"The visual is essentially pornographic."
So says Frederic Jameson in his Signatures of the Visible (London, 1990)>
That expresses contemporary cultural theory's mistrust of visuality very clearly. It is mistrust that construes the world as a spectacle to be observed from afar by a disembodied mind. It is a gaze that that petrifies and objectifies. So I guess that we need to talk in terms of a hegemonic perspectivialist regime that transfixes the Other as an insect on a pin. Hence the disembodied gaze of the eye of the mind.
The central modernist question of form of "good" or "significant" form (the main agenda of modernism) was premised on various optical theories that underpinned the single-minded focus on visual form. These presupposed a notion of the eye as a purely abstract organ, cut off from the bodily pulses to which it is connected. A relationship is established that excludes everything but the axis between the eye and framed forms mounted vertically on the wall.
Are there not gazes that “care for”? Embodied gazes?
The counterimpulse is the Bataillian one toward "impurity and obscurity", which is developed in order to pursue the "critique of visual primacy". This is a valorization of the low and dirty and rejected, such as eroticism and the unconscious. This "base materialism" works in terms of the notion of informe, which describes workings of "base materialism" as pure destructive action; the informe is what indifferenciates and confuses the world of meaning and form and its clear-cut differences.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 12, 2004 10:56 PM | TrackBack