Touch\Vision: Irigaray, Post-Cartesianism and Film

Andrew Gibson

(i)
 The features of the more central Cartesian account of vision are familiar in outline, not least, from recent critical and deconstructive interrogations of it, like Derrida's and Irigaray's. They will not need much elaboration here. In Cartesian metaphysics, vision is a metaphor for the apprehension of clear and distinct ideas in `the natural light of reason'. God is the `cause' of clear ideas. But he has given `each of us a light for distinguishing what is true from what is false for ourselves'. This is what is represented in Cartesian enlightenment and Cartesian autonomy, the independent mind arriving at the truth for itself, unaided by authority or dogma. Thus seeing is conflated with modern understanding and inseparable from it. In what Descartes calls `the mind's eye', the order of the visible becomes the order of reason. Seeing separates what is clear from what is obscure. It grasps stable or `firm and immovable' forms , allowing me `to reject the shifting ground and sand in order to find rock or clay'. It focuses. It refuses simultaneity, multiplicity, superimposition: those who `distribute their thought among many objects at the same time', says Descartes, will not arrive at insight. It operates from the distance imperative to thought and knowledge. It requires that, insofar as I see, I become `a spectator rather than an actor', that I deny or suspend participation.

Furthermore, `sensations' are themselves `modes of thinking'. `It is the soul that has sensory perceptions,' writes Descartes, `and not the body'. Clear and distinct ideas include `the [visual] images formed in our brain'. As a mode of thought that depends `on the soul', says the Discourse on Method, to see is to `raise' one's mind `above observable things'. Seeing, then, transcends the observed or observable. The logic is Cartesian: Descartes sometimes uses the word `see' with two different meanings in a single sentence. This doubleness is hardly surprising: there is a Cartesian physics as well as metaphysics. Along with the Discourse on Method and the Meditations, Descartes also produced an Optics and The World, a Treatise on Light. For vision to take place in the natural light of reason, some event must have preceded it, however little worthy, in truth, of the name of seeing. Without that event, the metaphorization of vision would not be possible. The understanding intervenes `in the process' of sensation. It intervenes, however, in a process that is designated as coming first, but also coming after, since the prior event is known in its priority only through the intervention of the understanding. Thus understanding as vision also produces vision's residue. According to the Optics, this prior event or residue is an encounter with `a certain movement, or very rapid and lively action'. Light is a complex `extension' of `some very subtle and fluid matter' moving at different speeds and in different directions. Descartes will give various accounts of this matter and its movements: in the description of fire, for example, at the beginning of the Treatise on Light; as a species of atomic fission, a motion and interaction of particles; as vortices. Sight as encounter with this world is an obscurity of contact, in effect, `blind seeing'. Physical sight is conceived of as a kind of blindness, a matter of `blind impulse', in the terms of the Meditations. `The images of sensible things blind the eye of the mind', Descartes writes. Seeing is the `most subtle' of the senses, according to the Principles of Philosophy, `the noblest and most comprehensive' of them, says the Optics. It is that status that presumably underwrites the promotion of sight to cardinal metaphor. Logically, however, since that sight is also blindness, it is most nearly rendered in terms of the coarsest or `least subtle' of the senses, the sense of touch. In a remarkable passage near the end of the fourth chapter of the Treatise on Light, Descartes evokes precisely what I called the prior event of seeing, of sensation, the obscurity of contact, the Cartesian residue, as the sensitivity of the sense organs in general to being constantly touched, moved by what is in movement. Remarkably, but again logically, almost within the first page of the Optics, the metaphor Descartes finds for physical sight is that of a blind man feeling his way by touch. This metaphor, however, may appear to give the appearance of activity to what the sixth Meditation describes as `a passive faculty'. In its passivity, the faculty in question is usable only because there also exists a properly `active faculty', the cogito, of course. In relation to this active faculty, the prior event, obscurity of contact, `blind seeing', seeing as touch, is as though it had never been, leaving its trace on thought only as an afterthought. By the same token, the subtle, dynamic, diverse, multiple, vital world of matter is what must be subdued in Cartesian meditation: as soon as the Optics turns to meditation, Descartes thinks in terms of the picture, the engraving, stasis. Cartesian meditation is closer to presuming the gallery than the cinema as metaphor. Something approaching the reverse may be the case with Cartesian physics.

(ii)
 Irigaray's work has involved a great deal of attention to what she calls the `naive or native sense of touch, in which the subject does not yet exist' and which is `submerged in pathos or aisthesis'. She appears to reverse both the Cartesian privileging of the light of reason and the Cartesian valuation of seeing specifically over touch, especially in early work. In the Ethics of Sexual Difference, however, and particularly in the three essays that I'll mention here, those on Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Descartes himself, a different orientation can be found. Here Irigaray rather attributes the reversal of Cartesianism to Merleau-Ponty, understanding it as the effect of the structure of a masculine agonistics. Irigaray shares Merleau-Ponty's conviction of the importance of the moment of preconceptual or prediscursive experience, the obscure source of Cartesian light.  She conceives of this `obscure source' as the `ground of the visible', the corporeal prelude to or condition of vision. In this obscure domain, the mode of relation to the other is not the Cartesian distance of seeing as theoretical knowledge. Nor is it a question of the certainty in identification that is born of patient meditation. It is rather participation, a `kinship' in which the toucher can be touched and the hand `"takes its place among the things that it touches"'. Here the tangible would appear to be `the ground that is available for all the senses.... I am touched and enveloped by the felt', says Irigaray, `even before seeing it' . Thus far, Irigaray coincides with Merleau-Ponty: it is seeing as Cartesian `idea' or Cartesian (or Husserlian) reduction that is `blindness'. My body sees `only because it is part of the visible' already. Unlike Merleau-Ponty, however, Irigaray explicitly associates this condition of intimate belonging with the maternal, the closed, dark intimate space of intrauterine life. The Cartesian privileging of vision has been a radical polemos against the maternal.But at the same time - and at this point the essay begins to emerge from Merleau-Ponty - there must be separation from the mother. In Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the tactile or fleshly embodiment, the subject is never separated from the world that is its obscure source. His is an incestuous phenomenology, determined by a nostalgia for the pre-natal and a refusal to mourn the birth into light. So, too, in assuming that touch is cardinal and the condition of the other senses, Merleau-Ponty also assumes that the specular is homologous with the carnal. But it is not: the two overlap but do not coincide. Thus in opposing the Cartesian reduction, Merleau-Ponty produces his own shadow-version of it, and thereby remains within its limits. What disappears in both, Cartesian and shadow-version, is the trace of difference. In Irigaray's terms, Merleau-Ponty turns out to be a solipsist. Her own insistence is rather on difference and movement, the production of difference and movement in vision as touch, the difference of the visible and tactile as well as their closeness.

Hence the shift, in the essay on Levinas which follows the Merleau-Ponty essay, to an erotics of seeing. Here Irigaray proclaims the look that `itself remains tactile, open to the light', is `always at the beginning and not based on the origin of a subject that sees...a subject that already knows its objects and controls its relations with the world and with others' and is thereby `closed to any initiation' . This version of the tactility of the look associates it with pleasure, appetite, attraction and in the essay on Descartes, desire, the movement towards the object; with hypnosis, fascination, an attraction to the object which, in Descartes, is never at issue. In relation to this tactile look, subject and object are evanescent. It lifts all reductive schemes according to which the other might be defined. Its pleasure rather depends on seeking out and affirming but also protecting otherness, in never finding a definitive form or image for otherness. This is not a phenomenology of vision in relation to the exhibits in a gallery, but a more cinematic phenomenology, a phenomenology of vision as movement in which the object is `a morph  in continual gestation' . Yet such a thought does not spell an end to meditation. Irigaray remains sufficiently Cartesian, in her essay on Descartes, to warn against any anti-Cartesianism that would proclaim the possibility of a return to what precedes ideation. She rather insists on the ceaseless transformation and renewal of meditation, meditation as touched and in movement. In this erotics of seeing and in contrast to her account of Merleau-Ponty's return to the pre-natal, Irigaray's insistence is finally on a non-identical intimacy or play of touch and seeing. The obscure source of vision is identified with touch without its being comprehensively denied as a source or forgotten within vision. Thus a clair-obscur or play of touch and vision is instituted which is also the play of affect within identification and understanding.

(iii)
 What I've been tried to suggest is how far a thought of seeing has been haunted, even overtaken by or reversed into a thought of touch. As seeing is equated with intellection, so the thought of touch becomes an expression for something else in seeing, something that makes it irreducible to the terms of that equation. In Descartes and Irigaray, in Merleau-Ponty and in Levinas too, the problem is that of the kind of attention it is possible to pay to pre-phenomenological experience. A few questions, then, for film theory, and a question of silent film. What might film theory gain from the thought of the pre-phenomenological? Has film theory had a place for a concept of what I've called the obscurity of contact, `blind seeing', vision as tactility? If not, what might the possible significance to it of such a concept be? What might be the uses and effects of such a concept within the discourses of film theory? If such uses and effects can only be negligible, what might that signify ? Might it be necessary to mark an absence? And secondly: in a cinema whose sole apparent concern is vision, the silent cinema, what traces can we find of the thought of seeing as touch? What happens to vision's residue? Gance's vast enthusiasm for the making of Napoleon was clearly driven by a passionate commitment to cinema as power, a means to seeing as never before. This was also a question of seeing the truth, of enlightenment: Napoleon was to produce a vision of warfare so stark that it would make future wars impossible. This conviction of the importance of both a massive extension of the resources of vision and a greater enlightenment produced in the process is precisely a question of a technology or an extended range of technical resources: the Brachyscope, for example, which Gance invented for extreme wide-angle shots; a new system of photographing close-ups with long lenses; Polyvision, with its three projectors and three screens, whereby the screen is transformed into a giant fresco; and so on. What powered the production of Napoleon was a kind of passion for vision. Gance intended the film as a kind of apotheosis or completion of seeing. In the process, however, vision also implodes. Gance is subtle: in order for him truly to achieve his apotheosis, he knows that seeing has to be turned against itself in a struggle to include its own residue, which Gance understands precisely in terms of physical contact or touch. His découpage technique contained instructions like: `The camera becomes a snowball. Camera K [meaning the camera operated by Kruger] defends itself as if it were Bonaparte himself. It is on the fortress and fights back. It clambers on the wall of snow and jumps down, as if it were human. A punch in the lens. Arms at the side of camera as if the camera itself had arms. Camera K falls on the ground, struggles, gets up'. So concerned, in fact, was Gance to stretch vision to encompass the visceral and tactile - so conscious was he of touch, while filming - that, in his determination that the audience should feel punches, he had his boy actors belabour Kruger's camera, but also had it padded with a large sponge, so the boys wouldn't hurt their hands. Gance was concerned to resist the construction of spectatorship as observing subject to observed object. He was intent on thrusting the spectator into participation, a participation which Kruger and his camera actually underwent on the spectator's behalf. In effect, Gance was obsessed with the reintroduction of the density and obscurity of sensible flesh into an art that, in triumphantly extending the visibility of bodies, also deprived them of their fleshly substance. Hence for example, the camera cuirasse which Kruger carried on a harness round his neck and which moved, fought and fell with him in various scenes. The camera becomes prosthetic to the body for which it is also an instrument.

In other words, Gance found himself resisting the camera as the Cartesian instrument par excellence, the very fulfilment of Cartesianism that, in other respects, he also required it to be. By contrast, despite its technical resemblances to Napoleon, The Man with the Movie Camera would initially seem to have little concern with touch, the obscurity of contact, any registration of fleshly substance as the residue of cinematic vision. The revolutionary fervour of the Kino-Eye group or kinoks, their utopian commitment to film as an analysis and enrichment of imperfect ways of seeing that anticipates a better future, would appear to commit them to a cinema of the idea. `We were intellectual engineers', said the man with the movie camera himself, Mikhail Kaufman, in an interview in 1979, `constructing thought out of figurative material'. Interestingly, however, whilst similar assertions are easily found in Vertov's writings, he and Kaufman quarrelled during the making of the film, and were never to work again. Interestingly, too, the quarrel turned partly on the question of the power of a woman, Elizaveta Svilova, Vertov's wife, chief editor of the film and later to become the leading film editor in the USSR, at least, according to Vertov. Kaufman wanted the film to move from chaos to clarity, in a gradual revelation of order. Vertov, however, resisted this Cartesian project, insisting on a non-linear complexity that effectively opens visibility up to its own exclusions. Hence The Man with the Movie Camera is punctuated with obscurities: the moments of pure abstraction, like the fleeting image of myriad, undulating lines; the `graphic abstractions', whereby a representational appearance is rendered too blurred or indistinct to be identified; the `abstract tableaux', whereby representational images gradually evolve into abstract designs, and so on. It was partly precisely in such processes of complication and abstraction; in the production of an obscurity, as Irigaray might say, not given beforehand to camera or eye; that the power of Svilova at her editing-table could be most strikingly made manifest. In specific moments of this kind, too, the visible aspires to the tactile. Take the well-known `Street and Eye' sequence: an eye moves in various directions, and is intercut with the camera panning and drifting over the street, at a variable but ever-increasing editing pace, quickening to the point where the two motions are being superimposed in what becomes a mutual caress. Staring at the eye, which intermittently appears to recede behind the images of the street, to be on the other side of them, as it were, the spectator also stares at an image of cinematic movement as itself a caress.

Vertov's writings of the 1920s reveal a man, like Gance, hugely and passionately excited by the power of the new medium, the vast extension it appears to offer to the possibility of vision. Could it be that, nonetheless, in supervising the production of The Man with the Movie Camera, he was also drawn to protect his film from his own hubris, and in doing so, precisely, to affirm Svilova's work? Although he was undoubtedly obsessed with the power of the camera as recording instrument, as the new, potentially all-seeing eye, Vertov's writings of the 1920s reveal that he could also think of it as almost literally thrown into the world (a Geworfenheit in Dasein, indeed), as jostling, colliding with, rubbing up against, touching bodies. `Life', wrote Vertov, `that whirlpool of colliding visible phenomena...with your camera, you enter the whirlpool of life'. The whirlpool is there in Man with the Movie Camera. One of the moments in the film when the eye is most obviously caressed is the famous `enigmatic shot'. Those who have slowed the film down will tell you that it is actually a rotating spool of wire. But that is not evident to the viewer, who might as easily see it as a whirlpool. At the beginning of the second Meditation, the whirlpool is precisely the image Descartes chooses to express a moment of spiritual and intellectual crisis: a crisis, he wrote, in which he could `neither put [his] foot on the bottom nor swim to the surface', but from which he determined to rescue himself by Cartesian meditation. Even in Descartes, however, the whirlpool reappears. As I said early on, one of the images he finds for matter in movement is precisely the vortex. Might it be, then, that, in Man with the Movie Camera, in Irigarayan terms, the principle of incompletion and openness to the future is identified, not with seeing ever more completely, but with an irreducible obscurity and a corporeality that is the residue of vision?