This first seminar takes as its starting point the theme of a recent visual semiotics congress, held in Quebec in October 2001: "Le visuel à l'ère du post-visuel". Our task is to examine the notion of "post-visual". Judging by the sub-themes on the same page, the main congress preoccupation appears to concentrate on technological innovations and developments and their potential impact on image-making. We devote the second part of the course to this theme. The first three courses, on the other hand, will be devoted to a less obvious, but more profound interpretation of the notion of the post-visual. Consider, to begin with, the the lexical organisation of the following extract:

Even a rapid glance at the language we commonly use will demonstrate the ubiquity of visual metaphors. If we actively focus our attention on them, vigilantly keeping an eye out for those deeply embedded as well as those on the surface, we can gain an illuminating insight into the complex mirroring of perception and language. Depending, of course, on one's outlook or point of view, the prevalence of such metaphors will be accounted an obstacle or an aid to our knowledge of reality. It is, however, no idle speculation or figment of imagination to claim that if blinded to their importance, we will damage our ability to inspect the world outside and introspect the world within. And our prospects for escaping their thrall, if indeed that is even a foreseeable goal, will be greatly dimmed. In lieu of an exhaustive survey of such metaphors, whose scope is far too broad to allow an easy synopsis, this opening paragraph should suggest how ineluctable the modality of the visual actually is, at least in our linguistic practice. I hope by now that you, optique lecteur, can see what I mean. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes, p.1

There are over twenty references to vision and to sight either in literal or metaphorical expressions, and constitute part of the technical vocabulary with which we talk about the world we live in. The significance of this will be explained shortly. Now examine the two images below:

Head of Aphrodite, 5th century BC	Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face), Barbara Kruger, 1981-83

Together they illustrate the evolution of western metaphysics over the past 2,500 years...

One of our main preoccupations in this initial seminar will be to discover just why a Master for students of English as a foreign language requires that these should have to read so many French authors. Remember that one of the seminar's objectives is to offer an alternative to the heavily literary bias (itself based upon the positions of yet another French author, Georges Bataille!) of most of the other seminars. Today's session will take us, then, from the bust of the goddess Aphrodite to the photocollage [strictly speaking, photo-text collage] of the American photographic artist, Barbara Kruger.

0. Epistemology vs. metaphysics

Epistemology is concerned with the nature and necessary conditions of knowledge. Typical epistemological distinctions are those between rationalism and empiricism — two competing theories of the way we acquire knowledge of the world around us. Metaphysics, on the other hand, is concerned with the fundamental nature of reality and therefore with those basic principles that can serve as the foundation of our knowledge of that reality. More or less consciously in our minds, metaphysics underwrites the way we conceive of the world around us, and is widespread in the language we use, as is demonstrated by the extract from Jay. It is thus with metaphysics that we shall be concerned principally in this particular session.

The history of "Indo-European" metaphysics begins with the primacy of perception, with sight very much hegemonic in this respect, the primacy of the scopic. From the beginning of the 20th century (even earlier if we go back to the dynamics of Hegel's dialectic) there is a very self-conscious movement promoting the primacy of language, indeed of written language, and a concomitant disparagement, denigration and suspicion of vision and the visual: the dangers of the gaze, of panopticism and the metaphysical lure of the visual.

Origins of the privileged status of sight:

• John Berger, and the primacy of sight:
  "Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it speaks." Ways of Seeing, BBC/Penguin, 1972, p. 7.
• Hall's theory of the flight to trees;

  "Originally a ground-dwelling animal, man's ancestor was forced by interspecies competition and changes in the environment to desert the ground and take to the trees. Arboreal life calls for keen vision and decreases dependence on smell, which is crucial for terrestrial organisms. Thus man's sense of smell ceased to develop and his powers of sight were greatly enhanced." Hall, The Hidden Dimension, N.Y.; Garden City, 1982, p. 39

• Freud on the accession to bipedal gait: According to Freud human civilization only began when our ancestors raised themselves off the ground, stopped sniffing the backsides of their companions in the manner of dogs, and elevated sight to a position of superiority. With that elevation went a concomitant repression of sexual and aggressive drives inspired by shame, Freud suggests, at the sight of the genitals, and the radical separation of the "higher" spiritual and mental faculties (sight and mind) from the "lower" functions of the body [See the extract from Civilization and its Discontents, and the astonishing footnote in which he outlines the elevation of sight thesis]. With this in mind one measures the full indignity Bataille inflicts upon the noble eye, and with it the ocularcentrist tradition outlined below....

1. Two conflicting strands of our Judeo-Christian metaphysical heritage: the Hellenic and the Judaic

Hellenic metaphysics leading to the domination of the "visual"

In other words, a vision-based, ocularcentrist (centred on the eye) metaphysics, engendering various scopic "regimes"

Visual bias in Greek thought: sight is pre-eminently the sense of simultaneity over a wide visual field; hence the importance of geometry and optics in Greek science (poor on motion) Sight thus emphasizes the essential nature of things, offering, it is said, a static, a-temporal view of the world, flooded with light:

"Clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible; and not less clear -- wholly expressed, orderly even in their ardour-- are the feelings and thoughts of the persons involved." Auerbach, (Odysseus' Scar), Mimesis, 1953, p. 3.

Such an Apollonian view (Apollo was the god of light and order) in turn emphasizes static being as opposed to dynamic becoming in the way we conceive metaphysically of the Greek world, which can be summarily (very!) characterized as follows:
• A preoccupation with form, shape over colour (cf. Aristotle and the portrait-painters - priority to outline over colour, Poetics), though this may be the result of the mistaken view that all Greek statues and buildings have always appeared as white marble, whereas, in fact, they were originally painted.
• Owing to the influence of the poets and philosophers, there was an evolution from liturgy (processions, dances, Dionysian celebrations) to drama, from man as participant in a rite to man as a spectator, from procession to spectacle, whence the importance of the spectacle and the theatre in classical Greek culture, particularly tragedy (cf. Aristotle's Poetics and the principle of mimesis, and Nietzsche's theory of the birth of tragedy). The Greek vision of the world appears clearly in Nietzsche's distinction between the "Apolline" in sculpture -- dreamlike, visual, governed by clarity, order and appearance, and the "Dionysiac" i.e. irrepressible, intoxicating internal forces that characterize music ("Apolline" and "Dionysiac" were Nietzsche's versions of the more usual "Apollonian" and "Dionysian"). These are united in tragedy (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872) ;
• The body beautiful, male nudity, gender as the object of the gaze; visible representations of the various deities, in human guise, a practice frowned upon by monotheistic religions (happily, Christianity made a miraculous escape); origins of partriachalism. Note that women were banned from participating in the games, and weren't even allowed to watch them.
• "Theatre", "theory" and "theorem" –, the latter two so important from an epistemological point of view, all originate in the same metaphysical tradition, their common Greek root theoria, meaning to gaze at, to look at; theoria translated into Latin becomes contemplatio (c.f. the Heidegger text): the Greek notion of theoria meant to gaze upon the truth, whereas Latin contemplatio, derived from templum, suggests compartmentalization.
• Any epistemology underwritten by the Hellenic tradition is thus often said to be "speculative" or "contemplative" (Note that L. speculum meant a mirror, while L. specula meant a watchtower, a sort of forerunner of Bentham's panopticon): the primary meaning of "speculate" is "to look at or into"; and "contemplate", "to look attentively at", "to observe".
• Knowledge conceived in this way is seen as acquired by the disinterested observer contemplating objects with which he has no personal involvement (objectivity), that is, contemplation of the thing in itself rather than the thing as it affects that observer.
• Finally, Plato's attack on sophistry and rhetoric elevated the view of a disinterested, "real" objective truth over truth seen as relative, dependent upon the doxa, the opinion of the majority. Note that "sophistry" is a derogatory term, while, paradoxically, Socrates' dialectic method presupposes that there is a "real" truth which can be elicited from virtually anyone by astute questioning and argument (i.e. by adopting the tactics of the rhetoricians).

In conclusion, the light of the sun becomes the metaphor of truth, giving us, dixit Derrida, a heliocentric metaphysics, in which light is held to be positive, good and the source of truth, while dark represents ignorance and even evil. See, in the image below, how the church incorporated this distinction into its doctrine, and made good propagandist use of it:

Tintoretto, Presentation of the Virgin at the temple, 1552-53

The image is divided into two areas characterized respectively by light and shade. The light-shade contrast, inherited from the heliocentric metaphysics examined above, symbolically separates Christian mothers and children on the right bathed in a state of grace (light, truth) from those on the left (a sinistra....) beyond grace (ignorance, darkness), in this case, Jews who have refused conversion.

Cf, too, the Gospel of Saint John, 8:12 (on the Mount of Olives) Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.

Stages: (the following is highly schematic, elliptical and therefore immensely pardonable attempt at a timeline...)

• Plato's Republic: paradoxical in that at one and the same time it introduces the heliocentric tradition of light as knowledge and darkness as ignorance, and, as we shall see later, refuses admission to the painters (producers of sham appearances and simulacra two removes from the truth). The Myth of the Cavern (see the extract): the acquisition of knowledge as the ascent towards the light; ignorance as darkness knowledge as the discovery of a landscape lit by the sun: the metaphor of the heliotrope (c. 360 BC)
• Aristotle's theory of mimesis: the correspondence between the world and its mimetic representation as a theory of knowledge; this was the theory of the faithful copy, the completely adequate reflection of the natural world (360-355 BC?).
• The Renaissance: after Brunelleschi (1412-3) and Alberti (Della Pictura, 1435) paintings tended to represent not the world as it is, but as a (monocular?) observer perceives it.
• Galileo and the invention of the telescope, thereby reinforcing the importance of the optical in science (c. 1609).
• Perspectivism and the introduction of subjectivity: the distinction between subject and object, reinforced by the painters' Man's eye view of the world, is also implicit in Descartes' cogito (1635), reinforced by his notion of clear ideas and the system of spatial distribution advanced by his coordinate geometry
• The Enlightenment (comme son nom l'indique…..): this was the age in which Baroque rhetoric was replaced by aesthetics, itself characterized by a return to Greek canons of beauty, it was the age of reason, of belief in progress, and the pursuit of happiness for everyone (this was before the Industrial Revolution!), and the eventual arrival at a perfect human state of affairs in which poverty, illness and religious oppression would cease to exist... After the barbarity of the two world wars, this ideal became severely dented, and the Enlightenment has now become emblematic of the the loss of faith in such "grand narratives".
• Kant (Critique of Pure Reason 1781, 1787) and his categories (a static, universal system, valid for all objects of knowledge, supposedly a reflection of the structure of the human mind, an idea which Peirce was to take over, and which Hegel was to rebut)
• The industrial and post-industrial societies of the spectacle (photography, cinema, digital technologies and what we now know as a visual culture - cf. the congress theme mentioned earlier)

1.2 The Judaic tradition characterized by suspicion of the visual.

Although this had less direct impact on western metaphysics, it has always been there in the background. It accords considerably less importance to sight and vision, and also appears to be considerably more patriarchal. Essentially an iconoclastic, iconophobic monotheism, exhibiting considerable mistrust of the influence of pagan idols and the fear of idolatry, with prohibitions on the representation of the deity and a taboo on graven images. Unlike the cult of nudity espoused by the Greeks, in this tradition emphasis is on clothing and on the covering of the body, on respecting the majesty of the invisible. [Note that already in 1766, Lessing, in his Laocoon, had advanced the superiority of poetry (writing) over painting (vision) since the former, unlike the latter, could represent both the visible world and the invisible.) This is the tradition of speaking, listening and writing, nourishing the verbocentrist tradition and its primacies: the tablets of the law, the Bible, the BOOK and literature (but note, too, paradoxically, that the rise of the novel and the consequent subjectivisation through characterisation occurred in the course of the Enlightenment)

The tradition culminates in psychoanalysis, though it is perhaps taking liberties to ascribe this to the Judaic tradition. Nevertheless Freud described himself as a completely atheistic Jew. His contribution to the replacement of perception by language was twofold: 1) analysis as listening to the patient's words, and 2) the introduction of the couch which inhibits observation, i.e. direct face-to-face confrontation, and with it the temptations of voyeurism, exhibitionism (scopophilia) and the fear of being seen (scopophobia), all forms of aberrant behaviours involving vision, power and mastery. On the other hand, to the distress and anger of subsequent generations of feminists, he also in typical ocularcentrist, heliocentric manner, described female sexuality as the "dark continent".... We note, finally, on this topic, that Jacques Derrida was born in Algeria of Jewish parents.

1.3 Towards the post-visual: 20th century iconoclasm and the linguistic turn

"The picture of ancient and medieval philosophy as concerned with things, the philosophy of the seventeenth through the nineteenth century as concerned with ideas, and the enlightened contemporary philosophical scene with words has considerable plausibility." Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Pr. Univ. Press, 1979, p. 263

Rorty, a contemporary American philosopher, is credited with having invented the expression "the linguistic turn", which he saw as dethroning the visual from the hegemonic position it held in metaphysics and philosophical reasoning; However, the movement began long before Rorty's first published texts.

• The first real crunch comes with Hegel's dialectic, which is not even a theory of language. Kant's twelve "universal" and immutable categories (Critique of Pure Reason 1781) which abet the static visuality of the Hellenic tradition, are subverted by Hegel's reflections on historicity, the French Revolution in particular, and on changes of epoch which perforce introduce dynamics, and movement in time. Thus logic is divided into three moments.

  The "thesis" which, owing to an internal contradiction, leads to its negation, "antithesis", which in turn is "overtaken" and absorbed by the third moment now known as "synthesis" (these are not the terms used by Hegel, but are more convenient that those he advanced himself). The following is an example (adapted from Peter Singer, Hegel, OUP, 1983), of how an initial "thesis" reveals itself to be incomplete or contradictory. Within the logical movement, it is followed by its negation, only for this to be integrated, together with the idea with which it conflicts into a harmonious synthesis. Thus the dialectical movement introduces into philosophy a form of temporality and the idea of becoming, both of which conflict with the principle of static being characteristic of the ocularcentric "visual" regime inherited from the Greeks. The following example illustrates this dialect movement and shows how chronology enters philosophical considerations (and how Hegel anticipates Derrida's deconstructive principle!):

  The Greek community was based upon customary morality, i.e. a political system based upon collective habit and convention, a harmonious society in which citizens identified themselves with the community and had no thought of acting in opposition to it. This stage is the thesis.

  However, as a description of Greek society this thesis proved to be inadequate, as shown by the questioning of Socrates: the Greeks couldn't do without independent thought, but the independent thinker is a thorn in the side of customary morality. The community based on custom collapses in the face of the principle of independent thought. The Reformation brings acceptance of the supreme right of individual conscience (no need of intermediaries between a man and his god) - the harmony of the Greek community has been lost, while individual freedom is triumphant. This stage is the negation of the first stage, and is known as the antithesis.

  But this stage too is inadequate: put into practice, the principle of absolute freedom turns into the Terror of the French Revolution, which shows that both customary harmony and abstract freedom of the individual are one-sided. They must be brought together, unified in a manner which preserves them, and avoids their different forms of one-sidedness. This results in a third, more adequate stage, and in this example the synthesis in the overall dialectical movement turns out to be the German society of Hegel's time... (i.e. German society flourishing between approx. 1812 and Hegel's death in 1831).

• The linguistic turn occurs with the study of the successivity of writing (and hearing), which encourages the consciousness of temporality and lays the basis for a metaphysics of becoming (cf. Saussure's second principle : le signifiant est linéaire). As a more or less direct consequence of the Cours de linguistique générale and its insistence on a system of differences without positive terms, twentieth century French philosophy has led to a (temporary?) reversal of the dominance of the scopic in metaphysics, whence the term "post-visual", and the replacement of perception by the metaphor of language in western metaphysics.

• With this has come the realization of certain ideological abuses of the various scopic regimes associated with ocularcentrism, bringing forth (among many others) the following reactions:
• Bataille: the anus as sun, the sun as anus! L'Anus solaire, and the unfortunate adventures of the erstwhile noble eye in the more ignominious nether regions of the body...
• Lacan's contention that the unconscious is structured like a language
• Foucault and the crusade against, among other emblems of abusive power relations, surveillance and panopticism:
  
      

  Jeremy Bentham's panopticon or "inspection house", Panopticon Letters, 1787	N. Harou-Romain: plan for a penitentiary, 1840

  Note, however, that perhaps the most famous example of all of this abuse of vision, mastery and power is to be found in George Orwell's dystopic novel 1984, in which a nebulous country called Oceania is ruled by the Party, itself led by a figure called Big Brother. The inhabitants are surrounded by posters bearing the message "Big Brother is watching you".

    
• Derrida: the free play of the signifier; the critique of white mythology (= "Indo-European" metaphysics) in a magnificent analysis of metaphor in western philosophical thinking
• Concomitantly, Umberto Eco's steadfast attack on the icon and the principle of iconicity and motivation, aided and abetted by the late Nelson Goodman, author of a well-known but vastly criticisable book entitled Languages of Art.....
• Post-modern attacks, especially by militant feminists and specialists of gender studies, on the patriarchal, male-dominated gaze (as opposed to the glance). Cf. Dürer's "lucinda", or wire drawing-grid: the metaphorical creation of woman by the male gaze (an object of male contemplation, evident in films, television, magazines and adverts) that parallels the creation of Eve from Adam's rib. Cf., too, Lacan's seminar devoted to the gaze.
  
      

  Albrecht Dürer, Artist and model in the studio, woodcut, 1525 This is Dürer's lucinda, a type of drawing aid with a vertical pointer that acts as a sort of "sight" (Fr. mire) enabling the artist to line up the object to be drawn with the appropriate part of the vertical grid on the table before him. He then transfers the information onto the grid on which he wants to draw the object. Significantly, the artist in Dürer's image is lining the reference point up with part of the body of a partially nude female model. Below is the subversive appropriation of Dürer's original image by the French photographic artist, Dany Leriche, a work entitled Hanneke et Elise. As with most if not all Leriche's life-size images, the participants are all female, generally entirely naked. This is a feminist-inspired rejection of the male gaze, throwing it back as it were into the face of the male observer, and no doubt rejoicing in the fact that the image will inevitably titillate him. The woman wearing clothing is a replacement for the male artist, and her position with respect to the model before her is far more revealing, showing just what it is the male wants to gaze at, but which Dürer's image neutralizes and naturalizes as "art". (In fact this image is just one part of a diptych - the second part is a photograph of the model taken through the grid from the point of view of the observer, and is of course, extrememly explicit.) With this in view, you should read the extract from Berger's Ways of seeing, pp. 62-63, in which he attributes the emergence of the female nude as "art", together with the voyeuristic observation of the female body, to the development of individualism after the Middle Ages.

  Danny Leriche, Hanneke et Elise, Kodachrome, 1993

  Tintoretto, Suzanna at her bath, c. 1560

  
      Finally note how biblical episodes like the one depicted above have enabled painters to circumvent censure and exhibit the female body. This particular image is a metaphor for the whole history of the male gaze that emerged out of visual metaphysics: two old men gazing at the naked girl, who is apparently unaware of them. On the other hand, she is fully aware of the observer of the painting (as the model would have been of the painter), and is an instance of a tradition found even today in pornographic photographs: "Say cheese....!". (Note, too, that both the Wallis and Harrison & Wood anthologies contain an excellent article on the male use of the visual as a means of constructing female sexual identity in film: Laura Mulvey's ground-breaking essay entitled: "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema".)

Conclusion

Thus at least one interpretation of the term "post-visual" involves the replacement of visual perception by language in the course of the 20th century, particularly in France (a consequence of Hegel, Bergson, and above all, the Cours de linguistique générale). This evolution is beautifully summed up by Kruger's magnificently sparse photo-text collage, in which the photo not of a woman, even less of a goddess, but one of a 1950s milliner's model, a dummy bust for placing hats on, has words—unstable shifters such as your, my—inscribed as a form of linguistic collage down the side of it's face: in 2,500 years we've come from Greek ocularcentrism to linguistic graffiti, a manipulation of appropriated signs which is both a target of and a weapon in the hands of a left-wing feminist. And by placing the language signs down the side of a traditional image of human consumption—women's hats— Kruger is signalling what she sees as the capitulation of the visual in the face of the linguistic.