Seeing as Practice (eBook)

Contents 6
Preface to the translated edition 2018 10
List of Figures 12
1 Introduction: Why Seeing is a Practice 13
1 Two Cases of Perceptual World Disclosure 15
2 The Performativity of Speech and Sight 19
3 The Double Sense of the Sense of Sight 22
4 The Iconicity of Visual Perception 23
5 Ethics and Aesthetics 25
References 28
2 Why Seeing is a Problem 29
1 Oculocentrism and Its Critics 30
1.1 Epistemology and Hermeneutics 32
1.2 The Idea of a Visual Deliverance 33
1.3 Aporias of Consciousness 35
1.4 Revenants from the History of Metaphysics 36
1.5 The Necessity of Mediation 37
1.6 Problems of Reference 38
1.7 Knowing, Believing, Concluding 41
1.8 Seeing Something, Seeing That, Seeing How 43
1.9 Conclusions 45
2 Other Approaches 46
2.1 Symbol Theory 47
2.2 Interpretation Theories 48
2.3 Narrative Theories 50
2.4 Visual Culture Studies 52
References 53
3 The Practice of Seeing 57
1 Shared Visibility 59
1.1 The Logic of Practice 59
1.2 The Field of Practice 60
2 Seeing as Doing 61
2.1 Syntactic Seeing How 63
2.2 Semantic Seeing As 64
2.3 Pragmatic and Practical Seeing 66
3 Worlds of Perception 67
3.1 Seeing as Means and Seeing as End in Everyday Life 71
3.2 Seeing as Means and Seeing as End in the Aesthetic 72
3.3 Seeing as Means and Seeing as End in the Ethical 73
4 Context and Situation 77
4.1 Neither Free Nor Arbitrary 78
5 Form of Life and World Image 80
5.1 Conditions of Possibility and Framing Factors 81
6 Acts and Actors 82
7 Medium and Mediality 84
7.1 Mediated Immediacy 85
References 86
4 The Performativity of Practice 89
1 Doing as Depicting 90
1.1 Space, Time and Perspective 92
1.2 The Corporeality and Affectivity of Seeing 94
1.3 Negativity and Blindness 96
2 The What and the How 98
2.1 The Fictional and Narrative Constitution of Reality 99
2.2 Style and (Re)Formulation 101
2.3 Iconic Seeing and Seeing Art 103
2.4 Shown Seeing 104
2.5 Ethos and Habitus 108
References 109
5 In Seeing Beyond Seeing 112
1 Sight and Insight—Seeing and Ways of Seeing 113
1.1 Wittgenstein’s Aspect-Seeing 114
1.2 Heidegger’s Interpretation 116
1.3 The Inevitability of Metaphor 118
2 The Visible and the Invisible 122
2.1 Dispositive Instead of Referential 122
2.2 Perception According to Merleau-Ponty 124
2.3 Figure and Ground 128
References 128
6 The Constructions of Imagination 131
1 The Powers of the Image 132
1.1 Spontaneity and Receptivity (Kant) 133
2 The Images of the Faculty 136
2.1 Iconic Consciousness (Fichte) 137
3 The Affective Force of Images 140
4 Corporeality and Iconicity 142
4.1 Perceptual Images 144
4.2 Image Without Model 145
5 Imaginary Seeing 146
5.1 The Case of Don Quixote 147
5.2 Images Hold Us Captive 149
References 150
7 Aesthetic and Ethical World Disclosure 153
1 Metaphorical Seeing 154
1.1 Transference and Bridging 154
1.2 Resemblance 156
2 Normative Seeing 158
2.1 Socialisation and Social Control 160
2.2 Esse Est Percipi 161
References 162
8 Seeing Each Other 164
1 Relations of Gazing 165
1.1 The Look and the Face 167
2 Sartre’s Notion of Visibility 168
2.1 Scopic Regimes 168
2.2 Acquiring and Losing Subjectivity 172
2.3 Master and Bondsman 173
3 Being Visible According to Lévinas 175
3.1 Face-to-Face and Alterity 175
3.2 Non-sensory Seeing 177
4 Re-visions 178
References 180
9 Seeing Art 182
1 The Art of Seeing Differently and Seeing Difference 183
1.1 Image and Gaze 184
2 Gary Hill: The Power of the Gaze 185
2.1 Rembrandt 1: The Status of the Image 187
2.2 Fictitious and Imagined Gazes 189
2.3 Rembrandt 2: Seeing Made Visible 192
3 Cézanne and Kentridge: Seeing-How and Seeing-As 193
3.1 Cézanne’s Face 195
3.2 Syntactic Seeing and the Non-Propositional 197
3.3 Abstraction and Concretion 198
3.4 Seeing as Transformation 199
3.5 How the Visible Becomes a Thing 199
3.6 Kentridge’s Media 201
3.7 Shadow Figures 204
3.8 Semantic Seeing and Sense Making 206
3.9 How the Visible Becomes an Image 207
3.10 Seeing as Presentation, Seeing as Performance 208
4 The Invisibilities of the Visible 209
References 211
Index 214