The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling
280
The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling
280eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520952140 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Vision and Embodiment
Seeing is powerful among humans and many higher mammals in part because it is a primary medium of social life. Communal relations are established and sustained in different kinds of looks — shy glances, bold stares, rapt gazes, or averted eyes interpret an encounter, confirm a relationship, or signal an intention with visceral force. Vision reveals authority and weakness, charisma and stigma, compassion and aggression, and a host of other dispositions. Seeing collaborates with gesture, movement, touch, sound, and facial expression to form the sensory basis of human communication. Vision also helps maintain social relations by linking individuals to the groups or social bodies that comprise their society — class, kin, tribe, ethos, folk, nation, monastic order, elect, redeemed, and damned.
Because seeing is such a powerful social sense, there is sometimes a tendency to characterize one of its most brutal features, shame, as the dominant tone of vision. That is because shame and shaming are very effective ways in which human beings deal with one another. Shame easily establishes pecking order and etches primary distinctions such as good and evil, powerful and weak, pure and impure, right and wrong. Shaming is a visual procedure, a way of looking; and being ashamed is a way of being seen, a way of appearing. This dual aspect of shame is clear in a nineteenth-century illustration (fig. 1), which appeared in a very popular schoolbook and captures every child's horror at being singled out for reprobation by teacher and peers. The dunce must wear the large conical hat, derived from the headgear once worn by subjects of the Inquisition. The hat invites the shaming gaze of the group, whose concerted look sets off the boy for special odium. He is stricken by the look and desperately avoids the gaze by covering his eyes. The boy is reduced to the object of their collective stare. He is "the dunce," a role prescribed by a social script enacted in the stare. The gaze defines him; all he can do is to refuse to be seen. He is "a sad, sad sight," as the lesson describes him, trapped in front of the class. And there is no escape — unless he repents and seeks the approval of the others, whereby he may be reincorporated into the group. Only the appropriate penance will secure his freedom from the penitentiary gaze of the others. When that happens, he will cease to be the object of the look of shame, remove the damning hat, and take up another way of seeing and being seen, which will redefine him as a member of the social body of his community in the classroom.
There is no doubting the power of the gaze of shame. Anyone who has experienced it knows its force. We shall examine other examples of it in this chapter, but my intention is to show how unsatisfactory it will be as the singular model for the study of vision as culturally constructed. Unfortunately, the monolithic study of vision as "the gaze" has reduced seeing to shaming or being shamed. The aim in this chapter is to open the book with an argument for expanding the range of study to look for a broader basis on which to study seeing.
* * *
To see is to see from the circumstance of a body. Not just one's own, biological or somatic body, but also any encompassing corpus such as a gathering of worshippers. This suggests that to look for a point of view is to look for a body from which, or in which to see. Seeing is the act of embodiment, taking a position in a body — one's own or the shared boundaries of a social corpus. In either case, people make or maintain a body by affirming its composition and lineaments. In the case of the social body, they stand in relation to others, sharing some aspect of common features and maintaining the perimeter of the group. The body is the medium of vision. Placement within a corpus is also individual in the case of the body one inhabits. Collective or individual, a body is a bounded set of members that work together to endure, a system of interdependencies, an enclosure with a homeostatic force of coherence, a structure that displays itself as a public surface concealing an interior, a body with a face that has the ability to reveal the unseen depth. The face of the somatic body is a richly communicative zone. Likewise, the face of the social body is a densely semantic stereotype or symbol — think of familiar faces of social bodies such as the stereotypes of an immigrant group or Uncle Sam as the totemic representation of the American people.
Human societies consist of many bodies, groups such as families, neighborhoods, cities, regions. Also clubs, associations, institutions, classes, religious denominations, professions, ethnicities, races. Each is a kind of community, demarcated by a social boundary. To belong to the community means to look a certain way. There are two different but related senses to this. In the first instance, one bears certain characteristics in appearance — style of dress, accoutrements, behavior, gesture, color of skin. In the second instance, one regards others and the world about one with a characteristic look. In the first sense one is seen; in the second one does the looking. Sometimes the medium of vision is visible; sometimes it is the means of doing the seeing and becomes as invisible as a lens one looks through. This dual meaning suggests that one belongs to a social body by virtue of what one looks like and how one sees the world. One bears on one's body the signs of participation in the social body and one inhabits this body by seeing with its eyes, smelling with its olfaction, feeling with its fingers and flesh. The fact that human beings are always seer and seen, agent and the object of vision, means that the individual human body is not only a discrete biological unit, but also a medium, an interface, the way we participate in bodies larger than our own. But separating the two aspects of seeing, ignoring their intimate connection, is what a fuller account of visuality should seek to correct.
In the case of social bodies, individuals do the seeing, but they are looking with eyes not entirely their own when they gaze upon the world with visual practices they share with other members of the group. The idea of a social body is compelling because I am strongly inclined to understand religions as communities of feeling or sentiment that are held together by shared forms of intuition, imagination, and body practices. But this does not mean that members of most groups walk in locked step. Those who belong to the same club or family, for example, don't feel or see identically. But they do share an ethos drawn from common formation in such things as speaking, eating, throwing, dressing, sitting, running, waving or looking. Members of a group also share history, ideology, and economic interests. My intention is to understand how they also share ways of seeing. Doing so is important for this study, which argues that visual practice is a powerful form of social embodiment. Seeing is vital precisely because it situates viewers within social configurations of power. I do not mean this in a deterministic sense, though indeed the effect of seeing in certain ways can be overwhelming, subjecting the viewer to a commanding set of circumstances, as we shall see. But adopting other points of view can also empower the viewer with sympathy for others, move one to moral intervention, provoke the will to resistance, inspire protection for the weak, compassion for the poor, admiration for some, scorn for others. Understanding how an act of seeing mobilizes people by situating them within the compelling social body of a community that is animated by a common ethos has everything to do with understanding how seeing constructs the sacred in visual practices and images.
THE DISCIPLINED EYE: DISTANCE AND THE EYES OF OTHERS
It is not difficult to observe that human beings commonly change what and how they see by modifying the state of their bodies. They do so by relying on visual practices that discipline or restrain the eye-brain network in order to idealize or conceptualize what or how they see, which may mean purifying, rationalizing, or spiritualizing the object. Vision is made to defer to measurement or technical calculation or the use of special instruments; or it is guided by the rhetoric or technique or style of diagrams, drawings, x-rays, magnetic resonance imaging, or other special imaging devices. Or vision may be conditioned by ascetic disciplining of the body such as meditation, fasting, yogic exercise, sweat lodges, or narcotics. In every case, the body is modified in order to enhance, deepen, restrain, or purge how the eye-brain system works. As one philosopher has noted, "no matter how sophisticated our abstractions become, if they are to be meaningful to us, they must retain their intimate ties to our embodied modes of conceptualization and reasoning. We can only experience what our embodiment allows us to experience."
The history of philosophy offers one of the oldest practices of disciplining vision. In a telling etymology, William Barrett once pointed out "the Greek ideal of detachment as the path of wisdom" was expressed in the fact that the word theory derived from the verb theatai, "which means to behold, to see, and is the root of the word theater." Barrett contended that in a theater "we are spectators of an action in which we ourselves are not involved." Theater and theory consist of contemplation, or seeing at a distance. He wished to make the point that Greek philosophers advocated detachment or dispassionate distance from the senses for the exercise of reason. In The Symposium, Socrates portrayed the quest of the lover of wisdom as a graduated removal from the senses, climbing up a ladder of love that began with sexual desire for beautiful boys but ended in the desire to gaze upon the pure Idea of Beauty. Socrates' guru, the priestess Diotima of Mantinea, drew a strong distinction between mortal body and divine idea when she celebrated "the felicity of the man who sees absolute beauty in its essence, pure and unalloyed, who, instead of a beauty tainted by human flesh and colour and a mass of perishable rubbish, is able to apprehend divine beauty where it exists apart and alone."
The desire to idealize seeing is evident in the modern era. The ascent to divine goodness was visualized by Americans early in their nation's history in a very different image — the emblem on the verso of the Great Seal (fig. 2), which is today found on the backside of the American dollar bill. The pyramid, Masonic device and symbol of stepped ascent to wisdom and moral perfection, culminates in the disincarnate eye of the deity, whose effulgence shows benevolently on the new nation's enterprise. The motto, annuit coeptis, announces the providential blessing of the unseen but all-seeing deity. Its act of seeing issued favor, promising Americans that an abundant and felicitous future awaited. The looming eye preserved God's invisibility or supreme otherness, suggesting that virtue was the only proper approach to the godhead just as Socrates insisted that dialectic was the singular means of beholding the ideas of divine thought.
If we are to believe Plato's account of him, Socrates disparaged the bodily senses and the representations that appealed to them with the single-mindedness that also characterizes Jewish, Islamic, and Calvinist anxieties about images and idolatry. Judging from The Republic, Socrates did not associate "theory" with "theater." Indeed, he rued the power of the Greek theater's embodied nature of seeing. The experience of the body and the sway of its aesthetic knowing was never far from the audience of a Greek tragedy, especially if we bear in mind Aristotle's claim that tragedy purges an audience of its pent up fears and anxieties. Think of the gory scene of the blind and bloodied King Oedipus appearing center stage through the ocular gates of the palace:
... The doors are opening.
Sophocles arranged the scene to mimic the structure of an opening eye: the audience is cued by a cast member to behold the sightless, mutilated man, who appears through the aperture of the stage setting. Oedipus is blind, but the audience is not, and is drawn inexorably to gaze upon the horror of his fate. The viewer was not meant to regard the humiliated king dispassionately, but with pathos. It goes without saying that Sophocles orchestrated a moment of high drama that was anything but dispassionate. Yet Barrett was correct in recognizing the detachment of much Greek philosophy. Reason was powerful for Socrates precisely because he deployed it to curb the darker elements of the soul that Homer and Sophocles stirred turbulently.
Although seeing is sometimes detached, it is also often deeply passionate. If we contemplate some events with lofty disinterest, on other occasions we experience an intense empathy for someone's struggle; or a violent revulsion at someone's deed. The power of seeing resides in the compelling connection it forges between ourselves and whatever we behold. But no matter how detached we wish to be, the very repression of feeling is itself an embodied act. The stiffened gesture, the passive demeanor — dispassion is couched in the body. Seeing construes all manner of relations but on every occasion the act of looking is a bodily one.
Take, for example, those instances in which seeing is unbearable, moments when we bury our eyes or turn sharply away in order to avoid the sight of something disturbing. If I am embarrassed or humiliated, if I've been caught committing an error, even if I merely stumble while strolling on the sidewalk, I am likely to avoid the gaze of an onlooker. Why? Perhaps because in that moment of loss of self-control I see myself with another's eyes. By avoiding the look of the other I presume to vanish, to sink into invisibility, and thereby to remove the stigma of the gaze of judgment and to regain a sense of self-possession. To see myself being seen, to look into the shaming eyes of the other is to suffer the loss of esteem. To see myself being seen under these circumstances can be excruciating because I become painfully aware that in some sense I am inferior to the one looking at me. Yet I am not condemned to this fate if the other excuses my faux pas. In that case, I recover myself and return the gaze with an affirming one of my own. Seeing is able to reestablish my countenance with a look of esteem. But if that does not happen, I may choose to rush off into the oblivion of being unseen and there recover some form of self-presence.
The active and passive coupling of seeing and being seen captures two interrelated bodies of vision — the somatic and the social. Culture's two bodies, as I have called them. Human vision is eminently, perhaps always social, given the expressive nature of the face. Look is what I do and what others do toward me. We see with the same aspect of the body on which we rely for communicating with others. I see and I am seen by others. In the case of being seen, I feel others seeing me — it may be a look of admiration, of contempt, of shame or a petition for assistance. Whatever the look, I feel my objecthood, in the touch of their look on my flesh. Variously apprehended, I am able to imagine myself from the outside, to intuit or envision myself from beyond, as if my eyes separated from my body, joined another, and turned from that distance to behold me. This is a kind of reembodiment, where my objectification results in an altered sense of embodiment.
In fact, there are several different visually activated ways in which reembodiment occurs and it is important to enumerate them for the sake of clarifying how vision works. We have already noted the first, moral judgment or discernment, as a visual apprehension represented in extremis in the Oedipal act of extinguishing the eyes that condemn him by removing his own. On a more practical level, Adam Smith brilliantly explained moral self-government in ocular terms. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) Smith claimed that "our first ideas of personal beauty and deformity are drawn from the shape and appearance of others, not from our own." But we quickly learn, he added, "that others exercise the same criticism upon us. We are pleased when they approve of our figure, and are disobliged when they seem to be disgusted." Beauty and ugliness, according to Smith, the capacity for attraction and repulsion, are not personally generated, but originally interactive or social constructions. We learn of our social deployment from our interaction with others. We then turn to examine ourselves, Smith reasoned, in order to test what others have impressed upon us: "We examine our persons limb by limb, and by placing ourselves before a looking-glass, or by some such expedient, endeavour, as much as possible, to view ourselves at the distance and with the eyes of other people."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Embodied Eye"
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsPreface
Acknowledgments
Part One. Culture’s Two Bodies
1. Vision and Embodiment
2. The Body in Question
3. Ways of Seeing
4. Icon and Interface
Part Two. The Senses of Belief
5. The Matter of the Heart: Touching and Seeing
6. The Look of Sympathy: Feeling and Seeing
7. The Enchantment of Media: Hearing and Seeing
8. At the Cusp of Invisibility: Visions, Dreams, and Images
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
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