Downcast eyes: the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought

Downcast-

Eyes

THE DENIGRATION OF VISION IN TWENTIETH-cENTURY FRENCH THOUGHT

,· ·,·

'

'i:.

A CENTENNIAL

K

One hundred books published between 19?Q:~nd 1995 bear this special iJilp~iritof the University of C;lifqt~nia Press. We have chosen each Centennial Book as an example of the Press's finest publishing and booki::rlaking traditions as we celebrate the beginning of our second century.

UNIVERSITYOF CALIFORNIA PRESS Fotmded in 1893

Downcast

Eyes

THE DENIGRATION OF VISION IN TWENTIETH{E NTU RY FRENCH THOUGHT

Martin jay

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY

LOS ANGELES

LONDON

((85

h/ :2,

;

\

1-.)

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University ofCaliforni~ Press, Ltd. London, England First Paperback Printing 1994 Copyright © 1993 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Camloging-in-Publicarion Data Jay, Marrin, 1944Downcast eyes : the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought I Martin Jay. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-08885-9 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Vision. 2. Cognition and culrure. 3. Philosophy, French-20th cemury. 4. France-Civilization-20th century. 5. France-inrellectual life-20th century. I. Tide. 1993 B2424.P45J39 194---dc20 93-347 CIP Printed in the United States of America 10

09

08

07

06

05

14

13

12

11

10

9

04 8

7

6

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requiremenrs of ANSIINISO 239.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). (§)

For Beth

Contents

IX

l

21

Acknowledgments Introduction CHAPTER ONE: The Noblest of the Senses: Vision from

Plato to Descartes 83 149

CHAPTER TWO: Dialectic of EnLIGHTenment CHAPTER THREE: The Crisis of the Ancien Scopic Regime:

From the Impressionists to Bergson 211

CHAPTER FOUR: The Disenchantment of the Eye: Bataille

and the Surrealists 263

CHAPTER FfVE: Sartre, Mcrleau-Ponty, and the Search for

a New Ontology of Sight 329

CHAPTER SIX: Lacan, Althusser, and the Specular Subject

of Ideology 381

CHAPTER SEVEN: From the Empire of the Gaze to the Society

of the Spectacle: Foucault and Debord 435

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Camera as Memento Mori: Barthes,

Metz, and the Cahiers du Cinema 493

CHAPTER NINE: "Phallogocularcentrism": Derrida and Irigaray

543

CHAPTER TEN: The Ethics of Blindness and the Postmodern

Sublime: Levinas and Lyotard 587

Conclusion

595

Index

Vll

Acknowledgments

Registering the many acts of generosity that made this book possible is both a pleasant and melancholy activity. Its pleasure follows from the fond · recollection of the people and institutions who were so supportive of the project from the beginning. It is difficult to imagine a warmer or more constructive response to a scholarly enterprise than was forthcoming in this instance. Because the scope of the book is so wide, I have had to rely on the expert knowledge of many people in a multitude of disciplines, all of whom were remarkably willing to share with me the fruits of their own research and learning. The melancholy flows no less inexorably from the fact that several of their number are no longer alive and able to know how deeply I benefited from and appreciated their help. I would not have been in a position to s~licit such aid without the support of the more anonymous benefactors who made the institutional decisions that allowed this project to prosper. Let me thank them first. I was given financial sustenance by the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of California Center for Germanic and European Studies, and the University of California Committee on Research. Clare Hall, Cambridge University kindly provided me a visiting membership while I was engaged in writing the manuscript. And three institutions allowed me to teach courses on its theme: the College international de philosophic of Paris in 1985, the School of LX

Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth College in 1986, and Tulane University, where I was Mellon Professor in summer of 1990. There can be no better preparation for writing a book of this kind than testing its ideas out in seminars comprising both faculty and advanced graduate student participants, who taught me far more than I t;mght them. Only they will know how much this book is a collaborative effort. Special thanks are due to Bernard Pulman, Galt Harpham for their respective invitations to conduct those seminars. abetted by the kindDuring the year I spent in Paris, I also was nesses of many French scholars, whose names will be found in the pages that follow. Let me acknowledge them with gratitude: Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Cornelius Castoriadis, the late Michel de Certeau, Daniel Defert, Luce Giard, Jean-Joseph Goux, Luce Irigaray, Sarah Kofman, Claude Lefort, Michel LOwy, Lyotard, Gerard Raulet, Jacob Rogozinski, and Philippe Soulez. I have aiso deeply benefited from conversations with Jacques Derrida, Philippe LacoueLabarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, and the late Michel Foucaulr during their visits to America. and colleagues, I also owe an enormous debt to the following who in a variety of ways left their mark on this book: Svetlana Alpers, Mitchell Ash, Ann Banfield, Susanna Barrows, William Bouwsma, Teresa Brennan, Carolyn Burke, Drucilla Cornell, Carolyn Dean, John Forrester, Hal Foster, Michael Fried, Amos Funkenstein, Claude Gandelman, Alexander Gelly, John Glenn, Joseph Graham, Richard Gringeri, Sabine Gross, Robert Harvey, Joan Hart, Frederike Hassauer, Eloise Knapp Hay, Denis Hollier, Michael Ann Holly, Axel Honneth, Karen Jacobs, Michael Janover, Dalia Judovitz, Anton Kaes, Kent Kraft, Rosalind Krauss, Dominick LaCapra, Thomas Laqueur, David Michael Levin, the late Eugene Lunn, Jane Malmo, Greil Marcus, Irving Massey, ]ann Matlock, Frans;oise Meltzer, Stephen Melville, Juliet Mitchell, John Durham Peters, Mark Poster, Christopher Prendergast, Anson Rabinbach, Paul Rabinow, John Rajchman, Bill Readings, Eric Rentschler, Irit Rogoff, Michael Rosen, Michael Roth, Michael Schudsen, Joel Snyder, Kristine Stiles, Sidra Stich, Marx Wartofsky, John Welchman, J. M. x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Winter, Richard Wolin, Eli Zaretsky, and Jack Zipes. Skilled research assistance was supplied by Berkeley graduate students Alice. Bullard, Lawrence Frohman, Nicolleta Gullace, Gerd Harten, a:nd..Darrin Zook. It has also been my great good fortune to be able to lecture on aspects of this project to audiences from many different disciplines in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, Hungary, India, and Yugoslavia, as well as throughout the United States. I want those who invited me and those who responded with questions I am still struggling to answer to know how much I value their hospitality. I would also like to thank the editors of the journals and volumes in which earlier versions of several chapters or parts of chapters appeared: chapter 4 in the Visual Anthropology Review, 7, 1 (Spring, 1991); chapter 5 in Modendty and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley, 1993), chapter 7 in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (London, 1986), 1CA Documents (London, 1986), and chapter 10 in Thesis Eleven, 31 (1992). James Clark and Edward Dimendberg of the University of California Press have supported the book with great vigor and generosity. The readings they provided by Rosalind Krauss and Allan Megill were invaluable. So too were the ones solicited by Harvard University Press from Walter Adamson and Paul Robinson; Aida Donald's efforts on behalf of the manuscript were in this sense not in vain, and I want to express my appreciation for her enthusiasm and understanding. I have also benefited from the computer. assistance of Gail Phillips, the copyediting of Lisa Chisholm, and the indexing of Rita Chin .. As always, I am privileged to be able to acknowledge the relentless scrutiny of a pair of very special readers: my wife, Catherine Gallagher and the late Leo LowenthaL Leo's death at the age of ninety-two earlier this year ended a remarkable friendship, the like of which I will never enjoy again. Two more eagle-eyed critics are hard to imagine. Finally, no acknowledgment section would be complete without mentioning my daughters, Shana Gallagher and Rebecca Jay, who know how to roll their eyes when their father, like George Bush, bemoans yet again his problems with "the vision thing." ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

XI

Introduction

Even a r~pid glance at the language we commonly use will demonstrate the ubiquity of visual metaphors. If we actively focus our attention on them, vigilantly keeping an eye out for those deeply embedded as well as those on the surface, we can gain an illuminating insight into the complex mirroring of perception and language. Depending, of course, on one's outlook or point of view, the prevalence of such metaphors will be accounted an obstacle or an aid to our knowledge of reality. It is, however, no idle speculation or figment of imagination to claim that if blinded to their importance, we will damage our ability to inspect the world outside and introspect the world within. And our prospects for escaping their thrall, if indeed that is even a foreseeable goal, will be greatly dimm'ed. 1 In lieu of an exhaustive survey of such metaphors, whose scope is far too broad to allow an easy synopsis, this opening paragraph should suggest how ineluctable the modality of the visual actually is, at least in our linguistic practice. I hope by now that you, optique lecteur, can see what I mean. 1 l. There are some twenty-one visual metaphors in this paragraph, many of them embedded in words that no longer seem directly dependent on them. Thus, for example, vigilant is derived from the Latin vigilare, to watch, which in irs French form veiller is the root of surveillance. Demonstrate comes from rhe Latin monstrare, to show. Inspect, prospect, introspect (and other words like aspect or circumspect) all derive from rhe Latin specere, to look at or observe. Speculate has the same root. Scope comes from the Latin scopium, a translation of a Greek word for to look at or examine. Synopsis is from the Greek word for general view. These are latent or dead metaphors,

Other Western languages also contain a wealth of examples to buttress the point. No for instaflce, can miss the Augen in Augenblick or the Schau in Anschauung, nor can a Frenchman fail to hear the voir in both savoir and pouvoir.2 And if this is so with ordinary language, it is no less the case with the specialized languages intellectuals have designed to lift us out of the commonsensical understanding of the world around us. As Ian Hacking and Richard Rorty have recently emphasized, even Western philosophy at its most putatively disinterested and neutral can be shown to be deeply dependent on occluded visual metaphors. 3 In addition to the ocular permeation of language, exists a wealth of what might be called visually imbued cultural social practices, which may vary from culture to culture and epoch to epoch. Sometimes these can be construed in grandiose terms, such as a massive shift from an oral culture to a "chirographic" one based on writing and then a typographic one in which the visual bias of the intermediate IS even more 4 firmly entrenched. On a more modest level, anthropologists and sociolobut they still express the sedimemed importance of the visual in the English language. For a discussion of dormant visual metaphors, see Colin MurrayTurbayne, The Myth ofMetaphor (Columbia, S.C., I 971). 2. The French etymologies for these words are, to be sure, different-voir coming savoir from sapere, and pouvoir from potere. But som,etimes from the Latin imagined reveal as much as real ones. For a consideration of this 1theme, see Derek as History/History as Saussure :)'nd the ed. Derek Romance of Etymology," in Post-structuralism and the Question Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (Cambridge, nections were made is shown by the film .theorist Thierry Kuntzel's essay "Savoir, pouvoir, voir," c;:a Cinema, 7-8 (May, 1975). 3. Ian Hacking, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophyi'(Cambridge, 1975); Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror ofNature (Princeton, 1979). For a discussion of the link between knowledge and sight in all Indo-European tongues, see Stephen A. Tyler, "The Vision Quest in the West, or What the Mind's Sees," journal of Anthropological Research, 40, 1 (Spring, 1984), pp. 23-39. He shows that at least one other language family, Dravidian, lacks this linkage. 4. For arguments of this kind, see \Valter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Mind (Cambridge, Haven, 1967); Jack Goody, The Domestication of the 1977); and Donald M. Lowe, History ofBourgeois Perception (Chicago, 1982).

2

INTRODUCTION

gists have examined such visually fraught phenomen:a as the widespread belief in the evil eye, which has given rise to a no less popular series of countervailing apotropaic remedies. 5 Somewhere in betw~n, historians of technology have pondered the implications of our expanded capacity to see through such devices as the telescope, microscope, c.amera, or cin-

ema. What has been called the expansion of our "exosomatic organs" 6 has meant above all extending the range of our vision, compensating for its imperfections, or finding substitutes for its limited powers. These expansions have themselves been linked in complicated ways to the practices of surveillance and spectacle, which they often abet. Because of the remarkable range and variability of visual practices, many commentators have been tempted, in ways that we will examine shortly, to claim certain cultures or ages have been "ocularcentric," 7 or "dominated" by vision. For them, what may seem a function of our physiology or evolution is best understood in historical terms, with the obvious conclusion often drawn that we can reverse the effects of that domination. Anthropological evidence of radical variations in the intersensory mix of different cultures has been adduced to encourage such an outcome. 8 But as in so many other similar debates, the threshold betvveen what is "natural" and what is "cultural" is by no means easy to fix with any cer5. For recent studies of the evil eye, see Clarence Maloney, ed., The Evil Eye (New York, 1976); Lawrence DiStasi, Mal Occhio: The Underside ofVision (San Francisco, 1981 ); and Tobin Siebers, The Mirror ofMedusa (Berkeley, 1983). For an account of apotropaic responses to it, see Albert M. Pons, The World's Eye (Lexington, Ky., 1982).

6. Robert E. Innis, 'Technics and the Bias of Perception," Philosophy and Social Criticism, 10, 1 (Summer, 1984), p. 67. Although visual "prostheses" appear to be the most significant extension of human sense organs, such inventions as the telephone, loudspeaker, stethoscope, and sonar demonstrate that hearing has also been exosomatically enhanced. The other senses have perhaps not been as fortunate.

7. A~ is the case with many neologisms, "ocularcenrric" or "ocularcenrrism" is sometimes spelled differently in the literature. Often it is rendered "oculocentric," or less frequently "ocularocentric." In previous publications I have followed the first of these usages and will remain with it here. 8. See, for example, the essays in David Howes, ed., The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology ofthe Senses (Toronto, 1991).

INTRODUCTION

3

tainty. For example, the psychologists Michael Argyle and Mark Cook have recently concluded that "the use of the gaze in human social behavior does not vary much between cultures: it is a cultural universal." 9 But the implications of the work of another psychologist, James Gibson, suggests otherwise. Gibson contrasts two basic visual practi.ces, which produce what he calls "the visual world" and the "visual field." 10 In the former, sight is ecologically intertwined with the other senses to generate the experience of "depth shapes," whereas in the latter, sight is detached by fixating the eyes to produce "projected shapes" instead. A plate, for example, will be experienced as round in the visual world, but as an ellipse in the visual field, where the rules of perspectival representation prevail. The implication of Gibson's argument is that vision is normally crossed with the other senses~' but it can be artificially separated out. Thus, cultures might be differentiated according to how radically they distinguish between the visual field and the visual world. But whether we identifY the latter with "natural" vision is not self-evident. In a series of essays, the philosopher Marx Wartofsky has argued for a radically culturalist reading of all visual experience, including Gibson's two dominant modes. 11 Alternately talking about "visual postures," "visual scenarios," "styles of seeing," or "cultural optics," he concludes that 9. Michael Argyle and Mark Cook, Gaze and Mutual Gaze (Cambridge, 1976), p. 169. It should be noted that they use the term "gaze" in a general sense to mean any kind of visual interaction. Unlike some of the authors cited later, they do not contrast it with the less fixating glance. 10. James J. Gibson, The Perception ofthe Visual World (Boston, 1950); Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston, 1966); The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston, 1979). For a recent defense of Gibson, see John Hell, Perception and Cognition (Berkeley, 1983). 11. M