Tactil gaze

This is Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s terminology, to whom the analytic gaze is the basis of instrumental reason: the one which intends to understand the world in order to use it. It acquired its full development in political regimes which carried out the conquest and control on remote territories; the journey as a colonizing and imperialist means. The mimetic gaze is the basis of a sensorial knowledge which seeks to be pervaded by what it observes and gives in to the resistance of the object; Horkheimer and Adorno saw in it a vehicle for non-alienated experience, open to the diversity of the world. We could also mention here the distinction between a knowledge (and a passage) based on the optical image, and one based on the haptic or tactile image, according to Alois Riegl’s terminology. The optical image needs distant perspective and global vision. It requires a separation between the subject and the world and it produces knowledge through the erasure of any material contingencies in the scene. In the second case, the knowledge based on the haptic gaze emerges from the contact with the observed objects and becomes infected by their textures, rhythms and temporality, in other words, by their material density. According to this, there are two possible ethnographies with regard to the other: a rationalist ethnography focussed on explaining the other, and a tactile, mimetic or haptic ethnography which, without renouncing to knowledge, does not erase the unknowable (what is present to vision but not to understanding), nor exorcises disorientation, which can be highly instructive as it states the limits of knowledge and makes unpredictable associations, an irregular line of thought which avoids predetermined paths.

This is the kind of ethnography – or the type of encounter with the other – which, since the beginning of modern anthropology has been practised by an obscure kind of authors who looked more like artists and fiction writers than like scholars: some examples are provided by the ethnographies made by surrealists and proto-surrealists such as the North-American Zora Neale Hurston, novelist and ethnographer, and Maya Deren, experimental filmmaker and expert on the Haiti voudon, or the French novelist and Africanist Michel Leiris, author of Afrique Fantôme and close to George Bataille and the group Documents. More recently, this way of doing ethnography, of facing the other without trying to reduce its alterity, can be found in the participative documents by Jean Rouch, Juan Downey or David and Juliet MacDougall, or in the deconstructive documents by Victor MAsevesva, Jr. or Thrinh T. Mihn Ha. These are works which do not make use of image and sound in order to talk about the other but, in Trihn’s words, to talk near the other. Besides, Rouch and the MacDougall came close to the other in order to let them speak, even to let them film without glossing or interpreting them, without reducing them to a label, a human type or a category.

http://www.pedrortu.com/textos/texto1_ing.html

Sensuous contact, explicit and ready tactility between viewer and viewed, exists as an optical unconscious, as a secret of perspectivalism exploited to the hilt by commodities in advertisements which rub up against the supposedly dislocated viewer every chance they get. Why must sensuous contact between viewer and viewed be disavowed? Why a “secret” of perspective? Why the realm of a collective optical unconscious? The separation of viewer and viewed is fundamental to capitalism. Like the historically gendered distinction between
producer and consumer (by which men get to produce and women get to consume), the (gendered) separation between viewer and viewed functions as a conceptual space for commodity exchange in which the viewer (male) is marked as separate, possessing desire for the sensuous (residing in the commodity, female).1 The separation between viewer and viewed institutes an insatiable desire across the divide by which the viewer has the desire, the product is the desired. Sensuous complicity, literal and immediate contact between seer and seen as always already operative must be disavowed to service the status of “desire for contact” which keeps commodities circulating. Tactility is deployed and simultaneously secret(e)d, becoming an optical “unconscious” as we are consciously habituated to a seemingly a-sensuous dislocation between viewer and viewed.

rebecca schneider - the explicit body in performance (the secret's eye) pag .89

In her writings, Marks highlights the concept of haptic perception, that is the union of tactile and cinesthetic functions that make it possible for us to experience physically the objects surrounding us. By applying these theories to the field of cinema, Marks distinguishes between a purely optical and a haptic visuality, by which the eyes act like tactile organs: where an optic vision suggests a distance between the observer and the image and thus forces the spectator to „work by imagination“, the haptic cinema aims to create a sensorial relationship between the spectator and the image. Thus, the target of a tactile gaze, is not an „object“; more the idea is of a dynamic of subjectivity between the observer and the observed.In order to create his tactile cinema, Scott Hayes has involved the visitors of the gallery in two different „experiments“: in the first ( live cinema 1) he proposed a vj-set in which the fast ongoing of various videos prevented an involvement in the narration and would induce the public to search for other levels of fruition; furthermore he has preferred the disturbed and husk images of the video, to the clear cinematographic ones: the video images, exactly because of their inferior quality, would return in an approximative way that what the human vision picks in detail, and would activate a different visual perception. In the second experiment (live cinema 2), Hayes has immersed the public into what he himself defined a sensation-thought, by which the visitors would be able to perceive, in the almost total darkness, the presence of objects, without nevertheless ever being able to understand their real nature nor their definitive location. The primary intent of the artist was, as a matter of fact, not to decodify the object-space relationship in terms of sculpture or environment, but to stimulate a sensorial and imaginative perception as an alternative path to knowledge.

http://mcconch.com/hayes/pages/writing/haptic_cinema.htm

A commonly talked-up theoretical position these days is the idea of the ‘tactile eye,’ a sort of cinematic gaze that doesn’t establish the story and screen space; it more obviously follows the close-up thoughts and feelings of the characters. From Fish Tank to Somersault, from Morvern Callar to Blissfully Yours, this is a cinema where you don’t locate the shot but sense the character.

THE FINGERING GAZE

"It seems as if the problems arising in the natural philosophy of antiquity have not been discussed except in the categories of modern physics, mechanics or optics."13 Gérard Simon breaks with this convention against which, even before Thomas Kuhn,14 objections had been voiced by a historian of science, Pierre Duhem,15 and a poetic philosopher of science, Gaston Bachelard.16 With Simon, wever, unease with the prevailing exegesis of Greek authors turns into a competent and radical review of classical optics. The title of his book makes the intent explicit: It deals, not with classical optics, but
with the gaze, opsis:

What counts for the historian of optics is its localisation within the constellation of knowledge in a given epoch ... thus the archaeology of the gaze, man who gazes and this man's relation to the realm of the then visible.

Simon is a recognized Greek scholar; we can trust his conclusion that the object of optical treatises from Euclid via Ptolemy to those of the high Middle Ages is not light, but the ray originating in the eye. These ancient authors study the reflection of the gaze in a mirror, the refraction of the gaze when it hits the surface of water, the confusion of the gaze when it pursues a flying bird, and the illusion induced by paintings. These entrapments, seductions and distractions of the visual ray are examined because they constitute obstacles to right, fitting and honorable use of the visual sense. In this way the science of optics came to be understood as the basis and guide for a cultivated human activity, ultimately for ethics.

http://www.google.ro/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=64&ved=0CNUDEBYwPw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.davidtinapple.com%2Fillich%2F1998_scopic_past.PDF&ei=bGZ2TLzwNJGSswaS2-GIBg&usg=AFQjCNHZMHFFbEzEP7k4zZ0PCmo5zezuJQ&sig2=lUbr2dTNoWYIaEBmLDfUpg