Seeing Perception

Seeing Perception

Edited by

Silke Horstkotte and Karin Leonhard

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Seeing Perception, Edited by Silke Horstkotte & Karin Leonhard

This book first published 2007 by
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright 2007 by Silke Horstkotte, Karin Leonhard and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-84718-374-3, ISBN (13): 9781847183743

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SILKE HORSTKOTTE AND KARIN LEONHARD

Introduction .............................................................................................. 1
I. Thinking Seeing
DIMITRI LIEBSCH
The Rhetoric of Seeing: Considering the Relationship
between Spectator and Object ................................................................ 24
EMANUEL ALLOA
The Madness of Sight............................................................................. 40
BIRGIT MERSMANN
Looking through Script: Roland Barthes Literal Ideographism ............ 60
II. Writing Seeing
GUSTAV FRANK
Layers of the Visual: Towards a Literary History of Visual Culture...... 76
MICHAL BEN-HORIN
Seeing the Voices, Hearing the Sights. Perceptual Distortions in Bll,
Bachmann and Celan .............................................................................. 98
JULIE LEBLANC
The Pictorial Signifying System of Hans Holbein the Youngers The
Ambassadors: Iconicity and Intertextuality in Blackout (Trou de
mmoire) by Hubert Aquin ......................................................................... 128
RENATE BROSCH
The Curious Eye of the Reader: Perspective as Interaction
with Narrative.................................................................................... ...143

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

TAMAR YACOBI
Intermedial Narrative: Ekphrasis and Perspectival Montage,
or Sorting out the Gaze of Narrative Agents ..................................... ...166
III. Picturing Seeing
ITAY SAPIR
The Visible, the Invisible, and the Knowable: Modernity
as an Obscure Tale............................................................................. ...198
RICCARDO MARCHI
Learning to Look at Kandinsky in Berlin, 1913 ................................ ...216
BARBARA LANGE
Following Humboldt? LAmrique disparue in Surrealist
Concepts of the Unconscious ............................................................ ...237
STEPHAN GNZEL
Seeing Perception in Video Games. Image Studies of First Person
Shooters ........................................................................................... ...255
IV. Watching Seeing
JOCELYN CAMMACK
Cinema, Illusionism and Imaginative Perception .............................. ...270
CHRISTINA LAMMER
Patient BodiesDifferent Modes of Perception
and the Fabrication of Moving Body Landscapes in Angiography
and Interventional Radiology ............................................................ ...292

INTRODUCTION: SEEING PERCEPTION

SILKE HORSTKOTTE
AND KARIN LEONHARD

What do we see when we see, how do we perceive vision itself, and

how do we speak and write about seeing and perception? Over the past
two decades, these and other questions concerning seeing and visual
perception have garnered increasing critical attention. With good reason,
the visual has come to feature in several different disciplines as well as in
inter- or transdisciplinary perspectivesas an object of collaboration
between disciplines, and as a new object which demands a new
disciplinary formation (such as visual studies or visual culture).
Vision can be, and has been, conceptualised as a philosophical category, as
cultural medium of expression, as instrument and technology of
visualisation and as a means of communication. Renouncing the
denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought (Jay 1993), a
series of pioneering studies from the 1980s and 90s such as Norman
Brysons monograph on the Logic of the Gaze (1983), Brennan and
Jays collection of essays on Vision in Context (1996), James Elkins
provocatively entitled study The Object Stares Back (1996), and Jonathan
Crarys books on vision and modernity (1990), and on attention (1999),
have contributed to highlight the centrality of visual perception in all areas
of Western culture.
Besides establishing the crucial cultural function of the observer for
the constitution of visual objects, and the situated social nature of
spectatorship, the study of visual perception also offers intriguing
possibilities for interdisciplinary connections between the cultural study of
vision, and research done on human perception in the sciences. As Lisa
Cartwright argues in Screening the Body, the invention and subsequent
proliferation of cinematic technology at the turn of the twentieth century
not only revolutionised the social relations of looking; the moving image
was also a crucial instrument in the emergence of a distinctly modernist
mode of representation in Western scientific and public culturea mode
geared to the temporal and spatial decomposition and reconfiguration of

HORSTKOTTE AND LEONHARD

bodies as dynamic fields of action in need of regulation and control.

(Cartwright 1995 ix) This means that the new cinematic mode of
representation simultaneously offered ways to regulate cultural, social, and
scientific aspects of vision. It follows that these aspects cannot be studied
in isolation from each other. Another groundbreaking researcher in the
interdisciplinary study of vision is Barbara Stafford. In her Body Criticism
(1991), Stafford referred to early nineteenth-century semiotic discussions
about imaging the body, based on the assumption that the body is a field of
signs, which came to the conclusion that pictorial strategies for
externalising the internal can be gained by abstracting from the individual.
The wish to render the invisible visible formed part of a rising interest
both in anthropology and in the scientific study of the human brain, and it
tackled fundamental questions concerning perception, sensation, emotion,
imagination and subjectivity. As soon as the problem of seeing the
invisible merged into the great field of neurobiology, new performing
technologies were developed which attempted to grasp, through
visualisation, something that is ultimately unpresentable and
unrepresentable. This is one reason why visual studies increasingly touch
on a cognitive history of images (Stafford 2007).
Despite such pioneering work on the cultural, social, and scientific
aspects of visual perception, however, many questions remain to be asked
(and answered!) concerning seeing and perception. Moreover, the multiple
and varied treatments these topics have received make it necessary to take
stock of the current state of debates surrounding seeing and perception,
and to inquire into their underlying bases. A questioning of the underlying,
often implicit theoretical and methodological assumptions on which the
study of visual perception is premised becomes all the more necessary
when we consider that the discussion of visual perception in the
humanities has been stagnating lately, with a majority of contributions
following a Foucauldian trajectory and stressing the constructed and
ideological nature of seeing. As Jonathan Crary puts it, vision ... is
embedded in a pattern of adaptability to new technological relations, social
configurations, and economic imperatives (1999: 13). In an essay about
Visual Essentialism, Mieke Bal has similarly argued that vision is always
implicated in a knot of power and knowledge, and that this contributes to
the difficulty of talking about seeing, as the knowledge which we draw
upon to describe sight is constituted in the same acts of looking that it
analyses or critiques (Bal 2003: 11). Seeing is therefore closely related to
matters of power, of sexuality (Rose), and to identity itself (Silverman).
However, James Elkins has pointed out that the close connection between
sight and sexuality, which surfaces in a voyeuristic vision but ultimately

INTRODUCTION

underlies all acts of vision, makes human sight very difficult to

controlwhether by the perceiving subject, or by the ideological and
technological relations in which that subject is implicated.
Vision, then, is irrational, inconsistent, and undependable. It is immensely
troubled, cousin to blindness and sexuality, and caught up in the threads of
the unconscious. Our eyes are not ours to command; they roam where they
will and then tell us they have only been where we have sent them. No
matter how hard we look, we see very little of what we look at. ... Seeing is
like hunting and like dreaming, and even like falling in love. It is entangled
in the passionsjealousy, violence, possessiveness; and it is soaked in
affectin pleasure and displeasure, and in pain. (Elkins 1996: 11)

Moreover, how we see something is always to some extent dependent

on the perceived object. For this reason, Elkins has somewhat
provocatively entitled his study The Object Stares Back, by which he
means that there exists a reciprocal and indeed dialogical relation between
spectator and object: Ultimately, seeing alters the thing that is seen and
transforms the seer. (Elkins 1996: 11f)
A tentative consensus between the divergent positions on sight in the
humanities may be formulated as follows: seeing is nothing natural; it is
rooted in cultural practices and codes as well as in sexuality, desire, and
the unconscious; it is predicated on culturally and historically specific
technologies; and it does not take place in isolation, either from other
subjects or from other (non-visual) senses. While a lot of effort has been
extended into exploring the culturally contingent conditions under which
vision takes place, however, less attention has been paid to our perception
of (visual) perception, and to its description. Despite Mieke Bals poignant
observation that we constitute sight in the very act of attempting to
theorize and critique itthat we are, in short, never out of the visual
fieldit thus remains to be seen how far the situated and subjective
aspects of vision also determine the scholarly perception of vision (and of
other sense perception). As implied by our title, Seeing Perception, this
volume attempts to take some steps towards what we might call a
participant observation of vision. It addresses the questions with which we
opened this introduction by inquiring into two relationships which we
believe are central to the task of conceptualising perception for a visual
culture: firstly, the relation between spectator and object, and second, on
the descriptive level, that between pictures and the words that fail them,
as another, rather appropriately titled study by James Elkins has it (Elkins
1998).

HORSTKOTTE AND LEONHARD

Concerning the first of these two fields of inquiry, the reciprocal

relationship between an image or other visual object and its spectators (an
important point which has come up time and again in recent discussions)
concerns the precise contribution of both parties in a given visual
interaction. The crucial question, then, is this: What specific role do both
partiesspectator and objectplay, and what are the limitations inherent
in each of the two positions? Which forms (e.g. time, space) and
frameworks are presupposed in a visual exchange, and which are
generated in the act of looking itself? Other questions which need to be
tackled concern the object of our vision: Does it ever exist, or are we
merely seeing our own projections? The latter is of particular importance
when looking at an object which we do not fully understanda process
which inevitably leads to misrepresentations. How much information,
then, do we need when we look at something? And what does it mean, in
general, to look at something utterly unfamiliar? Similar questions arise
regarding the perception of invisible objects with the help of microscopic
or digital technology, and also concerning our perception of invisibility
and of darkness as such. It is therefore not surprising that the question of
learning to see, and of painting in particular as a school of sight, keeps
recurring throughout the sections of this volume.
Not only does the role of the spectator in constituting what counts for a
visual object thus require clarification; the effects of the object on the
spectator, which need not be limited to the visual domain, are also in need
of more thorough theorising and systematic inquiry. We already cited
James Elkins The Object Stares Back, which implies that looking is not
just something I do, but also something which happens to me. The agency
of the object side, often neglected in older work, was already stressed by
David Freedberg in The Power of Images (1989), and raised again more
recently in W.J.T. Mitchells What Do Pictures Want (2005). If we thus
reconceptualise vision as an exchange between the subject and object of
perception, and accord equal importance, and what is more, agency, to
both parties, this has consequences for both sides. No longer is the
spectator supreme subject and master of that which s/he sees, nor is the
object a passive recipient of that gaze. Besides receiving crucial input from
the object side, the spectator is also always already influenced by the
vision of other subjects: We are ourselves in the field of vision. Lisa
Cartwright has therefore spoken of the position of a moral spectator as
an intersubjective space in which what is being perceived is held between
subjects (Cartwright 2004, 2005).
Conceptualising the relation of spectator and object thus raises
questions of identity and alterity, self and other, as well as inquiring into

INTRODUCTION

the specific nature of seeing and looking. Formulations such as the gaze,
Lacanian (Silverman 1996) or not (Bryson 1983, 1988), fixate that relation
by describing looking as a voyeuristic desire which forcefully moves
towards the image and only partially replaces a desired touch with looking.
Brysons glance, on the other hand, describes a respectful and selfreflexive way of looking and thus keeps the relation of spectator and
object in an unfixable motion. Going one step further, theorists such as
George Didi-Huberman (1992), James Elkins (1996) and W.J.T. Mitchell
(2005) have furnished the image with its own set of eyes when they imply
that images can be organisms with their own peculiar life and an at times
threatening activity. Gottfried Boehms recent postulate of a new
definition of the image no longer orients itself towards a frame, limiting
part or detail, but rather centres on the intentional focus which the
spectator directs at an imaging field (2005, 1985). Consequently, images,
with their ordered visuality, can seem to be alive or even look back at
the spectator.
Not the image as visible object, then, but the visual perception framing
and surrounding it with its restless motion and performance constitutes the
focal point of this volume. Moreover, we do not limit our inquiry to the
area of (Western) high art, but include images that are not art as well as
visual objects taken from everyday life and from the sciences.
Furthermore, we contend that visual perception need not be limited to the
realm of optics and to optical media; it also determines processes of
reading and constructions of time and space, as well as bodily experience
and processes of cognition. Scholars such as Mieke Bal have stressed
visions inevitable proximity to other sense perceptions, concluding that
vision is itself inherently synaesthetic (Bal 2003: 9). This harks back to
positions first formulated in the 1920s and 30s, when Walter Benjamin
wrote about the Zerstreuung or dispersion experienced by early
visitors to the cinema as a haptic dimension of filmic perception
(Benjamin 1969). This tactile perception is, of course, akin to the aesthetic
contemplation of the bourgeois subject (re Kant), but at the same time,
points to the fact that visual culture is always a hybrid with other senses.
One of the most promising recent trends in visual culture studies therefore
concerns the rediscovery of contributions from the 1920s and 30s, such as
the early film theories of Rudolf Arnheim (2002) and Bla Balzs (2001),
which discussed the reception of visual, especially filmic images in great
detail. Indeed, Balzs seems to have been the first critic to have introduced
the term visual culture, which has become one of the staples of the
discussion (Balzs 2001: 16).

HORSTKOTTE AND LEONHARD

The impurity of the visual, and the contextuality of all acts of looking,
constitutes a common thread running through the articles collected in this
volume. The ways in which images are perceived in Western culture are
inextricably linked with verbal and textual structures and ways of thinking.
If words can cite, but never sight, as W.J.T. Mitchell (1994) has it,
how can the verbal paradigm deal adequately with matters of vision and
perception? Conversely, the visuality of language and text, and the
rhetoric of the visual (Hill and Helmers 2004), also deserve further
critical attention. This means that the visibility of an object needs to be
referenced to its readability, as well as to the pragmatics of its use. Of
course, it is well known that images can not only be looked at or
perceived, but also touched, used, painted over or destroyed (cf.
Freedberg). This line of research has received increasing attention through
the study of new media and media art, of computer games and every kind
of interactive image use. Such a pragmatics of the image is concerned with
images as objects, as well as images as action, event or experience, as
creation, configuration or as a deconstruction of identity (and of alterity).
At the same time, this approach stresses that logical differentiations
between image and medium rely on a concept of perception which
includes imagination, memory, and other practices of image production in
which all meaning-making processes relating to images are based.
However, the contributions in this volume are less concerned with the
practical, political implications of a visual culture which formed the
backbone of visual studies research a few years ago (Mirzoeff 1999;
Sturken and Cartwright 2001), and more with an adequate understanding
of the various concepts and operations at work in theories of visual
perception, of seeing, the gaze, and of focalisation. The concept of
focalisation, drawn from narratological theory (Genette 1980), is one of
the key issues in theories geared towards a transmedial narratology in the
sense of a set of universal, media-independent tools of interpretation.
Through its basis in the notion of perspective, focalisation is associated
with matters of vision; it has therefore been proposed as a concept
bridging textuality and visuality (Bal 1997), and has been tentatively used
as a tool for analyzing visual artefacts (Yacobi 2002) as well as ones that
combine the visual and the verbal (Horstkotte 2005). However, it remains
to be seen in how far focalisation can serve to grasp the inherent
problematic of seeing and the visual, or if it remains a metaphor for more
traditional (or simple technical) concepts such as perspective. In particular,
concepts of a visual focalisation will have to explain how different
narrative agents (author, narrator, focaliser) can be separated if we move
from the textual to the iconic paradigm. The distinction between focaliser

INTRODUCTION

and narrator is crucial in narrative; in visual art, however, it is not always

possible to clearly discriminate between a narrative agent and the
represented perspective. How, then, can we move beyond the constrictions
inherent in an overtly technical concept of perspective, and how can
narratological categories such as focalisation help us in analysing modes
of perception both within the image and circulating around it?
These questions lead us back to the title of our book, derived from an
international conference on Seeing Perception which took place in
Leipzig in November 2006. In fact, the highly formal titlereferring to
vision as being both fleeting and framingserved a special purpose. For
us, it seemed important to bend these two modes of vision back into a loop
and let them run together. We were interested in observing the constitution
of perception itself, be it of a visual field or visible objects, but also of
images which emerge in the mind, e.g. that of the reader in the act of
reading. The mutual permeability of the seer and the seen was the main
issue of that conference, reflecting on the reciprocal relationship between
the visuality of objects and the very act of looking, which could be
understood not only as a sensual experience but also as a practice: an
intellectual performance and interpretation. But if there exists this
inseparable bond between object and spectator, how can we distance
ourselves from the act of looking and show seeing, how is it possible to
talk and write about seeing perception?
As we pointed out above, critics of visual culture and visual studies
have often and rightfully claimed that the act of looking is profoundly
impure. Seeing very much entails other modes of sense-based perception
such as listening, touching, feeling, tasting or smelling. Various modes of
seeing can moreover be observed within literary texts or in music, dreams,
memory or all kinds of bodily experiences like dance, pain, sexuality etc.,
so that there cannot be any such thing as a clearly defined realm called
visuality. When talking about visual perception, then, we are soon
restricted by certain methodological limitations. How, for example, can we
verbalise the discontinuities and unpredictabilities of visual
experienceand what tools have we got to analyse the complex shades of
perceptual awareness? Will we be able to find the right mixture of
approaches (Elkins 2003) to concentrate on technical details of some
scientific image and thenshifting between different levels of attentions,
changing ones mode of perceptionrelax into the capacious and
unfocussed frame of mind again?
Within twentieth century thought, there have been two broad
theoretical pathways for dealing with vision and visuality. These are
closely linked to the opposition between two disciplinary watersheds in the

HORSTKOTTE AND LEONHARD

history of the humanities which have become known as the linguistic

(Rorty 1967) and iconic or pictorial turns (Boehm 1994, Mitchell
1994). Phenomenology, the first of these pathways, stresses the subjective
experience and the role of sensation in perception, an approach which
could lead either to solipsism, or to an empathetic worldview. The
linguistic or semiotic approach, on the other hand, turns towards a socially
constructed environment which can only be understood through cultural
analysis, an approach which sometimes comes dangerously close to
turning visuality into verbality. Both methodologies therefore carry their
ideological weight while simultaneously providing us with an important
analytical framework. Moreover, both must deny the possibility of a
natural attitude towards the world, but with different consequences.
Because of their highly formalised attitude towards reading and other
forms of cultural perception, semiotic approaches tend to build up a
distance between the observer and the field of material objects, but also
within the beholder herselfa sort of gap which opens up because we
have to learn about our own historicity and social anchoring.
Phenomenology, in the other hand, also works against the idea of a natural
attitude, but simultaneously emphasises that perception and visual
experience always involve more than a mere reading or decoding of signs.
For phenomenological approaches, the knowledge of a world of shared
language and shared meanings provokes the spectator into bridging the
gap between him- or herself and the object world by becoming more fully
involved in the process of constituting a visual environment. In both cases,
it is the dynamics of intersubjective life which pushes our perceptions into
future activities and tightens the knot of affect and cognition (Bal 2003:
11). Such a rhythmically driven dialectical field, created by actions and
counteractions of observation and absorption, then frames the unstable
process that we have, in a most provisional term, called Seeing
Perception.
What, then, could a methodology of Seeing Perception entail? The
challenge to know how to see things, how much attention to pay,
whether to look in sequence or randomly, whether to look close up or just
take it all in at once, whether to linger or move quickly, is certainly part
of the answer (Elkins 2003: 195). Once again, however, this raises the
problem of visual literacy: the question how far visuality actually reaches,
and where it ends, if we continue to believe that vision is always impure
and that all media are mixed media (Mitchell 1994: 5). How, then, can
we talk about the specificity of visual images without falling into the trap
of visual essentialism (Bal 2003)? How do we gain visual knowledge

INTRODUCTION

and come to imaginatively possess all that cannot be consumed, or

subsumed, by wordsall that is irrational, and unpredictable, about sight?
In order to sketch out some possible answers, we have chosen to
include in this introduction a discussion of a well-known example of a
medial experiment floating between images and words: Alain Resnais
film Last Year at Marienbad from 1961. Much has been said and written
about this film, which was planned and worked out in cooperation with
Alain Robbe-Grillet, who was responsible for the textual frame of this
severe and utterly modernistic aesthetic experiment (cf., e.g., Binczek
2002; Leutrat 2000; Sweet 1981, Beltzer 2000). It has been a regular
object of scholarly inquiry and is often used as a classroom example
because of its structural complexity. But what happens when we confront
this film with the private and subjective eye of one specific spectator?
How can we put different modes of explanationformal, iconographic,
sociological, or autobiographicaltogether and blend them into new
forms of writing about vision and visuality? Seeing Perception has to
open towards such a mixture of approaches in order to disentangle its
seemingly inextricable knot of affect and cognition.
The reading we give of Last Year at Marienbad is based on a
subjective viewing experienced by of one of us, Karin. As Roland Barthes
famously argued in Camera Lucida (1981), the act of looking at an image
activates different kinds of responses from the spectator, which Barthes
called the images punctum, and its studium. Barthes explicitly spoke
about photographic images, but as our example below shows, similar
processes also operate when looking at filmic images. A photographs
studium refers to the activation of objective cultural knowledge in the
viewer. This might consist of recognising a photos setting, of dating the
fashion worn by the people in the photograph, or of looking for contextual
information about an image, for instance in the shape of a caption or some
form of ekphrasis. In brief, studium is any form of knowledge which
would be available to multiple viewers of the same image. A photos
punctum, conversely, constitutes a much more subjective, individual
connection between the image and its spectator. Barthes describes the
punctum as a detail which jumps out at the spectator because it offers a
connection which is not based in cultural knowledge, but in memory and
in affection. This means that an images punctum will be different for
every spectator, and will be difficult to convey intersubjectively, and
through language. Indeed, Barthes scholars have remarked that the author
himself never quite manages to explain what precisely it is in the images
reproduced in Camera Lucida that jumps out at or wounds him (cf., e.g.,
Attridge 1997: 79).

10

HORSTKOTTE AND LEONHARD

With these reservations in mind, let us now enter Marienbads maze

and follow some of its possible ways. In Karins words: The path we
choose is determined by a punctum which jumped out at me, a nearly
forgotten mental image of mine, a memory of my childhood, which was
suddenly almost painfully activated when watching Resnais Marienbad.
To understand this particular interaction between an image and its
spectator, we first need to take a short look at the plot of Last Year at
Marienbad. The film is supposedly set in a baroque hotel, which, however,
looks more like a baroque palacea Schloss. In any case, this building
exhibits a well-constructed, even rational labyrinth of stairs and corridors
and rooms with doors and windows and mirrors framing, reflecting,
dividing and multiplying the interior, so that it becomes a hermetically
sealed world which soon appears quite surreal. The characters are
nameless and locked in a world of their own, moving around like
somnambulists. At this baroque resort, an unnamed man tries to convince
an unnamed beautiful woman that they had had an ardent love affair the
previous year and arranged to meet at the hotel again, where she would
then agree to leave her husband. The woman does not remember this affair
at all, but what the man tells her has the power to create a past for her and
to blend it into her present. By creating a desire for the mans story and for
his perception, all characters in the film become caught up in a loop of
disjointed time. The woman and her husband are cycling endlessly in a
film which never ends. The stranger offers her a way to freedom. Although
he himself also seems to be caught in the other characters world at first,
he may also be able to alter this world through the power of his
suggestions (Beltzer 2000).
This hermetic circle of personal relations within the film was the
reason why the moment when the film hit me (that is: when it reached my
own present), came unprepared. The couple are resting on a bench. The
man is trying to convince the woman that he met her exactly one year ago,
that he loved her and was loved by her. He also tells her that he had then
taken a photograph of her, and suddenly she seems to
rememberalthough she is not sure about the truth of her memory. An
image comes to her mind, maybe because it was hidden there, but possibly
also because the man created it in this very moment. So does she
remember things because she wants them to be part of her life and part of
her past (and therefore with the ability to change her future), or because
the man simply succeeds in creating them? The moment the woman tries
to perceive the past in his way; his images start to flood her memory,
which is possibly not her memory any more.

INTRODUCTION

11

Fig. 1: Resnais, Robbe-Grillet: Last year at Marienbad, 1961.

The couples conversation in the park struck me, not only because of the
dialogue, but because I recognised the bench. It was the very bench I
climbed on when I was a child. I had lived near this baroque castle and
used to visit the park, both laid out and built at the end of the seventeenth
century after the Bavarian Duke Max Emanuel had successfully taken side
against the Turkish troops invading Vienna. Other scenes in Resnais film
show features of its great hall and staircase, some of them show its
impressive, formal garden faade. Again, other parts were filmed at a
nearby Schloss in Munich, especially in the so-called Amalienburg, a
small hunting lodge which is situated in the parka masterpiece of the
Frenchman Franois Cuvillis. When I watched Resnais film for the first
time, I didnt know about the setting and therefore was struck visually, by
simply recognising the places. Although I knew them by heart, they
seemed not to be real, even surreal. And as the buildings and parks were
only shown in bits and pieces, slowly, step by step, intermingled with
other settings, the result was an increasing and confused awareness of
familiarity, which ended with the Proustian moment of recognition, or
Barthian punctumthat is, when I saw the bench. In this moment, the
whole film had become different.

12

HORSTKOTTE AND LEONHARD

Fig. 2: Schlosspark Schleissheim, 2007.

The plot of Resnaiss film turns on the power of the imagination and the
fragile nature of memory. Regarding its visual presentation, the film is
famous for its formal purism, showing a solipsistic labyrinth of mirrored
rooms and corridors leading to the same rooms again, with no
breakthrough to an outer reality. This fits well with the filmmakers stress
on their works aesthetic autonomyfor example no credit is given, either
in the film or the published screenplay, that it is based on a prior text. But
recent research by Thomas Beltzer has shown that there is actually a
reference text behind the film: The Invention of Morel, a novella written
twenty-one years earlier by Adolfo Bioy Casares, an Argentinian writer
who, like his more famous friend Jorge Luis Borges, worked in what we
may broadly call the fantastic genre (Bioy Casares 2003). According to
Beltzers description of the novella,
[this] Argentinean masterpiece is about a fugitive, Morel, hiding out alone
on a deserted island, who one day awakens to discover that the island is
filled with anachronistically dressed people who dance, stroll up and
down, and swim in the pool, as if this were a summer resort like
Marienbad. (Beltzer 2000)

INTRODUCTION

13

The Invention of Morel is a cruelly Kafkaesque narrative, dealing with

the diabolical invention of a holographic recording device which captures
all of the senses in three dimensions, but at the same time destroys its
subject in the recording process, slowly rotting the skin and flesh off its
bones. The novella therefore becomes a parable for the relationship
between nature and the image, or between sensations or thoughts and the
possibility of preserving them in ones memory. A second novella by
Casares, A Plan for Escape, also bears an interesting affinity to the plot of
Last Year at Marienbad. Both of these novellas belong to the science
fiction and/or horror genres.
The film script of Last Year at Marienbad thus emerges as an
intertextual piece of writing, but the allusions to Bioy Casares remain
unmarked. Instead of acknowledging the scripts reliance on these earlier
texts, the filmmakers have chosen to disassociate their work from its
sources in the science fiction genre, and to handle it as a purely formal
work. Indeed, the formal peculiarities in the films visual presentation
seem to take priority over the plot, so that the film can be seen as a
meditation on the relationship between art and nature. It therefore makes a
huge difference whether we watch the film with Bioy Casares The
Invention of Morel in mind, or whether we fail to notice the films
intertextuality. When seen without reference to the Argentinian novella,
Marienbad is mostly an exercise in formalism; however, seen in light of
the intertextual juxtaposition, the film turns into quite another, different
work, as becomes obvious in the film reading proposed by Beltzer. With
reference to the holographic recording device described in The Invention
of Morel, Beltzer suggests that the unnamed characters in Marienbad
might also be seen as holographs who are, however, caught in their own
world and unaware of their ephemeral status, with only the stranger having
achieved at least some self-awareness of what they all are. The
holographic imagery of the film echoes places and people who move like
shadows through the baroque garden, repeating its geometrical structure.
But while the narration and flow of images are bent back into a formal
loop or circle, its autonomy and perfect form are challenged and
contradicted by the discursive references to an outside worldthat is, the
Casares novel, the real places, a simple memory of a bench.
Of course, scholars of intertextuality have long suggested that
intertextuality is an activity which is primarily based on the side of the
recipient, rather than being an effect achieved by the author, as was
believed in older scholarship (cf. Frey 1990, Holthuis 1993, SchulteMiddelich 1985). That such an entanglement between a cultural object and
its recipient also operates in acts of a visual appropriation will be shown in

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HORSTKOTTE AND LEONHARD

the articles collected in this volume. They do so by relying on a mixture of

approaches ranging from philosophical theories about the dialectics of
cognition and perception, to discourses on the visual, visual semiotics, and
the narratological theory of focalisation. This eclectic mix of disciplines
and methodologies is motivated by the common conviction that the study
of seeing and perception can only talk about processes which cannot be
predicted, and that we thus need to activate divergent ways of seeing
developed, for instance, both in visual semiotics and phenomenology
(rather than taking sides with one school of thought and against the other;
cf. Frank 2006). Instead of favouring one particular school of thought, this
volume approaches the thorny field of seeing perception in four different
ways: through thinking seeing, writing seeing, picturing seeing and
watching seeing.
In the order in which they appear in this volume, the articles in Section
One, Thinking Seeing, pursue a systematic inquiry into the tangled
relations of spectator and object and of seeing, speaking, reading and
writing, by engaging with a number of positions from within Western
philosophy. In the opening article to the collection, DIMITRI LIEBSCH
shows several points of departure from a naive logic of vision. The
naive logic conceives of the subject and object of seeing as the two
distinctive positions of a binary opposition, and describes the act of vision
itself as a distanced and methodical activity which represents the object
world as it supposedly really is. Engaging Maurice Merleau-Pontys
critique of this naive logic, Liebsch describes a series of unexpected looks
which cannot be adequately accommodated within it. These deviations are
classified in terms of a rhetoric of seeing. Thus, Liebsch identifies a
chiasm of self and other in the act of seeing; a synaesthetic vision which is
crossed with other sense impressions; a metonymy of vision, referring to
the fact that seeing never takes place in isolation, but always engages a
range of contexts; an allegorical vision which makes visible, e.g. through
the use of microscopic or digital technology, that which is normally
invisible to the human eye; and in inverted vision which locates activity
with the object of vision, while the subject remains passive.
EMANUEL ALLOA extends the engagement with Merleau-Ponty by
taking up the French philosophers suggestion that vision is characterised
by an ecstatic structure of madness which, indeed, underlies all forms of
bodily perception: Every vision is madness, insofar as every vision is
possession. Merleau-Ponty associated this madness of vision primarily
with the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, and Alloa shows through a detailed
analysis of Vermeers painting The Music Lesson that the madness of
vision operates through a chiasm of the viewer and the visible: while the

INTRODUCTION

15

viewer may visually possess the perceived object, beyond distance, the act
of vision also implies that the viewer him- or herself belong to the order of
the visible and is thus exposed to the possibility of being held by that
which s/he beholds. Ultimately, this means that the beholder is
permanently displaced, thereby implying an anthropology of eccentricity.
The relationship between the visible, the readable and the writeable lies
at the heart of BIRGIT MERSMANNs inquiry into the visibility of writing.
Most of our readers will be familiar with W.J.T. Mitchells dictum, in
Picture Theory, that all media are mixed media and that all
representations are heterogeneous (1994: 5), meaning that visuality and
verbality are intrinsic to each other and thus no easy or straightforward
separation between images and words is possible. However, Mersmann
points out that more than twenty years before Mitchell and Boehm
proclaimed a pictorial or iconic turn, a visuo-perceptive linguistic shift
occurred in the writings of French philosophers, especially Roland Barthes
and Jacques Derrida, when these writers turned away from phonism
towards graphism and used ideographic writing systems in particular like
Japanese, Chinese, or Egyptian hieroglyphs, which are composed of
characters instead of letters, as a source of inspiration.
Besides offering productive insights into the visibility of script, an
aspect which often receives too little attention in theories of intermediality,
Mersmanns contribution serves as a point of linkage between the first and
second sections of this volume. For in Section two: Writing Seeing, we
turn our attention towards the various and tangled issues raised by the
dominance of the verbal medium when dealing with matters of visionbe
it in theoretical enquiries or in literary fiction. As GUSTAV FRANK points
out, literature and other verbal media (for instance, newspaper journalism
and popular magazines) deal with all sorts of questions concerning
perception in general, seeing pictures in particular, and image making. He
thus conceives of visual culture studies as a licence for literary studies to
renew itself by reposing questions which have not yet been successfully
answered, for instance concerning the stages of a professionalisation of
authorship and the mediality of texts, i.e. the relevance of journals and
papers that enable the development of careers as well as of genres and
subgenres in the course of the nineteenth century. Through readings of
texts by canonical German authors of this period, such as E.T.A.
Hoffmann, Adalbert Stifter and (in the early twentieth century) Robert
Musil, Frank points out that these texts are constituted out of layers of the
visual, and need to be analysed accordingly.
Referring to three German authors from the second half of the
twentieth centuryHeinrich Bll, Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul

16

HORSTKOTTE AND LEONHARD

CelanMICHAL BEN-HORIN tackles another crucial moment in the literary

history of ekphrastic description. She shows how these three authors all
attempted to come to terms with the horrific experience of World War II
and the Shoah by exploiting a rather unusual poetic device, that of
synaesthetic or perceptual distortion, thus enabling a poetics which does
not permit any harmonic or automatic correspondence between the sensory
channels and the stimuli of reality. Hence, Ben-Horins analysis shows
once again that visual perception need not necessarily be limited to the
realm of optics and optical media, but also to processes of reading and
cognition on the one hand, and textual constructions of time and space, on
the other.
The close reading of one specific example of literary ekphrasis
constitutes the focus of JULIE LEBLANCs article. Blackout (Trou de
mmoire), a postmodernist novel by the Canadian writer Hubert Aquin, is
centrally concerned with actualising, reproducing, and simulating a pictorial
signHans Holbein the Youngers famous painting The Ambassadors
through an act of language. The painting, which is not visually represented in
the novel, is evoked only through forms of verbal description, especially,
LeBlanc concludes, through the figure of the hypotypose, a form of
description so vivid and energetic that it puts the described object (here: the
painting) in front of the readers eyes, thereby achieving the transformation
from a description into a tableau. The description itself acts as a sort of verbal
doublet of the painting which is, moreover, informed by its intertextual
reference to an earlier description of The Ambassadors in an art historical
textbook. Thus, the textual description simultaneously functions as an
intertextual device of self-referentiality and specularity which crucially
implies the reader in its visual re-constitution.
Like Frank and LeBlanc, RENATE BROSCH is concerned with the
change in ways of reading and visualising literary texts necessitated by the
changing discourses on visuality, the dominance of images and the visual
media both within visual culture studies and in other, neighbouring
humanities disciplines as well as in interdisciplinary research. Her
contribution to this collection identifies visual images created in the mind
of the reader in the act of reading, through a process of visualisation, and
discusses the concepts of perspective and focalisation, drawn from
narratological theory, as salient features on which this visualisation
depends. Thus, where LeBlancs article is preoccupied with the descriptive
features of the text, Brosch focuses on the readers ongoing construction of
a fictional world through a dynamic process of hypothesis building, which
constantly visualises mental images although these never become
concrete, as in a film, but remain transient and evanescent. This transience

INTRODUCTION

17

of mental images, which always remain potentially adaptable and

emendable to new knowledge presented by the narrative, is a crucial
difference to actual visual perception, yet cannot be discussed in isolation
from seeing and perception.
In the concluding article to this section, TAMAR YACOBI reposes the
question: who sees in any act of vision?, in terms of the narrative agents
involved in the rendering of a literary fiction. As is well known,
narratological theory offers a number of concepts for processes of
perspective building in narrative fiction, including point of view,
perspective, focalisation and so on, all of which are functionally distinct
from the narrator of a story, although narration and focalisation can, of
course, coincide in one person. Yacobi proposes a way around these
muddled and frequently unhelpful distinctions by distinguishing, not
between narrator and focaliser, but between different degrees of
(un)selfconsciousness in the act of describing literary characters visual
impressionsor more specifically, characters viewings of paintings taken
from the domain of High Art. Discussing a number of such ekphrases,
Yacobi concludes that ekphrasis need not be limited to scenes or contexts
of actual art-viewing, it may just as well arise from the narrators
articulated or the reflectors private (hence doubly interiorised) memories,
associations, or unconscious. Perception, therefore, need not be accurate;
indeed, misper-ceptions abound in ekphrasis, which means that the
readers position regarding the characters perceptions also varies.
Our next section, Picturing Seeing deals with the difficulties that
accompany depicting different ways of seeing within visual media.
Hence, a special interest of the authors lies in pictures that present
perception and externalise the act of looking, thereby making vision itself
visible, and analysable. Turning away from the ocularcentristic models of
modernity, ITAY SAPIR argues that painting not only deals with what can
be seen, but also with the unseen and invisible. His descriptions of early
modern paintings concentrate on the dark side of visionblindness,
shadows, black spaces, and, in doing so, enable these blanks to tell an
obscure tale, an alternative story placed against the background of an
increasingly self-aware image-production in early modern Europe. Sapir
refers to the phenomenological tradition and to Lacanian theories of the
unconscious to demonstrate how the invisible always already lodges
within the visible itself, how perception itself is provoked by the insoluble
dialectical dilemma between seeing and knowing.
Another phenomenological approach towards art history is proposed in
RICCARDO MARCHIS article on Learning to look at Kandinsky, in which
he refers to an historic event, the Berlin First German Autumn Salon of

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HORSTKOTTE AND LEONHARD

1913. Marchi diligently reconstructs a debate about early non-objective

painting and the difficulty of the critics to see anything in them. This
reconstruction leads him to a reflection on the relationship between
visuality and verbality, because, as one critic wrote, it is impossible to
describe in words the style of this art. However, the critics loss of words
stimulated new reflections on vision, as is shown in a contemporary
reference to Bergsons theory of intuition: Kandinsky then shows us vision
as an event, not as an object of artistic creation.
Other possible ways of tackling the invisible are developed in
BARBARA LANGES article on Surrealist Concepts of the Unconscious in
the 1920s and 30s. The emphasis now lies on the relation between the use
of material and its sensual effect, but the question remains the samehow
to develop visual strategies to encounter otherness or the unknown.
Lange argues that these strategies, which she discusses in the context of
recalling the relics of Pre-Columbian material culture, remain highly
artificial, because they are supported by contemporary popular images of
the unconscious. Comparing Batailles concept of base material and
Max Ernsts techniques of frottage and grattage, she claims a
difference between two usages: archaic material can either be used to
deconstruct form or as a tool to evoke images which belong to a wellknown cultural memory. Lange also discusses how the imagery of
disappeared cruel cultures, in return, served as a substitute for the
surrealists experiences from World War I.
The surrealists keen interest in sensation and the unconscious initiated
new pictorial strategies for externalising the internal. But can perception
itself be perceived at all? To discuss this question, STEPHAN GNZEL looks
at pictures which present a perception that is external to the mind, that is,
the structure of possible visual experiences. In analysing the use of
perspective in video games, especially in so-called first person shooter
games (FPS), he reflects upon images in which the first person perspective
is used and which are manipulated by the user and not only by the
producer. However, his interest in the pragmatics of the image is
combined with a formalistic approach, because FPS games have to employ
the pictorial style of realism to enable the identification between seer and
seen. Within computer game designs of the last years, Gnzel therefore
observes a recurrence of the main stylistic features of modern art history,
from Renaissance central perspective to Surrealisms uncanny and highly
artificial pictorial spaces.
Section four: Watching Seeing concentrates on the use and significance
of scientific images, drawing together cultural, material, and biological
analyses of thought, cognition and emotion. Trained as a professional

INTRODUCTION

19

filmmaker, JOCELYN CAMMACK currently works on the cinematic

exploitation of perceptual error, for which she is also co-supervised by the
Department of Visual Neuroscience at Imperial College, London. In her
paper on Cinema, Illusionism and Imagination she presents current
investigations into the perception of ambiguous images and provides the
basis for further dialogue within the emerging field of neuroaesthetics. The
increasing desire of filmmakers to uncouple the mechanisms of seeing and
thinking by destabilising the secure object-spectator relationship
encourages reflections on the specific capacity for realism and illusionism
of moving images.
Another way of watching seeing is provided by CHRISTINA LAMMER,
whose current research on empathy and somatic perception in the
biomedical context let her ponder the importance of the arts and
humanities and the role they play in understanding science, cognition, and
images themselves. In her essay on Patient Bodies she explores different
modes of perception in the clinical context of a university hospital and
shows how bodies, including those of patients and her own, are being
fabricated in diagnostic and operating theatres of the clinic. The visualised
human body, then, can be regarded not simply as a product of medical
operations, but as constitutive of such operations and cognitive processes.
Due to her interest in how identities are being transformed by the process
of image production Lammer rethinks questions about Seeing
Perception which have been crucial throughout this volume.

Table of Illustrations
Fig. 1: Resnais, Robbe-Grillet: Last Year at Marienbad, 1961. Cropped
film still.
Fig. 2: Schlosspark Schleissheim, 2007. Photo: Karin Leonhard

Works Cited
Arnheim, Rudolf (2002). Film als Kunst (orig. pub. 1932). Frankfurt a.
M.: Suhrkamp.
Attridge, Derek (1997). Roland Barthess Obtuse, Sharp Meaning and the
Responsibilities of Commentary. In Writing the Image After Roland
Barthes, ed. Jean-Michel Rabat. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 77-89.
Bal, Mieke (1997). Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative.
2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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HORSTKOTTE AND LEONHARD

. (2003). Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture.

Journal of Visual Culture 2(1), 5-32.
Balzs, Bla (2001). Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films
(orig. pub. 1924). Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Barthes, Roland (1981). Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography.
New York: Hill and Wang.
Beltzer, Thomas (2000). Last Year at Marienbad: An Intertextual
Meditiation. In Senses of Cinema (October 2000),
<http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/10/marienbad.html>
Benjamin, Walter (1969). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction (orig. pub. 1936). In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt.
New York: Schocken Books.
Binczek, Natalie (2002). Zur Funktion des Ornaments in Luhmanns
Kunst-Buch: mit einem Supplement zum Bild des Ornaments in
Lanne dernire Marienbad. In sthetische Postionen nach
Adorno, ed. Gregor Schwering. Munich: Fink, 103-122.
Bioy Casares, Adolfo (2003). The Invention of Morel (New York Review
Books classics). New York: New York Review Books.
Boehm, Gottfried (1985). Bildnis und Individuum: ber den Ursprung der
Portrtmalerei in der italienischen Renaissance. Munich: Prestel.
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Boehm. Munich: Fink, 11-38.
. (2005). Vor Augen stellen. Zum lebendigen Bild, paper presented
at the conference Evidentia. Reichweiten visueller Wahrnehmung in
der Frhen Neuzeit. Munich.
Brennan, Teresa, and Martin Jay (eds.) (1996). Vision in Context:
Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight. New York:
Routledge.
Bryson, Norman (1983). Vision and Painting. The Logic of the Gaze.
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. (1988). The Gaze in the Expanded Field. In Vision and Visuality, ed.
H. Forster. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 87-114.
Cartwright, Lisa (1995). Screening the Body: Tracing Medicines Visual
Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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. (2005). Spectatorship and Pity: Representations of the Global Social
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INTRODUCTION

21

Crary, Jonathan (1990). Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and

Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. (1999). Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern
Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Didi-Huberman, Georges (1992). Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous
regarde. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
Elkins, James (1994). The Poetics of Perspective. Ithaca, London: Cornell
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. (1996). The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. San Diego,
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. (1998). On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them. Cambridge:
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. (2003): Visual Studies. A Skeptical Introduction. New York, London:
Routledge.
Frank, Gustav (2006). Textparadigma kontra visueller Imperativ: 20
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Literaturwissenschaft. In Internationales Archiv fr Sozialgeschichte
der Literatur 31 (2): 26-89.
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Jay, Martin (1993). Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
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. 2005. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images.

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New York: Rodopi, 189-202.

I. Thinking Seeing

THE RHETORIC OF SEEING:

CONSIDERING THE RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN SPECTATOR AND OBJECT
DIMITRI LIEBSCH

Un milln de estrellas son

dos ojos que las miran.
(Antonio Porchia)

Both the development of visual culture and the proclamations of the

pictorial turn have confirmed the suspicion that the relationship between
spectator and object is more than a duality consisting of two simply
isolatable parts. I will therefore discuss this more complex relationship,
and supplement the still widespread, naive logic of seeing by a rhetoric of
seeing.
When I began working on the concept for this article, an admittedly
perplexing anecdote came to my mind right away and repeatedly. In his
Parisian seminars on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
in 1964, Jacques Lacan presented a recollection from his young adulthood.
At that time Lacan was looking for an activity that contrasted with his
intellectual one. He therefore liked to be outdoors and even worked as a
fisherman on the coast of Brittany at one point. One day, the following
happened to him there: He was waiting to pull in the nets when he saw a
sardine can glistening in the sun. One of the fishermencalled PetitJean by Lacanpoints to the can and says: You see that can? Do you
see it? Well, it doesnt see you. (Lacan 1973: 89) Petit-Jean finds this
extremely amusing, very much in contrast to Lacan. This contrast in
estimation is due to the fact that Lacan is by no means of the opinion that
the can doesnt see him. On the contrary: He thinks, as the French original
says, elle me regarde (ibid.). I find this anecdote rather revealing for two
reasons. On the one hand, it is obviously a recollection concerning the
young adulthood of a psychoanalyst, in whichbesides Lacans own
Egonames from Sigmund Freuds case studies recur. Petit-Jean of
course alludes to the notorious medical history of little Hans, who