norman bryson - the gaze in the expanded field

5/13/2018 Norman Bryson - The Gaze in the Expanded Field

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ART CRITICISM

IJ a c q u e l i n e R o s eSEXUALITY

NUMBER

2

D iu A r t F o u n d a ti o n~ .~":J .; ii- . it

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EDITED BY

H a l F o s te r


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Library of CongressCataloging-in-Publication DataDiscussions in Contemporary Culture.No.2 edited by Hal Foster.Includes bibliographies.Contents: no. 2 .Vision and Visuality.I . Art and society . 2 . Aesthet ics, Modern 20th century.I. Foster, Hal. II. Dia Art Foundation.N72.S6D57 1987 700'.1'03 8771579ISBN 1-56584-461-0

The New Press was established in 1990 asa not-far-profit alternative to the large,commercial publishing houses currently dominating the book publishing industry.The New Press operates in the public interest rather than for private gain, and iscommitted to publishing, in innovative ways, works of educational, cultural, andcommunity value that are often deemed insufficiently profitable.

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CONTENTS

H a l F o st erix

F'REFACE

M artin J aySCOPIC REGIMES OF MODERNITY

J an a th an C r ar yMODERNIZING VISION

R o sa li nd K ra u ssTHE IM/F'ULSE TO SEE

GENERAL DISCUSSION

N or ma n B ry so nTHE GAZE IN THE EXF'ANDED FIELD

J ac q ue li ne R o seSEXUALITY AND VISION: SOME OUESTIONS

13 t j G ENE R A L DIS C U S S ION
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Figure I. Jiun. The character "Man."

N o rm a n B ry s o n

THE GAZE IN THE EXPANDED FIELD

In this paper I will be examining a term that has become impor-tant in contemporary discussions of painting and of visuality: lereaard, "the Gaze." First of all I will do what I can to trace theconcept of the Gaze as it passes from Sartre to Lacan, fromSartre's description of the Gaze of the other in B eina and N oth-ingness to Lacan's reworking of that description in the first twosections of T he F ou r F un da me nta l C on cep ts if Psycho-analysis. Tosome this will be familiar territory, to others it will be less fa-miliar; I will do my best to proceed as clearly as I can. But oncethat account of I e r eg ar d, the Gaze, is stated I want to move towhat may seem at first Sight a quite unconnected account of vi-sion, the one that emerges in the meditation on Western phi-losophy conducted in Japan principally by Kitaro Nishida andthen by Nishida's student Keiji Nishitani. The reason I wish toinvoke ishida and Nishitani is that their theoretical develop-ment seems in many respects to go further than Sartre andLacan towards a radical reformulation of our thought on visu-alitv, and as a consequence of this our thought on painting.

My argument will be that the line of thinking that passesfrom Sartre to Lacan in crucial respects remains held within aconceptual enclosure. where vision is still theorized from thestandpoint of a subject placed at the center of a world. Althoughthat centralized subject is progressively dismantled by Sartre andLacan-and the direction of their thought is unmistakeably to-wards a radical decentering of the subject -there seem to me tobe areas in which the standpoint of the subject as center is actu-

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N o rm a n B ry so n I

ally retained; the result of that residual centering upon thestandpoint of the subject is that vision is portrayed as menacedat that vestigial center, threatened from without, and in somesense persecuted, in the visual domain, by the regard or Gaze. Thedirection of thought that passes from Nishida to Nishitani un-dertakes a much more thoroughgoing displacement of the sub-ject in the field of vision, which finds expression in a term so farlargely neglected in the Western discussion of visuality, siinyara,translated as "blankness," "emptiness," or "nihilitv." The con-cept of blankness, as it evolves in the thought of Nishida andthen of Nishitani, relocates the Gaze, le reqard, in an expandedfield where a number of conceptual transformations becomenecessary and urgent: notably concerning the aspect of menacewhich still colors Lacan's account of the subject's visual experi-ence; concerning the question of vd!E:L~.ubje~, underthe Gaze and in the expanded field of i i inyata or "blankness";and concerning, in the practice of painting, the repercussions ofthe structures of I e r e ga r d, the Gaze, and siinyarQ, blankness oremptiness, at the level of brush, pigment, and frame.

IISartre's conception of the gaze of the other is clearest in hisstory or scenario of the watcher in the park. 1 Sartre's narrativeinvolves two stages. In its first movement, Sartre enters a parkand discovers that he is alone: everything in the park is there forhim to regard from an unchallenged center of the visual field.All of the park unfolds before this absolute center of a livedhorizon: the subject resides at the still point of the turningworld, master of its prospects, sovereign surveyor of the scene.In this initial exhilaration of self-possession, nothing threatensthe occupancy of the self as focus of its visual kingdom. But inSartre's second movement, this reign of plenitude and luminouspeace is brought abruptly to an end: into the park and into the

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watcher's solitary domain there enters another, whose intrusionbreaks the peac~ and fractures the watcher's self-enclosure. Thewatcher is in turn watched: observed of all observers, the viewerbecomes spectacle to another's sight. Now all the lines of forcewhich had converged on the center of the watcher's lived hori-zon turn, reverse, and reconverge on the space of the intruderand his irruption. Before, all of the perspective lines had run infrom the horizon towards the watcher in the park; now anotherperspective opens up, and the lines of flight race away from thewatcher self to meet this new point of entry. For the intruderhimself stands at his own center of things, and draws towardsand into himself everything he,,;sees; the watcher self is now atangent, not a center, a vanishin~ point, not a viewing point, anopacity on the other's distant horizon. Everything reconvergeson this intrusive center where the watcher self is not: the in-truder becomes a kind of drain which sucks in all of the formerplenitude, a black hole pulling the scene away from the watcherself into an engulfing void.

Were we to represent Sartre's scenario in terms of a pic-ture, the Raphael Sposalizio would illustrate its general formation(Figure 2). In one sense all of the architectural spaces turn to-wards the viewer, displaying their advertent aspects to one whostands at the place of masterly overview, with every line of flightacross the cornices, flagstones, and arcades traveling in towardsthe sovereion spectator But in another sense the architecture ofCo the piazza turns towards a place where the viewer does not andcannot exi~t. The moment the viewer appears and takes up posi-tion at the viewpoint, he or she comes face to face with anotherterm that is the negative counterpart to the viewing position:the vanishing point. All of the orthogonal lines across windows,doors, pavements converge there at the vanishing point where,p a r e x ce ll en c e, the viewer is not. The lines of the piazza race awaytowards this drain or black hole of otherness placed at the hori-zon, in a decentering that destroys the subject's unitary self-pes-

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F igure 2 . Raphael . /ltJarTi(l8(' . r : l r i l e V i rB i n ( S po : ;o li 7 .i o d e 1/ a I l4 a d o nn a ) . 1504. Hr c r -a ,Pinacoreca. {Courrcsv Al inarJ /Art Resource, N.Y. )

THE GAZE IN THE EXPANDED FIE.LD

session. The viewpoint and the vanishing point are inseparable:there is no viewpoint without vanishing point, and no vanishingpoint without viewing point.1!.e self-poss


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unmedi~ted visual experience. Between retina and world is in-serted a screen of signs, a screen consisting of alI the multiplediscourses on vision built into the social arena.

This screen casts a shadow: sometimes Lacan calls it a\~otoma sometimes a stain. For when we look through thescreen, what we see is caught up in a network that comes to usfrom the outside: mobile tesserae of signification, a mosaic thatmoves. This network isgreater than its individual agents or op-erators. When I learn to speak, I am inserted-intosystems.of,discourse that were there before [ was, and will remain after Iam gone. Similarly when [ learn to see socially, that is, when [begin to articulate my retinal experience with the codes of rec-ognition that come to me from my social milieu(s),J...am--~T-I-serted into systems of visual discourse that saw the world beforeI did, and will go on seeing after I see no longer. The screen,


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may similarly be that I always feel myself to live at the center ofmy vision-somewhere (where?) behind my eyes; but, again,that vision is decentered by the network of signifiers that cometo me from the social milieu.

Lacan pushes this descr iption fur ther. In place of thespeaker in ordinary conversation, he invites us to consider thespeech of the analysand. The experience of analysis, as Lacan de-fines it, forces the speaker to recognize that the words she or heutters have their own perturbing life; that they follow paths andchains unknown in advance, in movements that circle round yetnever reach the locus of desire or fear. Psychoanalysis is that ex-perience of speaking on the field of the other. The .analvsanddoes not stand at the center of control over these motions of theSignifie r; he or she is more like the ir bewildered observer.Lacan's analysis of vision unfolds in the same terms: the viewingsubject does not stand at the center of a perceptual horizon, andcannot command the chains and series of signifiers passingacross the visual domain. Vision unfolds to the side of, in tan-gent to, the field of the other.~? th~t form of seei~g_Lacangives a name: seeing on the field of the other, seeing undert h e Gaze. -~

IIII want now to pass from the current of thought of Sartre andLacan to another current, the one which passes from Europeinto Japan by way of the most influential Japanese philosopher ofthe twentieth century, Nishida, and which passes on fromNishida to the writer who, at the level of translation, is muchmore accessible to Western readers than Nishida himself, ~i~.5 Nishitani's critique of Sartre occupies a crucial sec-tion of Nishitani's book Religion and Nothingness, and it bases it-self on the observation that with Sartre there is no radicaloverturning of the enclosure of thought which treats the gues-

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tions of ontology, of subject and object, from within the stand-point if t he s u bj ec t. 6 Nishitani remarks that the Sartrean je iscapable of reaching a level of nihility in which everything thatexists is cast into doubt, except the fundamental irreducibility ofthe je which does the doubting. For example, when the je fullyunderstands the death of God and comes to doubt the viabilityof an ethics imposed on the subject from the outside, theSartrean je reacts by falling back in on itse lf, and by strugglingto locate an authenticitv of the self from which ethical action,can emanate directly: when the forms of ethics pass into thefield of nihility and are annulled there, that annihilation is over-come by the je's assertion of itself as authentic core of moralagency. The pass ing of ethical fO'rms into the f ield of annihilationdismantles them, but does not dismantle the je , the self whichreacts by redoubling the force of the self as it operates on thenothingness outs ide it. For Nishitani, Sartre' s nihilism is half-hearted: Sartre places the universe around the self on the field

- ~ity, yet the self gathers force there, and uses the blank-ness surrounding it as, so to speak, a springboard from which tolaunch its own authentic operations." This is to treat the fi~}d o fnihilitv, Nishitani observes, as though it were something againstwhich the self reacts- in this case by multpJying its efforts and. _ _ _ _ _ _ I , solidifying its centeredness . What does not happen-rri Sartre'swork, as Nishitani sees it, is the plaCing of the je itself on thefield of nihilitv or emptiness: the je reemerges from its encoun-ter with nihil ity, reiriforced in its position as the center of itsexperience.

So it is with Sartre's description of visior:, and the scenarioof the watcher in the park. The intrusion of the other makes ofthe self a spectacle or object in relation to that other: the self isthreatened with annihilation by that irruption of alterity on thesubject's horizon. But Sartre's analysis in fact stops a long wayshort of the stage at which this menace to the subject would passon to the field of nihility and become a full decentering of the

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subject. Sartre's watcher is objectified by the other's gaze, just asthat other is objectified by his gaze: but the fundamental terms,of subject and object, remain intact throughout the encounter. Itis as though both the watcher in the park and the intruder whodisturbs its peace were supplied with optical frames-binocu-lars, telescopes, viewfinders-which restricted the surroundingworld to just these two poles, the watcher (now threatened bythe other's gaze) and the intruder (similarly threatened). Thoughmenaced by each other, neither isfundamenrally challenged: thesubject can survive such a gaze, and survive more strongly for be-ing exposed to this "alteritv" which may menace the subject butwhich does not in any sense actually dissolve or annihilate it.The subject's sense of being a subject is heightel)ecl,_not undone:and this, follOWingNishitani's argument, is because the entire~enario is restricted to its twin poles of subject and object.What is not thought through is the question of vision'swider frame.

I V

Like Sartre's BeinS and Nothinsness, Nishitani's Relision and Noih-tnqticss sets out to criticize the Cartesian self-enclosure of thecoSito. In the coSito the subject conceives of itself as universal-center, surrounded by the stable plenitude of an object world.Both subject and object exis~~n a state of mutual confirmationand fixity. The subject, from its position of center amidst theworld of things, looks out on its objects and perceives them asseparate ernities. That is, objects manifest to the subject as com-plete beings having (i ) stable location in a Singleplace; (ii) inde-pendent self-existence (reqUiring the existence of nothing else inorder to exist); (iii) permanent or enduring form. The subjectlooking out upon the world of entities finds itself to be an entitysymmetrical with them. Like them, the subject exists (i ) in one

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place and one place only. lt exists (ii) independently of the ob-jects around it, whose existence the subject is free to doubt,without that doubt entailing that the subject come to doubt itsown existence. And the subject (iii) remains itself despite trans-formation in the material world. In addition to these qualities ofthe entity which the subject shares with its object world, thesubject of the coSita has a further characteristic which the ob-jects of the world do not share: (iv) a position of universal cen-ter, around which the object world clusters or converges as thesubject's experiential horizon.

Like Sartre and like Lacan, Nishitani's aim is to dismantlethis anthropocentric subject, but his critique differs from theirsin his insistence on the term, slir;yaco, translated as "emptiness,"~'ra~i~al imEen.nanence," "blanknes-s,"-;;:nd-'~nihility.'~8 The en-tity, as a conceptual category, is found unable to withstand thecritique of slinyaco, and transposed to the field of siinyato boththe subject-entity and the object-entity literally break up. Sta-bilizing the entity as a fixed Form, with a bounded outline, ispossible only if the universe surrounding the entity is screenedout and the entity withdrawn from the universal field of trans-formations. The concept of the entity can be preserved only byan optic that casts around each entity a perceptual frame thatmakes a cut from the field and immobilizes the cut within thestatic framework. But as soon as that frame is withdrawn, theobject is found to exist as part of a mobile continuum that can-not be cut anywhere. If the object is, say, a Rower, its existenceis only as a phase of incremental transformations between seedand dust, in a continuous exfoliation or perturbation of matter:at no point does the object come under an arrest that would im-mobilize it as Form or eidos. Moved on to the field of siinyato orradical impermanence, _the-entity cOJll_e~flart. It cannot be saidto occupy~a sinsle location, since its 10Cl~sis always the universalfield of transformations: it cannot achieve separation ft:_

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N o rm a n B ry so n Ifield or acquire any kind of bounded outline. Because of its in-separability from the field of impermanence it cannot be said toenjoy independent self-existence, _stnc_e_the_gr_oundoD1li_b.eiug..-is..~~ existence of everything~And it cannot present itself inthe guise of an enduring Form.In Nishitani's description, an object's presence can be de-fined only in negative terms. Since there is no way of singlingout an object x without at t~ same time including it in theglobal field of transformations, what appears as the object x isonly the difference between x and the total surrounding field.Similarly what appears as "the surrounding field" is only its dif-ference from the object x. Nishitani's thinking is morphologicallyclose to Saussure's account of the location of an individual wordin a lang~e. The word, Saussure maintains, is nothing in itself:it lacks all the properties of the entity. Rather, the word is con-stituted "diacritically" in its difference from its surroundingfield, in this case all the other words in the language. In thesame way, Nishitani argues for the diacriti~~l.~. of ob-jects: the system of objects "knows no positive terms." More-over, since the object field is a continuous mobility, individualobjects are constituted by differance, deferral in time, as well.Nishitani's thinking here is close to Derrida's pqrtrayal oLdif-

jerance in la~uage. The meaning of a word never stands forth infull array. If we want to know the meaning of an individualword, and look it up in a dictionary, what the dictionary gives isnot the meaning of that one word, but other words, synonyms.As one reads a sentence, one does not know what a word inmid-sentence means until one reaches the end of the sentence,and that sentence in turn changes as one moves to the next sen-tence, or paragraph, or page. Meaning in a sense never arrives;and in the same way, for Nishitani, being never arrives (beings~eve~ arr~ve). The form of the seed is already turning into the

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form of the Rower, and the Rower is already becoming dust. Thepresent state of the object appearing as the Rower is inhabited byits past as seed and its future as dust, in a continuous motion ofpostponement, whose effect is that the Rower is never presently[here , any more than seed or dust are there.Nishitani sums up the deferred/differed presence of (whathad been) the entity in a series of aphoristic flashes that illumi-nate his text in the same way that the parables of the invadedpark and the Roating sardine can illuminate the texts of Sartreand Lacan (if one "gets" the aphorisms one has grasped the coreargument). ])\lo_key_aphorisms are: "fire does not burn fire,"and "water does not wash water. "9

It would seem to be the essence of fire that it burns; if itdoes not burn it is not fire. Yet fire cannot burn itself; it cannotexist in self-enclosure. Fire can burn everything that can beburned, but the one thing fire cannot burn is fire. For fire to befire it must extend out of the enclosure of Harne into the sur-rounding field, and only when its roots travel into its surroundcan it burn. Similarly, it is of the essence of water that it canwash everything that exists, and if it does not wash it is not wa-ter. Yet the one thing water cannot wash is water: it cannot existinside the self-enclosure of the enti~ circumscribed by a bound-ary or outline, in a Single location that excludes the surroundingfield. For water to be water it must percolate through thatboundary and infiltrate the entity's dry surround, enter into thesurrounding field across the porous filters of irrigation: onlywhen it does so, when it leaves the self-enclosure of water, canit become water. Its existence comes to it when it has left waterbehind it and entered what is not itself. Its being is interpene-trated by what it is not: which is to say that th!~s exist in the;.vays they do exist, under a mode of cons!.ituti\~e_negativit):..2!:-_emptin~)'Qt


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vNishitani's analysis of vision works in terms that are very dif-ferent from those of Sartre. In Sartre, the object is what appearsto a subject, so to speak at the end of a viewfinder. The view-finder or leghimate construction creates a kind of tunnel visionin which all of the surrounding field is screened out. Only thatwhich appears within the framing apparatus-perspective, pic-ture frame, camera - exists: the viewer on one side, the objecton the other. Nishitani's roo.'!'_es to dissolve the apparatus offraming which always produces an object for a subject and a sub-ject for an object. Passing on to the field of sunyaro the object isfound to exist, not at the other end of tunnel vision, but in thetotal ~}5L2!~e universal remainder. The object opens out om-nidirect ionally on to the universal surround, against which it de-fines itself negatively and diacritically. The viewer who looks outat the object sees only one angle of the global field where theobject resides, one Single tangent of the 360 degrees of the cir-cle, and of the 360 degrees in all directions of the radiatingsphere of light spreading out from the object into the globalenvelopment.

In the same way that Nishitani takes the object away fromthe framing apparatus-the picture frame, the legitimate con-struction-and places it on the expanded field of blankness ors i inyato, so the viewer is pulled away from the aperture of theviewfinder or lens and redefined as radically dis-framed. Theviewer still has his or her eyes open: the universe does not dis-appear. But the viewer is now a being that exists through the ex-istence of everything else in the universal field, and not just asthe subject-effect of the object that appears at the end of theviewing tunnel. Let us say that ~ view!!is_q.e.sJ .oGk-mt~at ..a.-

~g!.l2ent of the 195al fi~~hat surrounds the viewer o.mnid~tionally. This small section (or cone, or pyramid) is in fact only a

.-r;;ct-;Q; of the field of universal surround; this partial view can-100

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not be cut out of the total surround, Singled out, and be made torepresent the totality of the viewer's being. What enabled thatnarro~o~e or pyamid to featu!:e as _the...'::_isualield was exactly. t he -enclosure of the frame-the tunnel, the viewfinder, the le-oitimate construction . . . fu ! 1 _ o . m ; ; .e . that frame...is...dissolved on thebf ield of s i inyGto or emptiness, that narrow angle is found to b!_~nvelo~ed on all sides by a ~~urround of invisibility. Once dis-framed, the brightly luminous segment is found actually to beconstituted within the invisible, the dark or unmarked remainderthat extends beyond the edge of peripheral vision into the spacethat wraps its way round behind the spectator's head and behindthe eyes. _Wha.t c~~ be seen is supported and inte en~tr~ed byJ-vhat is outside Sight, a Gaze of the other enveloping sight ..on allsides.

How can such a Gaze be re~ll.te_dl..Eor surely we nowstand at the very limits of representation. From this point on,only a technique which undermines the frame can ~tand in forthe invisible which the frame excludes. And if we try to pictureto ourselves the Gaze of sunyato or blankness, it must be interms of the_E:onreEr~~tat ional or the_anti-re ~~ti. .onal .Perhaps the clearest image of this comes from the techniquewhich sets out both to assert and to undermine representationalpractice, the technig~.!


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Figure 4. Sesshn. Landscape (detail). Tokyo. National Museum.

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omnidirectionallv: Ch'an does not dispute that. What Ch'an doesdisput~uh\l.t_tI1GJ:Qi.k __w.hich thus a12pears can be identifiedwith the object itself, as it exists in the field of emptiness. Whattne-imag~~.k~ the fact of rh ; o~ i ea' s rema inde t. .. .. .! h _e_other views which pass out from the object to all those un-.Q?untable piaces~~- the vi.;ver~agealso has to a~kn~wledg~~ords the narrow pas-sage of light that travels to 2 l " l _ empirical obse!ver~ is_ the ~ ' iewe_r ' sremainder, the sum of other views that the viewer excludes by as-~ - - - - - - - -uming this view, the surroundino envelope of i~bility. Whatpainting risks, in the Ch'an perspective, is the production of afalse ontology in which the seer and the seen commune in tun-nel vision: the subject mistaking what=is only a profile of the ob-ject for the object itself; the profile, thus cut out, creating foritself a hypostasized viewing subject, pinned at the other end ofthe tunnel.

In the case of the Rung-ink painting, Ch'an's solution is todisfigure the image, the bipolar view, by_openin_g on to the~ random_n!.::.: As the ink is cast, it flies out of theenclosure or tunnel of the frame, and opens the image on to thefield of material transformations that constitutes the universalsurround. The flinging of ink marks the surrender of the fixedform of the image to the global configuration of force that sub-tends it. Eidos is scattered to the four winds. The im3,ge is madeto float on the forces which lie outside the frame; it is~s. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - -- ----~ -----------.._.one throws dice. What breaks inro the image is the rest of the~niver~ ev!,!rything o~e... .. .2f . the frame.

It is the same with the flung ink of Ch'an calligraphy, sorapid that the ink cannot be contained by the system of script(Figure 1) . When the graphic gesture is slow, deliberate, thetraces can still be held within a framework of control. The cal-ligrapher operates on the character, and the character dictates themovements of the brush ..Accelerated, .the gesture comes loosefrom this bipolar structure of holding-in-place: the ink flies

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N o rm a n B ry so n Ifaster than the hand can control it, and to areas of the paper orsilk beyond the sway of the character's prescribed structure. Itbreaks free from the subject who controls it, and from ~crip-tural form. The framework of script and calligrapher is cutacross by another term that stands for everything outside theircircumscribed enclosure: the rest of the universe, the field ofemptiness that subtends the entities of scribe and script and an-nihilates them as freestanding and independent forms.

(Something cuts across the field of vision, and invades itfrom the outside. Vision is traversed by something wholly un-

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overnable by the subject, something that harbors within it theorce of everything outside the visual dyad. Let us call it theGaze. But it is hardly the Gaze of Sartre, or even of Lacan.

V I

In Lacan, something cuts across the space of sight and darkensit: the Gaze. And in the flying of the inks there is an entry intothe visual field of something totally dark and opaque that standsfor absolute alteritv: the otherness of the rest of the universe, asurrounding field that decenters the subject and the subject's vi-sion completely. When the painter or calligrapher throws theink; there is renunciation of all claim to act as universal center,and at the same time (pace Sartre) renunciation of the object asalternative universal center. Yet these abolitions of self and centerare not accompanied by any apparent sense of menace, whichmay indicate ways in which Sartre and Lacan still operate fromwithin a certain intellectual enclosure.

What seems questionable in)..acan's acco_~~ is the paranoid coloration given to the Gaze. The Ch'anexamples point to regimes of visuality in which the decenteringof the subject may be thought in terms that are not essentiallycatastrophic. And this in turn prompts the question: if, in cer-tain "alternative" scopic regimes, decentering is unaccompanied

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by the sense of menace or persecution, why does Lacan provideonly one model of vision and of painting, that of the negative orterrorizing gaze?

There seem to me two, related answers. The first concernsa rather deep uncertainty in Lacan concerning the role of cul-tural variation in the construction of subjectivity. Lacan's de-scription of how the subject is formed unfolds in terms ofculture: it is in the irruption of the symbolic order and of sig-nification that human subjectivity is precipitated, and since thecomposition of the symbolic order and of the codes of significa-tion are historically and culturally variable, !.,he subject in Lacanis given by culture and history, not by nature, Nevertheless,Lacan says far more about the subject' ....initial insertion into thesymbolic than about the subject's subsequent life there. Thatsubsequent existence is where the variables of history, culture,and class operate, and construct the subject across the enormousarray of local discourses through which the subject moves: in theworkplace and the family, in the institutions of education, medi-cine, law, property, religion, government, and all the diversecultural arenas of the social formation. We are certainly invitedto think of Lacan's terms, the Symbolic and the Imaginary, asoperating in all of these adult arenas, and not only at the stage ofthe subject's initial formation (in childhood). Yet Lacan's descrip-tions tend to privilege the genetic and formative moment, notthe Ion" and diverse elaborations of adult life. This concentra-

btion on subjective genesis and installation makes it difficult tothink through the question of cultural variation. As part of this,it is difficult to think through to the cultural diversity of visualregimes, some of which may view the decentering of the subjectin terms other than those of menace.

The second answer is an extension of the first: that Lacan'sportrayal of the Imaginary gives a centrality to his ar


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N o rm a n B ry s on INishitani engages with Sartre as a precursor, and both reaardthe centering of the unive~se around the sovereign subject as il-~. In the field of sunyata the centralized subject falls'apart;its boundary dissolves, together with the consoling boundary ofthe object. Nib_Ditx.a.n.d..hlankness.__undO-th subj~t'~~ering oLthe world upon itself; and, radically decentered, the subjectcomes to know itself in noncentered terms, as inhabiting and in-h~b~tive emptiness. Such decentering is a cen-tral theme in Lacan and in Nishitani; and yet their approachesare quite different. Perhaps one can illustrate their divergence byway of the skull in the Holbein, and the Aung ink in Ch'an. Theskull appears in and as the proteSt of the Imaginary against itsown decentering, as the menace of death; the Aung ink figuresinstead ;_he subject's acceptance oLck.cen.teri!}g. The skull repre-sents the subject's fear of dissolution, the flung ink embodies in-stead the subject's renunciation of a central subject position, ona field of radical emptiness where the last remains of the cogitoare rendered null and void, literally cast out on empty air. Whatchanges between them is~\..ili:uxa.Lc.ons_tL1,lction obbe Imagi_:__na!J. Which suggests, finally, that Lacan's account of vision aspersecuted by the Gaze, like Sartre's, itself unfolds within theImaginary, an Imaginar _~onstructed in a culturally and histor=._~a!ly speci~. If so, then it is that analysis which itselfneeds to experience some cultural and historical decentering.

Why should I or anyone spend time wrangling over Lacan'sconcept of the Gaze? My own answer must be that, although Iobviously have reservations about a certain paranoid colorationwithin it, nevertheless Lacan's account of visuality seems to mehistorically extremely important. It marks a fundamental shiftaway from the ground on which vision has been previouslythought. The nineteenth century saw the rise of a theory of vi-sion in which the truth of vision lay in the retina, in the phys-iology of the eye and the neurology of the optical apparatus. Inthe twentieth century the conception of vision as primarily a

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THE GAZE IN THE EXPANDED F"IELD

domain of retina and light has subtended a number of kev ac-tivities: in art historv, formalism; in art theory, the approach to:;:~ vi; th;-psycholo~y of percep~on, in the work of Gombrichor Arnheim; in the construction of museums and exhibitionspaces premised on the practice of decontextualizing the imagein order to permit unmediated communion between the viewer'seye and pure form. From these and related activities hasemerged the notion of art as~. ~atte! of pe!ceptual purity:

/i'timeless, sequestered from the social domain, universal-Post-!modernism has entailed moving beyond this episteme and ac-/. knowledging the fact that the visual field we inhabit is one ofI meanings and not just shapes, that it is permeated by verbal and\., visual discourses, by signs; and that t!lese signs are socially con-

structed, as are we.\ The real discovery here is that things we took to be pri-vate, secluded, and inward-perception, art, the perception ofart in the museum-are created socially. What is at stake is thediscovery of a politics of vision. Which is finally why one mightwant to query the paranoid or ter rorrst coloration that Lacangives the Gaze. Let us say that it is a bit easier, since Lacan, tothink of visualitv as something built cooperatively, over time;that we are therefore responsible for it, ethically accountable. YetLacan seems to me, at least, to view the subject's entry into thesocial arena of visuality as intrinsically disastrous: the vocabularyis one of capture, annexation, death. Against this someone elsemight say: the degree of terror depends on how power is dis-tributed within that construct once it is built, and on where oneis made to stand inside it. Under a voyeuristic male gaze, awoman might well experience terror. And what of the beggar inthe street, or of a Third World rendered trivia] and picturesqueunder the gaze of colonialism? Terror comes from the way thatsight is constructed in relation to power, and powerlessness. Tothink of a terror intrinsic to sight makes it harder to think whatmakes sight terroristic, or otherwise. It naturalizes terror, and

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that is of course what is terrifying. But what should ensue fromLacan's portrayal of the terror of sight is analysis, analyses, manyof them, of how power uses the social construct of vision, visu-ality. And also of how power disguises and conceals its opera-tions in visualitv, in myths of pure form, pure perception, andculturally universal vision.

No lesJ. Jean-Paul Sarrre, B ei nS a nd N O lh in gn es s. trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York:Philosophical Libra ry, 1956) , Chapter I, s ection 4, pp. 254-302.2. jacques Lacan, T he F ou r F un da me nt al C on ce pt s '!f P~Fcho-ana!ys i; . ed. jacques-Alain Miller, tra ns . Alan Sherida n (New York and London: W. W. Norton,1978 ), sec ti on s 6 -9 .3 . lb id ., p. 95.4. lbid., pp. 85-90.S. Works by Ki ta ro Ni sh id a (1870 --1945 ) ava il ab le i n Eng li sh include : Intel -l ig ib il il Y a nd t bc P hi lo ,o ph y o f Norhingness . t rans . Robe rt Sc. himinger (Honolulu:Ea st- West C enter Pres s, 1958); A S cu d)' o f G oo d. tra ns . V. H. Viglielmo (Tokyo:Printing Bureau of the Japanese Government, 1960); and Last Wr ir in g s: N o th in g -n es s a nd r he R e li Si ou s W o rl d, i ew . trans. David A. Dilworth (Honolulu: University ofHawaii Press, 1987). On the relevance of lishida in the context of poststruc-tura lism and pos tmodernism, see W illiam Haver, "The Body of this Death: AI-terit), in Nishida-Philosophy and Pos t-Marxism," Ph.D . diss erta tion, Univers ityo f Chic ago, 1987.6. Kciji Nishitani (b. 1914), R di Bi on a nd N o, hi na ne ss , tra ns. Ja n Van Bragt(Berkeley: UniverSity of Ca lifornia Pres s, 1982), pp. 30-45.7. Ibid., P 33.8. On 1; ;n) ,a1" . see ibid., chapters 4-6.9. Ibid. , p. 116.

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DISCUSSION

N orm an B ryson I should clarify one thing. The Ch'an examples, bySesshu and Murata Shuko, date from the fifteenth century - Iwasn't making an historical connection between the paintingsand Nishitani. The illustrations Iused are simply diagrams of ar-guments; I'm not making historical claims about the East and theWest and their traditions. But since Sartre uses the visual sce-nario of the park and Lacan involves Holbein to diagrammatizehis argument, Ihought Ch'an painting might provide a visualform for ishitani's ideas.R o s a li n d K ra u s s When you described the gaze of {un),oro, particu-larly in relation to the notion of framing developed by Nishitani,you said it has to do with the dark, unmarked remainder-thethings that fall outside the frame of vision in its Western per-spectival sense. Immediately thought of the notion developedby Merleau-Pontv in Th e Ph e ti omen ol oq y if Percept ion that vision isconstituted precisely by what goes on behind the head and inthe body-all those perspectives that are the perspectives of theworld. It is precisely his account of the phenomenology of visionthat it is dependent on the sum of other views excluded by theposition of the viewer, an account that he develops specificallyin relation to Cezanne. Iwonder-and this rna)' be pure projec-tion on m)' part-if there is not an echo of Th e Ph en omen o lo q v ifPerception in Nishitani,Bryson It seems to me that Nishitani does draw on Merleau-Ponty, but the practice of flung-ink painting is obviously dif-ferent from that of Cezanne. The emphasis is far more on aradical decentering of the subject, and I think that points to adifference between Nishitani and Merleau-Ponty, although in thethematic of the invisible thev are close. In Merleau-Pontv there- .~ ,seems to be not only a desocialization of the body but also asimplification of the body-a simplification because it is still re-garded as the center from which one looks out onto the world,and it is exactlv this center that is cast out in Nishitani.,

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,

This leads to the question of the difference between Mer-leau-Ponty and Lacan. At certain points Lacan is asked if hisposition is like Merleau-Ponty's and, curiously enough, he saysthat it is. But it obviously can't be because the body in Merleau-Ponty is a unified, untroubled place of acrobatic grace and per-ceptual accord between subject-world and object-world, an exactfit of the incarnated subject inside the flesh of the world. Andsuch harmony of the body in its world is precisely what isn'tpresent in any theory in which the sign is seen to trouble thisunion. Now when I invoked my Oriental example-s-even thoughit is the only appropriate one for an argument~~.Q!!Lthe outside - it might have seemed asthough I was invoking a purely gestural painting, but my point isnot the pure gesturality of the Japanese work but rather the re-nunciation of gesturality in the flinging of ink: _!hegesture of theMerleau-Pont~y,.sentrali~e~ inits world, is also thrownout by th~ flin,giog_of.ink

M a rt in J ay I think it is crucial to recognize the existence in thisJapanese discourse of a Heideggerian motif even more than aMerleau-Pontyan one. When Heidegger talks about the notion ofUmsicht, of a circumspect vision, he means a vision that doesn'thave anyone particular \ ector. And when he contests the notionof enframing as part of the Gestel! of Western science, he attacksthe same thing the Japanese thinkers are attacking. His notion ofLichtunp, of a clearing, is also the notion of a place in whichtruth is revealed - but not necessarily to anyone eye or twoeyes in anyone body. The truth is revealed, and the eye is sim-ply there to bear witness to it; this happens in precisely the wayyou described it in Japanese painting. Now Heidegger had an ex-traordinary impact in Japan from the 19205 to 1940s, and I aminterested to know whether or not the figures you discussedwere consciously indebted to him.

My second question concerns the issue that Rosalind just

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DISCUSSION

raised about Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty seems to me to be avery important transitional figure between Sartre and Lacan, notonly because he is more interested in the body and the crOSSingof crazes, but also because he is more interested in signs. I think

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it would be wrong to say that, unlike Lacan, Merleau-Pontv onlytalks about the body, In his last writings he actually cites Lacan("the unconscious is structured like a language"), and there areat least gropings toward a structuralist view of language. I do,however, agree that the later Merleau-Ponty is much more op-timistic about visual interaction than Lacan, who shares withSartre a much more pessimistic, perhaps even paranoid view.But Merleau-Pontv also introduces elements which lead us to-Iward Lacan, including the linguistic me1iiation of the viewer andthe viewed in the flesh of the world.Bryson I would agree with both those emphases. About the con-nection between Nishitani and Heidegger: it is via Nishida, morethan twenty of whose students, including Nishitani, went tostudy with Heidegger. But actually I have a question for you. Ithas been verv much on mv mind - this issue of the paranoidI /coloration given to visualitv in different French traditions of theseventeenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries. I am impressedby what vou write about this tradition in the twentieth century[i-n"In the Empire of the Gaze"], though I also have reserva-tions, especially in relation to Foucault. Nevertheless, I wonderwhether Lacan's rhetoric of decentering as paranoid and ter-roristic does not participate in that tradition.Ja y I think his early discussion of the "mirror stage" as thesource of a false notion of the integrity of the ego does reflect ageneral hostility to the gaze as a source of ideological notions ofselfhood. But in the later Four Fundamemal Concepts o f Psycho-anaIjih , a very difficult text, Lacan perhaps moves away from anidea of vision as strictly paranoid and terroristic, and this maybe "vhy he draws on Merleau-Ponty-to nuance the problem

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somewhat. I agree that Foucault can also be seen to nuance thesimply hostile tradition; Merleau-Ponty obviouslv docs. One hasto avoid making it black and white. But I think that Lacan mustbe understood largely in the tradition critical of vision. Al-thusser, too, when he talks about ideology as produced by thegaze, by the mirror stage, draws on Lacan and attacks vision.Christian Metz, when he talks about the scopic regime of thecinema, also draws on Lacan to denigrate vision as well. So Ithink they are all part of a larger story. Lacan gets it, as yousaid, to a great extent from Sartre; Sartre's view of vision is veryseminal for a lot of these thinkers. One might also mentionBataille- there are many interesting connections betweenBataille and Lacan-and Bataille has a fascinating crit ique of theprimacy of sight in such works as his pornographic novelL ' hi st oi re d e l 'o ei ! and his essays on vision. That would have to bepart of the story of Lacan's attitude toward vision as well.

J o n at h an C r a ry Norman, could you clarify something for me' Ini-tially you said you didn't want to set up an opposition between aWestern and a non-Western tradition, and then you said youcould only have picked a Japanese example to incarnate thisother tradition. Would it have been possible for you to have cho-sen an example from, say, twentieth-century Western modernistart practice, or is it a priori impossible'

Bryson No, it's not a matter of impossibility: it was just a guest ionof what images could give the best form to these arguments. Thereisno cultural enclosure that makes it impossible for a Western artpractice to embody the concepts Nishitani works with.

Crary Let me then pose a rather crude, formalist-type question.If a Franz Kline had been shown, what would one have said?

B ry so n I was thinking more of Pollock's work, but I couldn't use it.There isan essential difference between Pollock and the flung ink

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