9781847183743-sample

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

1/30

Seeing Perception

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

2/30

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

3/30

Seeing Perception

Edited by

Silke Horstkotte and Karin Leonhard

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

4/30

Seeing Perception, Edited by Silke Horstkotte & Karin Leonhard

This book first published 2007 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright 2007 by Silke Horstkotte, Karin Leonhard and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-84718-374-3, ISBN (13): 9781847183743

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

5/30

TABLE OFCONTENTS

SILKEHORSTKOTTE ANDK ARINLEONHARD Introduction ..............................................................................................1

I. Thinking Seeing

DIMITRILIEBSCH The Rhetoric of Seeing: Considering the Relationship between Spectator and Object ................................................................24

EMANUELALLOA The Madness of Sight.............................................................................40

BIRGITMERSMANN Looking through Script: Roland Barthes Literal Ideographism ............60

II. Writing Seeing

GUSTAV FRANK Layers of the Visual: Towards a Literary History of Visual Culture......76

MICHALBEN-HORIN Seeing the Voices, Hearing the Sights. Perceptual Distortions in Bll,Bachmann and Celan..............................................................................98

JULIELEBLANC The Pictorial Signifying System of Hans Holbein the YoungersThe

Ambassadors : Iconicity and Intertextuality in Blackout (Trou demmoire ) by Hubert Aquin ......................................................................... 128

R ENATE BROSCH The Curious Eye of the Reader: Perspective as Interactionwith Narrative.......................................................................................143

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

6/30

TABLE OFCONTENTS vi

TAMARYACOBI Intermedial Narrative: Ekphrasis and Perspectival Montage,

or Sorting out the Gaze of Narrative Agents ..................................... ...166III. Picturing Seeing

ITAY SAPIR The Visible, the Invisible, and the Knowable: Modernityas an Obscure Tale................................................................................198

R ICCARDOMARCHI Learning to Look at Kandinsky in Berlin, 1913................................ ...216

BARBARALANGE Following Humboldt? LAmrique disparue in SurrealistConcepts of the Unconscious ............................................................ ...237

STEPHANGNZEL Seeing Perception in Video Games. Image Studies of First PersonShooters ........................................................................................... ...255

IV. Watching Seeing

JOCELYN CAMMACK Cinema, Illusionism and Imaginative Perception.................................270

CHRISTINALAMMER Patient BodiesDifferent Modes of Perceptionand the Fabrication of Moving Body Landscapes in Angiographyand Interventional Radiology ............................................................ ...292

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

7/30

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

8/30

HORSTKOTTE ANDLEONHARD 2

bodies as dynamic fields of action in need of regulation and control.(Cartwright 1995 ix) This means that the new cinematic mode of

representation simultaneously offered ways to regulate cultural, social, andscientific aspects of vision. It follows that these aspects cannot be studiedin isolation from each other. Another groundbreaking researcher in theinterdisciplinary study of vision is Barbara Stafford. In her Body Criticism (1991), Stafford referred to early nineteenth-century semiotic discussionsabout imaging the body, based on the assumption that the body is a field ofsigns, which came to the conclusion that pictorial strategies forexternalising the internal can be gained by abstracting from the individual.The wish to render the invisible visible formed part of a rising interest both in anthropology and in the scientific study of the human brain, and ittackled fundamental questions concerning perception, sensation, emotion,imagination and subjectivity. As soon as the problem of seeing theinvisible merged into the great field of neurobiology, new performingtechnologies were developed which attempted to grasp, throughvisualisation, something that is ultimately unpresentable andunrepresentable. This is one reason why visual studies increasingly touchon a cognitive history of images (Stafford 2007).

Despite such pioneering work on the cultural, social, and scientificaspects of visual perception, however, many questions remain to be asked(and answered!) concerning seeing and perception. Moreover, the multipleand varied treatments these topics have received make it necessary to takestock of the current state of debates surrounding seeing and perception,and to inquire into their underlying bases. A questioning of the underlying,often implicit theoretical and methodological assumptions on which thestudy of visual perception is premised becomes all the more necessarywhen we consider that the discussion of visual perception in thehumanities has been stagnating lately, with a majority of contributionsfollowing a Foucauldian trajectory and stressing the constructed andideological nature of seeing. As Jonathan Crary puts it, vision ... isembedded in a pattern of adaptability to new technological relations, socialconfigurations, and economic imperatives (1999: 13). In an essay aboutVisual Essentialism, Mieke Bal has similarly argued that vision is alwaysimplicated in a knot of power and knowledge, and that this contributes tothe difficulty of talking about seeing, as the knowledge which we drawupon to describe sight is constituted in the same acts of looking that itanalyses or critiques (Bal 2003: 11). Seeing is therefore closely related tomatters of power, of sexuality (Rose), and to identity itself (Silverman).However, James Elkins has pointed out that the close connection betweensight and sexuality, which surfaces in a voyeuristic vision but ultimately

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

9/30

I NTRODUCTION 3

underlies all acts of vision, makes human sight very difficult tocontrolwhether by the perceiving subject, or by the ideological and

technological relations in which that subject is implicated.Vision, then, is irrational, inconsistent, and undependable. It is immenselytroubled, cousin to blindness and sexuality, and caught up in the threads ofthe unconscious. Our eyes are not ours to command; they roam where theywill and then tell us they have only been where we have sent them. Nomatter how hard we look, we see very little of what we look at. ... Seeing islike hunting and like dreaming, and even like falling in love. It is entangledin the passions jealousy, violence, possessiveness; and it is soaked inaffectin pleasure and displeasure, and in pain. (Elkins 1996: 11)

Moreover, how we see something is always to some extent dependenton the perceived object. For this reason, Elkins has somewhat provocatively entitled his studyThe Object Stares Back , by which hemeans that there exists a reciprocal and indeed dialogical relation betweenspectator and object: Ultimately, seeing alters the thing that is seen andtransforms the seer. (Elkins 1996: 11f)

A tentative consensus between the divergent positions on sight in thehumanities may be formulated as follows: seeing is nothing natural; it isrooted in cultural practices and codes as well as in sexuality, desire, andthe unconscious; it is predicated on culturally and historically specifictechnologies; and it does not take place in isolation, either from othersubjects or from other (non-visual) senses. While a lot of effort has beenextended into exploring the culturally contingent conditions under whichvision takes place, however, less attention has been paid to our perceptionof (visual) perception, and to its description. Despite Mieke Bals poignantobservation that we constitute sight in the very act of attempting totheorize and critique itthat we are, in short, never out of the visualfieldit thus remains to be seen how far the situated and subjectiveaspects of vision also determine the scholarly perception of vision (and ofother sense perception). As implied by our title,Seeing Perception, thisvolume attempts to take some steps towards what we might call a participant observation of vision. It addresses the questions with which weopened this introduction by inquiring into two relationships which we believe are central to the task of conceptualising perception for a visualculture: firstly, the relation between spectator and object, and second, onthe descriptive level, that between pictures and the words that fail them,as another, rather appropriately titled study by James Elkins has it (Elkins1998).

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

10/30


Concerning the first of these two fields of inquiry, the reciprocalrelationship between an image or other visual object and its spectators (an

important point which has come up time and again in recent discussions)concerns the precise contribution of both parties in a given visualinteraction. The crucial question, then, is this: What specific role do both partiesspectator and object play, and what are the limitations inherentin each of the two positions? Which forms (e.g. time, space) andframeworks are presupposed in a visual exchange, and which aregenerated in the act of looking itself? Other questions which need to betackled concern the object of our vision: Does it ever exist, or are wemerely seeing our own projections? The latter is of particular importancewhen looking at an object which we do not fully understanda processwhich inevitably leads to misrepresentations. How much information,then, do we need when we look at something? And what does it mean, ingeneral, to look at something utterly unfamiliar? Similar questions ariseregarding the perception of invisible objects with the help of microscopicor digital technology, and also concerning our perception of invisibilityand of darkness as such. It is therefore not surprising that the question oflearning to see, and of painting in particular as a school of sight, keepsrecurring throughout the sections of this volume.

Not only does the role of the spectator in constituting what counts for avisual object thus require clarification; the effects of the object on thespectator, which need not be limited to the visual domain, are also in needof more thorough theorising and systematic inquiry. We already citedJames ElkinsThe Object Stares Back , which implies that looking is not just something I do, but also something which happens to me. The agencyof the object side, often neglected in older work, was already stressed byDavid Freedberg inThe Power of Images (1989), and raised again morerecently in W.J.T. MitchellsWhat Do Pictures Want(2005). If we thusreconceptualise vision as an exchange between the subject and object of perception, and accord equal importance, and what is more, agency, to both parties, this has consequences for both sides. No longer is thespectator supreme subject and master of that which s/he sees, nor is theobject a passive recipient of that gaze. Besides receiving crucial input fromthe object side, the spectator is also always already influenced by thevision of other subjects: We are ourselves in the field of vision. LisaCartwright has therefore spoken of the position of a moral spectator asan intersubjective space in which what is being perceived is held betweensubjects (Cartwright 2004, 2005).

Conceptualising the relation of spectator and object thus raisesquestions of identity and alterity, self and other, as well as inquiring into

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

11/30

I NTRODUCTION 5

the specific nature of seeing and looking. Formulations such as the gaze,Lacanian (Silverman 1996) or not (Bryson 1983, 1988), fixate that relation

by describing looking as a voyeuristic desire which forcefully movestowards the image and only partially replaces a desired touch with looking.Brysons glance, on the other hand, describes a respectful and self-reflexive way of looking and thus keeps the relation of spectator andobject in an unfixable motion. Going one step further, theorists such asGeorge Didi-Huberman (1992), James Elkins (1996) and W.J.T. Mitchell(2005) have furnished the image with its own set of eyes when they implythat images can be organisms with their own peculiar life and an at timesthreatening activity. Gottfried Boehms recent postulate of a newdefinition of the image no longer orients itself towards a frame, limiting part or detail, but rather centres on the intentional focus which thespectator directs at an imaging field (2005, 1985). Consequently, images,with their ordered visuality, can seem to be alive or even look back atthe spectator.

Not the image as visible object, then, but the visual perception framingand surrounding it with its restless motion and performance constitutes thefocal point of this volume. Moreover, we do not limit our inquiry to thearea of (Western) high art, but include images that are not art as well asvisual objects taken from everyday life and from the sciences.Furthermore, we contend that visual perception need not be limited to therealm of optics and to optical media; it also determines processes ofreading and constructions of time and space, as well as bodily experienceand processes of cognition. Scholars such as Mieke Bal have stressedvisions inevitable proximity to other sense perceptions, concluding thatvision is itself inherently synaesthetic (Bal 2003: 9). This harks back to positions first formulated in the 1920s and 30s, when Walter Benjaminwrote about the Zerstreuung or dispersion experienced by earlyvisitors to the cinema as a haptic dimension of filmic perception(Benjamin 1969). This tactile perception is, of course, akin to the aestheticcontemplation of the bourgeois subject (re Kant), but at the same time, points to the fact that visual culture is always a hybrid with other senses.One of the most promising recent trends in visual culture studies thereforeconcerns the rediscovery of contributions from the 1920s and 30s, such asthe early film theories of Rudolf Arnheim (2002) and Bla Balzs (2001),which discussed the reception of visual, especially filmic images in greatdetail. Indeed, Balzs seems to have been the first critic to have introducedthe term visual culture, which has become one of the staples of thediscussion (Balzs 2001: 16).

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

12/30


The impurity of the visual, and the contextuality of all acts of looking,constitutes a common thread running through the articles collected in this

volume. The ways in which images are perceived in Western culture areinextricably linked with verbal and textual structures and ways of thinking.If words can cite, but never sight, as W.J.T. Mitchell (1994) has it,how can the verbal paradigm deal adequately with matters of vision and perception? Conversely, the visuality of language and text, and therhetoric of the visual (Hill and Helmers 2004), also deserve furthercritical attention. This means that the visibility of an object needs to bereferenced to its readability, as well as to the pragmatics of its use. Ofcourse, it is well known that images can not only be looked at or perceived, but also touched, used, painted over or destroyed (cf.Freedberg). This line of research has received increasing attention throughthe study of new media and media art, of computer games and every kindof interactive image use. Such a pragmatics of the image is concerned withimages as objects, as well as images as action, event or experience, ascreation, configuration or as a deconstruction of identity (and of alterity).At the same time, this approach stresses that logical differentiations between image and medium rely on a concept of perception whichincludes imagination, memory, and other practices of image production inwhich all meaning-making processes relating to images are based.

However, the contributions in this volume are less concerned with the practical, political implications of a visual culture which formed the backbone of visual studies research a few years ago (Mirzoeff 1999;Sturken and Cartwright 2001), and more with an adequate understandingof the various concepts and operations at work in theories of visual perception, of seeing, the gaze, and of focalisation. The concept offocalisation, drawn from narratological theory (Genette 1980), is one ofthe key issues in theories geared towards a transmedial narratology in thesense of a set of universal, media-independent tools of interpretation.Through its basis in the notion of perspective, focalisation is associatedwith matters of vision; it has therefore been proposed as a concept bridging textuality and visuality (Bal 1997), and has been tentatively usedas a tool for analyzing visual artefacts (Yacobi 2002) as well as ones thatcombine the visual and the verbal (Horstkotte 2005). However, it remainsto be seen in how far focalisation can serve to grasp the inherent problematic of seeing and the visual, or if it remains a metaphor for moretraditional (or simple technical) concepts such as perspective. In particular,concepts of a visual focalisation will have to explain how differentnarrative agents (author, narrator, focaliser) can be separated if we movefrom the textual to the iconic paradigm. The distinction between focaliser

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

13/30

I NTRODUCTION 7

and narrator is crucial in narrative; in visual art, however, it is not always possible to clearly discriminate between a narrative agent and the

represented perspective. How, then, can we move beyond the constrictionsinherent in an overtly technical concept of perspective, and how cannarratological categories such as focalisation help us in analysing modesof perception both within the image and circulating around it?

These questions lead us back to the title of our book, derived from aninternational conference on Seeing Perception which took place inLeipzig in November 2006. In fact, the highly formal titlereferring tovision as being both fleetingand framingserved a special purpose. Forus, it seemed important to bend these two modes of vision back into a loopand let them run together. We were interested in observing the constitutionof perception itself, be it of a visual field or visible objects, but also ofimages which emerge in the mind, e.g. that of the reader in the act ofreading. The mutual permeability of the seer and the seen was the mainissue of that conference, reflecting on the reciprocal relationship betweenthe visuality of objects and the very act of looking, which could beunderstood not only as a sensual experience but also as a practice: anintellectual performance and interpretation. But if there exists thisinseparable bond between object and spectator, how can we distanceourselves from the act of looking and show seeing, how is it possible totalk and write about seeing perception?

As we pointed out above, critics of visual culture and visual studieshave often and rightfully claimed that the act of looking is profoundlyimpure. Seeing very much entails other modes of sense-based perceptionsuch as listening, touching, feeling, tasting or smelling. Various modes ofseeing can moreover be observed within literary texts or in music, dreams,memory or all kinds of bodily experiences like dance, pain, sexuality etc.,so that there cannot be any such thing as a clearly defined realm calledvisuality. When talking about visual perception, then, we are soonrestricted by certain methodological limitations. How, for example, can weverbalise the discontinuities and unpredictabilities of visualexperienceand what tools have we got to analyse the complex shades of perceptual awareness? Will we be able to find the right mixture ofapproaches (Elkins 2003) to concentrate on technical details of somescientific image and thenshifting between different levels of attentions,changing ones mode of perceptionrelax into the capacious andunfocussed frame of mind again?

Within twentieth century thought, there have been two broadtheoretical pathways for dealing with vision and visuality. These areclosely linked to the opposition between two disciplinary watersheds in the

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

14/30


history of the humanities which have become known as the linguistic(Rorty 1967) and iconic or pictorial turns (Boehm 1994, Mitchell

1994). Phenomenology, the first of these pathways, stresses the subjectiveexperience and the role of sensation in perception, an approach whichcould lead either to solipsism, or to an empathetic worldview. Thelinguistic or semiotic approach, on the other hand, turns towards a sociallyconstructed environment which can only be understood through culturalanalysis, an approach which sometimes comes dangerously close toturning visuality into verbality. Both methodologies therefore carry theirideological weight while simultaneously providing us with an importantanalytical framework. Moreover, both must deny the possibility of anatural attitude towards the world, but with different consequences.Because of their highly formalised attitude towards reading and otherforms of cultural perception, semiotic approaches tend to build up adistance between the observer and the field of material objects, but alsowithin the beholder herselfa sort of gap which opens up because wehave to learn about our own historicity and social anchoring.Phenomenology, in the other hand, also works against the idea of a naturalattitude, but simultaneously emphasises that perception and visualexperience always involve more than a mere reading or decoding of signs.For phenomenological approaches, the knowledge of a world of sharedlanguage and shared meanings provokes the spectator into bridging thegap between him- or herself and the object world by becoming more fullyinvolved in the process of constituting a visual environment. In both cases,it is the dynamics of intersubjective life which pushes our perceptions intofuture activities and tightens the knot of affect and cognition (Bal 2003:11). Such a rhythmically driven dialectical field, created by actions andcounteractions of observation and absorption, then frames the unstable process that we have, in a most provisional term, called SeeingPerception.

What, then, could a methodology of Seeing Perception entail? Thechallenge to know how to see things, how much attention to pay, whether to look in sequence or randomly, whether to look close up or justtake it all in at once, whether to linger or move quickly, is certainly partof the answer (Elkins 2003: 195). Once again, however, this raises the problem of visual literacy: the question how far visuality actually reaches,and where it ends, if we continue to believe that vision is always impureand that all media are mixed media (Mitchell 1994: 5). How, then, canwe talk about the specificity of visual images without falling into the trapof visual essentialism (Bal 2003)? How do we gain visual knowledge

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

15/30

I NTRODUCTION 9

and come to imaginatively possess all that cannot be consumed, orsubsumed, by words all that is irrational, and unpredictable, about sight?

In order to sketch out some possible answers, we have chosen toinclude in this introduction a discussion of a well-known example of amedial experiment floating between images and words: Alain Resnaisfilm Last Year at Marienbad from 1961. Much has been said and writtenabout this film, which was planned and worked out in cooperation withAlain Robbe-Grillet, who was responsible for the textual frame of thissevere and utterly modernistic aesthetic experiment (cf., e.g., Binczek2002; Leutrat 2000; Sweet 1981, Beltzer 2000). It has been a regularobject of scholarly inquiry and is often used as a classroom example

because of its structural complexity. But what happens when we confrontthis film with the private and subjective eye of one specific spectator?How can we put different modes of explanation formal, iconographic,sociological, or autobiographical together and blend them into newforms of writing about vision and visuality? Seeing Perception has toopen towards such a mixture of approaches in order to disentangle itsseemingly inextricable knot of affect and cognition.

The reading we give of Last Year at Marienbad is based on asubjective viewing experienced by of one of us, Karin. As Roland Barthesfamously argued in Camera Lucida (1981), the act of looking at an imageactivates different kinds of responses from the spectator, which Barthescalled the images punctum , and its studium . Barthes explicitly spokeabout photographic images, but as our example below shows, similar

processes also operate when looking at filmic images. A photographs studium refers to the activation of objective cultural knowledge in theviewer. This might consist of recognising a photos setting, of dating thefashion worn by the people in the photograph, or of looking for contextualinformation about an image, for instance in the shape of a caption or someform of ekphrasis. In brief, studium is any form of knowledge whichwould be available to multiple viewers of the same image. A photos

punctum , conversely, constitutes a much more subjective, individualconnection between the image and its spectator. Barthes describes the

punctum as a detail which jumps out at the spectator because it offers aconnection which is not based in cultural knowledge, but in memory andin affection. This means that an images punctum will be different forevery spectator, and will be difficult to convey intersubjectively, andthrough language. Indeed, Barthes scholars have remarked that the authorhimself never quite manages to explain what precisely it is in the images

reproduced in Camera Lucida that jumps out at or wounds him (cf., e.g.,Attridge 1997: 79).

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

16/30


With these reservations in mind, let us now enter Marienbads mazeand follow some of its possible ways. In Karins words: The path we

choose is determined by a punctum which jumped out at me, a nearlyforgotten mental image of mine, a memory of my childhood, which wassuddenly almost painfully activated when watching Resnais Marienbad .To understand this particular interaction between an image and itsspectator, we first need to take a short look at the plot of Last Year at Marienbad . The film is supposedly set in a baroque hotel, which, however,looks more like a baroque palacea Schloss. In any case, this buildingexhibits a well-constructed, even rational labyrinth of stairs and corridorsand rooms with doors and windows and mirrors framing, reflecting,dividing and multiplying the interior, so that it becomes a hermeticallysealed world which soon appears quite surreal. The characters arenameless and locked in a world of their own, moving around likesomnambulists. At this baroque resort, an unnamed man tries to convincean unnamed beautiful woman that they had had an ardent love affair the previous year and arranged to meet at the hotel again, where she wouldthen agree to leave her husband. The woman does not remember this affairat all, but what the man tells her has the power to create a past for her andto blend it into her present. By creating a desire for the mans story and forhis perception, all characters in the film become caught up in a loop ofdisjointed time. The woman and her husband are cycling endlessly in afilm which never ends. The stranger offers her a way to freedom. Althoughhe himself also seems to be caught in the other characters world at first,he may also be able to alter this world through the power of hissuggestions (Beltzer 2000).

This hermetic circle of personal relations within the film was thereason why the moment when the film hit me (that is: when it reached myown present), came unprepared. The couple are resting on a bench. Theman is trying to convince the woman that he met her exactly one year ago,that he loved her and was loved by her. He also tells her that he had thentaken a photograph of her, and suddenly she seems toremember although she is not sure about the truth of her memory. Animage comes to her mind, maybe because it was hidden there, but possiblyalso because the man created it in this very moment. So does sheremember things because she wants them to be part of her life and part ofher past (and therefore with the ability to change her future), or becausethe man simply succeeds in creating them? The moment the woman triesto perceive the past in his way; his images start to flood her memory,which is possibly not her memory any more.

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

17/30

I NTRODUCTION 11

Fig. 1: Resnais, Robbe-Grillet: Last year at Marienbad , 1961.

The couples conversation in the park struck me, not only because of thedialogue, but because I recognised the bench. It was the very bench Iclimbed on when I was a child. I had lived near this baroque castle and

used to visit the park, both laid out and built at the end of the seventeenthcentury after the Bavarian Duke Max Emanuel had successfully taken sideagainst the Turkish troops invading Vienna. Other scenes in Resnais filmshow features of its great hall and staircase, some of them show itsimpressive, formal garden faade. Again, other parts were filmed at anearby Schloss in Munich, especially in the so-called Amalienburg, asmall hunting lodge which is situated in the park a masterpiece of theFrenchman Franois Cuvillis. When I watched Resnais film for the firsttime, I didnt know about the setting and therefore was struck visually, by

simply recognising the places. Although I knew them by heart, theyseemed not to be real, even surreal. And as the buildings and parks wereonly shown in bits and pieces, slowly, step by step, intermingled withother settings, the result was an increasing and confused awareness offamiliarity, which ended with the Proustian moment of recognition, orBarthian punctumthat is, when I saw the bench. In this moment, thewhole film had become different.

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

18/30


Fig. 2: Schlosspark Schleissheim, 2007.

The plot of Resnaiss film turns on the power of the imagination and thefragile nature of memory. Regarding its visual presentation, the film isfamous for its formal purism, showing a solipsistic labyrinth of mirroredrooms and corridors leading to the same rooms again, with no breakthrough to an outer reality. This fits well with the filmmakers stresson their works aesthetic autonomyfor example no credit is given, eitherin the film or the published screenplay, that it is based on a prior text. But

recent research by Thomas Beltzer has shown that there is actually areference text behind the film:The Invention of Morel , a novella writtentwenty-one years earlier by Adolfo Bioy Casares, an Argentinian writerwho, like his more famous friend Jorge Luis Borges, worked in what wemay broadly call the fantastic genre (Bioy Casares 2003). According toBeltzers description of the novella,

[this] Argentinean masterpiece is about a fugitive, Morel, hiding out aloneon a deserted island, who one day awakens to discover that the island isfilled with anachronistically dressed people who dance, stroll up anddown, and swim in the pool, as if this were a summer resort likeMarienbad. (Beltzer 2000)

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

19/30

I NTRODUCTION 13

The Invention of Morel is a cruelly Kafkaesque narrative, dealing withthe diabolical invention of a holographic recording device which captures

all of the senses in three dimensions, but at the same time destroys itssubject in the recording process, slowly rotting the skin and flesh off its bones. The novella therefore becomes a parable for the relationship between nature and the image, or between sensations or thoughts and the possibility of preserving them in ones memory. A second novella byCasares, A Plan for Escape, also bears an interesting affinity to the plot of Last Year at Marienbad . Both of these novellas belong to the sciencefiction and/or horror genres.

The film script of Last Year at Marienbad thus emerges as anintertextual piece of writing, but the allusions to Bioy Casares remainunmarked. Instead of acknowledging the scripts reliance on these earliertexts, the filmmakers have chosen to disassociate their work from itssources in the science fiction genre, and to handle it as a purely formalwork. Indeed, the formal peculiarities in the films visual presentationseem to take priority over the plot, so that the film can be seen as ameditation on the relationship between art and nature. It therefore makes ahuge difference whether we watch the film with Bioy CasaresThe Invention of Morel in mind, or whether we fail to notice the filmsintertextuality. When seen without reference to the Argentinian novella, Marienbad is mostly an exercise in formalism; however, seen in light ofthe intertextual juxtaposition, the film turns into quite another, differentwork, as becomes obvious in the film reading proposed by Beltzer. Withreference to the holographic recording device described inThe Inventionof Morel , Beltzer suggests that the unnamed characters in Marienbad might also be seen as holographs who are, however, caught in their ownworld and unaware of their ephemeral status, with only the stranger havingachieved at least some self-awareness of what they all are. Theholographic imagery of the film echoes places and people who move likeshadows through the baroque garden, repeating its geometrical structure.But while the narration and flow of images are bent back into a formalloop or circle, its autonomy and perfect form are challenged andcontradicted by the discursive references to an outside worldthat is, theCasares novel, the real places, a simple memory of a bench.

Of course, scholars of intertextuality have long suggested thatintertextuality is an activity which is primarily based on the side of therecipient, rather than being an effect achieved by the author, as was believed in older scholarship (cf. Frey 1990, Holthuis 1993, Schulte-Middelich 1985). That such an entanglement between a cultural object andits recipient also operates in acts of a visual appropriation will be shown in

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

20/30


the articles collected in this volume. They do so by relying on a mixture ofapproaches ranging from philosophical theories about the dialectics of

cognition and perception, to discourses on the visual, visual semiotics, andthe narratological theory of focalisation. This eclectic mix of disciplinesand methodologies is motivated by the common conviction that the studyof seeing and perception can only talk about processes which cannot be predicted, and that we thus need to activate divergent ways of seeingdeveloped, for instance, both in visual semioticsand phenomenology(rather than taking sides with one school of thought and against the other;cf. Frank 2006). Instead of favouring one particular school of thought, thisvolume approaches the thorny field of seeing perception in four differentways: through thinking seeing, writing seeing, picturing seeing andwatching seeing.

In the order in which they appear in this volume, the articles in SectionOne, Thinking Seeing , pursue a systematic inquiry into the tangledrelations of spectator and object and of seeing, speaking, reading andwriting, by engaging with a number of positions from within Western philosophy. In the opening article to the collection, DIMITRI LIEBSCH shows several points of departure from a naive logic of vision. Thenaive logic conceives of the subject and object of seeing as the twodistinctive positions of a binary opposition, and describes the act of visionitself as a distanced and methodical activity which represents the objectworld as it supposedly really is. Engaging Maurice Merleau-Pontyscritique of this naive logic, Liebsch describes a series of unexpected lookswhich cannot be adequately accommodated within it. These deviations areclassified in terms of a rhetoric of seeing. Thus, Liebsch identifies achiasm of self and other in the act of seeing; a synaestheticvision which iscrossed with other sense impressions; ametonymyof vision, referring tothe fact that seeing never takes place in isolation, but always engages arange of contexts; anallegorical vision which makes visible, e.g. throughthe use of microscopic or digital technology, that which is normallyinvisible to the human eye; and ininverted vision which locates activitywith the object of vision, while the subject remains passive.

EMANUEL ALLOA extends the engagement with Merleau-Ponty bytaking up the French philosophers suggestion that vision is characterised by an ecstatic structure of madness which, indeed, underlies all forms of bodily perception: Every vision is madness, insofar as every vision is possession. Merleau-Ponty associated this madness of vision primarilywith the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, and Alloa shows through a detailedanalysis of Vermeers paintingThe Music Lesson that the madness ofvision operates through a chiasm of the viewer and the visible: while the

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

21/30

I NTRODUCTION 15

viewer may visually possess the perceived object, beyond distance, the actof vision also implies that the viewer him- or herself belong to the order of

the visible and is thus exposed to the possibility of being held by thatwhich s/he beholds. Ultimately, this means that the beholder is permanently displaced, thereby implying an anthropology of eccentricity.

The relationship between the visible, the readable and the writeable liesat the heart of BIRGIT MERSMANNs inquiry into the visibility of writing.Most of our readers will be familiar with W.J.T. Mitchells dictum, in Picture Theory, that all media are mixed media and that allrepresentations are heterogeneous (1994: 5), meaning that visuality andverbality are intrinsic to each other and thus no easy or straightforwardseparation between images and words is possible. However, Mersmann points out that more than twenty years before Mitchell and Boehm proclaimed a pictorial or iconic turn, a visuo-perceptive linguistic shiftoccurred in the writings of French philosophers, especially Roland Barthesand Jacques Derrida, when these writers turned away from phonismtowards graphism and used ideographic writing systems in particular likeJapanese, Chinese, or Egyptian hieroglyphs, which are composed ofcharacters instead of letters, as a source of inspiration.

Besides offering productive insights into the visibility of script, anaspect which often receives too little attention in theories of intermediality,Mersmanns contribution serves as a point of linkage between the first andsecond sections of this volume. For in Section two:Writing Seeing , weturn our attention towards the various and tangled issues raised by thedominance of the verbal medium when dealing with matters of vision beit in theoretical enquiries or in literary fiction. As GUSTAV FRANK pointsout, literature and other verbal media (for instance, newspaper journalismand popular magazines) deal with all sorts of questions concerning perception in general, seeing pictures in particular, and image making. Hethus conceives of visual culture studies as a licence for literary studies torenew itself by reposing questions which have not yet been successfullyanswered, for instance concerning the stages of a professionalisation ofauthorship and the mediality of texts, i.e. the relevance of journals and papers that enable the development of careers as well as of genres andsubgenres in the course of the nineteenth century. Through readings oftexts by canonical German authors of this period, such as E.T.A.Hoffmann, Adalbert Stifter and (in the early twentieth century) RobertMusil, Frank points out that these texts are constituted out of layers of thevisual, and need to be analysed accordingly.

Referring to three German authors from the second half of thetwentieth centuryHeinrich Bll, Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

22/30


CelanMICHALBEN-HORIN tackles another crucial moment in the literaryhistory of ekphrastic description. She shows how these three authors all

attempted to come to terms with the horrific experience of World War IIand the Shoah by exploiting a rather unusual poetic device, that ofsynaesthetic or perceptual distortion, thus enabling a poetics which doesnot permit any harmonic or automatic correspondence between the sensorychannels and the stimuli of reality. Hence, Ben-Horins analysis showsonce again that visual perception need not necessarily be limited to therealm of optics and optical media, but also to processes of reading andcognition on the one hand, and textual constructions of time and space, onthe other.

The close reading of one specific example of literary ekphrasisconstitutes the focus of JULIE LEBLANCs article. Blackout (Trou demmoire), a postmodernist novel by the Canadian writer Hubert Aquin, iscentrally concerned with actualising, reproducing, and simulating a pictorialsignHans Holbein the Youngers famous paintingThe Ambassadors through an act of language. The painting, which is not visually represented inthe novel, is evoked only through forms of verbal description, especially,LeBlanc concludes, through the figure of thehypotypose, a form ofdescription so vivid and energetic that it puts the described object (here: the painting) in front of the readers eyes, thereby achieving the transformationfrom a description into a tableau. The description itself acts as a sort of verbaldoublet of the painting which is, moreover, informed by its intertextualreference to an earlier description ofThe Ambassadors in an art historicaltextbook. Thus, the textual description simultaneously functions as anintertextual device of self-referentiality and specularity which cruciallyimplies the reader in its visual re-constitution.

Like Frank and LeBlanc, R ENATE BROSCH is concerned with thechange in ways of reading and visualising literary texts necessitated by thechanging discourses on visuality, the dominance of images and the visualmedia both within visual culture studies and in other, neighbouringhumanities disciplines as well as in interdisciplinary research. Hercontribution to this collection identifies visual images created in the mindof the reader in the act of reading, through a process of visualisation, anddiscusses the concepts of perspective and focalisation, drawn fromnarratological theory, as salient features on which this visualisationdepends. Thus, where LeBlancs article is preoccupied with the descriptivefeatures of the text, Brosch focuses on the readers ongoing construction ofa fictional world through a dynamic process of hypothesis building, whichconstantly visualises mental images although these never becomeconcrete, as in a film, but remain transient and evanescent. This transience

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

23/30

I NTRODUCTION 17

of mental images, which always remain potentially adaptable andemendable to new knowledge presented by the narrative, is a crucial

difference to actual visual perception, yet cannot be discussed in isolationfrom seeing and perception.In the concluding article to this section, TAMAR YACOBI reposes the

question: who sees in any act of vision?, in terms of the narrative agentsinvolved in the rendering of a literary fiction. As is well known,narratological theory offers a number of concepts for processes of perspective building in narrative fiction, including point of view, perspective, focalisation and so on, all of which are functionally distinctfrom the narrator of a story, although narration and focalisation can, ofcourse, coincide in one person. Yacobi proposes a way around thesemuddled and frequently unhelpful distinctions by distinguishing, not between narrator and focaliser, but between different degrees of(un)selfconsciousness in the act of describing literary characters visualimpressionsor more specifically, characters viewings of paintings takenfrom the domain of High Art. Discussing a number of such ekphrases,Yacobi concludes that ekphrasis need not be limited to scenes or contextsof actual art-viewing, it may just as well arise from the narratorsarticulated or the reflectors private (hence doubly interiorised) memories,associations, or unconscious. Perception, therefore, need not be accurate;indeed, misper-ceptions abound in ekphrasis, which means that thereaders position regarding the characters perceptions also varies.

Our next section, Picturing Seeing deals with the difficulties thataccompany depicting different ways of seeing within visual media.Hence, a special interest of the authors lies in pictures that present perception and externalise the act of looking, thereby making vision itselfvisible, and analysable. Turning away from the ocularcentristic models ofmodernity, ITAY SAPIR argues that painting not only deals with what can be seen, but also with the unseen and invisible. His descriptions of earlymodern paintings concentrate on the dark side of vision blindness,shadows, black spaces, and, in doing so, enable these blanks to tell anobscure tale, an alternative story placed against the background of anincreasingly self-aware image-production in early modern Europe. Sapirrefers to the phenomenological tradition and to Lacanian theories of theunconscious to demonstrate how the invisible always already lodgeswithin the visible itself, how perception itself is provoked by the insolubledialectical dilemma between seeing and knowing.

Another phenomenological approach towards art history is proposed inR ICCARDOMARCHIS article on Learning to look at Kandinsky, in whichhe refers to an historic event, the Berlin First German Autumn Salon of

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

24/30


1913. Marchi diligently reconstructs a debate about early non-objective painting and the difficulty of the critics to see anything in them. This

reconstruction leads him to a reflection on the relationship betweenvisuality and verbality, because, as one critic wrote, it is impossible todescribe in words the style of this art. However, the critics loss of wordsstimulated new reflections on vision, as is shown in a contemporaryreference to Bergsons theory of intuition: Kandinsky then shows us visionas an event, not as an object of artistic creation.

Other possible ways of tackling the invisible are developed inBARBARALANGES article on Surrealist Concepts of the Unconscious inthe 1920s and 30s. The emphasis now lies on the relation between the useof material and its sensual effect, but the question remains the samehowto develop visual strategies to encounter otherness or the unknown.Lange argues that these strategies, which she discusses in the context ofrecalling the relics of Pre-Columbian material culture, remain highlyartificial, because they are supported by contemporary popular images ofthe unconscious. Comparing Batailles concept of base material andMax Ernsts techniques of frottage and grattage, she claims adifference between two usages: archaic material can either be used todeconstruct form or as a tool to evoke images which belong to a well-known cultural memory. Lange also discusses how the imagery ofdisappeared cruel cultures, in return, served as a substitute for thesurrealists experiences from World War I.

The surrealists keen interest in sensation and the unconscious initiatednew pictorial strategies for externalising the internal. But can perceptionitself be perceived at all? To discuss this question, STEPHANGNZEL looksat pictures which present a perception that is external to the mind, that is,the structure of possible visual experiences. In analysing the use of perspective in video games, especially in so-called first person shootergames (FPS), he reflects upon images in which the first person perspectiveis used and which are manipulated by the user and not only by the producer. However, his interest in the pragmatics of the image iscombined with a formalistic approach, because FPS games have to employthe pictorial style of realism to enable the identification between seer andseen. Within computer game designs of the last years, Gnzel thereforeobserves a recurrence of the main stylistic features of modern art history,from Renaissance central perspective to Surrealisms uncanny and highlyartificial pictorial spaces.

Section four:Watching Seeing concentrates on the use and significanceof scientific images, drawing together cultural, material, and biologicalanalyses of thought, cognition and emotion. Trained as a professional

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

25/30

I NTRODUCTION 19

filmmaker, JOCELYN CAMMACK currently works on the cinematicexploitation of perceptual error, for which she is also co-supervised by the

Department of Visual Neuroscience at Imperial College, London. In her paper on Cinema, Illusionism and Imagination she presents currentinvestigations into the perception of ambiguous images and provides the basis for further dialogue within the emerging field of neuroaesthetics. Theincreasing desire of filmmakers to uncouple the mechanisms of seeing andthinking by destabilising the secure object-spectator relationshipencourages reflections on the specific capacity for realism and illusionismof moving images.

Another way of watching seeing is provided by CHRISTINALAMMER ,whose current research on empathy and somatic perception in the biomedical context let her ponder the importance of the arts andhumanities and the role they play in understanding science, cognition, andimages themselves. In her essay on Patient Bodies she explores differentmodes of perception in the clinical context of a university hospital andshows how bodies, including those of patients and her own, are beingfabricated in diagnostic and operating theatres of the clinic. The visualisedhuman body, then, can be regarded not simply as a product of medicaloperations, but as constitutive of such operations and cognitive processes.Due to her interest in how identities are being transformed by the processof image production Lammer rethinks questions about SeeingPerception which have been crucial throughout this volume.

Table of Illustrations

Fig. 1: Resnais, Robbe-Grillet: Last Year at Marienbad , 1961. Croppedfilm still.

Fig. 2: Schlosspark Schleissheim, 2007. Photo: Karin Leonhard

Works Cited

Arnheim, Rudolf (2002). Film als Kunst (orig. pub. 1932). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

Attridge, Derek (1997). Roland Barthess Obtuse, Sharp Meaning and theResponsibilities of Commentary. InWriting the Image After Roland Barthes, ed. Jean-Michel Rabat. Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 77-89.

Bal, Mieke (1997). Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative.2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

26/30


. (2003). Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture. Journal of Visual Culture 2(1), 5-32.

Balzs, Bla (2001). Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films(orig. pub. 1924). Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.Barthes, Roland (1981).Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography.

New York: Hill and Wang.Beltzer, Thomas (2000). Last Year at Marienbad: An Intertextual

Meditiation. InSenses of Cinema(October 2000),

Benjamin, Walter (1969). The Work of Art in the Age of MechanicalReproduction (orig. pub. 1936). In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books.

Binczek, Natalie (2002). Zur Funktion des Ornaments in LuhmannsKunst-Buch: mit einem Supplement zum Bild des Ornaments in Lanne dernire Marienbad . In sthetische Postionen nach Adorno, ed. Gregor Schwering. Munich: Fink, 103-122.

Bioy Casares, Adolfo (2003).The Invention of Morel ( New York Review Books classics). New York: New York Review Books.

Boehm, Gottfried (1985). Bildnis und Individuum: ber den Ursprung der Portrtmalerei in der italienischen Renaissance. Munich: Prestel.

. (1994). Die Wiederkehr der Bilder. InWas ist ein Bild , ed. G.Boehm. Munich: Fink, 11-38.

. (2005). Vor Augen stellen. Zum lebendigen Bild, paper presentedat the conference Evidentia. Reichweiten visueller Wahrnehmung inder Frhen Neuzeit . Munich.

Brennan, Teresa, and Martin Jay (eds.) (1996).Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight . New York:Routledge.

Bryson, Norman (1983).Vision and Painting. The Logic of the Gaze.London: Macmillan.

. (1988). The Gaze in the Expanded Field. InVision and Visuality, ed.H. Forster. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 87-114.

Cartwright, Lisa (1995).Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine s VisualCulture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

. (2004). Emergencies of Survival: Moral Spectatorship and the NewVision of the Child in Postwar Child Psychoanalysis. In Journal ofVisual Culture 3 (1).

. (2005). Spectatorship and Pity: Representations of the Global SocialOrphan in the 1990s. InCultures of Transnational Adoption, ed.T. Volkman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

27/30

I NTRODUCTION 21

Crary, Jonathan (1990). Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

. (1999). Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and ModernCulture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Didi-Huberman, Georges (1992).Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nousregarde. Paris: Editions de Minuit.

Elkins, James (1994).The Poetics of Perspective. Ithaca, London: CornellUniversity Press.

. (1996). The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing . San Diego,CA: Harcourt Brace.

. (1998). On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

. (2003): Visual Studies. A Skeptical Introduction. New York, London:Routledge.

Frank, Gustav (2006). Textparadigma kontra visueller Imperativ: 20Jahre Visual Culture Studies als Herausforderung derLiteraturwissenschaft. In Internationales Archiv fr Sozialgeschichteder Literatur 31 (2): 26-89.

Freedberg, David (1989).The Power of Images. Studies in the History andTheory of Response. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Frey, Hans-Jost (1990). Der unendliche Text . Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.Genette, Grard (1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method ,

translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press.Hill, Charles A., and Marguerite Helmers (eds.) (2004). Defining Visual

Rhetorics. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Holthuis, Susanne (1993). Intertextualitt. Aspekte einer rezeptionsorien-

tierten Konzeption. Tbingen: Stauffenburg.Horstkotte, Silke (2005). The Double Dynamics of Focalization in

W. G. Sebalds The Rings of Saturn. In Narratology Beyond LiteraryCriticism. Mediality, Disciplinarity, ed. Jan Christoph Meister. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 25-44.

Jay, Martin (1993). Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision inTwentieth-Century French Thought . Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Leutrat, Jean-Louis (2000). LAnne dernire Marienbad. London:British Film Institute.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas (1999). An Introduction to Visual Culture. London, New York: Routledge.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994). Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

28/30


. 2005. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images.Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.

Robbe-Grillet, Alain (1962). Last Year at Marienbad , translated byRichard Howard. New York: Grove Press.Rorty, Richard (1967). The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in

Philosophical Method . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Rose, Jaqueline (1988). Sexuality and Vision: Some Questions. In

Vision and Visuality, ed. H. Foster. Seattle, WA: Bay Press.Schulte-Middelich, Bernd (1985). Funktionen intertextueller Textkonsti-

tution. In Intertextualitt. Formen, Funktionen, anglistische Fallstudien, ed. Ulrich Broich and Manfred Pfister. Tbingen: Niemeyer, 197-242.

Silverman, Kaja (1996).The Threshold of the Visible World . London:Routledge.

Stafford, Barbara (1991). Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen inEnlightenment Art and Medicine. Cambridge, Mass., London: MITPress.

. (2007). Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.

Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright (2001). Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sweet, Freddy (1981).The Film Narratives of Alain Resnais. Ann Arbor,MI: UMI Research Press.

Yacobi, Tamar (2002). Ekphrasis and Perspectival Structure. InCultural Functions of Intermedial Exploration, ed. Erik Hedling. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 189-202.

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

29/30

I. Thinking Seeing

8/10/2019 9781847183743-sample

30/30

THE R HETORIC OF SEEING : CONSIDERING THE R ELATIONSHIP

BETWEEN SPECTATOR AND OBJECT

DIMITRI LIEBSCH

Un milln de estrellas sondos ojos que las miran.

(Antonio Porchia)

Both the development of visual culture and the proclamations of the pictorial turn have confirmed the suspicion that the relationship betweenspectator and object is more than a duality consisting of two simplyisolatable parts. I will therefore discuss this more complex relationship,

and supplement the still widespread, naive logic of seeing by a rhetoric ofseeing.When I began working on the concept for this article, an admittedly

perplexing anecdote came to my mind right away and repeatedly. In hisParisian seminars on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysisin 1964, Jacques Lacan presented a recollection from his young adulthood.At that time Lacan was looking for an activity that contrasted with hisintellectual one. He therefore liked to be outdoors and even worked as afisherman on the coast of Brittany at one point. One day, the followinghappened to him there: He was waiting to pull in the nets when he saw asardine can glistening in the sun. One of the fishermen called Petit-Jean by Lacan points to the can and says: You see that can? Do yousee it? Well, it doesnt see you. (Lacan 1973: 89) Petit-Jean finds thisextremely amusing, very much in contrast to Lacan. This contrast inestimation is due to the fact that Lacan is by no means of the opinion thatthe can doesnt see him. On the contrary: He thinks, as the French originalsays, elle me regarde (ibid.). I find this anecdote rather revealing for tworeasons. On the one hand, it is obviously a recollection concerning theyoung adulthood of a psychoanalyst, in which besides Lacans ownEgo names from Sigmund Freuds case studies recur. Petit-Jean ofcourse alludes to the notorious medical history of little Hans who

9781847183743-sample

Documents