The Inhuman Gaze - Paris - final text with images (original) (raw)
Related papers
Perception and the Inhuman Gaze - Introduction penultimate version
Perception and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology and the Sciences., 2020
Introduction [In the gaze] …. 'the other person transforms me into an object and denies me, I transform him into an object and deny him, it is asserted. In fact, the other’s gaze transforms me into an object and mine him, only if both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking nature, if we both make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each of us feels his actions to be not taken up and understood, but observed as if they were an insect’s'. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty here responds to the pessimistic and reductive Sartrean account of the Gaze, highlighting that this objectifying gaze only becomes possible by withdrawing into our thinking nature. The capacity to detach and compartmentalize our manner of engagement with others, becoming empathically unavailable, closing down affective responsiveness, can serve positive ends as with certain occupations such as bomb disposal and surgery. Outside circumstances such as these, however, empathic unavailability may facilitate violence, negligence and ethical failure. It remains contentious, nonetheless, whether empathic responsiveness is ontologically basic and whether it is essential for ethics. What is clear is that primary empathy drives psycho-social development and serves as an affective and ethical touchstone for the more cognitive modes of intersubjective engagement and for metadiscursive practices, ensuring that subjects are able to sustain positive connections with others and the shared world. Merleau-Ponty’s inhuman gaze both ‘animalizes’ the ‘object’ of the gaze but paradoxically requires a ‘rational’ retreat, effectively ‘de-animalizing’ the gazing subject .......
This paper discusses the question of visualization and politics by analyzing the history of the Architecture Machine Group in relation to postcolonialism, race, and war inorder to elucidate a new of neuro-political condition.
Visual Worlds: Chapter 4, "The Gaze" (different forms of the "theory of the gaze")
Visual Worlds: Looking, Images, Visual Disciplines, 2020
This is a chapter from the book Visual Worlds (Oxford, 2020), a textbook on forms of visual practice in art, science, medicine, the miltary, law, and other fields. The book is available on Amazon. In it we survey several principal forms of the theory of the gaze, including psychoanalytic (and feminist), and positional (perspectival), in an attempt to decide if the "theory of the gaze" is a coherent subject, or actually several theories traditionally named as one.
2018
There is no pure gaze, but only embodied modalities of presence. Sensory perception is the common function of the living. Humans do not see as flies do; neither do dogs, trouts, or eagles. The world is the edifice of perceptions which varies according to its occupants. And, among humans, who came late on the scene, a new principle of variety: that of histories, periods, narratives, cultures. After the long conditions of the species, there is—for humans especially, if not only for humans—the historical variety of forms of sensory perception.
A short piece written for the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College about Harun Farocki's Images of the World and the Inscription of War, and how it informs our understanding of the proliferation of Drone technology and Media
PhD PRIMAL EYE (aka Median Vision Theory) A phantom limb or sense organ (see Chapter) are good examples of " virtual " or " simulated " body parts. But since phantom limbs or organs usually (except for the important cases of congenitally arising phantoms) arise as a result of the loss of the physical organ I have previously only been able to draw comparisons between documented phantom organ experiences and the 'phantom I' experience of the primal eye: organ of unitary sense.
Augmenting the Physiognomic Gaze Across Space and Time: A Conversation with onformative
Membrana, 2018
Augmented photography can be used in the digital arts to over-code upon real-world environments with computer-generated data, in order to translate stimuli across sensory modalities, and thereby extent or increase our faculties for perceiving spatial and temporal relations. Because of this media-specific affordance, the augmentation of the photographic medium may have especial application for the “physiognomic gaze”, a way of doing “form interpretation” or “nature knowing” based on the physical behaviors and psychological phenomena of the human face, head and body. The innovativeness of such technological prosthetics becomes manifest how new ways are generated to both perceive and to know those experiences that were previously unseeable or otherwise unsensable. Here, I converse with Cedric Kiefer (co-founder and creative lead) of the onformative studio for digital art and design in Germany about their works Meandering River (2017), Pathfinder (2014) and Google Faces (2013). And we explore how onformative uses the augmented photograph in their digital artworks to extend the physiognomic gaze, bringing data not visible to the naked eye into the senseable sphere, to offer the audience different perspectives about space and time.
The Inhuman Gaze and Perceptual Gestalts: The making and unmaking of others and worlds
Perception and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology and the Sciences., 2020
While on the one hand for Merleau-Ponty, ‘the perception of the other founds morality’; on the other, it is the rationalizing of perception by stripping it of empathic responsiveness, becoming an inhuman gaze, that allows ethical failure. Through his ground-breaking analyses of embodied percipience, Merleau-Ponty offers a powerful critique of the view from nowhere, the objectivist, disembodied, unsituated, purely rationalist view which underwrites all inhuman gazes. Complicating and deepening these analyses, Merleau-Ponty also draws on gestalt theory, elaborating particularly on the roles of perspectivism, wholism and figure-ground structures in the perception of things and of others. It is Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with gestalt theory that informs the key claims of this essay, supported by diverse accounts and analyses of the underlying psychological dimensions and consequences of torture. Specifically, I will argue that while we can theoretically decompose perception in terms of gestalt structures to better understand the mechanisms of perceptual experience in general, we can also understand how it is possible to achieve an inhuman gaze through a rationalizing deconstructive process of perception; rather than ‘making’ others and worlds, these are ‘unmade’ for potentially violent and unethical ends.
Text from the exhibition Manuel Vilarinho. 20 drawings and 4 paintings. held at Casa da Cerca-Contemporary Art Centre, 2006.
The Beast: Echology of the Gaze
Dawn of Europe, 2019
The essay moves the installation ›The Beast‹ by artist Georg Lutz in a speculative neighborhood with Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne project and Anne Conway’s concept of morality. Here it discusses the event of similarity as well as a possible ethics of the gaze. Translator: Aaron Zielinski https://uni-frankfurt.academia.edu/AaronZielinski