Picturing vision The interconnectedness of mental and visual images NJ
Eva Schürmann
Abstract • Kant taught us to think of the faculty of imagination as an ingredient of perception. Vision, thus, is not only opened to the present but also to the absent, for instance through expectations or mem- ories. Our ways of seeing are literally formed by normative presumptions and culturally predetermined ideas. This makes visual perception a sort of an image-making activity in the context of a practice. It is the practice that regulates what can be perceived in which way or what is overlooked. As an activity it is neither solely a pure construction of individual viewpoints, nor a pure representation of the physically present world. Rather, it is the result of the reciprocal tension between the perceiver and the perceived.
A holistic notion of seeing I proposed in my book on seeing as doing In this article I propose a holistic rather than (Schürmann 2008) a notion of practice that a naturalistic approach to philosophy of per- owes a lot to two very different thinkers, namely ception. In the philosophical tradition seeing French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau- is treated mostly in terms of an epistemological Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein, in order to framework. The idea of perception as an activ- explain perception as action in situated cultural ity re-emerged in the context of enactivism and collective contexts. embodiment studies. My claim is that we have to It may be fruitful to remind ourselves that go into further details here by qualifying the type the capacity of imagination is deeply connected of activity as an image-making practice. By image, with vision, as it is related to interpretation, though, I do not mean mimetic representations, judgement and discernment. By conceiving of and by representation I certainly do not mean it as cultural practice, I mean that seeing is an copies. Pictorial representations are the result of activity through which we disclose the sensually the mind’s capacity to imagine something that is perceptible world. As I intend to show below, not necessarily physically present. the interconnectedness of impressions, ideas, Causal conceptions of visual perception can- perceptions and images characterises the way not explain why perception is not determined the mind deals with the world and the other. 1 by the perceivable world but can function in a Mental images start with visual images and very individually different manner. Scientific visual images are informed by mental activities. and naturalistic explanations of the capacity of vision leave unexplained the vivid experience how visual perception involves mental activities 1 For a recent overview on the mental imagery such as normative attitudes, expectations and debate from a transdisciplinary perspective see emotions. Visual perception cannot be reduced Sebastian Gerth (2016) and Klaus Sachs- to sensory experience. Hombach (1995).
1 Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 29, No. 1 3 Neither an understanding of retinal impulse expressed in a sensibly perceptible way. What reception nor of neuronal information process- gets represented is how the artist saw what he ing helps to explain the curious paradox that or she saw. For their part, representations are seeing is, on the one hand, a proven means of ways of seeing that have become objects. Like orientation, of acquiring information and inter- a personal style of handwriting, an individual acting with others, while being, on the other perceptual style and a personal visual ethos could hand, a personality-specific way of perceiving explain the space of free choice and the pos- reality dependant on individual and cultural sibilities of seeing differently without which variations. In general, a type of assertive seeing perception would not be world disclosure. The that is regarded as a non-problematic instance of aspect of style is not a mere formal determin epistemic perception, whereas all more complex ant, it is a moral factor, which is manifested in cases of seeing something as something are labelled the ethos and habitus of the seeing individual, interpretative deduction, or, worse still, thought whose biography and mentality structure the of as mere metaphorical talk about vision. possibilities of perceiving something creatively A philosophical notion of vision has to or conventionally. For vision’s capacity for world explain why we all have divergent perceptual disclosure the decisive characteristic is its iconic experiences, although the same physiology and nature. We can take recourse to Immanuel Kant, the same physical visibility in a certain time and who posited the imagination, conceived as the at a certain place should determine what we see. ‘faculty of images’, as an ingredient of perception At the same time, we do not live in perceptually (Kant 1999: A121). No theory of perception can private worlds either. It has to follow that see- do without such an image-making element. The ing is neither pure representation of a physic strange thing here, though, is that something is ally present world nor the pure construction of at the same time found and invented. individual viewpoints, although it nevertheless Now, images are not to be construed as rep- contains portions of both. licas of data otherwise present, but rather as This can only be explained by admitting indefinitely prolongable interactive processes that seeing takes place in the context of cultural enacted between mirroring and creation. In this customs and personal preferences. In seeing, the in-between space, what can be seen and how it particular dispositions of the individual as well can be seen is decided by a variable and presum- as social and historical circumstances transcend ably never entirely determinable combination of seeing itself and make it the constitution of a perception and imagination, seeing and blind- viewpoint. ness, addition and subtraction, look and view.
Iconicity Mediality
Yet, the ways of seeing are at first immanent Seeing as purpose-serving means to an end to consciousness and free from objectification. implies the use of the eyes as an object-like tool How perceivers represent something to them- like a telescope or a magnifying glass – classical 2 selves still has to be represented outwardly, instruments for mediating perception. This through language or through pictures. This type of seeing is entirely different from those occurs paradigmatically in art, where a painter may bring a view of something into an image, 2 Interesting material on this topic can be that means: a way of looking at the world. In this found in the anthology by Erika Fischer- way an otherwise invisible movement becomes Lichte et al. (2001).
4 Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 29, No. 1 cases where we see other persona and are our- The concept of practice provides an alterna- selves visible as we move around in the world, tive to the scheme of subjectivity versus objec- looking involuntarily around. Perception in this tivity by clearly showing the way both are medi- case is less active and more like the element we ated by their situation in contexts and forms of 3 find ourselves in than a tool we make use of. As life. Practice means being visible to oneself and medial occurrence, seeing is a way of relating to to others, acting and speaking in the world as something that at the same time absorbs us. a place we inhabit collectively, not infrequently There is a striking similarity to the way lan- fighting about its sense as a whole. We have inci- 4 guage is constituted. Where language is some- dentally seen that seeing can largely be divided thing we move about in and at the same time into a functional-pragmatic and a self-purposive the means by which we communicate, so too is dimension, whereby the many and varied appli- perception characterised by a thoroughly para- cations of visual perception can be systematic dox duplicity. Neither the world nor the other ally classified. is immediately given but rather mediated and generated by language and perception. Negativity While the concept of action requires an actor, the notion of mediality rather expresses To claim that seeing is a performative practice the character of something happening. Now also implies taking into account the negative seeing always entails something of both. It can side of the process. Seeing something entails be both functional and directed at ends and also blocking out other things. A figure can only be casual and involuntary. It can focus on some- focused by making the background vanish. The thing or be captured by something. Practice is practice of seeing systematically involves types itself the umbrella term for these logical para- of habitual blindness; no longer seeing familiar doxes. In practice, the medial character of seeing things or overlooking things we are accustomed can interact with its character as action. The odd to interpret schematically as well as overlooking medial location of practice between subject and things. The negativity of vision is what makes its object is precisely its specific feature. essential creativity comprehensible. If someone, Because seeing is always a movement for instance, enters a room where they are used to between two poles, between consciousness and seeing a piano, the piano is no longer perceived world, the sensory and the mental, reception and in the fullness of its sensory apparition. What spontaneity, it must itself be a mediating move- is thus no longer perceived might still present ment. It always proceeds as a balancing act that to echo in every act of vision. The same applies can lean towards at least two different sides, or to peripheral vision. This helps explain how our rather originate from two different sources. The perceptions can diverge from what is given to paradox of perceptual practice is that the phys- visibility. What we see and, more importantly, ical world as such is not an object, but rather the what we do not see result from acts of selection result of a process conditioned by individual and that individualise the meaning of the seen. socio-cultural criteria. Like the negativity of the visible, the nega tivity of seeing must be subdivided. To over- look something is different from being blinded 3 As Donald Davidson puts it, ‘We don’t look by imaginings. Supplementary seeing is woven through our eyes, but with them’ (Davidson into the invisible differently from how selective 1997: 18). seeing is. The former not only completes a seen 4 As Wilhelm von Humboldt (1973) pointed out by distinguishing ergon and energeia. object by adding its other sides, but also adds
Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 29, No. 1 5 inventions, interpretations and imaginings. We ian guardare, with the meanings to guard and to not only do not see what we do not see, we also take care of, and to the English ‘I see what you do not see that we do not see it (Foerster 1985). mean’. In the Greek, the perfect of *εἴδω ‘I see’ As William T. J. Mitchell has shown, even if is oἶda, ‘I have seen’ and is equivalent in mean- an innocent eye existed, it would in no way see ing to ‘I know’. Knowledge is construed as the ‘objectively the way things are’. result of having seen. This explains the weight of eyewitness accounts and visual demonstra- When we try to postulate a foundational tions. Far beyond figurative speech it articulates experience of ‘pure’ vision, a merely mechan- a systematic connection between sight, insight, ical process uncontaminated by imagination, understanding, interpretation, opinion forma- purpose, or desire, we invariably discover one tion, being convinced and knowledge. of the few maxims on which Gombrich and With Hans Blumenberg, seeing can thus be Nelson Goodman agree: ‘the innocent eye designated as an absolute metaphor, and that the is blind’. The capacity for a purely physical verba videndi stand in where logic fails (Blumen vision that is supposed to be forever inaccess berg 2010: 3). This befalls thought where it ible to the blind turns out to be itself a kind of attempts to explain the relation between sight blindness. (Mitchell 1986: 118) and insight. No well-defined ‘literal’ term for seeing can be isolated from metaphorical talk of Even if pure perception were to exist, which seeing. Rather, the figurative speech indicates a both Ernst Gombrich and Nelson Goodman problem the unavoidability of which demands 6 naturally deny, it would be partially blind to the attention since it signals that reducing the possible social meanings of the seen. sense of sight to perception is to artificially iso- late only one part of seeing from a holistic act. The metaphoricity of the term itself offers a way Metaphors to render seeing manifest. To speak of seeing Verba videndi in many languages show an insep- ‘with other eyes’, of overlooking or oversight, arability of seeing and thinking, and a deep of ways of looking at things, is not merely a intertwining of sight and insight. Words like way of speaking that could be translated into a view-point, German Ansicht, French point de clearer language or replaced with non-pictorial vue, and Italian considerazione express the unity terms. Rather, seeing is the literal movement of of an act of visual perception directed at both in-sight, which can be grasped neither purely the visible and the invisible. The entire meta- aisthetically nor mentally. It is an aisthetic way phor of understanding as seeing suggests this of world disclosure, the aesthetic and imaginary inextricability of the sensory and the mental.5 ramifications of which require investigation in The vocabulary of mental acts of understanding individual cases. For a holistic understanding of points in many languages to a visuality of cog- perception, ‘pro-viding’ or ‘seeing through’ some- nition and to intelligibility in perception. This thing are not merely figurative descriptions. Nor begins presumably with the Greek term θεωρία are they basic or simple perceptual acts, since for a seeing at once sensory and mental, con- the assumption of such acts is itself mixed up tinues with the Latin perspicere, the French voir in sa-voir, with the double meaning of the Ital- 6 Ralf Konersmann (1991) has played on similar notions regarding the metaphor of the mirror. The fleeting nature of the image 5 Yet the same is true of haptic connotations makes it appropriate as a representation of the such as to grasp. intangibility of a subjectivity that eludes itself.
6 Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 29, No. 1 with a misleading use of terms. Such activities §§ 17, 23, 49, 62). Arguably, it would also be 8 are at once aisthetic (in the sense of literally possible to speak of fantasy. What is meant is perceivable) and cognitively epistemic, meaning that seeing must maintain an intensive relation that they are bound to the use of the eyes with- to the powers of imagination. In order to illumi- out exhausting themselves therein. nate this relation, a concept of the image must be There exist isolated cases of metaphors of worked out that helps to explain the generation seeing. In order to ‘see’ what someone means I of images in perception as well as their expres- do not need to see something in front of me. sive function. We can understand how seeing is The act or state of ‘respecting’ someone is not capable of extending beyond the disclosure of itself an act of perception. Yet in the context of facts to become an act of configuration. the many-layered interconnections of the aeis- The theoretical separation between percep- thetic and the mental such relatively clear-cut tion and imagination is undermined in practice. cases are rather the exception than the rule. It is A recurring pitfall for theoretical explanation much more common to see that someone wants is that describing the correlation between per- to speak, or the way someone is looked up to ception and presentation, sight and imagination hinges on the way she looks. separates them whereas they are fused in prac- This cluster of verba videndi is genuinely tice. Reference to ‘interplay’ and ‘interlocking’ metaphorical in the sense that they cannot be between imagination and perception should not translated back into literal meanings and do not be understood as forgetting the insight that they provide merely rhetorical ornamentation but are inseparable. They are instead the attempt to rather disclose a relational whole. display the difficulties in grasping the protean Subsequently, seeing invisible things ‘in the interactions in between them. 7 mind’s eye’, that is to say, seeing what can only be known or wished, is precisely not an exclu- 8 The terms are all polyvalent and their use sively mental activity but rather a hybrid of varies according to author, language and aesthetically and mentally occasioned ways of epoch. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1817) distinguishes between imagination as a cre seeing. ative faculty and fancy. The German term Let us come back to the notion of image at Einbildungs kraft is translated into French as work here. ‘imagination’, meaning a Vorstellungsvermögen, As I said, the iconicity of seeing can be re translatable as faculty of representation. garded as grounded in this faculty, which is, This is an important shift in meaning. The plural Phantasien (fantasies) usually signifies according to Kant, not only ‘a necessary ingredi the content of Vorstellung, presentation or ent of perception itself ’ (Kant 1999: A121) but representation, while German Phantasie in also the ‘power of representation’ (Kant 2002: the singular means the faculty or power, Einbildungskraft. As Dietmar Kamper (1981: 12) has pointed out, the term Phantasie occurs 7 I avoid this expression as far as possible in three times in the Western tradition: ‘First, as order not to fall back into the division “material” … for dreams … and civilisations; between physical and mental seeing. The second, as transcendentally efficient order point here, however, is to refer to a term for knowledge; third, as the reviled minor responsible for the entire tradition of the idea faculty of daydreaming that mainly assumes of the given. It is indicative of the intricacies compensatory functions.’ The multiplicity of the problem that even authors like Jean- of the term is also manifest in the various Paul Sartre (2004) and Colin McGinn (2004) disciplines concerned with it: psychology, use the term although they postulate the psychoanalysis, philosophy, epistemology, cooperation of the mental and the visual in aesthetics, mythology and, in the case of practice. Cornelius Castoriadis, political theory.
Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 29, No. 1 7 Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte attribute As a picture-making creature, as homo pictor a truly impressive power to the imagination ( Jonas 1973: 226–47) and animal symbolicum (Fichte 1889: 187). We cannot overestimate (Cassirer 1944), the human discloses the world the extent to which it participates in all pro- in a way that cannot be divided hierarchically cesses of world disclosure. All perceptions of self into separate domains of competence. Attaining and world are inhabited by the affective power a mental image of an object can involve deliber- 9 of images, by an orchestral range of feelings, ately ignoring the surface, but it can also involve 10 desires, projections and stereotypes. being blinded by the surface and overlooking The images that emerge from the performa- what is concealed beneath it. In both cases see- tive interplay of imagination and perception are ing operates at the intersection of the visible and not solid givens but infinite productions. The the invisible. intermingling of the invisible into seeing does not result in externally visible objects. Rather, Perceptual images the products of imagination must be regarded 11 as processes of construction involving percep- Perceptions and images are not as different as tion and image making rather than as results. two entirely unrelated things, but they do not The stress is on the active character of the converge without difference either. There seem process that consists in a performative activity. to be equally plausible reasons for their insepar This process remains unfinished as long as see- ability as there are for their separation. To put it ing remains open to possibilities of seeing dif- concisely, it is their connectedness that presup- ferently. The resulting images can still become poses their distinctness. mortified, stereotypical and clichéd, since they Images develop against the background involve determination and exclusion. However, of what has been previously perceived and the the important point is that such images are perceptions themselves come about in corre- made possible by both perception and imagin spondence to the criteria of images, schema and ation and are consequently attributable neither representations, that is, in the temporal horizon to sensibility nor to sense alone. of previous experience and expectations derived Perceptions of world, the self and others are from that experience. A representationalist pos- influenced by images of wishes and fears, which, ing of the question of how much such images as we will see, in an extreme case like Don can ‘correspond’ with their referents is answered Quixote, qualify as insanity and not perception. from the point of view of performative prac- In general, however, the imaginary comes mixed tice not as a dual copy relation but rather as the 12 with things sensually present. iterative structure of references referring to ref- erences, interpretations interpreting interpret ations. This does not mean they are empty signs 9 Interesting in this regard is the empirical without a material basis. The world is the inter- study by James Elkins (2001). preted world. We cannot say what it would look 10 On the psychological and affective aspects like if it were not interpreted, i.e. mediated by of interactive percept see the collection by symbols, language and signs. But interpreta- Gertrud Koch (1995). tions are not arbitrary constructions, but rather 11 More on this can be found in Kamper 1998: 203–13. Further readings in the same spirit conditioned and regulated by the context of the are found in the collection by Gerd Schäfer practical. and Christoph Wulf (1999). 12 ‘The imaginary perhaps only attains to pure presence on madness’ (Iser 1991: 314).
8 Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 29, No. 1 Image without model the image. The opposition between model and And yet, it would be no remarkable finding that copy becomes untenable if images are grasped as perception is necessarily reflected, interpreted interminable processes of image making. Images, and mediated if that served only to revitalise as one might put it, are not objective opus constructionist concepts. Under the conditions operatum but a specific modus operandi, a mode by of a performative concept of perception, how- which our object relations are constituted. ever, this result can be specified to paradoxic Image-making proceeds from seeing in the ally render the mediations both responsive and same way that narrative does from doing. As we spontaneous, fictional and perceptual. Edmund saw, it is impossible to separate perception from Husserl’s lucid qualification of the image as the insight and knowledge it occasions or medi- ‘perceptual figment’ (Husserl 2006: 612) is a just ates. What is really significant plays out between characterisation also for images in perception, the I and the other, but also between mental rep- which then become aisthetic-aesthetic acts of resentation and intuition, perception and fiction. mediation between self and world. Once again Undoubtedly picturing something to oneself the model of seeing as practice both requires and is an extremely ambivalent activity. Images can enables a break with the logic of the disjunction always be both petrifications and vitalisations. between subject and object, since the paradox- They open creative options of seeing differently ical structure of perceptual-fictive mediations while holding us prisoner, transcending the can be grasped neither with constructionist nor finite while fixing it in place. The imagination with realist concepts. is at once void and plenitude, surplus and deficit, Perceptual-fictitious mediations produce production and destruction, gaining and losing images of self, world and others that are not the world. The one cannot be without the other. object-like. As problematic as the concept Not every imaginative seeing is a perception of mental images may be for epistemology of possible aspects of something. There are cases 13 (Kosslyn 1980), the non-object images that like that of Don Quixote, who fails within the someone makes of themselves and the world out shared perceived world in the way infelicitous of perceptual and imaginary images can only be speech acts fail, making thus clear the chances grasped as performative formations occasioned and risks of a perceptual practice informed by aisthetically, in which the person is unable to get imagination. Seeing windmills as giants, he away from evaluative ways of viewing the world. undoubtedly commits an act of creative inter- If the viewer and the visible are only given pretation but not of possible aspect-seeing. in and mediated by their performative mutual relatedness then the perceptual image cannot Images hold us captive be a mimetic representation. To put it with the words of French philosopher Jean-François Wittgenstein was right to say that we are Lyotard: ‘The concept of a picture (eikon) of facts held captive by an image (Wittgenstein 1986: 14 condenses within itself the metaphysical illusion, §115). It is no coincidence that he makes the reversal or prejudice that phrases come after this statement in the context of his new con- facts’ (Lyotard 1988: 79). This illusion is pur- ception of language after the picture theory chased at the cost of an objective concept of from the Tractatus (1921). Linguistically, we are
13 For a commentary see Gardner 1989: 339–56. An overview can be found in Gottschling 14 This applies to both conceptual reification 2003. and phantasm.
Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 29, No. 1 9 15 positively ensnared in images and narratives. individual dispositions to ways of seeing con- Every speech act re-invokes by citation things ditioned by habitus and world image; interper- 16 already said and our perceptions are prefigured sonally in the meaning of being visible for the by countless images. development of self and self-consciousness. The affective power of these images cannot be overestimated and their imaginary compo- Normative seeing nent not only opens but also closes. There is no escaping this arrangement. Creativity, on the The power to see and be seen by other persons one hand, is the condition of the possibility of extends from acts of normative identity attribu- world disclosure by seeing while, on the other tion to acknowledgement. The way people dis- hand, harbouring the danger of losing the world. close the world is specific to their personality, to I should have shown that there is no reason their moral disposition. Individual inclinations to replace the notion of pure seeing with one of to judge and censure, prejudices, biases and per- pure interpretation. In the nexus of perception sonal preferences condition what and how we and imagination the one is not reducible to the can see. other. There can be neither mere perception pro- World-images in the sense sketched above viding objective representations nor can percep- of a normative background to speech, perception tion be pure invention. and action are at once prerequisites and products The aesthetic liberties inherent in aisthetic of perceptive-fictive world disclosure. Instead of world disclosure interact with the social practice speaking of world-images we could speak of the 17 of a given epoch. The ways of seeing are there- world views involved in mindset, patterns of fore never entirely arbitrary. When they succeed behaviour and common normative orientation. or miscarry, then not because they are true or Such world-images are in any case evaluative false in essence but because they count as cap presuppositions often accompanied by conflict- able or incapable of being adopted, regardless of ing validity claims, and have already preconfig- justification. ured vision before it is directed at the world. The practical ramifications of perceptual They are thus the conditions of possibility of world disclosure are graspable in the normative creative and conventional world disclosure. and existential significance of seeing on the per- If, for example, in the 1930s the sight of a sonal and interpersonal levels: personally in the woman smoking in public was seen as a repul- sive common annoyance (Cason 1930), compar 15 Wilhelm Schapp (1976: ch. 4 and passim) able only to the sight of someone picking their places more emphasis than other narrative teeth, this not merely bears witness to the curi- theories on the process of self-understanding ous attitudes of the times, but it is evidence of by means of language as entanglement. However, the author reduces the relation how closely seeing is linked to ways of seeing. between stories and images basically to one of Admittedly, the way smoking is regarded in illustration. On this account, images have the health and fitness discourses goes beyond ais derivative function of making the story easier thesis. The concrete sight of a smoking woman, to understand. They are not recognised as a however, does not. This sight and the emotions proper form of story-making. 16 See Krämer (2001: 259) on Judith Butler’s it is obviously able to stir up are very much a conception of performative speech acts: ‘What constitutes its performativity is not that it is an individual speech act, but rather 17 See Karl Jaspers (1994), who divided world that it evokes past speech acts in the manner views into sensible-spatial, psychic-cultural of citation.’ and metaphysical.
10 Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 29, No. 1 question of seeing, and indeed a type of seeing The gaze can become an instrument of dom- that is, in practice, not independent of evaluative ination, as Sartre puts it. Emmanuel Lévinas, perspectives. It is thus a seeing that cannot be on the other hand, conceives of it as exterior- performed without being a way of seeing. ity. While Sartre sees the I as objectified by the Such normative constructions could be other, the seeing I in Lévinas is affected by an described as the narrative constitution of reality, exteriority of the other that I cannot assimilate. since narrative framing determines how emo- In Sartre the other looks at me with a powerful tion-based perceptual patterns are established. ‘evil eye’. In Lévinas the speaking face impera- Using the example of eating a cake, Charles tively summons me to a responsibility I cannot Taylor shows how a person’s eating behaviour rescind. Where Sartre speaks of subjugation, can be embedded in totally different interpretive Lévinas speaks of responsibility. Sartre’s other is frameworks according to whether or not the nar- the unconditional power that will disempower rator invokes cholesterol and carbohydrates or me unless I disempower it first. Lévinas’s other is qualities of self-control and abstinence (Taylor the unconditional alterity that disempowers me 1985: 20). The salient point here is the way such if I attempt to gain power over it (Sartre 1992: narratives begin with perceptions: how I liter- 340–401; Lévinas 1969). But both authors, ally and concretely see something determines my despite their insights, tend toward dividing and possibilities of world disclosure. ranking acts of the consciousness participating in seeing, thereby falling back into the subject– object dichotomy. This entraps them inevitably Seeing each other in all the difficulties that the concept of seeing What is seeing, when people see each other, as practice evades. They separate sensibility and when we are visible and being looked at? Human meaning, response and construction and take visibility is necessarily social visibility, since we only one side of the two poles between which are visible in a purely physiological way only – as I hope to have shown – seeing takes place. for instruments, not for other people. With As a practice, seeing takes place in contexts of our partly involuntary and partly chosen outer social visibility and is based on being visible image we show ourselves to the others and offer in a physiological sense and being seen as the ourselves to be perceived by them. Every self- subject of perceptual and fictitious gazes. Just as representation is an appeal to be seen and under- blushing with shame or turning pale with anger stood in a certain way, is mask or face. Looking at can hardly be regarded as ‘purely physiological’ another, taking them into view, is fundamentally reactions, psychic dispositions manifest physio- different from looking at an object. The charac- logically. As reductionist as the assumption of teristic simultaneity of seeing and being seen, the purely physiological seeing is, the notion that dimension of appealing-to and demanding-from, people can be visible in a purely physiological the character of encounter, all make interpersonal sense is just as unacceptable. seeing a special case of visual perception. The general structure of the way identity is The power of the gaze to constitute iden- constituted by social visibility can be differenti- tity was sharply delineated by Sartre in a way ated from diverse points of view. It has aspects exemplary for what I called instrumental seeing. in socio-philosophical, psycho-philosophical, Emmanuel Lévinas, on the contrary, has shown psychoanalytic, psychological, gender and power how we cannot see a human face as an arbi- studies extending far beyond the purview of a trary object, developing the ethical paradigm of theory of perception. Michel Foucault’s theory self-purposive seeing. of the panopticon or Jacques Lacan’s notion
Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 29, No. 1 11 of the gaze as object of desire. Judith Butler’s Prof. Dr Eva Schürmann holds the Chair for Philosophical theory of gendered performatively generated Anthropology and Philosophy subjectivisation and George Herbert Mead’s of Culture at the University of Magdeburg. In 2000, she explanations of social identity constitution both published her doctoral thesis belong to the broader context of seeing in rela- under the title Erscheinen und tion to personal acknowledgement (Foucault Wahrnehmen (‘Appearing and Perceiving’). In 2009, she 1995: 195 and passim; Lacan 1978; Butler 1997; became Professor for Cultural Mead 1959). Philosophy and Aesthetics at the HAW Hamburg. For her book Sehen als Praxis The ability to see oneself with the eyes of (‘Seeing as Practice’, Suhrkamp 2008) she was another is fundamental to generating social awarded the Science Prize of the Aby-Warburg- identity. It must be added that it is of course also Stiftung in 2014. Since October 2015 she has been co-editor of the Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie, the way the self is determined by the gaze of a peer-reviewed philosophical journal
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