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

One of the principal hypotheses at stake in these studies is that if we acknowledge that the discourse of philosophy is itself a historical construction and that it has often relied on a vision-
generated vocabulary and way of thinking (not only, for example, with words such as speculation, obseruation, insight, reflection, evidence, and intuition, and with metaphors such as minoring, clarity, perspectiae, point of view, horizon of understanding, and the light of reason, but also with certain methodological concepts such as totality, analysis, objectivity, reflective detachment, and representation), even to the extent, sometimes, of drawing on an ocular vocabulary and rhetoric for the construction of a system of thought at the same time that it has constructed a model of the gaze profoundly hostile to the testimony and claims of vision, then we
must also acknowledge that the use and the construction of this vocabulary needs to be examined, together with the discursive effects of such use and construction on the way of thinking that has dominated the history of philosophy.




Psychoanalytic film criticism relies on a conception of vision developed by theorists like Jean-Louis Baudry, who claims that cinema is merely the final and most perfected material realization of the return to the scene of the unconscious'
This realization began, he proposes' in Plato's cave' a prehistoric cinema that produced the first simulated and displaced dream state wherein the unconscious could represent itself. Thus, he
proposes, film's special function is to satis$ narcissism by Providing the subject with visual rePresentations that reproduce images from the unconscious, images that represent a world
ordired by active male subjects and passive females objectified by a controlling male gaze.

	Sites of Vision: The Discursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy

Can't Take My Eyes Off You

You're just too good to be true.
Can't take my eyes off you.
You'd be like Heaven to touch.
I wanna hold you so much.
At long last love has arrived
And I thank God I'm alive.
You're just too good to be true.
Can't take my eyes off you.

Pardon the way that I stare.
There's nothing else to compare.
The sight of you leaves me weak.
There are no words left to speak,
But if you feel like I feel,
Please let me know that it's real.
You're just too good to be true.
Can't take my eyes off you.

I love you, baby,
And if it's quite alright,
I need you, baby,
To warm a lonely night.
I love you, baby.
Trust in me when I say:
Oh, pretty baby,
Don't bring me down, I pray.
Oh, pretty baby, now that I found you, stay
And let me love you, baby.
Let me love you.

You're just too good to be true.
Can't take my eyes off you.
You'd be like Heaven to touch.
I wanna hold you so much.
At long last love has arrived
And I thank God I'm alive.
You're just too good to be true.
Can't take my eyes off you.

I love you, baby,
And if it's quite alright,
I need you, baby,
To warm a lonely night.
I love you, baby.
Trust in me when I say:
Oh, pretty baby,
Don't bring me down, I pray.
Oh, pretty baby, now that I found you, stay..

Michael Haneke from an interview

The simultaneously eye- and ear-occupying intensity of the film medium, the monumental size of its images, the speed at which its images demand to be viewed, its capacity above all other art forms to render or simulate reality virtually in toto, to make it tangible to the senses– in short, the medium’s capacity to overwhelm– downright predestine it for a narcotized, that is, an anti-reflexivereception. In contrast to literature and the fine arts, even the morally conscious and responsible depiction of acts of violence is bound to move into controversy. The moving image
requires other criteria than the still image – from the image’s viewer as well as its producers: The still image generally shows an action’s result, whereas the film shows the action itself. The picture usually appeals to a viewer’s solidarity with the victim, while film often puts the viewer in the position of the perpetrator. (Upon, say, looking at Picasso’s Guernica, we see the suffering of the victims frozen for us to behold for all eternity. By virtue of the time allowed for becoming conscious of and contemplating the represented subject, our path towards solidarity with them is portrayed without any moral stumbling blocks. With the carnage in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now supported by Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries,” we are riding along in the helicopter, firing on the Vietnamese scattering in panic below us, and we do it without a guilty conscience because we – at least in the moment of the action – do not become aware of this role.) This guiltless complicity is also that to which violence in film owes its all-overpowering presence. The surrogate action banishes the terror of reality; a mythical narrative mode and an aestheticizing mode of representation allow a safe release of our own fears and desires. The hero on the screen transcends the helplessness and power-lessness of the viewer with his accomplishments.

As we all know, the cinema is celebrating 100 years of existence this year. For more than half of this time period, it was the sole ruler in the realm of moving pictures, a period during which it tried to develop a grammar intended to enable this completely new organ of speech to speak in its own terms. Two devices, the camera and the tape recorder, offered the possibility of reflecting and simulating an almost complete impression of reality. The reports of the incredible effect of the new medium are well known and range from the panic of the Parisian audience with regardto Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat by the Lumière Brothers to the terrified reactions of South American jungle inhabitants upon their first confrontation with film projections half a century later.

For the viewer, the boundary between real existence and image was difficult to establish from the beginning, which is precisely why the medium won a great deal of its fascination. The oscillation between the disconcerting feeling of being present at a real event and the emotional security of seeing only the image of an artificially created or a found reality was what enabled the emergence of the genre described above.

The scene changed with the appearance of television. The documentary element entered the foreground. (In the cinema, it had become – at least with regard to its acceptance by viewers – a marginal area shortly after its inception.) The speed by which electronic media conveyed and disseminated information led to a shift in viewing habits. The impact of the impression exerted by the larger-than-life image on the screen during a single trip to the movies was matched and then eclipsed by the sheer mass of impressions and their permanent presence in the living room.
Building on the dramaturgical and aesthetic forms of the cinema, television changed precisely these forms by permanently deploying them.

The cinema tried to counter the overwhelming omnipresence of the electronic media by intensifying its own means, which television – as much as it was technically able – then immediately integrated into its system again. The compulsion to trump one another led to the permanent paroxysm of attempted intensity and, thus, indirectly to the further blurring of the boundary between reality and image as well.

The Panopticon’s ‘potential’ for surveillance nurtures self-discipline (causing individuals to ‘gaze upon themselves’) and self-discipline replaces torture as the ‘paradigmatic’ method of social control. Thus where persons themselves and their bodies are turned into ‘objects’, self-surveillance emerges as a practice of control. This practice is reflected in language (‘Watch yourself’), architecture and power relations. When people are treated as objects they see themselves as objects and tend to torture their bodies and desires to fit instructions and specifications. They evaluate their own behaviour and tend to become either docile subjects or rebellious subjects.

Foucault saw the development of psychoanalysis as a further repression of the self rather than as ‘a liberating step beyond the human sciences’. To Foucault (1981: 67), psychoanalysis was the ‘culmination of a normalising confessional technology’ first used by the early Catholic Church and which ensured that ‘sex’ as well as the ‘body’ became medicalised, psychiatrised, psychologised and hygienised. One could enter the ‘illness’ world and ‘disordered’ world via a variety of ‘new personages':

the nervous woman, the frigid wife, the indifferent mother — or worse the mother beset by murderous obsessions.. . the hysterical or neurasthenic girl, the precocious and already exhausted child ...
(Foucault 1981: 110)

Surveillance of the family under the gaze of the new professionals of psychiatry and psychology could turn up a variety of ways of ‘disturbed being’. Foucault (1981: 111) argues that the family from the mid-nineteenth century was compliant in this process:

the family broadcast the long complaint of its sexual sufferings to doctors, educators, psychiatrists, priests and pastors, to all the experts who would listen . . . [it] engaged in searching out the slightest forces of sexuality in its midst, wrenching from itself the most difficult confession, soliciting an audience with everyone who might know something about the matter and opening itself unreservedly to endless examination.

http://www.academyanalyticarts.org/eckerman.htm

Tim Dean - Unlimited Intimacy:

Working from a different methodological approach, the German sociolo-
gist Ulrich Beck has identified risk as the defining feature of postmodernity.
His account of the “risk society” emphasizes how environmental damage, ter-
rorism, and other instances of “manufactured risk” have saturated everyday
life during the past several decades. Because the risks of nuclear catastrophe
or global warming exceed temporal, geographic, and institutional boundar-
ies, we now live in a world where risk cannot be contained. This characteristic
of contemporary life reorients social theory from its preoccupation with the
distribution of social goods to a new focus on the distributed effects of social
“bads.” More than a decade before 9/11, Beck was arguing that the engine of
the risk society was fear or anxiety:

The dream of class society is that everyone wants and ought to have a share of
the pie. The utopia of the risk society is that everyone should be spared from
poisoning. . . . The driving force in the class society can be summarized in the
phrase: I am hungry! The movement set in motion by the risk society, on the
other hand, is expressed in the statement: I am afraid!

We witnesses can't escape ourselves - J.G. Ballard

So how does one approach a diversity of works, made for cinema, television and the gallery, in light of this? The condition of being a subject of surveillance is clearly omnipresent and television has happily hooked itself into what might be called the 'panoptical imaginary'. Consider the extraordinary success and popularity of 'Reality TV' shows such as Big Brother (the British equivalent of Loft Story), for whose first series more people voted than did in recent elections in the UK (to which fact nothing, and everything, need be added). Surveillance is a given condition of debates about law, order and social control. All of which is only to state the obvious, to invoke a national variation on a global theme. So much so, in fact, that between October 2001 and February 2002 the Zentrum fur Kust und Media (ZKM) in Karslruhe, Germany devoted a major exhibition to the subject: CTRL Space: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. The catalogue that accompanied the show has been an invaluable companion in researching this letter and must surely stand as a key work of reference on the subject if one begins to approach surveillance not only as a means of externally-imposed social control but also as an increasingly internalised condition. From which it's only a short step to asking: what are the conditions of this internalised self-surveillance? What are its aesthetics and its rhetorics as visible in the UK? One place to start from is the assertion made by Ursula Frohne in her essay for the exhibition catalogue: “The unforeseen success of docu-soaps such as Big Brother indicates that we are on the threshold of a transition from the bureaucratic-institutional tactics of surveillance to the medially-staged spectacle of the individual's total surrender to the media's regime of the gaze.” (3) Cinema, and other moving-image art forms, occupy a privileged position in this transition, existing between the bureaucratic-institutional and the medially-staged spectacle and are able to recruit, represent and possibly even détourne the apparatus by which internalisation takes place. In so doing, certain works provide valuable meditations on the aesthetics and rhetorics of the condition of internalised surveillance.

http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/25/letter_london.html