photographic (or cinematic) apparatus (of the white gaze) entails this latent possibility.
Reading Ellison’s “Harlem is Nowhere” and revisiting my understanding of what the “gaze” or “flight” and “fugitivity” are proved to be a challenging experience for me. Ellison’s opening of the discussion and reflection on the three criteria for clinical assessment (e.g. minority, politico-economic relations, and revolutionary subject status) already set up a particular set of terms whereby one might encounter the nowhereness of Harlem. I immediately coupled this quasi-pathological assessment with a kind of gaze cast upon the Ellison’s subject; a latent desire to classify in order to make sense of the one who stands out uncomfortably. This idea of the “total Negro” (and, of course, I cannot help but think about Eastman and his attention to “that which is fundamental”) seems to emerge at the wayside (we might also think of Ellison writing “one wanders in a ghetto maze”) of Ellison’s inquiry (2, 7). He writes, after “leaving” the clinic “for a while,” how might we “describe the past which he [the Negro] drags into this scene, and what is the future toward which he stumbles and becomes confused?” (2). Unfortunately, my understanding of the gaze cannot quite ever be dislodged from Foucault; the gaze, in the carceral sense, seeks to view and apprehend. I am particularly made aware of my Foucauldian response in the space of redaction; I want to know what was crossed out and typed over in Ellison’s text. The various equations penciled in Ellison’s text makes me curious about the things that he is interested in counting and listing—the latent accounting and numerical material that hides behind his assessment. Yet, in Ellison’s attempt to make sense of the temporality of this racialized apprehension of “the Negro” in the clinic and, more generally, “the scene: Harlem” (2). Ellison also attends to a variety of affective dimensions whereby we understand the state of Harlem: “a reality which for many defines and colors the world” (2). Ellison queers the normative encounter of finding or looking for by attending to the “unseen eye”; yet, I do not believe this gesture escapes a gaze that seeks to extract meaning (59). I am wondering if, adjacent, aside, or eschew from a “gaze,” we might consider a “clock” or a “read”—gestures that play with ephemeral (after Muñoz) assessments of embodiment, consciousness, and relation.
Thinking about the “demand [for] new definitions of terms,” under what constraints (e.g. ethical, spatial, temporal, etc.) might we render unreality/reality legible? Could we think more about the aesthetic space “folk-jazz” as it concerns city life (7)? What can be said for a looking that is present in the feeling qua being “guilty, hostile, ‘nowhere’” and the affective connection to Frame 6—especially the child sitting in front of the phrase “the unseen eye is watching you” (76).
My first point of reference for the “gaze” is Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” as I’m sure is the case for others in this class. For Mulvey, the concept of the gaze is tightly intertwined with hierarchies of power and notions of pleasure. Foucault’s panopticon, surveillance from above, is another point of reference for my understanding of the gaze. Additionally, while I am at the moment unable to point to specific theorists or works that have influenced my understanding of the gaze in this direction, I’ve come to realize that I also associate the gaze with an imperializing, archival impulse. The motivation to categorize—to make fit within a Western epistemological structure, to put everything/one in its place—is latent to the gaze. In this way, the gaze is antithetical to opacity.
However, I am very interested to continue our conversation about a potential Black gaze because I do not necessarily believe that my referents when I use/hear the term “gaze” are inherent or inescapable. In the past, I’ve often turned towards bell hooks’ Black Looks: Race and Representation, specifically the essay “Representation of Whiteness.” hooks makes a strong case for a Black mode of looking that is not invested in scopophilic pleasure or an imperializing impulse, but instead validates the interiority and subjectivity of the Black “looker.” I would also gesture towards Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) as a film that centers an idea of the Black gaze and a Black aesthetic. Between the materials for this week and last week, I feel that last week’s photo projects, especially Weems’ The Kitchen Table Series, point more towards a theory of a potential Black gaze than this week’s materials. Ellison’s “Harlem is Nowhere” felt particularly pathologizing and classificatory, characteristics that I do not associate with a Black gaze that aims to subvert the more traditional associations of the gaze with surveillance, power, and the imperial impulse.
As Stephen and Heather write in their posts, I often think about the gaze in reference to Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Rereading the essay, this passage in particular caught my eye: “Originally, in his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality which exist as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones. At this point he associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (Mulvey 8 italics mine). The description of the gaze as controlling seems relevant to our discussion of the gaze and its potential recoverability in developing something that might be called a black gaze. The gaze as a method of control resonates with the fixity of the white gaze that Fanon describes in Black Skin, White Masks. But, as Ellison exposes with the invisible/hypervisible overlap in Invisible Man, the white gaze is incapable of fulling controlling/capturing/fixing its subject. Something on the lower frequency moves otherwise away from the control of the gaze.
What I have also been thinking about the past week, similar to what Lee describes in their post, is how a sonic form of the gaze is also performed. In returning to Mulvey, I also return to my first encounter with her article during last year’s MA Seminar with Julie Crawford, who assigned James Baldwin’s short story “Going to Meet the Man” alongside Mulvey. Certainly Baldwin shows in reverse how deputy Jesse develops a scopophilic relationship to blackness, through his leveraging of his power as a white police officer to sexually assault black women and brutally beat the imprisoned young black man, and through recalling the source of his scopophilia: witnessing a lynching as a child. But sound weaves itself into these scopophilic interactions. In the cell, “The boy rolled around in his own dirt and water and blood and tried to scream again as the prod hit his testicles, but the scream did not come out, only a kind of rattle and a moan” (Baldwin 233). And all the while, behind the scene of the beating, black protesters outside the are singing to attempt to free the wrongly imprisoned people inside. Here we see a contestation of sound under the hegemony of the deputy’s gaze. In response to the sound outside that he cannot control (and at the moment cannot see through the walls of the police station), he attempts to illicit sound from the imprisoned man to counter the singing. The beating functions both to destroy the body of the man and to draw out the scream, to regain control of the soundscape and cancel out the singing outside. But “the scream did not come out,” and the singing goes on. The utterances produced, the “rattle and a moan” do not seem to do the work the white gaze requires at that particular moment.
And, further back, we hear sound as part of the child-Jesse’s inauguration into a white gaze. At the lynching, “The sounds of laughing and cursing and wrath—and something else—rolled in waves from the front of the mob to the back. Those in front expressed delight at what they saw, and this delight rolled backward, wave upon wave, across the clearing, more acrid than the smoke” (245). The sound of the crowd signals the appearance of the man that is about to be killed; sound sets the scene and invites the gaze. Here I am also thinking about Gustavus Stadler’s article “Never Heard Such a Thing: Lynching and Phonographic Modernity.” Stadler explores a history of early sound recordings that advertised themselves as “real,” “authentic” recordings of lynchings in the late 1870s and 1880s (many thanks to Professor Hartman for recommending this article to me last semester). As we talk about how the development of visual technologies from photography to videography impact our understanding of the gaze, I think we also must keep in mind how audio technology constructs a racialized gaze.
Just as certain modes of listening might reinforce the gaze as a practice of control, we could also think about modes of listening that destabilize that same control. But I wonder if “gaze” is a productive term for this mode of vision/listening or if there is something else we might use instead. Since we looked at the Hughes and DeCarava text, I’ve thought about one image of a couple dancing, an image that blurs at the outline of the subjects because there is a movement that escapes the controlling gaze of the camera. There is a bleeding in the blur (a phrase I’m stealing from metalcore band Code Orange) that implies less a gaze than a haze, a word which could so easily be produced by a misplaced finger on the computer keyboard (and which might recall the Invisible Man sharing a joint with Louis Armstrong in his hole). These thoughts formed while reading this passage in Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha:
“How she loved a ‘hike.’ Especially in the evening, for then everything was moody, odd, deliciously threatening, always hunched and ready to close in on you but never doing so. East of Cottage Grove you saw fewer people, and those you did see had, all of them (how strange, thought Maud Martha), white faces. Over there that matter of mystery and hunchedness was thicker, a hundred-fold” (Brooks 9-10).
We might call Maud Martha’s looking at the strange, white faces a kind of black g(h)aze because it is undergirded by movement and it does not seem to have the impulse to control, categorize, limit, etc. that the scopophilic gaze exhibits. Maud Martha does not seek to uncover or render understandable the hunched mystery. There is also no safety in this g(h)aze; it is “deliciously threatening.” In this g(h)aze there might be a move toward an unboundedness that, as our class discussed on the second week, Fanon views with anxiety.
A note that does not relate to the previous paragraphs:
I think it’s interesting that there is a subgenre of music called “blackgaze” (a hybrid of black metal and shoegaze).
Here is an example of French blackgaze band Alcest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn7wvu8R4Wk
And American blackgaze band Deafheaven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81ITd6ByRLE
As I work on the literature of the eighteenth century, for me, the technological object that functions as a substitute for the eye is not the lens of the camera but rather the scalpel of the dissector. As I contemplate the im/possibility of a black gaze, these anatomical images of opened-up bodies haunt my understanding of what it means to look and to look-in. The dissector’s images are voyeurism at its most intimate and, often, most violent. It is the pornographic gaze as wombs are opened up and enough flesh is left on breasts to remain titillating even when the inner fat is what “should” be looked at. Often set up in anatomical theaters, the body is the performance and is on display. However, rather than just spectacular, these images made it into the routine of perverse gazing as men’s diaries from the 17th and 18th centuries are scattered with references to regularly masturbating to just these images.
I think it might be useful to turn to the medical gaze as the medical looms over this week’s readings, such as in Ralph Ellison essay “Harlem is Nowhere,” which opens exactly in the brightly lit halls of a clinic.
To best understand the gaze on/in the body, I always turn to Shigehisa Kuriyama, who lays out an understanding of how we look at bodies by tracing the Chinese practices of charting the inside of the body alongside the white Western practices of dissection in the eighteenth century. Relying on a fluid East/West binary, his comparisons make apparent the central function of the gaze to constructions of the body and how other ways of looking may become available when the substance of the body shifts. Kuriyama makes an argument for seeing as a way of imagining and that such seeing/imagining ultimately constructs the way the body is inhabited. I bring with me to any discussion of the gaze this sense that the scalpel carves out living experiences of the body along with the rendering inert the fleshy objects in front of it.
At its heart, the scalpel as a technology of a white gaze seeks to know and seeks a knowing that is imagined as only possible through penetration. According to Kuriyama, “for the dissector, the viscera are the truths buried in and under dense flesh, fat, and bone” that require the scalpel to peel back, “violating or peering beneath,” such “opaque” layers of the body to expose “a secret realm” (18). These actions build up an idea of the body possessing “resistant secrecy” (19). In other words, the white gaze is that which constructs a resistance in the body and then simultaneously and subsequently seeks to penetrate within that constructed resistance.
For Kuriyama, there does exist an alternative gaze, a “nonchalant gaze” (29). In the Chinese images of the body, the different approach to seeing is “plainly visible, but which by its very nature is easily overlooked. I mean their fleshless transparency” (18). There are multiple levels of looking at play here. First, the images of the body show the flesh and skin as transparent or even unseen when the right medical eye is trained on it. Second, we, as the viewer of the image, are at once unable to see this invisible skin and struck by its “plain” absence. This nonchalant gaze, this act of looking and not-looking, is not driven by “ocular yearning” as it implies no flesh to be penetrated through (20).
This different way of looking comes from different imaginaries of the body itself and medical attention to it. Mainly, the body is transparent, in part, because the body is imagined within medical practices as feeling always a part of a landscape and setting behind them. The body on display for the medical gaze may have a subtle breeze blowing at the hair and clothes that suggest the environment around them as much as the stuff inside. The nonchalant gaze of not-seeing viscera emerges from a different inhabiting of the body. The body is always open to the environment; it is a realm of “empty places” (28). Health, energy, liveliness, mental state are dependent on such empty spaces being variously filled and acting as “tenuous gathering” spaces for such energies and fluids (28). To inhabit such a body is to inhabit an empty space.
I don’t mean to suggest that either side of this binary constructed by Kuriyama and elaborated on by me is at work in our texts. Within Ellison, I see hints of both. Ellison describes Richard Wright’s Black Boy as evoking “the paradoxical, almost surreal image of a black boy singling lustily as he probes his own grievous wound” (265). This image that Ellison crafts for us imagines Wright as the subject and object of anatomical curiosity, of the desire to peer beyond the flesh. Ellison himself riffs on the idea of being “nowhere,” which we might take to be an adjacent form of inhabiting and gathering in vacancy. Rather, I aim to add physical penetration, visceral transparency, and bodily inhabitation to our cloud of connected concepts that give power and orient the gaze.
Sources I consulted beyond the required readings:
Hitchcock, Tim. English Sexualities, 1700-1800. Macmillan, 1997.
Kuriyama, Shigehisa. “The Case of Chinese Views of the Viscera” in The Imagination of the Body and the History of Embodied Experience. Ed. Shigehisa Kuriyama. International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 2001: 17-29.
And: Lan Li’s writings, working with Kuriyama, on in/visible fluids (there are also some images here): https://preview.shorthand.com/0AptWsLXiO4i7IVP
My encounters with the gaze as concept and nomenclature have typically been rooted in a kind of self-negating or recursive art-historical project. In other words, the gaze is identified in the terminology of its deficient vision or that which undoes it. The gaze is thus folded into its return; the idea is constructed in order to disestablish it. At the risk of sounding tautological, does the gaze (in art-historical practice at least) need to be reclaimed if it is already about what is withheld? Maybe what I bristle against is the idea of perspective rather than gaze, with regard to a hegemonic visual regime.
It is in these terms of the ocular then that the stakes of the gaze vs. perspective debate might lie. The gaze is more ambivalent and environmental: it resides in a space of relationality and is not necessarily about looking directionally in the way that perspective might suggest. Breaking from an art-historical standpoint to one of visuality more broadly, the gaze is a distinctly ambient phenomenon that, as Georges Didi-Huberman suggests, troubles the semiotic fixedness of an image. How do we read this in the FSA photographs in 12 Million Black Voices, that have a clear telos in their purposes of representation. Does the text displace perspective into gaze, from the image and into the environment, or reinstate its fixedness? Can a frequential reading (or “listening”) unhinge the two?
This returns me to the problematic of fiction and documentary that I (along with many others!) raised on the blog last week. Specifically: does the documentary form lend itself to a reading of the gaze as opposed to the perspective of fiction? What aesthetic and affective strategies do we deploy for the FSA images as opposed to, say, DeCarava’s more gestural captures? In a fascinating essay more squarely concerned with documentary film, Erika Balsom suggests a modality of looking drawn on ethnographic practice that challenges the idea of perspectival looking, creating the conditions for a vision that is simultaneous and all-at-once. The works she considers—many from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab—are effective because they provide “thick description of the irreducible complexity of the world, its vital excessiveness and ambiguity.”
Can description then be a practice of the non-visual? Is a sonic gaze a useful paradigm for reclamation of a visual regime, in the way that Weheliye calls for in “In the Mix”? Perhaps we can import the descriptive potential into our discussions around the gaze this week, to complicate the questions of narration and voice that were brought up through Langston Hughes during the last session.
I remember Jenna Wortham, culture editor for The New York Times Magazine, wrote in a letter to the editor of McSweeney’s this: “Are you seeing what I’m seeing on Instagram these days? Selfies, taken in the feeds of store security cameras. Sometimes they’re staged in a bodega, sometimes in a museum. They mimic that old-school picture-in-picture effect, which helped sell televisions in the 1980s and ‘90s. A person capturing themselves as captured by a closed-circuit television, an image frozen in repetition”. She later expands on the potentially utopian possibility within this seemingly dystopian totality: “These images are purposely reclaiming the state’s definition of us [here she refers to Black people, and especially women]—a radical act of play”.
Similarly, I think Weems takes up the issue of gaze through play, but a form of play that entails serious engagement. Though Weems and these everyday selfie artists are inviting the camera to look, to stare or even gaze, there is nothing naive about their projects. Following Uri McMillan’s work Embodied Avatars, I understand these gestures as a commentary on identity under capture. My use of this term, “capture”, brought up concerns last class, so I will seek to clarify here. By capture, I refer to photographic capture, as in being seen through the flattening and totalizing gaze of the security camera and interpellated as a certain subject, a certain body. I also mean capture to align with the working definition on gaze that Prof. Hartman provided us: “man, capital, the gaze”. Wortham goes on to write that “We are always in modes of capture. There is no escape. Surveillance is constant, and the modern experience of blackness oscillates between the extremes of invisibility and visibility.” I think Wortham’s use of capture gestures to the material reality we all live in, now, which is to be at any moment the object of a security camera’s gaze, an undercover cop, an online tracker that records our every online search, but also to capture as an affective and political reality for Black and Indigenous bodies in particular.
As I continue to work through a definition of gaze, I am also thinking of Simone Browne’s argument that the trauma of surveillance on Black bodies begins with the transatlantic slave trade and stretches into the present, which makes me wonder what a historical definition of the gaze would look like. I am also thinking of Achille Mmembe and Janet Roitman’s piece, “Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis”. In it, they theorise how space and failed infrastructure in Cameroon at the height of structural adjustment programs produced an ambient environment of simultaneous laughter and despair at the incredulousness of the economic and political situation. They write, “As rites of expiation, laughter and derision give way to an imaginary well-being; they allow for distance between the subject who laughs and the object of mockery.
The division thus realized is precisely what permits the laughing subject to regain possession of self and to wear the mask” (1995: 352). Similarly, what I see in Weems and the bodega selfies is an incredible tension between “the subject who laughs” and the object being captured by the camera. The one who gazes back is both of these things, and it is that cognitive and affective dissonance that ultimately, according to Mmembe and Roitman, allows the individual to “become a stranger to the “thing” that exercises domination—and then to deride torture, murder, and all other forms of wretchedness” (1995: 352).
I can’t say I have an original referent for “the gaze” but I can say a few words about an article—Peggy Phelan’s “Broken Symmetries”—that shook up my perception of the gaze as a performer.
Phelan writes: “Self-identity needs to be continually reproduced and reassured precisely because it fails to secure belief. It fails because … One’s own origin is both real and imagined. The formation of the “I” cannot be witnessed by the “eye” (Phelan 12). For the diasporic subject in particular, I believe the failure applies two-fold. The origin of birth is imagined, but so too is the original place, original culture, original kin before the hold and before the disaster.
Seeing the other then, according to Phelan, becomes a “social form of self-reproduction. For in looking at/for the other, we seek to re-present ourselves to ourselves.” As a performer, I’ve often reflected on how greedily I seek out the gaze of individual audience members, especially those who avoid the grip of such contact. To be honest, I think I seek out, to some degree, their discomfort. It never occurred to me (until reading Phelan and Fanon’s work) that I also seek their assurance; that I’ve been playing in an invisible world for a long time and have a strong desire to be “marked” by the “other’s” gaze, however much I also feel fixed by it.
And yet, I don’t consider this a deadly exchange. I have invited the audience into the theater after all. This performance is a construct of my own making. While performing, there is an aspect of my being that is, as Fred Moten describes, “captured motion constantly escaping.” I am multiple, I am failing to appear, I will never be found, and I am transforming—all this at the very same moment that my external self is caught in the grip of someone’s gaze. A gaze that I am likely returning.
Phelan suggests that “until one can accept one’s internal other as lost, invisible, an unmarked blank to oneself and within the world, the external other will always bear the marks and scars of the looker’s deadening gaze” (Phelan 25). I am moved by this proposition to surrender to loss. What if I have no need to be marked because I am already marked? Loss left an immaterial scar. Or, alternatively, a part of me is unmarked, lost, and invisible—I work with this part in the theater where “performance enacts the productive appeal of the nonreproductive” and where the gaze cannot be total or totalizing, because I am, with purpose and clarity, “actively vanishing.”
Many of the photographs in 12 Million Black Voices look at backs (see pages 18, 20, 24, 31, 58, 80, 89, 91, 96, 129, 138). At first glance, an image of someone’s back seems to reproduce the impersonal, distant, voyeuristic gaze of the government workers/celebrated photographers rendering lives as facts, interchangeable examples, generalizable representations, or evidence for sociological study, with little regard for singular lives unless framed as a portrait. If Wright all but buries the FSA photographs in text, it might be because he’s seeking to translate some tones he hears (through the muffling of disciplinary gazes) from the phonic substance of these photographs into a narrative. Such a narrative doesn’t so much tell us what or even how to see the images. Rather, it seems to perform how Wright sought to listen to these photographs, even those of backs, in spite of the deadening of phonic substance brought about through techniques, grammars, and frames that direct, discipline, and fix gazes. For instance, next to the photograph of field workers on page 24, Wright writes, “So our bent backs continued to give design and order to the fertile plantations.” Juxtaposed to the narrative (which discusses the antebellum South on this page), this photograph of the Jim Crow and New Deal era reverberates across time yet within a history of other gazes (juridical, medical) that also captured but don’t contain the widely circulated, loud image (rendered as evidence) of Gordon’s back. Still, when thinking about how a back looks, I want to read Wright’s synecdoche “our bent backs continued to give design” as a way to think not only about the look that compels a back to bend. I also want to think about how the person with their back to this white gaze looks at what that gaze can’t see when a back is turned toward it (how someone who is seen as a back looks at the world before them), as well as how this relates to the transhistorical process of “looking back” that concerns Wright.
(Pre)positions (here I have Moten’s recent sermon on Baldwin and opening pages of All That Beauty in mind) become disoriented when faced with the opaque way a back looks: do we talk about what’s behind of, in front of, before, on the other side of a back when trying to articulate how the person who is seen as a back themselves sees? How might a non-possessive looking, not concerned with ordering the living and nonliving, transpire, even when directed to give design and order to the plantation? The opaque back-looking the black field worker engages would, I imagine, involve a look that gives care to the cotton, watches over the soil, attends to insects, etc, even under the Lords of the Land’s order that the workers bend their backs and enter debt under the demand that field workers pay for their own supervision. Another back-looking might transpire that is not reducible to looking behind one’s back, even if it is conditioned by the anticipatory mode of “look[ing] into the white man’s [always changing] mind” that precedes movement (“Before we black folk can move”) (35). Wright’s thinking continues to relate looking and backs in two other moments. Concerning the collective decision of “us” to go North, he writes, “Perhaps for the first time in our lives we straighten our backs, drop the hoe, give a fleeting glance at the white man’s face, and walk off” (87). Once in the North, he writes that the Bosses of the Buildings “brand us as revolutionists when we say that we are not allowed to react to life with an honest and frontal vision” (130). In both cases, Wright joins honest looks (glances or visions) with a straightened, frontal posture. This would seem to be the posture presupposed in the way of looking back that Wright calls readers and viewers to assume: “Look at us and know us and you will know yourselves, for we are you, looking back at you from the dark mirror of our lives!” (146)... (1/2)
(2/2) ... So what I’m wondering is if this call to “look at us… looking back at you” depends on or moves beyond this straightened (erect), frontal posture, especially since this stance also seems aligned with a qualified “we” that seems to assume a hetero-masculine gaze in Wright’s frequent gendered divisions (for instance, “our women fared easier than we men during the early days of freedom…” 36).
Against this potential limitation to how Wright posits looking back, I want to set another movement of back-looking in his narrative that I think still involves what Wright is getting at in looking back but that perhaps exceeds some of the ways he articulates this looking. Of the black children in the North, Wright (as “we”) writes, “Always our deepest love is toward those children of ours who turn their backs upon our way of life, for our instincts tell us that those brave ones who struggle against death are the ones who bring new life into the world, even though they die to do so, even though our hearts are broken when they die” (136). This complex sentence gestures toward a vision beyond the frontal vision, a vision belonging (“the children of ours”) and not belonging to the “we” that sees through, with, yet beyond death into new life. Yet what does it say about the frontal vision that its “deepest love” is for those who look by turning their backs on this very frontal vision? How could looking back constitute a gaze that undoes its own assumed postures? How could looking back seek to look with another without presuming to see what they see, without presuming to render transparent what the one they’re looking with has made opaque in turning their back (particularly if this turning back involves refusal of what’s been refused)? How could looking back figure itself without capitulating the demand to look beyond the terms that might be imposed by the (asymmetrical and reciprocal) gazes of the ones looking back (perhaps at each other)? What is the relationship between a way of seeing and a way of life? I think we’re confronted again with a more complex way of looking than Wright’s narrative often admits, even as the narrative helps bring it in and out of focus. It seems that, in excess of his own articulation, Wright might be getting at a way of seeing (what might be called a back gaze if not/also a black gaze, I’m not sure) that seeks to see through and with the back turned on itself in a way that doesn’t demand that back-turned look to face itself in recognition. This may be what the children see, but it also seems involved in the seeing Wright rehearses in the narrative yet which exceeds, perhaps necessarily, the instantiation he gives under the qualified sign “we.”
Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” has been useful for my understanding of two principal psychoanalytic processes of looking: “the scopophilic instinct (pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object) and in contradistinction, ego libido (forming identification processes)” (Mulvey 67). Her expounding on these processes respectively fostered my particular interest in the narcissism occasioned in the latter process of articulating the subjective “I” (Mulvey 61). I recall reading the essay for the first time and being drawn to this mirror moment of (mis) recognition in which the conception of self is indelibly wrapped-up in an appeal and ideal for an other. Peggy Phelan’s “Broken Symmetries: Memory, Sight, Love” thinks further with identificatory moment of subjectivity. “Broken Symmetries” has enabled me to investigate the relationship between visuality and ascriptive meanings, which are of importance for me when parsing out the rhetorical production of racialized-gendered schemas as articulated by Black Feminist theorists like Hortense Spillers. Phelan describes the unmarked-marked binary that informs “the epistemological, psychic, and political binaries of Western metaphysics,” where the process of marking with meaning is a process of transforming difference into the same:
“…cultural reproduction takes she who is unmarked and re-marks her, rhetorically and imagistically, while he who is marked with value is left unremarked, in discursive paradigms and visual fields…the psychic subject transforms this difference into the Same, and converts the Other into the familiar grammar of linguistic, visual, and physical body of the Same” (Phelan 12)
Writing itself “re-marks the hole in the signifier, the inability of words to convey meaning exactly,” therefore constituting binaries such as “positive/negative, the seen and the unseen” (13). Writing the sign images the gap, that inapprehensible extraction of the essential. This gap that serves as sign reanimates Evelyn Higginbotham’s declaration in “African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race” that race is “global sign” albeit thwarting in its ability to signify meaning (Higginbotham 255). Likewise, this meeting of rhetorical-imagistic symbolic cover echoes Spillers’ own covered-uncovered dynamic of race in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” where the hieroglyphic “iconography” written onto the flesh marks the racialized other (Spillers 67). In this sense, Phelan and Spillers underscore articulation as a necessarily incorporative visual process. For me, this recalls Spillers’ jointure that she, the racially-gendered marked subject that posed illusionary to the United States’ imaginary would have to have been created; she functions in the gap of the U.S. rhetorical repository (Spillers 65).
And still, I hesitate to answer whether or not I believe in recuperating this understanding of gaze and gazing for the constitution of a Black Gaze. If the question is about championing a Black Gaze the takes-up this objectifying relationality between subject-object, then my answer would be a very serious no. However, I think it’s important to attend to the episteme that might shroud our own understanding (I’m thinking here of someone at Columbia’s insightful invocation of Simone Browne’s “dark sousveillance” and also an equally insightful conversation with Semilore on troubling episteme and ontology: just because we may be constituted by an epistemological “capture” of being looked at, doesn’t mean we are not looking and cannot look). Again, I underscore Phelan’s own push (and perhaps Browne’s too) to disrupt a visual or optic “wholeness” by thinking about the visual as resonant. My timid hope is that it is possible to negotiate new terms that don’t rely on a metric of maximal objectification.
I was stuck by the resonances and divergences of Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices with and from both Du Bois’s Paris exhibit and Hughes and DeCarava’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life. In many ways, Wright’s work seems to parallel Du Bois’s Paris exhibit (including the data portraits, photographs, and Jim Crow legal artifacts). Like Du Bois, Wright seeks to envision black America in the terms of mass struggle and troubled progress. Like Hughes and DeCarava, however, Wright also synthesizes text and photographic images as a strategy for entering into the rhythms and textures of everyday black social life, posing a tension between generational uplift and the fleeting satisfactions and enduring disappointments of the ordinary.
As in the work of Du Bois and Hughes and DeCarava, Wright demonstrates a preoccupation with abstraction and singularity, albeit in a different way than the former authors and imagemakers. Wright’s voice, with its emphasis on broad, structural racial and class categories—such as the “Lords of the Land” or “Bosses of the Buildings,” on one hand, and the “black dancer” or “black sharecropper” on the other—parallels Du Bois’s visual breakdown of black and white populations by industry, occupation, wealth, and other demographic figures. Wright’s language struck me with its figural quality, not unlike Du Bois’s abstract visual forms. The voice of 12 Million Black Voices seems to me to enact a sort of allegorical mode of narration, in the sense that archetypal social figures stand in for fleshed-out individual characters. The effect of this style conveys a sense of the cyclical movement between expectation and disillusionment against teleological conceptions of progress. I think here of David Scott’s discussion of Merle Collins’ novel The Colour of Forgetting, which renders through allegorical narrative a sense of rupture in the temporal imaginary of post-revolutionary Grenada. “Within its allegorical economy,” writes Scott, “the collapse of the Grenada Revolution is conceived not as the catastrophic end of a teleological history of continuous progress but, rather, as merely one significant episode in a larger story of generations of conflict in what is now imagined and represented as the cyclical pattern of a general history whose generative logic is catastrophic” (74-75). By shifting from individual portraits to social figurations, Wright suggests that the forces embodied by the “Lords of the Land,” the “Bosses of the Buildings,” or “Queen Cotton” and the struggles enacted by “the black maid” or “the black industrial worker” constitute world-structuring antagonisms rather than particularistic moral journeys. While, like Du Bois, Wright holds onto hope for better collective futures, he too lingers with the anti-black violence of enclosure and rejects any possibility of neat resolution or transcendence.
The relationship between this textual voice and the photographic images, however, is to my mind a more ambiguous matter. While the FSA photographs are clearly designed to produce a kind of social typologization, which Wright seizes upon, the subjects of these images seem to trouble such schematization. Consider, for example, the photograph of three little boys hanging around in the street (138). This image would seem initially to support Wright’s apocryphal claim on the next page—“The streets claim our children”—as the boys seem to roam unsupervised in a trash-strewn city street, dwarfed by an imposing, shadowy brick building. Nonetheless, there is a touch of homosocial intimacy that Wright’s captioning leaves unaddressed, as one boy places an affectionate hand on another’s shoulder. Their backs to the camera, the boys are on the verge of passing around the corner and out of view. Wright’s generalized vision of black urban life oscillates between an understanding of the streets as a feminizing site of moral temptation and promiscuity, on the one hand, and a masculinizing site of bravery and self-sovereignty, on the other. The subjects of this particular photograph, however, elude these two poles. The question I am grappling with, then, is whether Wright’s tendency at times to suppress rather than explore the fugitive possibilities of such images derives from his move toward abstraction. If we take this to be the case, then we might challenge and supplement the text’s authoritative captioning through a return to the particular, envisaging richly-textured individual characters in the way that Hughes does for DeCarava’s images. On the contrary, however, we might argue that Wright’s imagination merely happens to be restricted to certain figurations, and we might instead welcome in other kinds of social abstractions. What might it look and sound like to imagine, say, black urban homosociality in the sort of capaciously collective terms that Wright favors? What if we added “the black queer” alongside “the black industrial worker”?
“When things take on special significance because you are black, a cold, accusing, unseen eye seems to judge your every act. It makes you feel guilty, hostile, ‘nowhere’.” Reading this quote in Ralph Ellison’s Harlem is Nowhere seems like a crucial departure point for discussions on the gaze since it immediately brings us back to Fanon and the way in which he argues that the white gaze establishes a “racial epidermal scheme”. This quote is followed by a picture of a young black boy in whose background there is a painted eye on a wall alongside an ominous warning: “The unseen eye is watching you”. As in the Foucauldian panopticon, this invisible eye watches everything and everyone in Harlem, enacting a gesture of enclosure that resonates both with the Fanonian account and with the feeling of being “nowhere”. When evoking the Foucauldian idea of the panopticon as one of the foundational discussions about the gaze, it becomes crucial to highlight how Bentham’s planning of the panopticon prison was preceded by the plantation system, which had already established many of his ideas for this system. For Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011), visuality “was founded in plantation practice, from the mapping of plantation space to the identification of cash-crop cultivation techniques and the precise division of labor required to sustain them…Such visuality separates and segregates those it visualizes to prevent them from cohering as political subjects” (p.3).
Following Mirzoeff argument, we can perceive how the privilege of the optical over the other senses is indebted of the possibility of engaging with it as a means to frame and control racialized bodies is historically linked to slavery and the creation of the color line – and we could go even before the plantation system to perceive how the gaze was also at the center stage in the first texts produced by Europeans after their arrival in America. If we think of this plantation visuality as being yoked to the idea of the gaze as an “ordering frame” – and, in here, we could once again think on how visuality was a crucial tool for the colonial grammar and the way it had to claim territories by resorting to the visual register of the ‘landscape’ (Mary Louise Pratt, 2008, p.59). The quote from Ellison's novel alongside the aforementioned picture brings to stark relief how the plantation was perpetuated within the city, how those who migrated to the North were also followed by this plantation visual system. And the pictures from Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices highlights this continuation in a very poignant way. Produced by the Farm Security Administration, these pictures echo each other in disregards to geographical space in which they take place. In them, we perceive the perpetuation of the sociological eye which enters the domestic space to register the impoverished conditions in which black families lived. As argued by Saidiya Hartaman (2019), “the photographs coerced the black poor into visibility as a condition of policing and charity, making those bound to appear to suffer the burden of representation. In these iconic images of the black urban poor, individual persons were forced to stand in for sweeping historical narratives about the progress or failure of the Negro, serve as representative of a race or class, embody and inhabit social problems, and evidence failure or improvement”. The repetition of the same frame and mise-en-scene pursed by these photographs dissolves the possibility of difference, as we can notice when seeing how the same visual code gets repeated in the pictures from pages 65 (in the South) and page 108 (a kitchenette in the city). These pictures are part of the multitude of the unseen eye who watches these black bodies and that fixates them, and, by doing so, they resort to a visual code to reinforce the feeling of being nowhere, as being halted in time.
Wright’s stated aim in the Preface of 12 Million Black Voices of placing “within full and constant view the collective humanity” of the “countless black millions” provokes me to return to Weheliye’s “Diagrammatics as Physiognomy”. In thinking through what is offered by Du Bois’s data portraits in relation to photography and other forms, Weheliye argues: “Since the masses, just as races, are not visible to the “naked eye,” the optic illustration of the statistical data provides the channel through which to render thinkable and perceptible the Negro qua masses” (38). I want to think about the work Wright is doing to challenge this argument, to render the Black masses thinkable through the combination of photography and “fabulatory” narrative. Thinking Wright in conversation with the two visual-textual ensembles from last week, we can see the repetition of a method of writing with photographs as a means of representing Black life. I argued in my post on DeCarava/Hughes and Weems that the methods of writing with the photograph exceed categories of fact and fiction, using “knowledge from and of the everyday” (drawing from Sharpe) to narrate what the author “knows” about Black life that exceeds the category of evidence. Wright engages this practice in presenting the photograph yet not writing about what is “in” the photograph but what exceeds it. Even the captions he uses speak beyond the images to the “abstract forces” and affective registers which shape black life. It is the register of affect and a Black interiority, in dialogue with Hughes and Weems, which allows Wright to bring the Black masses into constant view. Wright makes a Back mass visible and thinkable through a narrating of a collective conception, experience, movement of and through history, and through a conceptualizing of a collective Black affect. What does it mean to think of oneself as within a collective, continuously made and unmade through the afterlives of slavery? How do we represent this visually? Wright takes Farm Security Administration photos, and reads underneath the images of Black capacity to participate in the American project, attuning the reader and viewer to the “uneasily tied knot of pain and hope whose snarled strands converge from many points of time and space” (10). Wright, engaging in a similar work of Du Bois, is working out a historicizing of the psyche of the Negro as a collective people, a nation within a nation. I want to think about Wright (and Rosskam, as photo director) engaged in a type of archival manipulation in conversation with the work Arthur Jafa is doing. Out of an archive of visual images, how do you determine what to select to portray Black life? In what order and at what frequency do you display them? What sounds and text enable an encounter with Black life?
This response has two sections. The first is the restating of a gesture in Fred Moten’s criticism which I find helpful. The second is an attempt to provisionally define the gaze in terms as I understand it. It begins with a concise attempt at a definition before meandering.
(coming back to put this up front: I realise that the question of gaze is for me one that has resonances both in a conversation of grammar and ontology which spin, again for me, a little out of control.)
Part 1) The passage of Moten’s that I brought up last class. What is the gesture to use the improper language of the sense for the description of a photo, text, or piece music’s attributes? Why does he use the language of phonic substance in relation to the photo in a chapter called “Visual Music?” What is in this choice and how does it relate to an attempt to articulate something in excess of meaning? Does noticing the gesture speak to its formulaic and perhaps unsuccessful gesture? Can that which operates in excess be not excessive? Does excess disturb legibility? Does legibility call for the non-excessive?
Part 2) Here is an attempt at articulating my understanding of what the gaze/white gaze does: Gaze produces intelligibility through the terms of utility(or potential utility) by way of the violent omission of a relationality which moves in excess of meaning.
This definition relies on several preconceived notions. 1) A relationality which moves in excess of meaning: perhaps we could call this a kind of substance which is produced upon. 2)An act of production which at least in some way is successful in its omission; an omission which in as much as it is violent fails its mission of the total foreclosure of excess. 3)A conception of a system or structure of thought for which intelligibility is only made through utility/use. 4)An articulation of appearance or the realm of appearance.
The process of the gaze, in my mind, works something like this: in the face of the disruptive and disturbing excess of meaning a subject is offered a space within the structure of the gaze if they are willing to do the work of the production. This work is that which attempts to fix(here I am thinking of Fanon) meaning and cut off its excess; an arrest and an omission. This work stabilizes and mobilizes the gaze to adaptation.
What is tricky about this work is that often its production appears to be a production acted out on a material and so the response might be to go to this material as a place of resistance but what if this material was already determined by the gaze? Under this thinking, the articulation and creation of a raw material which is workable is a primary act of the gaze. This raw material might be thought of as that which appears. The gaze, then, produces this realm of appearance as much as it acts within the horizon of that which appears.
But this is quite the claim because it suggests that the gaze is not just an act, within or on that which appears, but the determiner of that which appears. But in as much as the gaze determines what appears or works with what appears or acts out its appearing the gaze fails to fully omit the relationality it seeks to preclude so that the material it produces carries the trace of that substance which it was produced out of. Gaze is an apprehension. For me the gaze is akin to the anti-blackness of western civilization. Is blackness that relationality which operates in excess of meaning? And whiteness the gaze? Is the articulation of the paraontological helpful here? Does this articulation leave any room for what happens when a photograph is looked at? Perhaps it does not leave room within appearance. But it might point toward that which is in excess of appearance; when this appearance is the empirical or meaning. This is, as I think Calvin Warren would want to remind me, a question which has echoes in the ontological (This is an essay from Warren that I have been thinking alongside while writing this response: https://unbag.net/end/black-mysticism)
Ralph Ellis, within the same breath, proclaims the contradictory conditions of Black life in the American North at the time : “To live in Harlem is to dwell in the very bowels of the city… Harlem is a ruin…Harlem is the scene and symbol of the Negro’s alienation in the land of his birth” while it is at the same time “the setting of his transcendence”(2-3). It is a site and a sight of “grace under pressure” (5). Thinking about this text in dialogue with the prose and photographs that animate Richard Write’s 12 Million Black Voices I am interested in the ways in which a history of Black migration maps a landscape as much as it traces a “moving into the sphere of conscious history” (147). Not in the sense of historical progress, which has been mobilized against BIPOC as a means of justification for their exploitation, but in the sense that Wright describes it when he invites a different modality of mobility: a “living past” locatable in “the mirror of our consciousness“ (146). I was struck by the simultaneously eloquent yet scathing tone of Wright’s narrative which foregrounds the unbearable conditions of enslavement, sharecropping, and the kitchenette and names the culpable – the greedy Lords of the Land and the Bosses of the Buildings – again in the same breath. He seamlessly pulls these figures through the canals of history and shows how their roles transform in response to the material, political, social, religious, economic conditions of the time but always while maintaining their violent frame. Mirroring these transformations is the constant resurgence of his African American community “moving in all directions” with a “sense of constant change” (143). We discussed this rhythmic movement in the diagrams and narratives by Du Bois and the parallel but disjointed cadences of image and text in The Sweet Flypaper of Life. Repetition is the rhythm that haunts Wright’s text, generating both new means of entrapment while also gestating higher frequencies or capacities for resilience or what Ellis, I think, means when he identifies Harlem as a site of “transcendence.” I was reminded of bell hooks work on “marginality as a site of resistance.”
In terms of the texts I bring with me to discussions about visuality, I am probably most firmly grounded in Nicole Fleetwood’s book, Troubling Vision. A text that is very much complementary to Simone Browne’s Dark Matters, Troubling Vision is, in Fleetwood’s words, “a study of how blackness becomes visually knowable through performance, cultural practices, and psychic manifestations,” (Fleetwood 8). Her question of “how blackness gets attached to bodies, goods, ideas, and aesthetic practices in the visual sphere,” (Fleetwood 20) illuminates the artificiality of blackness being associated with certain kinds of matters and aesthetic practices, while simultaneously exploring how black subjects subvert and manipulate said associations. Like the Browne’s idea of sousveillance, Fleetwood explores how dispossessed subjects use the gaze as a method of expressing themselves with the full knowledge of how the white gaze warps them.
Because of my personal academic interests in black women, I found chapters two and three to be useful, especially when set against each other. In chapter two, “Her Own Spook: Colorism, Vision, and the Dark Female Body”, Fleetwood genders Fanon’s famous racial and psychoanalytic question, asking “How does the darkly coded black female subject come to see herself as abject being? And how is dominant vision structured in such a way that reinforces her abjection?” (Fleetwood 95). Fleetwood focuses on dark skinned black women’s presumed self-hatred, a self-hatred that makes the dark skinned woman “her own spook”. Looking at the play Yellowman as well as the work of artist Renee Cox, Fleetwood provides an incisive analysis of how “the black female body always presents a problem within a field of vision structured by racialized and gendered markings”, and how the dark skinned woman is encouraged to turn that gaze in on herself, to imagine herself as vulnerable/deserving of assault, as Yellowman’s Alma does, in particular with respect to the sexual—“The explicit black female body is an excessive body,” (Fleetwood 109).
The conflation of explicitness with excess on the template on the black female body continues through into the following chapter, “Excess Flesh: Black Women Performing Hypervisibility” where explores how performers like Renee Cox and Lil’ Kim manipulate the association of explicitness, excess, and black femininity by enacting what she refers to as “performances of excess flesh”, which are “enactment[s] of visibility that seizes upon the scopic desires to discipline the black female body through a normative gaze that anticipates its rehearsed performance of abjection,” (Fleetwood 112). Fleetwood’s excess flesh performances perform a sousveillance by anticipating the surveillance and disrupting its image through the dark matter that renders the surveillance/abjection necessary. In doing so, these performances trouble the formation of the afterimage, unsettling a veillance.
Discussing the twerking of video vixens in 90s hip hop music videos, Fleetwood writes that “they bend over and fully expose their buttocks to the camera. Their fleshy thighs and jiggly buttocks captivate the camera. They are autoerotic, driving themselves to inappropriate levels of ecstasy,” (133). Covering the veillance in excess, this excess flesh performance engenders afterimages that “captivate” the eye, designed to be watched. The infamous fish-eye lens, however, does not encapsulate the eye of the performer herself, who eludes the watcher’s eye, yet—although we can neither confirm nor deny it—likely looks back at it.
This approach to looking as something that is fundamentally conversational colors my approach to Twelve Million Black Voices, the Sweet Flypaper of Life, and the films we watched earlier this week. How do black people, who have so often been objects of study as a result of their perceived fleshiness and excess, interact with a camera as opposed to being just subjected by it? The work that Fleetwood does that I feel is important, which Tara and I referenced in our conversation, is to piece apart assumptions that would imply that the black person is incapable of subjecthood within the photograph simply because photography was a medium initially designed to objectify black people. To me, black photographies like Weems's allow for a splitting of an episteme that marks black people as objects and the reality of their subjecthood, with the work itself producing a friction between the two.
This question still resonates with me, far from being answered; even too far off of looking for an answer, cryptically posed by Jacques Derrida in his exuberant essay on Jean-Luc Nancy. Day and Night. White and Black. For Derrida, the question posed is tied to the question of ‘sense’ — sensualism, carnality, fleshliness, and meaning. Didn’t we say, that we see nothing, that we would lose any information, in the glaring whiteness of overexposure? And doesn’t the (terrible) beauty lie in the dark, non-visible passages of photography, in which the dark-grey and black tones preserve the tonality of black life? – at least for who is ready to (not) see, but listen to the unrecognizable undertones of what cannot be seen? Who is looking (at) (me)?
»— These eyes or these gazes? You're going from one to the other. For two gazes, more than two eyes are often needed. And then there are eyes that no longer see, and eyes that have never seen. Aren't you also forgetting those living without any eyes? All the same, they don't always live without any light.«
The Oxford English Dictionary’s etymology is rather sparse: ‘gaze’ — Etymology: Of unknown origin; possibly < the same root as 'gaw' v., with an -s- suffix. Rietz gives a Swedish dialect 'gasa' to gape, stare. a. intransitive. † In early use: To look vacantly or curiously about; also, to stare, open one's eyes (with astonishment). In modern use: To look fixedly, intently, or deliberately at something.
There seems to be a terminological difference at work in the term gaze. I am interested in this difference between a gaze that fixes intentionally, and one that is marked by a certain openness, or vacancy. Following this thread into the term gaze itself, I am wondering why it is that most conceptions of the gaze think it as something a subject ‘has,’ or ‘owns,’ as well as something through which a subject owns someone other in making it some'thing' other. Rather, it can be said that the gaze in general describes a scene of intersubjective encounter first of all. Even the objectifying gaze, as can be seen in Sartre, is embedded in the important moment in which a being realizes that it is a being-for-others ('être-pour-autrui'). I am not trying to negate the objectifying, possessive, or subduing agency of the gaze; the subtle violence of being disarmed and captured in a mode of existence that apprehends itself as having become an object for another consciousness—the ultimate alienation in the potential freedom of a subject to be, that happens when this being is transformed into an object which exists like any other object. This feeling of being the object of the other’s look, which is often accompanied by a feeling of shame. And yet, there is this moment of intersubjectivity. So, there is always an exchange of looks, there is always eyes that meet each other. Someone other is always another other for its other–if that makes sense somehow. This scene of relationality, the in-between two others, is something I would like to address in this post.
In following Jean-Luc Nancy (among others), with which I want to think the gaze, not so much as a tool to fix, command and subjugate something other, but as a moment of movement. In his text on Abbas Kiarostami’s films Nancy writes the following:
“In fact there are no stable, simply discrete poles: there is the movement from one to the other, and there is the energy of this movement, and there is film, which is the capture of this energy (in the sense that film takes away this power in order to give it back again and realize it also). It is the energy of a mobilized, activated, or animated look: that is to say the power of regard (égard) with respect to what presents itself to a look. In French regard (look) and égard (regard) are more or less the same word: re-gard indicates a propitious distance for an intensified guard (garde), for looking after (prise en garde) (it is a Germanic root, wardon/warten, that yields all these words). Guarding calls for watching and waiting, for observing, for tending attentively and overseeing. We look after what is ahead and after the way it presents itself: we let it present itself—and thus we also leave open the field for its withdrawal, where presence is in reserve, where presence keeps itself reserved […]. Looking is regarding and consequently respecting. The word respect also has to do with regard (respicere ): it watches for..., turned toward ... , guided by attention, by observance or consideration. A rightful look is respectful of the real that it beholds, that is to say it is attentive and openly attending to the very power of the real and its absolute exteriority: looking will not tap this power but will allow it to communicate itself or will communicate with it itself. In the end, looking just amounts to thinking the real, to test oneself with regard to a meaning one is not mastering.”
What I like about this passage is the urge to keep an eye on the dimension of attention, or looking out for the other, solicitude and care. In Nancy’s concept of gaze, it is I who enters into a relationship with the world, rather than maintaining a relationship to objects. There is no way to look for me without having something else approaching, addressing and tackling me. Thinking about the guard, I am very interested in a scene in which I am vacantly looking into the eyes of someone other; not with the intention to objectify, in order to guard my own self-conscious, but with the attention of handing myself over to the other, the moment of surrender, which is also a moment of letting one self’s guard down.
Far from determining what my conception of gaze is, this post has no problem with keeping things in the obscure darkness that was seeking for shining a light onto the dimension of non-intentionality and surrender, which is at work in the very moment when eyes ( I’s ) meet:
»—Where we are, this night-seems even darker, then. Don't we have to make a choice between looking or exchanging glances or meeting gazes, and seeing, very simply seeing? And first between seeing the seeing and seeing the visible? For if our eyes see what is seeing rather than visible, if they believe that they are seeing a gaze rather than eyes, at least to that extent, to that extent as such, they are seeing nothing, then, nothing that can be seen, nothing visible. Away from all visibility, they founder in the night. They blind themselves so as to see a gaze; they avoid seeing the visibility of the other's eyes so as to address themselves only to his or her gaze, to his or her sight that is merely seeing, to his or her vision.«
Listening-Gaze (part 1)
ReplyDeleteIn a visually encoded world, it is not surprising that the perception of the heard is considered secondary to that of the seen, and that the sonic is thought of as an attribute to a visual object. However, sounds and voices are of equal presence and significance in our realities. In receptive terms –hearing– the role of sound is almost obvious. We orient ourselves in the world sonically; a quiet place triggers immediate alertness in us, and in a louder space the sound of our names will most likely catch our attention. Yet, sound does not only function receptively in our realities. Appearance is not only visual, and we appear sonically just as much as we do visually. Sonic appearance is not physiognomic; it is not a fixed, innate condition of identity, but rather it is an active doing. With the ability to appear sonically comes the ability to be perceived sonically, and so I would like to take this space to reflect on the gaze from the lens of sound studies.
In an article titled “Listening” from the volume The Responsibility of Forms, Roland Barthes distinguishes between three modes of listening. His thinking of listening relies on a strict differentiation between the physiological phenomenon of hearing, and the psychological phenomenon of listening, which for him means an intentional engagement with sonic content. Barthes credits this ability only to human ears (a somewhat problematic statement when thinking of other accounts of sonic realities, but that is a whole different conversation), which separates human beings form animals. The first mode of listening he presents is the only one we share with animals: “alert” listening through which we orient ourselves in the world. The second mode, Barthes names “deciphering”; a mode in which “the human begins” (Barthes, 245) and listening is used in order to analyze semantic content. Finally, the third mode is nameless. This is a mode that concentrates on the “who” which speaks, instead of “what” is said. Barthes writes:
The third listening […] does not aim – or await – certain determined, classified signs: not what is said or emitted, but who speaks, who emits: such listening is supposed to develop in an inter-subjective space where “I am listening” also means “listen to me”; what seizes upon – in order to transform and restore to the endless interplay of transference –is a general “signifying” no longer considerable without the determination of the unconscious. (Barthes, 246)
Even if the semantic layer is dissected and the listening is focused solely on the “who” there exists still a layer of “what” that informs this listening. Sonic content such as intonation, speed, stability of the voice and other subtle vocal cues can reveal aspects of the state of the “who” that speaks. However, listening is not blind, and unconsciously we hold a massive database of sonic bias; we hear nationality, class, race, gender and education just as clearly as we do words. Thus, while listening to the who may (and does) tell us things that go beyond the semantic content, the ability of the “who” that speaks to be affected by the “who” that listens is in and of itself a condition of heardness.
Listening-Gaze (part 2)
ReplyDeleteAt this point it is useful to consider further accounts of listening practices, such as those proposed by sound theorist Michel Chion. Chion’s account of listening comes from the tradition of Musique Concréte, a stream of electroacoustic music developed in France in the 1940s, and most notably recognized with the composer Pierre Schaeffer. This tradition aimed to emancipate sound from its’ perceptive conditions as a secondary value of an object, and considered it as an object itself. As such, sound becomes more than a mere signifier of an action and is now able exist independently.
Although Chion is concerned with contextualized listening practices in relation to music and film, similarly to Barthes he also divides listening into three categories. For the purposes of this writing, I will only focus on Chion’s second listening category, reduced listening. A mode of listening that “attend[s] to sounds in themselves, and analyz[es] sounds strictly in terms of their formal attributes rather than in relation to cause, context, or semantic information.” (Sound Objects, 7) However, listening to “disembodied” sounds in general, and voices in particular, is never this simple. I believe it is actually not much different from considerations of visuality and the gaze in more traditional senses.
In “The Lived Experience of The Black Man” Fanon opens by saying: “I am an object among objects” (Fanon, 89), a being that is independent and is not yet subjected. When encountered with the white gaze, Fanon writes: “I cast an objective gaze over myself, discovered my blackness, my ethnic features; deafened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders, and above all, yes, above all, the grinning Y a bon Banania.”(Fanon, 92) Fanon’s interaction with the white gaze reduced him to his formal attribute(s)- his race. Would a recording of Fanon’s voice, detached from the visuality of his body, access this database as well? My answer would be yes, absolutely.
Considering that, could we think of listening as the gaze of the sonic realm? The current discourse about the emancipation of sound has taken another groundbreaking turn with the rise of new materialism. Authors such as Christoph Cox, Brandon Labelle and Salomé Voegelin have begun to raise questions about sonic agency, and to consider sounds as active, sounding beings. The sounding being refuses the definition of neither an object nor a subject, as it is a continuous doing. It is a being that appears and is perceived simultaneously. The conditions of heardness that impact the ways in which a sounding being is listened to does not define it’s ability to sound (if a tree falls in the forest and no one was there to hear it, it did make a sound.), but rather it defines the ways in which it is perceived as a subject. In an essay titled “Ethics of Listening”, Salomé Voegelin echoes my understanding of a sounding being as a doing, and speaks to the constant interplay between the appearance and subjection in the life of a sounding being:
The being as doing foregrounds existence in general, ignoring whether the being is an object or a subject; and it comes to meaning from this non-distinct equivalence, through its process rather than as an entity. At the same time it challenges the notion of doing as inherently better than being, as it is being, but being not as object but as thing, thinging existence continually, fluidly, in passing. The object as thing is an activity, it is to do: being as the production of possibilities rather than the appearance of totality. (Voegelin, “Ethics of Listening”)
Listening-Gaze (part 3)
ReplyDeleteThe consideration of possibilities as opposed to an “appearance of totality” is bound to the same significations that exist in the unconscious “interplay of transference” between that who speaks and that who listens. In her most recent publication, The Race of Sound, Nina Sun Eidsheim discusses the case of Charles Clifford, an African-American man who was convicted in 1999 for selling drugs only based on a recording of his voice. The Clifford example shows us that the sounding identity is subjected to the same gaze. The reduction of the white gaze as experienced equally by both Clifford and Fanon, while it reduced both of their identities through a subjection of another, the reduction itself was overloaded with the same unconscious database of bias that is expressed visually in Fanon’s case, and sonically in Clifford’s.
The understanding of listening as a sonic gaze is an understanding of our ears’ ability to hear beyond semantic content. Concentrating on the “who” as opposed to the “what” is an act of reduced listening that hears the voice as an independent object, one that may be detached from the body, but is not at all disembodied. A voice is a continuation of a body; it is a sonic manifestation of identity. In the context of the gaze, reduced listening by the “who” that listens, is informed by unconscious layers of signification that “pollute” it’s listening and affects it’s ability to listen of this voice purely in terms of the “who” which speaks.
Response to readings:
ReplyDeleteThe readings this week made me think the formation of an identity and the implications of a lack of an identity. In music and sound studies, a sonic identity is defined by “timbre”: when two instruments play the same note, we go to timbre to tell us which instruments they are. Timbre is the thing differentiates one sound from another and creates a class of sounds. However, the ways in which it does the differentiation work against the consideration of a sonic identity, because timbre almost always belongs to the listener, the perceiver of a sound.
I find it interesting to consider timbre alongside Ellison’s work. In his writing on Wright in the article Richard Wright’s Blues, Ellison claims that the formation of identity or individuality is always a process:
Man cannot express that which does not exist – either in the form of dreams, ideas, or realities- in his environment. Neither his thoughts nor his feelings, his sensibility nor his intellect are fixed, innate qualities. They are processes that arise out of the interpretation of human instinct with environment, through the process called experience; each changing and being changed by others. (Ellison, 270-271)
Ellison’s consideration of experience and the formation of an identity as a process, echoes Judith Butler’s understanding of identity as performative, as opposed to a fixed quality. The expression of these processes depends on their existence in reality. Going back to timbre, if the perceiver defines the timbre of Black American identity, what reality does it express? Does this reality actually exist in the person’s environment? Or does it only exist in the eyes of the perceiver? What does the ability dictate someone else’s identity impose on the subject of this identity?
In Harlem Is Nowhere, Ellison’s ‘nowhere man’ who is “in a constant search of an identity” (Ellison and Parks, 4) has to always fight against the social factors that are supposed to shape the black American identity (Ellison and Parks, 1). Is it possible to think of the search after the black American identity as a search for self-definition that is not dictated by perception?
In the opening paragraph of “12 Million Black Voices”, Wright writes: “you usually take us for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem” (Wright, 10). The timbre of Black American identities is a result of processes that took (and are still taking) place throughout history, that managed to morph and change it, while still maintaining the same core sonic identity, which becomes inaudible through the saturation of perception.
The discussion about knowledge as power, and the use of language as resistance in part two of “12 Million Black Voices”, “Inheritors of Slavery”, speaks to the role of the voice and language in the formation of an identity, it’s ability to appear, and the required conditions of heardness that are necessary in order to participate in any sort of resistance. Wright describes situations in which the slaves’ ability to “steal” the language of the Lords of the Land, and to learn ways to use it as if it was their own has created a sense of victory and freedom:
We stole words from the guarding lips of the Lords of the Land, who didn’t want us to know too many of them and their meaning. […] We proceeded to build a language in inflections of voice, through tonal variety, by hurried speech, in honeyed drawls, by rolling our eyes, by flourishing our hands, by assigning common, simple words new meanings, meanings which enabled us to speak of revolt in the actual presence of the Lords of the Land without their being aware! (Wright, 40)
In this description we learn a lot on a formation of a sonic identity through voice contours and language. The instrumentalization of language that is expressed in this passage creates a mask through two conditions of heardness: the one the Lords of the Land hear, and the one that the slaves hear in their own reality, which allows them to resist and claim their sonic identity as their own.
As we consider the im/possibility of a black gaze, we can look to yet ultimately depart from varied understandings of the gaze writ large. Many (in film theory at least) deploy this term in relation to Laura Mulvey, whose notion of the male gaze in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” identifies scopophilia at the base of Hollywood viewing practices. Objectification of the female body onscreen, what she describes as “to-be-looked-at-ness”, secures the position and pleasure of the male spectator who looks. While subsequent theorists, including feminist ones and many of color, question her assumption that male spectatorship is given in any audience, her idea that objectification of whomever a medium represents operates as pleasurable for the one who looks continues to be relevant even if schematic. This assumption similarly belies, however, the way in which (as I understand) Foucault, Sartre, and Lacan, have theorized the gaze as non-localizable and certainly not gendered in any particular sense:
ReplyDeleteWith Foucault, the panopticon describes an imagined gaze and structure of power that entails the process of subjectivation. The subject is produced by this structure insofar as one internalizes the panoptic gaze and behaves in conformity to its law. In this conception of the gaze, which Foucault redressed after criticism, the subject remains powerless and cannot necessarily resist.
For Sartre in Being and Nothingness, the gaze of a subject involves both looking and in turn being looked at. Here the look operates as a pure and disembodied act of looking, as in a voyeur who stares through a keyhole at someone. The rustling of leaves, of sound, interestingly, then provokes the feeling of being watched or the presence of another, or in other words a sound makes the subject imagine the gaze of another person as a threat. The threat is that you cannot locate the sound or the one who watches. At this moment the subject is no longer a subject, but the object of a gaze in a visual field.
Lacan extends the ideas of Sartre: This presence and feeling of another stems not necessarily from the other but from our own act of looking. For Lacan, the gaze is still imagined but it does not necessarily belong to another person. Rather, my ability to see leaves me open to being seen. Lacan uses the anecdote of a fishing boat, where he is asked by a friend if he can spot a sardine can in the distance. He replies that he cannot, to which his friend responds, “Well, it can see you!” Put differently, awareness emerges therefore of a possibility that others can see me at any point and from any point. This stems though from my ability to see in the first place. Here the gaze implies a subject but not necessarily as the product of an internalized Foucauldian law, rather as the condition of the possibility of seeing for the subject in the first place.
While these ideas do not necessarily include subjects of color, we might recall Sartre again and posit that the gaze disappears when you see that someone truly is watching. In other words, the eyes annihilate the gaze when you locate it. In this sense we can turn finally to bell hooks, whose “oppositional gaze” of black female spectatorship stages the aforementioned critique of Mulvey. By recognizing the panoptic structuration of power that attends visual representation/objectification, especially in terms of racialization, by locating the gaze of the other and returning it, the possibility and resistance of a black gaze might emerge in contest. As the Kitchen Table Series of Carrie Mae Weems reveals, the ability to look back and at the photographic (or cinematic) apparatus (of the white gaze) entails this latent possibility.
Reading Ellison’s “Harlem is Nowhere” and revisiting my understanding of what the “gaze” or “flight” and “fugitivity” are proved to be a challenging experience for me. Ellison’s opening of the discussion and reflection on the three criteria for clinical assessment (e.g. minority, politico-economic relations, and revolutionary subject status) already set up a particular set of terms whereby one might encounter the nowhereness of Harlem. I immediately coupled this quasi-pathological assessment with a kind of gaze cast upon the Ellison’s subject; a latent desire to classify in order to make sense of the one who stands out uncomfortably. This idea of the “total Negro” (and, of course, I cannot help but think about Eastman and his attention to “that which is fundamental”) seems to emerge at the wayside (we might also think of Ellison writing “one wanders in a ghetto maze”) of Ellison’s inquiry (2, 7). He writes, after “leaving” the clinic “for a while,” how might we “describe the past which he [the Negro] drags into this scene, and what is the future toward which he stumbles and becomes confused?” (2).
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, my understanding of the gaze cannot quite ever be dislodged from Foucault; the gaze, in the carceral sense, seeks to view and apprehend. I am particularly made aware of my Foucauldian response in the space of redaction; I want to know what was crossed out and typed over in Ellison’s text. The various equations penciled in Ellison’s text makes me curious about the things that he is interested in counting and listing—the latent accounting and numerical material that hides behind his assessment. Yet, in Ellison’s attempt to make sense of the temporality of this racialized apprehension of “the Negro” in the clinic and, more generally, “the scene: Harlem” (2). Ellison also attends to a variety of affective dimensions whereby we understand the state of Harlem: “a reality which for many defines and colors the world” (2). Ellison queers the normative encounter of finding or looking for by attending to the “unseen eye”; yet, I do not believe this gesture escapes a gaze that seeks to extract meaning (59). I am wondering if, adjacent, aside, or eschew from a “gaze,” we might consider a “clock” or a “read”—gestures that play with ephemeral (after Muñoz) assessments of embodiment, consciousness, and relation.
Thinking about the “demand [for] new definitions of terms,” under what constraints (e.g. ethical, spatial, temporal, etc.) might we render unreality/reality legible? Could we think more about the aesthetic space “folk-jazz” as it concerns city life (7)? What can be said for a looking that is present in the feeling qua being “guilty, hostile, ‘nowhere’” and the affective connection to Frame 6—especially the child sitting in front of the phrase “the unseen eye is watching you” (76).
My first point of reference for the “gaze” is Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” as I’m sure is the case for others in this class. For Mulvey, the concept of the gaze is tightly intertwined with hierarchies of power and notions of pleasure. Foucault’s panopticon, surveillance from above, is another point of reference for my understanding of the gaze. Additionally, while I am at the moment unable to point to specific theorists or works that have influenced my understanding of the gaze in this direction, I’ve come to realize that I also associate the gaze with an imperializing, archival impulse. The motivation to categorize—to make fit within a Western epistemological structure, to put everything/one in its place—is latent to the gaze. In this way, the gaze is antithetical to opacity.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I am very interested to continue our conversation about a potential Black gaze because I do not necessarily believe that my referents when I use/hear the term “gaze” are inherent or inescapable. In the past, I’ve often turned towards bell hooks’ Black Looks: Race and Representation, specifically the essay “Representation of Whiteness.” hooks makes a strong case for a Black mode of looking that is not invested in scopophilic pleasure or an imperializing impulse, but instead validates the interiority and subjectivity of the Black “looker.” I would also gesture towards Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) as a film that centers an idea of the Black gaze and a Black aesthetic. Between the materials for this week and last week, I feel that last week’s photo projects, especially Weems’ The Kitchen Table Series, point more towards a theory of a potential Black gaze than this week’s materials. Ellison’s “Harlem is Nowhere” felt particularly pathologizing and classificatory, characteristics that I do not associate with a Black gaze that aims to subvert the more traditional associations of the gaze with surveillance, power, and the imperial impulse.
As Stephen and Heather write in their posts, I often think about the gaze in reference to Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Rereading the essay, this passage in particular caught my eye: “Originally, in his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality which exist as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones. At this point he associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (Mulvey 8 italics mine). The description of the gaze as controlling seems relevant to our discussion of the gaze and its potential recoverability in developing something that might be called a black gaze. The gaze as a method of control resonates with the fixity of the white gaze that Fanon describes in Black Skin, White Masks. But, as Ellison exposes with the invisible/hypervisible overlap in Invisible Man, the white gaze is incapable of fulling controlling/capturing/fixing its subject. Something on the lower frequency moves otherwise away from the control of the gaze.
ReplyDeleteWhat I have also been thinking about the past week, similar to what Lee describes in their post, is how a sonic form of the gaze is also performed. In returning to Mulvey, I also return to my first encounter with her article during last year’s MA Seminar with Julie Crawford, who assigned James Baldwin’s short story “Going to Meet the Man” alongside Mulvey. Certainly Baldwin shows in reverse how deputy Jesse develops a scopophilic relationship to blackness, through his leveraging of his power as a white police officer to sexually assault black women and brutally beat the imprisoned young black man, and through recalling the source of his scopophilia: witnessing a lynching as a child. But sound weaves itself into these scopophilic interactions. In the cell, “The boy rolled around in his own dirt and water and blood and tried to scream again as the prod hit his testicles, but the scream did not come out, only a kind of rattle and a moan” (Baldwin 233). And all the while, behind the scene of the beating, black protesters outside the are singing to attempt to free the wrongly imprisoned people inside. Here we see a contestation of sound under the hegemony of the deputy’s gaze. In response to the sound outside that he cannot control (and at the moment cannot see through the walls of the police station), he attempts to illicit sound from the imprisoned man to counter the singing. The beating functions both to destroy the body of the man and to draw out the scream, to regain control of the soundscape and cancel out the singing outside. But “the scream did not come out,” and the singing goes on. The utterances produced, the “rattle and a moan” do not seem to do the work the white gaze requires at that particular moment.
And, further back, we hear sound as part of the child-Jesse’s inauguration into a white gaze. At the lynching, “The sounds of laughing and cursing and wrath—and something else—rolled in waves from the front of the mob to the back. Those in front expressed delight at what they saw, and this delight rolled backward, wave upon wave, across the clearing, more acrid than the smoke” (245). The sound of the crowd signals the appearance of the man that is about to be killed; sound sets the scene and invites the gaze. Here I am also thinking about Gustavus Stadler’s article “Never Heard Such a Thing: Lynching and Phonographic Modernity.” Stadler explores a history of early sound recordings that advertised themselves as “real,” “authentic” recordings of lynchings in the late 1870s and 1880s (many thanks to Professor Hartman for recommending this article to me last semester). As we talk about how the development of visual technologies from photography to videography impact our understanding of the gaze, I think we also must keep in mind how audio technology constructs a racialized gaze.
Just as certain modes of listening might reinforce the gaze as a practice of control, we could also think about modes of listening that destabilize that same control. But I wonder if “gaze” is a productive term for this mode of vision/listening or if there is something else we might use instead. Since we looked at the Hughes and DeCarava text, I’ve thought about one image of a couple dancing, an image that blurs at the outline of the subjects because there is a movement that escapes the controlling gaze of the camera. There is a bleeding in the blur (a phrase I’m stealing from metalcore band Code Orange) that implies less a gaze than a haze, a word which could so easily be produced by a misplaced finger on the computer keyboard (and which might recall the Invisible Man sharing a joint with Louis Armstrong in his hole). These thoughts formed while reading this passage in Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha:
Delete“How she loved a ‘hike.’ Especially in the evening, for then everything was moody, odd, deliciously threatening, always hunched and ready to close in on you but never doing so. East of Cottage Grove you saw fewer people, and those you did see had, all of them (how strange, thought Maud Martha), white faces. Over there that matter of mystery and hunchedness was thicker, a hundred-fold” (Brooks 9-10).
We might call Maud Martha’s looking at the strange, white faces a kind of black g(h)aze because it is undergirded by movement and it does not seem to have the impulse to control, categorize, limit, etc. that the scopophilic gaze exhibits. Maud Martha does not seek to uncover or render understandable the hunched mystery. There is also no safety in this g(h)aze; it is “deliciously threatening.” In this g(h)aze there might be a move toward an unboundedness that, as our class discussed on the second week, Fanon views with anxiety.
A note that does not relate to the previous paragraphs:
I think it’s interesting that there is a subgenre of music called “blackgaze” (a hybrid of black metal and shoegaze).
Here is an example of French blackgaze band Alcest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn7wvu8R4Wk
And American blackgaze band Deafheaven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81ITd6ByRLE
As I work on the literature of the eighteenth century, for me, the technological object that functions as a substitute for the eye is not the lens of the camera but rather the scalpel of the dissector. As I contemplate the im/possibility of a black gaze, these anatomical images of opened-up bodies haunt my understanding of what it means to look and to look-in. The dissector’s images are voyeurism at its most intimate and, often, most violent. It is the pornographic gaze as wombs are opened up and enough flesh is left on breasts to remain titillating even when the inner fat is what “should” be looked at. Often set up in anatomical theaters, the body is the performance and is on display. However, rather than just spectacular, these images made it into the routine of perverse gazing as men’s diaries from the 17th and 18th centuries are scattered with references to regularly masturbating to just these images.
ReplyDeleteI think it might be useful to turn to the medical gaze as the medical looms over this week’s readings, such as in Ralph Ellison essay “Harlem is Nowhere,” which opens exactly in the brightly lit halls of a clinic.
To best understand the gaze on/in the body, I always turn to Shigehisa Kuriyama, who lays out an understanding of how we look at bodies by tracing the Chinese practices of charting the inside of the body alongside the white Western practices of dissection in the eighteenth century. Relying on a fluid East/West binary, his comparisons make apparent the central function of the gaze to constructions of the body and how other ways of looking may become available when the substance of the body shifts. Kuriyama makes an argument for seeing as a way of imagining and that such seeing/imagining ultimately constructs the way the body is inhabited. I bring with me to any discussion of the gaze this sense that the scalpel carves out living experiences of the body along with the rendering inert the fleshy objects in front of it.
At its heart, the scalpel as a technology of a white gaze seeks to know and seeks a knowing that is imagined as only possible through penetration. According to Kuriyama, “for the dissector, the viscera are the truths buried in and under dense flesh, fat, and bone” that require the scalpel to peel back, “violating or peering beneath,” such “opaque” layers of the body to expose “a secret realm” (18). These actions build up an idea of the body possessing “resistant secrecy” (19). In other words, the white gaze is that which constructs a resistance in the body and then simultaneously and subsequently seeks to penetrate within that constructed resistance.
For Kuriyama, there does exist an alternative gaze, a “nonchalant gaze” (29). In the Chinese images of the body, the different approach to seeing is “plainly visible, but which by its very nature is easily overlooked. I mean their fleshless transparency” (18). There are multiple levels of looking at play here. First, the images of the body show the flesh and skin as transparent or even unseen when the right medical eye is trained on it. Second, we, as the viewer of the image, are at once unable to see this invisible skin and struck by its “plain” absence. This nonchalant gaze, this act of looking and not-looking, is not driven by “ocular yearning” as it implies no flesh to be penetrated through (20).
This different way of looking comes from different imaginaries of the body itself and medical attention to it. Mainly, the body is transparent, in part, because the body is imagined within medical practices as feeling always a part of a landscape and setting behind them. The body on display for the medical gaze may have a subtle breeze blowing at the hair and clothes that suggest the environment around them as much as the stuff inside. The nonchalant gaze of not-seeing viscera emerges from a different inhabiting of the body. The body is always open to the environment; it is a realm of “empty places” (28). Health, energy, liveliness, mental state are dependent on such empty spaces being variously filled and acting as “tenuous gathering” spaces for such energies and fluids (28). To inhabit such a body is to inhabit an empty space.
DeleteI don’t mean to suggest that either side of this binary constructed by Kuriyama and elaborated on by me is at work in our texts. Within Ellison, I see hints of both. Ellison describes Richard Wright’s Black Boy as evoking “the paradoxical, almost surreal image of a black boy singling lustily as he probes his own grievous wound” (265). This image that Ellison crafts for us imagines Wright as the subject and object of anatomical curiosity, of the desire to peer beyond the flesh. Ellison himself riffs on the idea of being “nowhere,” which we might take to be an adjacent form of inhabiting and gathering in vacancy. Rather, I aim to add physical penetration, visceral transparency, and bodily inhabitation to our cloud of connected concepts that give power and orient the gaze.
Sources I consulted beyond the required readings:
Hitchcock, Tim. English Sexualities, 1700-1800. Macmillan, 1997.
Kuriyama, Shigehisa. “The Case of Chinese Views of the Viscera” in The Imagination of the Body and the History of Embodied Experience. Ed. Shigehisa Kuriyama. International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 2001: 17-29.
And: Lan Li’s writings, working with Kuriyama, on in/visible fluids (there are also some images here): https://preview.shorthand.com/0AptWsLXiO4i7IVP
My encounters with the gaze as concept and nomenclature have typically been rooted in a kind of self-negating or recursive art-historical project. In other words, the gaze is identified in the terminology of its deficient vision or that which undoes it. The gaze is thus folded into its return; the idea is constructed in order to disestablish it. At the risk of sounding tautological, does the gaze (in art-historical practice at least) need to be reclaimed if it is already about what is withheld? Maybe what I bristle against is the idea of perspective rather than gaze, with regard to a hegemonic visual regime.
ReplyDeleteIt is in these terms of the ocular then that the stakes of the gaze vs. perspective debate might lie. The gaze is more ambivalent and environmental: it resides in a space of relationality and is not necessarily about looking directionally in the way that perspective might suggest. Breaking from an art-historical standpoint to one of visuality more broadly, the gaze is a distinctly ambient phenomenon that, as Georges Didi-Huberman suggests, troubles the semiotic fixedness of an image. How do we read this in the FSA photographs in 12 Million Black Voices, that have a clear telos in their purposes of representation. Does the text displace perspective into gaze, from the image and into the environment, or reinstate its fixedness? Can a frequential reading (or “listening”) unhinge the two?
This returns me to the problematic of fiction and documentary that I (along with many others!) raised on the blog last week. Specifically: does the documentary form lend itself to a reading of the gaze as opposed to the perspective of fiction? What aesthetic and affective strategies do we deploy for the FSA images as opposed to, say, DeCarava’s more gestural captures? In a fascinating essay more squarely concerned with documentary film, Erika Balsom suggests a modality of looking drawn on ethnographic practice that challenges the idea of perspectival looking, creating the conditions for a vision that is simultaneous and all-at-once. The works she considers—many from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab—are effective because they provide “thick description of the irreducible complexity of the world, its vital excessiveness and ambiguity.”
Can description then be a practice of the non-visual? Is a sonic gaze a useful paradigm for reclamation of a visual regime, in the way that Weheliye calls for in “In the Mix”? Perhaps we can import the descriptive potential into our discussions around the gaze this week, to complicate the questions of narration and voice that were brought up through Langston Hughes during the last session.
I remember Jenna Wortham, culture editor for The New York Times Magazine, wrote in a letter to the editor of McSweeney’s this:
ReplyDelete“Are you seeing what I’m seeing on Instagram these days? Selfies, taken in the feeds of store security cameras. Sometimes they’re staged in a bodega, sometimes in a museum. They mimic that old-school picture-in-picture effect, which helped sell televisions in the 1980s and ‘90s. A person capturing themselves as captured by a closed-circuit television, an image frozen in repetition”. She later expands on the potentially utopian possibility within this seemingly dystopian totality: “These images are purposely reclaiming the state’s definition of us [here she refers to Black people, and especially women]—a radical act of play”.
Similarly, I think Weems takes up the issue of gaze through play, but a form of play that entails serious engagement. Though Weems and these everyday selfie artists are inviting the camera to look, to stare or even gaze, there is nothing naive about their projects. Following Uri McMillan’s work Embodied Avatars, I understand these gestures as a commentary on identity under capture. My use of this term, “capture”, brought up concerns last class, so I will seek to clarify here. By capture, I refer to photographic capture, as in being seen through the flattening and totalizing gaze of the security camera and interpellated as a certain subject, a certain body. I also mean capture to align with the working definition on gaze that Prof. Hartman provided us: “man, capital, the gaze”. Wortham goes on to write that “We are always in modes of capture. There is no escape. Surveillance is constant, and the modern experience of blackness oscillates between the extremes of invisibility and visibility.” I think Wortham’s use of capture gestures to the material reality we all live in, now, which is to be at any moment the object of a security camera’s gaze, an undercover cop, an online tracker that records our every online search, but also to capture as an affective and political reality for Black and Indigenous bodies in particular.
As I continue to work through a definition of gaze, I am also thinking of Simone Browne’s argument that the trauma of surveillance on Black bodies begins with the transatlantic slave trade and stretches into the present, which makes me wonder what a historical definition of the gaze would look like. I am also thinking of Achille Mmembe and Janet Roitman’s piece, “Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis”. In it, they theorise how space and failed infrastructure in Cameroon at the height of structural adjustment programs produced an ambient environment of simultaneous laughter and despair at the incredulousness of the economic and political situation. They write, “As rites of expiation, laughter and derision give way to an imaginary well-being; they allow for distance between the subject who laughs and the object of mockery.
The division thus realized is precisely what permits the laughing subject to regain possession of self and to wear the mask” (1995: 352). Similarly, what I see in Weems and the bodega selfies is an incredible tension between “the subject who laughs” and the object being captured by the camera. The one who gazes back is both of these things, and it is that cognitive and affective dissonance that ultimately, according to Mmembe and Roitman, allows the individual to “become a stranger to the “thing” that exercises domination—and then to deride torture, murder, and all other forms of wretchedness” (1995: 352).
I can’t say I have an original referent for “the gaze” but I can say a few words about an article—Peggy Phelan’s “Broken Symmetries”—that shook up my perception of the gaze as a performer.
ReplyDeletePhelan writes: “Self-identity needs to be continually reproduced and reassured precisely because it fails to secure belief. It fails because … One’s own origin is both real and imagined. The formation of the “I” cannot be witnessed by the “eye” (Phelan 12). For the diasporic subject in particular, I believe the failure applies two-fold. The origin of birth is imagined, but so too is the original place, original culture, original kin before the hold and before the disaster.
Seeing the other then, according to Phelan, becomes a “social form of self-reproduction. For in looking at/for the other, we seek to re-present ourselves to ourselves.” As a performer, I’ve often reflected on how greedily I seek out the gaze of individual audience members, especially those who avoid the grip of such contact. To be honest, I think I seek out, to some degree, their discomfort. It never occurred to me (until reading Phelan and Fanon’s work) that I also seek their assurance; that I’ve been playing in an invisible world for a long time and have a strong desire to be “marked” by the “other’s” gaze, however much I also feel fixed by it.
And yet, I don’t consider this a deadly exchange. I have invited the audience into the theater after all. This performance is a construct of my own making. While performing, there is an aspect of my being that is, as Fred Moten describes, “captured motion constantly escaping.” I am multiple, I am failing to appear, I will never be found, and I am transforming—all this at the very same moment that my external self is caught in the grip of someone’s gaze. A gaze that I am likely returning.
Phelan suggests that “until one can accept one’s internal other as lost, invisible, an unmarked blank to oneself and within the world, the external other will always bear the marks and scars of the looker’s deadening gaze” (Phelan 25). I am moved by this proposition to surrender to loss. What if I have no need to be marked because I am already marked? Loss left an immaterial scar. Or, alternatively, a part of me is unmarked, lost, and invisible—I work with this part in the theater where “performance enacts the productive appeal of the nonreproductive” and where the gaze cannot be total or totalizing, because I am, with purpose and clarity, “actively vanishing.”
Many of the photographs in 12 Million Black Voices look at backs (see pages 18, 20, 24, 31, 58, 80, 89, 91, 96, 129, 138). At first glance, an image of someone’s back seems to reproduce the impersonal, distant, voyeuristic gaze of the government workers/celebrated photographers rendering lives as facts, interchangeable examples, generalizable representations, or evidence for sociological study, with little regard for singular lives unless framed as a portrait. If Wright all but buries the FSA photographs in text, it might be because he’s seeking to translate some tones he hears (through the muffling of disciplinary gazes) from the phonic substance of these photographs into a narrative. Such a narrative doesn’t so much tell us what or even how to see the images. Rather, it seems to perform how Wright sought to listen to these photographs, even those of backs, in spite of the deadening of phonic substance brought about through techniques, grammars, and frames that direct, discipline, and fix gazes. For instance, next to the photograph of field workers on page 24, Wright writes, “So our bent backs continued to give design and order to the fertile plantations.” Juxtaposed to the narrative (which discusses the antebellum South on this page), this photograph of the Jim Crow and New Deal era reverberates across time yet within a history of other gazes (juridical, medical) that also captured but don’t contain the widely circulated, loud image (rendered as evidence) of Gordon’s back. Still, when thinking about how a back looks, I want to read Wright’s synecdoche “our bent backs continued to give design” as a way to think not only about the look that compels a back to bend. I also want to think about how the person with their back to this white gaze looks at what that gaze can’t see when a back is turned toward it (how someone who is seen as a back looks at the world before them), as well as how this relates to the transhistorical process of “looking back” that concerns Wright.
ReplyDelete(Pre)positions (here I have Moten’s recent sermon on Baldwin and opening pages of All That Beauty in mind) become disoriented when faced with the opaque way a back looks: do we talk about what’s behind of, in front of, before, on the other side of a back when trying to articulate how the person who is seen as a back themselves sees? How might a non-possessive looking, not concerned with ordering the living and nonliving, transpire, even when directed to give design and order to the plantation? The opaque back-looking the black field worker engages would, I imagine, involve a look that gives care to the cotton, watches over the soil, attends to insects, etc, even under the Lords of the Land’s order that the workers bend their backs and enter debt under the demand that field workers pay for their own supervision. Another back-looking might transpire that is not reducible to looking behind one’s back, even if it is conditioned by the anticipatory mode of “look[ing] into the white man’s [always changing] mind” that precedes movement (“Before we black folk can move”) (35). Wright’s thinking continues to relate looking and backs in two other moments. Concerning the collective decision of “us” to go North, he writes, “Perhaps for the first time in our lives we straighten our backs, drop the hoe, give a fleeting glance at the white man’s face, and walk off” (87). Once in the North, he writes that the Bosses of the Buildings “brand us as revolutionists when we say that we are not allowed to react to life with an honest and frontal vision” (130). In both cases, Wright joins honest looks (glances or visions) with a straightened, frontal posture. This would seem to be the posture presupposed in the way of looking back that Wright calls readers and viewers to assume: “Look at us and know us and you will know yourselves, for we are you, looking back at you from the dark mirror of our lives!” (146)... (1/2)
(2/2) ... So what I’m wondering is if this call to “look at us… looking back at you” depends on or moves beyond this straightened (erect), frontal posture, especially since this stance also seems aligned with a qualified “we” that seems to assume a hetero-masculine gaze in Wright’s frequent gendered divisions (for instance, “our women fared easier than we men during the early days of freedom…” 36).
DeleteAgainst this potential limitation to how Wright posits looking back, I want to set another movement of back-looking in his narrative that I think still involves what Wright is getting at in looking back but that perhaps exceeds some of the ways he articulates this looking. Of the black children in the North, Wright (as “we”) writes, “Always our deepest love is toward those children of ours who turn their backs upon our way of life, for our instincts tell us that those brave ones who struggle against death are the ones who bring new life into the world, even though they die to do so, even though our hearts are broken when they die” (136). This complex sentence gestures toward a vision beyond the frontal vision, a vision belonging (“the children of ours”) and not belonging to the “we” that sees through, with, yet beyond death into new life. Yet what does it say about the frontal vision that its “deepest love” is for those who look by turning their backs on this very frontal vision? How could looking back constitute a gaze that undoes its own assumed postures? How could looking back seek to look with another without presuming to see what they see, without presuming to render transparent what the one they’re looking with has made opaque in turning their back (particularly if this turning back involves refusal of what’s been refused)? How could looking back figure itself without capitulating the demand to look beyond the terms that might be imposed by the (asymmetrical and reciprocal) gazes of the ones looking back (perhaps at each other)? What is the relationship between a way of seeing and a way of life? I think we’re confronted again with a more complex way of looking than Wright’s narrative often admits, even as the narrative helps bring it in and out of focus. It seems that, in excess of his own articulation, Wright might be getting at a way of seeing (what might be called a back gaze if not/also a black gaze, I’m not sure) that seeks to see through and with the back turned on itself in a way that doesn’t demand that back-turned look to face itself in recognition. This may be what the children see, but it also seems involved in the seeing Wright rehearses in the narrative yet which exceeds, perhaps necessarily, the instantiation he gives under the qualified sign “we.”
Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” has been useful for my understanding of two principal psychoanalytic processes of looking: “the scopophilic instinct (pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object) and in contradistinction, ego libido (forming identification processes)” (Mulvey 67). Her expounding on these processes respectively fostered my particular interest in the narcissism occasioned in the latter process of articulating the subjective “I” (Mulvey 61). I recall reading the essay for the first time and being drawn to this mirror moment of (mis) recognition in which the conception of self is indelibly wrapped-up in an appeal and ideal for an other. Peggy Phelan’s “Broken Symmetries: Memory, Sight, Love” thinks further with identificatory moment of subjectivity. “Broken Symmetries” has enabled me to investigate the relationship between visuality and ascriptive meanings, which are of importance for me when parsing out the rhetorical production of racialized-gendered schemas as articulated by Black Feminist theorists like Hortense Spillers. Phelan describes the unmarked-marked binary that informs “the epistemological, psychic, and political binaries of Western metaphysics,” where the process of marking with meaning is a process of transforming difference into the same:
ReplyDelete“…cultural reproduction takes she who is unmarked and re-marks her, rhetorically and imagistically, while he who is marked with value is left unremarked, in discursive paradigms and visual fields…the psychic subject transforms this difference into the Same, and converts the Other into the familiar grammar of linguistic, visual, and physical body of the Same” (Phelan 12)
Writing itself “re-marks the hole in the signifier, the inability of words to convey meaning exactly,” therefore constituting binaries such as “positive/negative, the seen and the unseen” (13). Writing the sign images the gap, that inapprehensible extraction of the essential. This gap that serves as sign reanimates Evelyn Higginbotham’s declaration in “African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race” that race is “global sign” albeit thwarting in its ability to signify meaning (Higginbotham 255). Likewise, this meeting of rhetorical-imagistic symbolic cover echoes Spillers’ own covered-uncovered dynamic of race in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” where the hieroglyphic “iconography” written onto the flesh marks the racialized other (Spillers 67). In this sense, Phelan and Spillers underscore articulation as a necessarily incorporative visual process. For me, this recalls Spillers’ jointure that she, the racially-gendered marked subject that posed illusionary to the United States’ imaginary would have to have been created; she functions in the gap of the U.S. rhetorical repository (Spillers 65).
And still, I hesitate to answer whether or not I believe in recuperating this understanding of gaze and gazing for the constitution of a Black Gaze. If the question is about championing a Black Gaze the takes-up this objectifying relationality between subject-object, then my answer would be a very serious no. However, I think it’s important to attend to the episteme that might shroud our own understanding (I’m thinking here of someone at Columbia’s insightful invocation of Simone Browne’s “dark sousveillance” and also an equally insightful conversation with Semilore on troubling episteme and ontology: just because we may be constituted by an epistemological “capture” of being looked at, doesn’t mean we are not looking and cannot look). Again, I underscore Phelan’s own push (and perhaps Browne’s too) to disrupt a visual or optic “wholeness” by thinking about the visual as resonant. My timid hope is that it is possible to negotiate new terms that don’t rely on a metric of maximal objectification.
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ReplyDeleteI was stuck by the resonances and divergences of Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices with and from both Du Bois’s Paris exhibit and Hughes and DeCarava’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life. In many ways, Wright’s work seems to parallel Du Bois’s Paris exhibit (including the data portraits, photographs, and Jim Crow legal artifacts). Like Du Bois, Wright seeks to envision black America in the terms of mass struggle and troubled progress. Like Hughes and DeCarava, however, Wright also synthesizes text and photographic images as a strategy for entering into the rhythms and textures of everyday black social life, posing a tension between generational uplift and the fleeting satisfactions and enduring disappointments of the ordinary.
As in the work of Du Bois and Hughes and DeCarava, Wright demonstrates a preoccupation with abstraction and singularity, albeit in a different way than the former authors and imagemakers. Wright’s voice, with its emphasis on broad, structural racial and class categories—such as the “Lords of the Land” or “Bosses of the Buildings,” on one hand, and the “black dancer” or “black sharecropper” on the other—parallels Du Bois’s visual breakdown of black and white populations by industry, occupation, wealth, and other demographic figures. Wright’s language struck me with its figural quality, not unlike Du Bois’s abstract visual forms. The voice of 12 Million Black Voices seems to me to enact a sort of allegorical mode of narration, in the sense that archetypal social figures stand in for fleshed-out individual characters. The effect of this style conveys a sense of the cyclical movement between expectation and disillusionment against teleological conceptions of progress. I think here of David Scott’s discussion of Merle Collins’ novel The Colour of Forgetting, which renders through allegorical narrative a sense of rupture in the temporal imaginary of post-revolutionary Grenada. “Within its allegorical economy,” writes Scott, “the collapse of the Grenada Revolution is conceived not as the catastrophic end of a teleological history of continuous progress but, rather, as merely one significant episode in a larger story of generations of conflict in what is now imagined and represented as the cyclical pattern of a general history whose generative logic is catastrophic” (74-75). By shifting from individual portraits to social figurations, Wright suggests that the forces embodied by the “Lords of the Land,” the “Bosses of the Buildings,” or “Queen Cotton” and the struggles enacted by “the black maid” or “the black industrial worker” constitute world-structuring antagonisms rather than particularistic moral journeys. While, like Du Bois, Wright holds onto hope for better collective futures, he too lingers with the anti-black violence of enclosure and rejects any possibility of neat resolution or transcendence.
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DeleteThe relationship between this textual voice and the photographic images, however, is to my mind a more ambiguous matter. While the FSA photographs are clearly designed to produce a kind of social typologization, which Wright seizes upon, the subjects of these images seem to trouble such schematization. Consider, for example, the photograph of three little boys hanging around in the street (138). This image would seem initially to support Wright’s apocryphal claim on the next page—“The streets claim our children”—as the boys seem to roam unsupervised in a trash-strewn city street, dwarfed by an imposing, shadowy brick building. Nonetheless, there is a touch of homosocial intimacy that Wright’s captioning leaves unaddressed, as one boy places an affectionate hand on another’s shoulder. Their backs to the camera, the boys are on the verge of passing around the corner and out of view. Wright’s generalized vision of black urban life oscillates between an understanding of the streets as a feminizing site of moral temptation and promiscuity, on the one hand, and a masculinizing site of bravery and self-sovereignty, on the other. The subjects of this particular photograph, however, elude these two poles. The question I am grappling with, then, is whether Wright’s tendency at times to suppress rather than explore the fugitive possibilities of such images derives from his move toward abstraction. If we take this to be the case, then we might challenge and supplement the text’s authoritative captioning through a return to the particular, envisaging richly-textured individual characters in the way that Hughes does for DeCarava’s images. On the contrary, however, we might argue that Wright’s imagination merely happens to be restricted to certain figurations, and we might instead welcome in other kinds of social abstractions. What might it look and sound like to imagine, say, black urban homosociality in the sort of capaciously collective terms that Wright favors? What if we added “the black queer” alongside “the black industrial worker”?
“When things take on special significance because you are black, a cold, accusing, unseen eye seems to judge your every act. It makes you feel guilty, hostile, ‘nowhere’.” Reading this quote in Ralph Ellison’s Harlem is Nowhere seems like a crucial departure point for discussions on the gaze since it immediately brings us back to Fanon and the way in which he argues that the white gaze establishes a “racial epidermal scheme”. This quote is followed by a picture of a young black boy in whose background there is a painted eye on a wall alongside an ominous warning: “The unseen eye is watching you”. As in the Foucauldian panopticon, this invisible eye watches everything and everyone in Harlem, enacting a gesture of enclosure that resonates both with the Fanonian account and with the feeling of being “nowhere”. When evoking the Foucauldian idea of the panopticon as one of the foundational discussions about the gaze, it becomes crucial to highlight how Bentham’s planning of the panopticon prison was preceded by the plantation system, which had already established many of his ideas for this system.
ReplyDeleteFor Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011), visuality “was founded in plantation practice, from the mapping of plantation space to the identification of cash-crop cultivation techniques and the precise division of labor required to sustain them…Such visuality separates and segregates those it visualizes to prevent them from cohering as political subjects” (p.3).
Following Mirzoeff argument, we can perceive how the privilege of the optical over the other senses is indebted of the possibility of engaging with it as a means to frame and control racialized bodies is historically linked to slavery and the creation of the color line – and we could go even before the plantation system to perceive how the gaze was also at the center stage in the first texts produced by Europeans after their arrival in America. If we think of this plantation visuality as being yoked to the idea of the gaze as an “ordering frame” – and, in here, we could once again think on how visuality was a crucial tool for the colonial grammar and the way it had to claim territories by resorting to the visual register of the ‘landscape’ (Mary Louise Pratt, 2008, p.59). The quote from Ellison's novel alongside the aforementioned picture brings to stark relief how the plantation was perpetuated within the city, how those who migrated to the North were also followed by this plantation visual system. And the pictures from Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices highlights this continuation in a very poignant way. Produced by the Farm Security Administration, these pictures echo each other in disregards to geographical space in which they take place. In them, we perceive the perpetuation of the sociological eye which enters the domestic space to register the impoverished conditions in which black families lived. As argued by Saidiya Hartaman (2019), “the photographs coerced the black poor into visibility as a condition of policing and charity, making those bound to appear to suffer the burden of representation. In these iconic images of the black urban poor, individual persons were forced to stand in for sweeping historical narratives about the progress or failure of the Negro, serve as representative of a race or class, embody and inhabit social problems, and evidence failure or improvement”. The repetition of the same frame and mise-en-scene pursed by these photographs dissolves the possibility of difference, as we can notice when seeing how the same visual code gets repeated in the pictures from pages 65 (in the South) and page 108 (a kitchenette in the city). These pictures are part of the multitude of the unseen eye who watches these black bodies and that fixates them, and, by doing so, they resort to a visual code to reinforce the feeling of being nowhere, as being halted in time.
Wright’s stated aim in the Preface of 12 Million Black Voices of placing “within full and constant view the collective humanity” of the “countless black millions” provokes me to return to Weheliye’s “Diagrammatics as Physiognomy”. In thinking through what is offered by Du Bois’s data portraits in relation to photography and other forms, Weheliye argues: “Since the masses, just as races, are not visible to the “naked eye,” the optic illustration of the statistical data provides the channel through which to render thinkable and perceptible the Negro qua masses” (38). I want to think about the work Wright is doing to challenge this argument, to render the Black masses thinkable through the combination of photography and “fabulatory” narrative. Thinking Wright in conversation with the two visual-textual ensembles from last week, we can see the repetition of a method of writing with photographs as a means of representing Black life. I argued in my post on DeCarava/Hughes and Weems that the methods of writing with the photograph exceed categories of fact and fiction, using “knowledge from and of the everyday” (drawing from Sharpe) to narrate what the author “knows” about Black life that exceeds the category of evidence. Wright engages this practice in presenting the photograph yet not writing about what is “in” the photograph but what exceeds it. Even the captions he uses speak beyond the images to the “abstract forces” and affective registers which shape black life. It is the register of affect and a Black interiority, in dialogue with Hughes and Weems, which allows Wright to bring the Black masses into constant view. Wright makes a Back mass visible and thinkable through a narrating of a collective conception, experience, movement of and through history, and through a conceptualizing of a collective Black affect. What does it mean to think of oneself as within a collective, continuously made and unmade through the afterlives of slavery? How do we represent this visually? Wright takes Farm Security Administration photos, and reads underneath the images of Black capacity to participate in the American project, attuning the reader and viewer to the “uneasily tied knot of pain and hope whose snarled strands converge from many points of time and space” (10). Wright, engaging in a similar work of Du Bois, is working out a historicizing of the psyche of the Negro as a collective people, a nation within a nation. I want to think about Wright (and Rosskam, as photo director) engaged in a type of archival manipulation in conversation with the work Arthur Jafa is doing. Out of an archive of visual images, how do you determine what to select to portray Black life? In what order and at what frequency do you display them? What sounds and text enable an encounter with Black life?
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DeleteThis response has two sections. The first is the restating of a gesture in Fred Moten’s criticism which I find helpful. The second is an attempt to provisionally define the gaze in terms as I understand it. It begins with a concise attempt at a definition before meandering.
ReplyDelete(coming back to put this up front: I realise that the question of gaze is for me one that has resonances both in a conversation of grammar and ontology which spin, again for me, a little out of control.)
Part 1) The passage of Moten’s that I brought up last class. What is the gesture to use the improper language of the sense for the description of a photo, text, or piece music’s attributes? Why does he use the language of phonic substance in relation to the photo in a chapter called “Visual Music?” What is in this choice and how does it relate to an attempt to articulate something in excess of meaning? Does noticing the gesture speak to its formulaic and perhaps unsuccessful gesture? Can that which operates in excess be not excessive? Does excess disturb legibility? Does legibility call for the non-excessive?
Part 2) Here is an attempt at articulating my understanding of what the gaze/white gaze does: Gaze produces intelligibility through the terms of utility(or potential utility) by way of the violent omission of a relationality which moves in excess of meaning.
This definition relies on several preconceived notions.
1) A relationality which moves in excess of meaning: perhaps we could call this a kind of substance which is produced upon.
2)An act of production which at least in some way is successful in its omission; an omission which in as much as it is violent fails its mission of the total foreclosure of excess.
3)A conception of a system or structure of thought for which intelligibility is only made through utility/use.
4)An articulation of appearance or the realm of appearance.
The process of the gaze, in my mind, works something like this: in the face of the disruptive and disturbing excess of meaning a subject is offered a space within the structure of the gaze if they are willing to do the work of the production. This work is that which attempts to fix(here I am thinking of Fanon) meaning and cut off its excess; an arrest and an omission. This work stabilizes and mobilizes the gaze to adaptation.
What is tricky about this work is that often its production appears to be a production acted out on a material and so the response might be to go to this material as a place of resistance but what if this material was already determined by the gaze? Under this thinking, the articulation and creation of a raw material which is workable is a primary act of the gaze. This raw material might be thought of as that which appears. The gaze, then, produces this realm of appearance as much as it acts within the horizon of that which appears.
But this is quite the claim because it suggests that the gaze is not just an act, within or on that which appears, but the determiner of that which appears. But in as much as the gaze determines what appears or works with what appears or acts out its appearing the gaze fails to fully omit the relationality it seeks to preclude so that the material it produces carries the trace of that substance which it was produced out of. Gaze is an apprehension.
DeleteFor me the gaze is akin to the anti-blackness of western civilization. Is blackness that relationality which operates in excess of meaning? And whiteness the gaze? Is the articulation of the paraontological helpful here? Does this articulation leave any room for what happens when a photograph is looked at? Perhaps it does not leave room within appearance. But it might point toward that which is in excess of appearance; when this appearance is the empirical or meaning. This is, as I think Calvin Warren would want to remind me, a question which has echoes in the ontological (This is an essay from Warren that I have been thinking alongside while writing this response: https://unbag.net/end/black-mysticism)
Ralph Ellis, within the same breath, proclaims the contradictory conditions of Black life in the American North at the time : “To live in Harlem is to dwell in the very bowels of the city… Harlem is a ruin…Harlem is the scene and symbol of the Negro’s alienation in the land of his birth” while it is at the same time “the setting of his transcendence”(2-3). It is a site and a sight of “grace under pressure” (5). Thinking about this text in dialogue with the prose and photographs that animate Richard Write’s 12 Million Black Voices I am interested in the ways in which a history of Black migration maps a landscape as much as it traces a “moving into the sphere of conscious history” (147). Not in the sense of historical progress, which has been mobilized against BIPOC as a means of justification for their exploitation, but in the sense that Wright describes it when he invites a different modality of mobility: a “living past” locatable in “the mirror of our consciousness“ (146). I was struck by the simultaneously eloquent yet scathing tone of Wright’s narrative which foregrounds the unbearable conditions of enslavement, sharecropping, and the kitchenette and names the culpable – the greedy Lords of the Land and the Bosses of the Buildings – again in the same breath. He seamlessly pulls these figures through the canals of history and shows how their roles transform in response to the material, political, social, religious, economic conditions of the time but always while maintaining their violent frame. Mirroring these transformations is the constant resurgence of his African American community “moving in all directions” with a “sense of constant change” (143). We discussed this rhythmic movement in the diagrams and narratives by Du Bois and the parallel but disjointed cadences of image and text in The Sweet Flypaper of Life. Repetition is the rhythm that haunts Wright’s text, generating both new means of entrapment while also gestating higher frequencies or capacities for resilience or what Ellis, I think, means when he identifies Harlem as a site of “transcendence.” I was reminded of bell hooks work on “marginality as a site of resistance.”
ReplyDeleteIn terms of the texts I bring with me to discussions about visuality, I am probably most firmly grounded in Nicole Fleetwood’s book, Troubling Vision. A text that is very much complementary to Simone Browne’s Dark Matters, Troubling Vision is, in Fleetwood’s words, “a study of how blackness becomes visually knowable through performance, cultural practices, and psychic manifestations,” (Fleetwood 8). Her question of “how blackness gets attached to bodies, goods, ideas, and aesthetic practices in the visual sphere,” (Fleetwood 20) illuminates the artificiality of blackness being associated with certain kinds of matters and aesthetic practices, while simultaneously exploring how black subjects subvert and manipulate said associations. Like the Browne’s idea of sousveillance, Fleetwood explores how dispossessed subjects use the gaze as a method of expressing themselves with the full knowledge of how the white gaze warps them.
ReplyDeleteBecause of my personal academic interests in black women, I found chapters two and three to be useful, especially when set against each other. In chapter two, “Her Own Spook: Colorism, Vision, and the Dark Female Body”, Fleetwood genders Fanon’s famous racial and psychoanalytic question, asking “How does the darkly coded black female subject come to see herself as abject being? And how is dominant vision structured in such a way that reinforces her abjection?” (Fleetwood 95). Fleetwood focuses on dark skinned black women’s presumed self-hatred, a self-hatred that makes the dark skinned woman “her own spook”. Looking at the play Yellowman as well as the work of artist Renee Cox, Fleetwood provides an incisive analysis of how “the black female body always presents a problem within a field of vision structured by racialized and gendered markings”, and how the dark skinned woman is encouraged to turn that gaze in on herself, to imagine herself as vulnerable/deserving of assault, as Yellowman’s Alma does, in particular with respect to the sexual—“The explicit black female body is an excessive body,” (Fleetwood 109).
The conflation of explicitness with excess on the template on the black female body continues through into the following chapter, “Excess Flesh: Black Women Performing Hypervisibility” where explores how performers like Renee Cox and Lil’ Kim manipulate the association of explicitness, excess, and black femininity by enacting what she refers to as “performances of excess flesh”, which are “enactment[s] of visibility that seizes upon the scopic desires to discipline the black female body through a normative gaze that anticipates its rehearsed performance of abjection,” (Fleetwood 112). Fleetwood’s excess flesh performances perform a sousveillance by anticipating the surveillance and disrupting its image through the dark matter that renders the surveillance/abjection necessary. In doing so, these performances trouble the formation of the afterimage, unsettling a veillance.
Discussing the twerking of video vixens in 90s hip hop music videos, Fleetwood writes that “they bend over and fully expose their buttocks to the camera. Their fleshy thighs and jiggly buttocks captivate the camera. They are autoerotic, driving themselves to inappropriate levels of ecstasy,” (133). Covering the veillance in excess, this excess flesh performance engenders afterimages that “captivate” the eye, designed to be watched. The infamous fish-eye lens, however, does not encapsulate the eye of the performer herself, who eludes the watcher’s eye, yet—although we can neither confirm nor deny it—likely looks back at it.
DeleteThis approach to looking as something that is fundamentally conversational colors my approach to Twelve Million Black Voices, the Sweet Flypaper of Life, and the films we watched earlier this week. How do black people, who have so often been objects of study as a result of their perceived fleshiness and excess, interact with a camera as opposed to being just subjected by it? The work that Fleetwood does that I feel is important, which Tara and I referenced in our conversation, is to piece apart assumptions that would imply that the black person is incapable of subjecthood within the photograph simply because photography was a medium initially designed to objectify black people. To me, black photographies like Weems's allow for a splitting of an episteme that marks black people as objects and the reality of their subjecthood, with the work itself producing a friction between the two.
»When our eyes touch, is it day or is it night?«
ReplyDeleteThis question still resonates with me, far from being answered; even too far off of looking for an answer, cryptically posed by Jacques Derrida in his exuberant essay on Jean-Luc Nancy. Day and Night. White and Black. For Derrida, the question posed is tied to the question of ‘sense’ — sensualism, carnality, fleshliness, and meaning. Didn’t we say, that we see nothing, that we would lose any information, in the glaring whiteness of overexposure? And doesn’t the (terrible) beauty lie in the dark, non-visible passages of photography, in which the dark-grey and black tones preserve the tonality of black life? – at least for who is ready to (not) see, but listen to the unrecognizable undertones of what cannot be seen? Who is looking (at) (me)?
»— These eyes or these gazes? You're going from one to the other. For two gazes, more than two eyes are often needed. And then there are eyes that no longer see, and eyes that have never seen. Aren't you also forgetting those living without any eyes? All the same, they don't always live without any light.«
The Oxford English Dictionary’s etymology is rather sparse: ‘gaze’ — Etymology: Of unknown origin; possibly < the same root as 'gaw' v., with an -s- suffix. Rietz gives a Swedish dialect 'gasa' to gape, stare.
a. intransitive. † In early use: To look vacantly or curiously about; also, to stare, open one's eyes (with astonishment). In modern use: To look fixedly, intently, or deliberately at something.
There seems to be a terminological difference at work in the term gaze. I am interested in this difference between a gaze that fixes intentionally, and one that is marked by a certain openness, or vacancy. Following this thread into the term gaze itself, I am wondering why it is that most conceptions of the gaze think it as something a subject ‘has,’ or ‘owns,’ as well as something through which a subject owns someone other in making it some'thing' other. Rather, it can be said that the gaze in general describes a scene of intersubjective encounter first of all.
Even the objectifying gaze, as can be seen in Sartre, is embedded in the important moment in which a being realizes that it is a being-for-others ('être-pour-autrui'). I am not trying to negate the objectifying, possessive, or subduing agency of the gaze; the subtle violence of being disarmed and captured in a mode of existence that apprehends itself as having become an object for another consciousness—the ultimate alienation in the potential freedom of a subject to be, that happens when this being is transformed into an object which exists like any other object. This feeling of being the object of the other’s look, which is often accompanied by a feeling of shame.
And yet, there is this moment of intersubjectivity. So, there is always an exchange of looks, there is always eyes that meet each other. Someone other is always another other for its other–if that makes sense somehow. This scene of relationality, the in-between two others, is something I would like to address in this post.
In following Jean-Luc Nancy (among others), with which I want to think the gaze, not so much as a tool to fix, command and subjugate something other, but as a moment of movement. In his text on Abbas Kiarostami’s films Nancy writes the following:
“In fact there are no stable, simply discrete poles: there is the movement from one to the other, and there is the energy of this movement, and there is film, which is the capture of this energy (in the sense that film takes away this power in order to give it back again and realize it also). It is the energy of a mobilized, activated, or animated look: that is to say the power of regard (égard) with respect to what presents itself to a look. In French regard (look) and égard (regard) are more or less the same word: re-gard indicates a propitious distance for an intensified guard (garde), for looking after (prise en garde) (it is a Germanic root, wardon/warten, that yields all these words). Guarding calls for watching and waiting, for observing, for tending attentively and overseeing. We look after what is ahead and after the way it presents itself: we let it present itself—and thus we also leave open the field for its withdrawal, where presence is in reserve, where presence keeps itself reserved […]. Looking is regarding and consequently respecting. The word respect also has to do with regard (respicere ): it watches for..., turned toward ... , guided by attention, by observance or consideration. A rightful look is respectful of the real that it beholds, that is to say it is attentive and openly attending to the very power of the real and its absolute exteriority: looking will not tap this power but will allow it to communicate itself or will communicate with it itself. In the end, looking just amounts to thinking the real, to test oneself with regard to a meaning one is not mastering.”
ReplyDeleteWhat I like about this passage is the urge to keep an eye on the dimension of attention, or looking out for the other, solicitude and care. In Nancy’s concept of gaze, it is I who enters into a relationship with the world, rather than maintaining a relationship to objects. There is no way to look for me without having something else approaching, addressing and tackling me. Thinking about the guard, I am very interested in a scene in which I am vacantly looking into the eyes of someone other; not with the intention to objectify, in order to guard my own self-conscious, but with the attention of handing myself over to the other, the moment of surrender, which is also a moment of letting one self’s guard down.
Far from determining what my conception of gaze is, this post has no problem with keeping things in the obscure darkness that was seeking for shining a light onto the dimension of non-intentionality and surrender, which is at work in the very moment when eyes ( I’s ) meet:
»—Where we are, this night-seems even darker, then. Don't we have to make a choice between looking or exchanging glances or meeting gazes, and seeing, very simply seeing? And first between seeing the seeing and seeing the visible? For if our eyes see what is seeing rather than visible, if they believe that they are seeing a gaze rather than eyes, at least to that extent, to that extent as such, they are seeing nothing, then, nothing that can be seen, nothing visible. Away from all visibility, they founder in the night. They blind themselves so as to see a gaze; they avoid seeing the visibility of the other's eyes so as to address themselves only to his or her gaze, to his or her sight that is merely seeing, to his or her vision.«