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by Corry Shores
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[The following is summary. Paragraph subheadings are my own. The PDF of the text can be found here from Timothy Quigley's course page. His own summary (far better than mine) can be found here.
May I thank the sources of the images:
Credits provided at the end.]
Mirror Eyes:
Summary of Section 2 of
Merleau-Ponty's "Eye and Mind"
Important Points in This Section:
- Our vision is what allows us to map the world and exploratively move bodily around in it.
- Our bodies and the world are made of the same stuff, the same fabric.
- Our visual experience with a painting is dynamic, immediate, and non-representational. The images paintings give us do not stand for absent things but are our intertwinement with the physical world around us, attesting to the non-subjective/objective split between us and our environing world.
- What our eyes see teach us how to view those very things we are seeing, in an active dynamic way.
- Painting paints what is invisible to our normal vision. The painter interrogates the world with her eyes, asking the thing being painted for those 'invisible' elements which give us the particular visual experience we have when seeing it.
- The world gives itself to us in a way that we can sense it for what it is. We might say that we breath-in the world as it breaths-out to us. [Our breathing-in is our inspiration of Being's expiration].
- We see the world, but the world sees right back at us. We are both seeing and seen. We and the world are integrated as one self-reflexively sensing flesh.
Points Relative to Deleuze [to be revised as we learn more. These points are mere speculations.]:
- Deleuze might say that our bodies and the world are made of the same stuff, only when we regard both to be constituted by difference. Our bodies are disorganizations (Bodies without Organs) interacting disjunctively with the chaotic world that gives itself to us.
- Our impressions from visual sensations attest not to our intertwinement in the world. Sensational vision is shocking, and shows us that our interaction with the world is always an intense encounter with what is different and incompatible.
- Like Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze regards our sensational visual experiences to not be representational. However, for Deleuze, this is not just because it is active, dynamic, and immediate. What we visually encounter sensationally are brute matters of fact. They involve the contraction of contrary forces, and in a way are what would be sensational (or empirical) paradoxes. We experience them as images whose relations never settle and become discernible or recognizable. For this reason, they cannot be representational.
- For Deleuze, Bacon does not paint the invisible elements which cause the object to be seen in the particular way one sees it. This would be painting resemblance (or non-resemblance) by resembling means. But for Deleuze, Bacon paints resemblance by non-resembling means. Bacon does not interrogate his subject and ask for the visual elements, seen or unseen, to reveal themselves. Rather, he disrupts these ways we might see them (using his chaos/chance-based diagramming technique). The way we see the image (our means of seeing) does not resemble how they were seen. But our intense visual experience of it resembles what someone would feel if they attended to the underlying forces of difference and chaos which make seeing possible in the first place. If what we saw remained always recognizable and self-resembling, then what we see would fade from our vision, like when staring blankly at a still scene. Merleau-Ponty says that art changes how we see things. Deleuze is interested in why this is so, and he does not think it is because of our harmonious and adaptive interactions with the things we see, but rather from our chaotic shocking encounters with them.
- Our bodies are not a flesh that is one with the sensing flesh of the world. If sensations are reflexive, it would be because there is change in the instant of sensation: two incompatible forces and directions of development are forced together in one moment, communicating their differences, and resonating each other like magnets pressed together same-to-same pole. This resonance is the reflexive structure of our bodies as raw 'senseless' yet sensing meat, and not as flesh.
Scientists seem to believe that they observe objects as though from a perspective detached from the world. They forget that their observations are grounded in their bodily immersion in the world around them. Painter's however, recognize their direct contact with the world they observe. So we may turn to them to learn more about our immediate immersion in the world.
Section 2
§8 Painting Embodied
The painter uses her body. "It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings" (162a). If we want to know how the painter uses her body to give a painted embodiment to the world, we need to "go back to the working, actual body - not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement" (162a).
§9 The Eyes of Motion
We naturally interact with the world around us. We do not need to know how our nervous systems work in order to interact with the things we see. Normally we see the world, and can thus move around in it. So seeing allows us to move. But to see, we also need to move our eyes and heads. (162b)
§10 Overlapping Maps of the Body and Eye
The regions of our landscape that we can see are also the domains that our body can traverse. "Each of the two maps is complete. The visible world and the world of my motor projects are each total parts of the same Being" (162bc).
§11 Radiance and Embodiment
Because our vision is so tied to our body in this overlapping way, we cannot claim that our vision is primarily conceptual in nature, that it begins with mental representations of the world, "a world of immanence and of ideality" (162c).
Our body immerses us in the visible. [But unlike the sense of touch, which often involves taking something into one's grasp,] this immersion in the visual does not mean we appropriate the world. We instead explore it, open-up ourselves to it. Note how we move the objects around us. But we do not in the same way move our bodies, as though there was some disembodied part of us that pulls our body's strings like a puppet. Our body's movement is not the product of a self, although it expresses that self; the body "radiates from a self" (162c).
§12 Tangled Selves
Our body also is self-sensitive. "It sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself" (162d). Note how when we think, we transform what we think-about into thoughts. The self that our body expresses is one that is caught-up and tangled with the world it lives in, and has parts of itself that extend beyond its horizons; it "has a front and a back, a past and a future . . . ." (163a).
§13 We are the Eyes of the World
These paradoxes produce others. Our body is a visible and mobile thing among others things; it is "caught in the fabric of the world" just like other things are. The world is an extension of us, we are made of the same materials. In a sense, the material of the world has come to see itself, by means of a seeing material part of it.
§14 Humanity's Dependence on Eyeballs
What if our bodies were not capable of sensing themselves. "Such a body would not reflect itself; it would be an almost adamantine body, not really flesh, not really the body of a human being. There would be no humanity" (163).
§15 Yet Eyeballs are a Necessary but Insufficient Condition for Humanity
Nonetheless, our abilities to sense ourselves are not enough to produce humanity.
§16 The Body's Everlasting Fire
Our bodies are animated. But not as a result of merely the assemblage of our moving body parts. Nor does our animation result from a spirit descending into a machine-like body. Both these views forget that the body itself has its own internal life and its own selfhood. The human body is to be found between the touching and the touched, the seeing and the seen; "a blending of some sort takes place - when the spark is lit between sensing and sensible, lighting the fire that will not stop burning until some accident of the body will undo what no accident would have sufficed to do" (163-164).
§17 Visions from the Inner Side
So our body is intimately tied and inter-tangled with the physical world around it. The world around us is visible. But it appears to our body, which sees the world in its own way. "'Nature is on the inside,' says Cézanne. Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them" (164a).
§18 Pictures Embodied
When we see things, our body detects them distinctly in its own way. It is not that in us there are representations of these things. Each one of them is a lived experience that we recognize in its uniqueness. So we see the thing directly with our eyes. But we have an internal, carnal vision of it as well. This internal object is not a faded copy of it. The images of animals on the walls of the Lascaux caves are neither reducible to the stones they are painted on, nor are these animals somehow elsewhere in a conceptual world of representations. And our eyes do not fix to an image the way we might view some object. Rather, our vision moves from one figure to the next. In a way, our eyes move with the painting, rather than over the painting.
§19 Miming & Actuality
We often think of images as copies or secondary things. And by extension, we consider our mental images as being such copies. But this is not what images are. Our impressions of things are not copies but rather entanglements with those things, which blurs the boundaries between inside and outside; "They are the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, which the duplicity of feeling [le sentir] makes possible and without which we would never understand the quasi presence and imminent visibility which make up the whole problem of the imaginary" (164c). In painting or acting, for example, there is mimicry and depictions. But they are "not devices to be borrowed from the real world in order to signify prosaic things which are absent" (164d). Recall how our body expresses the things it senses. In a way, our body is a "diagram of the actual" (165d). Our body's imagery, then, is very close to the actual world around us. For that reason, the images of the world that are found in our bodies, and that are depicted in painting, are too close to the actual world for these images to be representations of absent things. But also consider the way a painting allows us to experience these embodied images. But it engages us solely on the physical level. It draws our eyes into the world to experience it again physically. The painting renders the world into something that interacts especially with human bodies. So in way, the imaginary, as made to conform to our bodies, is too far away from actuality to be able to represent it in its absence.
§20 The Painter's Fleshy Third Eye
So there is another level of vision that sees more than just the material of the paint. Our body also physically experiences the depicted imagery. So we might be tempted to say that we view the world from the inside as though with a third eye (165b). Yet this does not really help us. Because it is the fleshy eyes of the painter which has this special vision. "The eye sees the world, sees what inadequacies [manques] keep the world from being a painting, sees what keeps a painting from being itself, sees - on the palette - the colors awaited by the painting, and sees, once it is done, the painting that answers to all these inadequacies just as it sees the paintings of others as other answers to other inadequacies" (165c).
§21 The World Sculpts Our Eyes
Our eyes see the world. But what they see help shape how they see. Our eyes continually improvise new adaptive ways to see the world. "The eye is an instrument that moves itself, a means which invents its own ends; it is that which has been moved by some impact of the world, which it then restores to the visible through the offices of an agile hand" (165d).
§22 Celebrating the Enigma of Visibility
In all instances of painting throughout history, from ancient cave art to the painting of today, "painting celebrates no other enigma but that of visibility" (165-166).
§23 The Texture of Painted Being
Painters paint the visible world. But to be in possession of the visible world means to have it at a distance. And painting extends this principle to "all aspects of Being, which must in some fashion become visible in order to enter into the work of art" (166a). Painting does not evoke the tactile, but rather the opposite: "It gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible; thanks to it we do not need a 'muscular sense' in order to possess the voluminosity of the world" (166b). This sort of vision can reach beyond what is visually given and open upon a deeper texture of Being that we all live in (166b).
[Additional summary material: Vision is always partial. But the whole world gives itself to the painter in a partial vision. And to paint something you see is to have it at a distance. But this is not a manual grasping of the thing. It is not a tactile sensation. Rather, the painter paints what was hitherto invisible. "This voracious vision, reaching beyond the 'visual givens,' opens upon a texture of Being of which the discrete sensorial messages are only the punctuations or the caesurae. The eye lives in this texture as a man lives in his house" (166b).]
§24 Mountain Interrogation
While painting, the painter's vision seems to do something magical, as if she makes objects pass into herself or perhaps it is as though her mind extends out through her eyes and wonders among the objects she sees; hence the painter practices a 'magical theory of vision' (166c). For the painter, "the same thing is both out there in the world and here in the heart of vision - the same or, if one prefers, a similar thing, but according to a metamorphosis of Being in his vision. It is the mountain itself which from out there makes itself seen by the painter; it is the mountain that he interrogates with his gaze" (166d).
§25 The Worldly Talismen of Vision
When the painter interrogates the mountain, she asks it to "unveil the means, visible and not otherwise, by which it makes itself a mountain before our eyes" (166d). The objects that the painter seeks are more like ghosts than real things: light, lighting, shadows, reflections, color, and so on. And in fact, these things are not seen except for the most part by painters. "The painter's gaze asks them what they do to suddenly cause something to be and to be this thing, what they do to compose this worldly talisman and to make us see the visible" (166d).
§26 The Feverish Genesis of Things in Our Body
We will consider an example, Rembrandt's Nightwatch.
De Nachtwacht (The Night Watch) 1642
We see the shadow of the pointing-man's hand cast upon the captain's body. On the one hand, we see what his hand looks like from the front.
So far, we might regard the images before us two-dimensionally. However, the shadow shows us the profile of the arm, as if we were at the same time viewing it from the side.
If we were in the painting, looking at the arm's profile, we could regard these images two-dimensionally. Yet, when we look at the painting from the front, and also see the shadow, we are forced to put together, all at once, two incompatible lines-of-sight. In a way, it forces us to perceive the depth in the painting, because the shadow-profile gives us the third-dimension. We often encounter such plays of shadow and other similar phenomena. They indicate to us the space that things occupy. But these are just surface effects that assist us in seeing something more profound in the object; "the interrogation of painting in any case looks toward this secret and feverish genesis of things in our body" (167b).
§27 The Constellations in the Earth
The painter lives in fascination of the way the world appears to us. "The actions most proper to him - those gestures, those paths which he alone can trace and which will be revelations to others (because the others do not lack what he lacks or in the same way) - to him they seem to emanate from the things themselves, like the patterns of the constellations" (167c).
§28 Paint the World by Letting It Paint You
The painter becomes a part of the world, and lets it see him.
§29 Inspired by Being's Expiration
Being expires. We breath it in. This is inspiration. (167d)
§30 Painters Are Always Babes
An unborn child is only virtually visible. She is born when she becomes visible to both herself and to the world. The painter is continually being born in this way.
§31 The Painting of the Eyes
The painter sees things in a 'pre-human' way (168a). [Merleau-Ponty here cites a text by Paul Claudel. Merleau-Ponty quotes Claudel as saying that in Dutch paintings, empty interiors are digested by the "round eye of the mirror." But instead of "round", Claudel writes of the "l’oeil fixe d’un miroir" (37ab). Given Merleau-Ponty's description, I suggest we illustrate with a famous painting, Van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding.
Van Eyck. Portret van Giovanni Arnolfini en zijn vrouw
[ The Arnolfini Wedding / The Arnolfini Marriage / The Arnolfini Double Portrait or the Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife.]
1434
We see that there is a convex mirror on the back-wall that 'digests' the interior of the room, and because it sees from the opposite perspective, it gives us something almost like a penetrating panoptic vision.
Note how the painter himself seems to be visible in the mirror.] Merleau-Ponty explains that this sort of mirror vision is involved with the "open circuit" going from the "seeing body to visible body". Our bodies, our flesh, are both seeing and visible at the same time. This is the reflexive "metaphysical structure of our flesh" (168b). The world would be incomplete if there was not this circuit that allows it to sense itself by means of our vision. Merleau-Ponty draws from an example by Schilder. We smoke a pipe before a mirror. We do not just feel the pipe in our own hands, we feel it in the hands of the mirror image as well. "Hence my body can assume segments derived from the body of another, just as my substance passes into them; man is mirror for man. The mirror itself is the instrument of a universal magic that changes things into a spectacle, spectacles into things, myself into another, and another into myself." (168cd). Painters often depict themselves in the act of painting "adding to what they saw then, what things saw of them. It is as if they were claiming that there is a total or absolute vision, outside of which there is nothing and which closes itself over them." (169a)
The painter paints some real live thing in the grips of the instant it presents itself. But the painter paints more than the thing, she paints the life of the thing, its givingness as a givenness. For this reason, long after the time of the work is created and its subjects have passed-on or changed, the work continues to present something real to us, something of its own category, a true persisting individual. "Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible - a painting mixes up all our categories in laying out its oneiric universe of carnal essences, of effective likenesses, of mute meanings." (169b).
Images obtained gratefully from:
Summary based on:
Merleau-Ponty. "The Eye and Mind." Transl. Carleton Dallery. in The Primacy of Perception and other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics. Ed. James M. Edie. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964.
Also cited:
Claudel, Paul. Introduction à la peinture hollandaise. Paris: Gallimard, 1935.
II The painter "takes his body with him," says Valery. Indeed we cannot imagine how a mind could paint. It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, actual body—not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement. I have only to see something to know how to reach it and deal with it, even if I do not know how this happens in the nervous system. My moving body makes a difference in the visible world, being a part of it; that is why I can steer it through the visible. Moreover, it is also true that vision is attached to movement. We see only what we look at. What 2 would vision be without eye movement? And how could the movement of the eyes not blur things if movement were blind? If it were only a reflex? If it did not have its antennae, its clairvoyance? If vision were not prefigured in it? All my changes of place figure on principle in a corner of my landscape; they are carried over onto the map of the visible. Everything I see is on principle within my reach, at least within reach of my sight, and is marked upon the map of the "I can." Each of the two maps is complete. The visible world and the world of my motor projects are both total parts of the same Being. This extraordinary overlapping, which we never give enough thought to, forbids us to conceive of vision as an operation of thought that would set up before the mind a picture or a representation of the world, a world of immanence and of ideality. Immersed in the visible by his body, itself visible, the see-er does not appropriate what he sees; he merely approaches it by looking, he opens onto the world. And for its part, that world of which he is a part is not in itself, or matter. My movement is not a decision made by the mind, an absolute doing which would decree, from the depths of a subjective retreat, some change of place miraculously executed in extended space. It is the natural sequel to, and maturation of, vision. I say of a thing that it is moved; but my body moves itself; my movement is self-moved. It is not ignorance of self, blind to itself; it radiates from a self…. The enigma derives from the fact that my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the "other side" of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself. It is a self, not by transparency, like thought, which never thinks anything except by assimilating it, constituting it, transforming it into thought—but a self by confusion, narcissism, inherence of the see-er in the seen, the toucher in the touched, the feeler in the felt—a self, then, that is caught up in things, having a front and a back, a past and a future…. This initial paradox cannot but produce others. Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.3 Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are incrusted in its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the very stuff of the body. These reversals, these antinomies,4 are different ways of saying that vision is caught or comes to be in things—in that place where something visible undertakes to see, becomes visible to itself and in the sight of all things, in that place where there persists, like the original solution still present within crystal, the undividedness of the sensing and the sensed. This interiority no more precedes the material arrangement of the human body than it results from it. What if our eyes were made in such a way as to prevent our seeing any part of our body, or some diabolical contraption were to let us move our hands over things, while preventing us from touching our own body? Or what if, like certain animals, we had lateral eyes with no cross-blending of visual fields? Such a body would not reflect itself; it would be an almost adamantine body, not really flesh, not really the body of a human being. There would be no humanity. But humanity is not produced as the effect of our articulations or by the way our eyes are implanted in us (still less by the existence of mirrors, though they alone can make our entire bodies visible to us). These contingencies and others like them, without which mankind would not exist, do not by simple summation bring it about that there is a single man. The body's animation is not the assemblage or juxtaposition of its parts. Nor is it a question of a mind or spirit coming down from somewhere else into an automation— 3 which would still imply that the body itself is without an inside and without a "self." A human body is present when, between the see-er and the visible, between touching and touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and hand a kind of crossover occurs, when the spark of the sensing/sensible is lit, when the fire starts to burn that will not cease until some accident befalls the body, undoing what no accident would have sufficed to do… Once this strange system of exchanges is given, we find before us all the problems of painting. These problems illustrate the enigma of the body, which enigma in turn legitimates them. Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, vision must somehow come about in them; or yet again, their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a secret visibility. "Nature is on the inside," says Cézanne. Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our bodies and because the body welcomes them. Things have an internal equivalent in me; they arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence. Why shouldn't these correspondences in turn give rise to some tracing rendered visible again, in which the eyes of others could find an underlying motif to sustain their inspection of the world?5 Thus there appears a "visible" to the second power, a carnal essence or icon of the first. It is not a faded copy, a trompe l'oeil, or another thing. The animals painted on the walls of Lascaux are not there in the same way as are the fissures and limestone formations. Nor are they elsewhere. Pushed forward here, held back there, supported by the wall's mass they use so adroitly, they radiate about the wall without ever breaking their elusive moorings. I would be hard pressed to say where the painting is I am looking at. For I do not look at it as one looks at a thing, fixing it in its place. My gaze wanders within it as in the halos of Being. Rather than seeing it, I see according to, or with it. The word "image" is in bad repute because we have thoughtlessly believed that a drawing was a tracing, a copy, a second thing, and that the mental image was such a drawing, belonging among our private bric-a-brac. But if in fact it is nothing of the kind, then neither the drawing nor the painting belongs to the in-itself any more than the image does. They are the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, which the duplicity of feeling [le sentir] makes possible and without which we would never understand the quasi presence and imminent visibility which make up the whole problem of the imaginary. The picture, the actor's mimicry—these are not devices borrowed from the real world in order to refer to prosaic things which are absent. For the imaginary is much nearer to, and much farther away from, the actual—nearer because it is in my body as a diagram of the life of the actual, with all its pulp and carnal obverse exposed to view for the first time. In this sense, Giacometti says energetically, "What interests me in all paintings is likeness—that is, what likeness is for me: something that makes me uncover the external world a little."6 And the imaginary is much farther away from the actual because the painting is an analogue or likeness only according to the body; because it does not offer the mind an occasion to rethink the constitutive relations of things, but rather it offers the gaze traces of vision, from the inside, in order that it may espouse them; it gives vision that which clothes it within, the imaginary texture of the real.7 Shall we say, then, that there is an inner gaze, that there is a third eye which sees the paintings and even the mental images, as we used to speak of a third ear which grasps messages from the outside through the noises they caused inside us? But how would this help us when the whole point is to understand that our fleshly eyes are already much more than receptors for light rays, colors, and lines? They are computers of the world, which have the gift of the visible, as we say of the inspired man that he has the gift of tongues. Of course this gift is earned by exercise; it is not in a few months, or in solitude, 4 that a painter comes into full possession of his vision. But that is not the question; precocious or belated, spontaneous or cultivated in museums, his vision in any event learns only by seeing and learns only from itself. The eye sees the world, and what it would need to be a painting, sees what keeps a painting from being itself, sees—on the palette—the colors awaited by the painting, and sees, once it is done, the painting that answers to all these inadequacies just as it sees the paintings of others as other answers to other inadequacies. It is no more possible to make a restrictive inventory of the visible than it is to catalog the possible expressions of a language or even its vocabulary and turns of phrase. The eye is an instrument that moves itself, a means which invents its own ends; it is that which has been moved by some impact of the world, which it then restores to the visible through the traces of a hand. In whatever civilization it is born, from whatever beliefs, motives, or thoughts, no matter what ceremonies surround it—and even when it appears devoted to something else— from Lascaux to our time, pure or impure, figurative or not, painting celebrates no other enigma but that of visibility. What we have just said amounts to a truism. The painter's world is a visible world, nothing but visible: a world almost mad, because it is complete though only partial. Painting awakens and carries to its highest pitch a delirium which is vision itself, for to see is to have at a distance; painting extends this strange possession to all aspects of Being, which must somehow become visible in order to enter into the work of art. When, apropos of Italian painting, the young Berenson spoke of an evocation of tactile values, he could hardly have been more mistaken; painting evokes nothing, least of all the tactile. What it does is entirely different, almost the inverse. It gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible; thanks to it we do not need a "muscular sense" in order to possess the voluminosity of the world. This voracious vision, reaching beyond the "visual givens," opens upon a texture of Being of which the discrete sensorial messages are only the punctuations or the caesurae. The eye lives in this texture as a man in his house. Let us remain within the visible in the narrow and prosaic sense. The painter, any painter, while he is painting, practices a magical theory of vision. He is obliged to admit that objects before him pass into him or else that, according to Malebranche's sarcastic dilemma, the mind goes out through the eyes to wander among objects; for he never ceases adjusting his clairvoyance to them. (It makes no difference if he does not paint from "nature"; he paints, in any case, because he has seen, because the world has at least once emblazoned in him the ciphers of the visible.) He must affirm, as one philosopher has said, that vision is a mirror or concentration of the universe or thai, in another's words, the idios kosmos opens by virtue of vision upon a koinos kosmos; in short, that the same thing is both out there in the world and here at the heart of vision— the same or, if you will, a similar thing, but according to an efficient similarity which is the parent, the genesis, the metamorphosis of being into its vision. It is the mountain itself which from out there makes itself seen by the painter; it is the mountain that he interrogates with his gaze. What exactly does he ask of it? To unveil the means, visible and not otherwise, by which it makes itself mountain before our eyes. Light, lighting, shadows, reflections, color, all these objects of his quest are not altogether real objects; like ghosts, they have only visual existence. In fact they exist only at the threshold of profane vision; they are not ordinarily seen. The painter's gaze asks them what they do to suddenly cause something to be and to be this thing, what they do to compose this talisman of a world, to make us 5 see the visible. The hand pointing toward us in The Nightwatch is truly there only when we see that its shadow on the captain's body presents it simultaneously in profile. The spatiality of the captain lies at the intersection of the two perspectives which are incompossible and yet together. Everyone with eyes has at some time or other witnessed this play of shadows, or something like it, and has been made by it to see things and a space. But it worked in them without them; it hid to make the object visible. To see the object, it was necessary not to see the play of shadows and light around it. The visible in the profane sense forgets its premises; it rests upon a total visibility which is to be recreated and which liberates the phantoms captive in it. The moderns, as we know, have liberated many others; they have added many a muted tone to the official gamut of our means of seeing. But the interrogation of painting in any case looks toward this secret and feverish genesis of things in our body. And so it is not a question asked of someone who doesn't know by someone who does— the schoolmaster's—question. The question comes from one who does not know, and it is addressed to a vision, a seeing, which knows everything and which we do not make, for it makes itself in us. Max Ernst (with the surrealists) says rightly, "Just as the role of the poet since [Rimbaud's] famous Lettre du voyant consists in writing under the dictation of what is being thought, of what articulates itself in him, the painter's role is to circumscribe and project what is making itself seen within himself. "8 The painter lives in fascination. The actions most proper to him—those gestures, those tracings of which he alone is capable and which will be revelations to others because they do not lack what he lacks—to him they seem to emanate from the things themselves, like figures emanating from the constellations. Inevitably the roles between the painter and the visible switch. That is why so many painters have said that things look at them. As Andre Marchand says, after Klee: "In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me…. I was there, listening…. I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it…. I expect to be inwardly submerged, buried. Perhaps I paint to break out. "9 We speak of "inspiration," and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, respiration in Being, action and passion so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to distinguish between who sees and who is seen, who paints and what is painted. We say that a human being is born the moment when something that was only virtually visible within the mother's body becomes at once visible for us and for itself. The painter's vision is an ongoing birth. In paintings themselves we could seek a figured philosophy10 of vision—its iconography, perhaps. It is no accident, for example, that frequently in Dutch paintings (as in many others) an interior in which no one is present is "digested" by the "round eye of the mirror. "11 This prehuman way of seeing things is emblematic of the painter's way. More completely than lights, shadows, and reflections, the mirror image anticipates, within things, the labor of vision. Like all other technical objects, such as tools and signs, the mirror has sprung up along the open circuit between the seeing and the visible body. Every technique is a "technique of the body," illustrating and amplifying the metaphysical structure of our flesh. The mirror emerges because I am a visible see-er, because there is a reflexivity of the sensible; the mirror translates and reproduces that reflexivity. In it, my externality becomes complete. Everything that is most secret about me passes into that face, that flat, closed being of which I was already dimly aware, from having seen my reflection mirrored in water. Schilder observes that, smoking a pipe before a mirror, I feel the sleek, burning surface of the wood not only where my fingers are but also in those otherworldly fingers, those merely visible ones inside the mirror.12 The mirror's phantom 6 draws my flesh into the outer world, and at the same time the invisible of my body can invest its psychic energy in the other bodies I see.13 Hence my body can include elements drawn from the body of another, just as my substance passes into them; man is a mirror for man. Mirrors are instruments of a universal magic that converts things into spectacle, spectacle into things, myself into another, and another into myself. Artists have often mused upon mirrors because beneath this "mechanical trick," they recognized, as they did in the case of the "trick" of perspective,14 the metamorphosis of seeing and seen that defines both our flesh and the painter's vocation. This explains why they have so often chosen to draw themselves in the act of painting (they still do—witness Matisse's drawings), adding to what they could see of things at that moment, what things could see of them—as if to attest to there being a total or absolute vision, leaving nothing outside, including themselves. Where in the realm of the understanding can we place these occult operations, together with the potions and idols they concoct? What can we call them? Consider, as Sartre did in Nausea, the smile of a long-dead monarch which keeps producing and reproducing itself on the surface of a canvas. It is too little to say that it is there as an image or essence; it is there as itself, as that which was always most alive about it, the moment I look at the painting. The "world's instant" that Cézanne wanted to paint, an instant long since passed away, is still hurled toward us by his paintings.15 His Mont. Sainte-Victoire is made and remade from one end of the world to the other in a way different from but no less energetic than in the hard rock above Aix. Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible—painting scrambles all our categories, spreading out before us its oneiric universe of carnal essences, actualized resemblances, mute meanings.
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