Thursday, February 10, 2011

Elkins - The Object Stares Back (1996)

That The Object Stares Back is only part of the picture; in fact, it's the same name as one of the six chapters in Elkins's 1996 meditation on seeing. The objects that stare back include everything from stars, moth wings, radar imagery, and insects ill-fitted to our schema for recognizing them. These objects are, although named differently, more like quasi-objects because when they stare back, they implicate us in a "tangled web of seeing" that challenges whether the human observer is an "autonomous, independent, stable self" (74). Elkins goes on, "This is the kind of idea that is popular in academia because it is so exhilaratingly radical—but at the same time it is almost entirely unbelievable, which is to say we cannot believe it if we want to keep going" (74).

The object-stare-back is a peculiar notion: "In a grocery store, I do not think for a moment that rows of vegetables and the cans of soup might be looking at me as I speed down the aisle" (73). And yet there is an emerging stare-back that accompanies positionally sentience: locatable as something suspended between products and consumer positions, if we can link this phenomena with something like the Shell gas station icon rolling up on the GPS interface. This is not quite the same as the can of Campbell's Chicken Noodle peering at shoppers, but is does seem like a new variation on the stare-back.

In the chapter on "Blindness," staring takes another turn: "Staring is an unusual kind of seeing, and there's usually something odd going on when I find myself staring. Perhaps staring is a sign that an artwork has malfunctioned: it has arrested my thinking, slowed me down, paralyzed me so I can barely move" (209). Intriguing here that staring establishes an irregular relationship to time; in staring, so much comes to a standstill. Elkins also compares staring to gazing: "That's how I would distinguish a stare or a glance from a gaze: stares and glances are focused on details" (210). Barthes' Camera Lucida comes to mind here. That staring is an unusual kind of seeing, that it is "focused on details," that it brings time to a standstill, could mean that it is located at the critical juncture between studium and punctum. It is, as I now think of it, at the point where the punctum's sting (not only photographically, but arguably extending into the world) is suspended, noticed in such a way that it heeds a kind of proprioceptive pull toward studium. In time, whatever holds the stare might end up there, something studied.

This holds up in Elkins's discussion of German realist painter, Franz von Lenbach who appears almost straining in a series of photographs in the chapter, "Blindness":

In picture after picture and even in his self-portrait paintings, [von Lenbach] has this same faintly ridiculous pompous stare. It may have been an accustomed squint or an affectation—as if to say, I am a great and penetrating artist—but I almost prefer to think it was the symptom of a concentrated effort to see. (He wasn't a first-rate painter, and I also wonder if he might have been hampered by the very intensity of everything under his gaze, so that there wasn't much left to see.)

Not much left to see: stare-punctum becomes crushing-gaze-studium. Why not? Could such effortful seeing generalize to over-exerted writing? I don't know. But the build-up clicks for me. To re-enact the von Lenbach expression, I tried it out, let my MacBook Pro's built-in camera capture me imitating the painter (Think, think: "I am a great and penetrating artist"). 3...2...1... Yet I cannot unpick the loopknot: Is this the computer staring back at me? Me staring back at me? Me staring back at you? You staring back at my Macbook?

By the way, to make this face I had only to think about the fact that I wrote a version of this entry yesterday late afternoon and then failed to save it: big frown and scrunched brow.

Ahead of much of what else is here, I appreciated Elkins's attention in Chapter Two to the function of tropes in science. A researcher sees something unrecognizable, unclassifiable, and assigns to it a metaphor that links inexplicable thing (e.g., an amoeba) to an existing schema. "But [the amoeba's] body is very strange, very distant from mine, and my mind is clotted with analogies: the amoeba reaches out 'arms,' it rolls over itself like a tractor head. I cannot experience the amoeba except through mechanical and biological metaphors" (158). Through substitution (i.e., tropes), recombination and, in effect, new knowledge become possible. Tropes contribute clarity and contour. Elkins identifies another example of this in a doctor's puzzling over a previously unknown (undisclosed) condition in which the tongue's surface changes while others aspects of its functioning are in tact. The doctor does not know what to call it, but based on pattern similarities, it becomes "Cerebriform Tongue or Cartographic Tongue" (147). Such naming is complicated, right?, because it is both consequential and underpinned with uncertainty—a provisional relationship to knowledge. In the turn to mapping, a more tightly fitted description would be Raised Relief Tongue, but "raised relief" risks a degree of domain specificity that could undermine the necessarily general level of association between topography and the tongue.

There's more, but I have other stuff to tend to. The more: a noticably arhetorical discussion of empathy (137), a fascinating section on cyclophobic adaptations (75), a disputable point about visual desperation (156), literary flourishes citing Kafka and, at the end of the book, Wallace Stevens (the conclusion, by the way, is titled "Envoi," which I read as "Ennui" the first time; need another chapter titled "Oops: When the Wrong Word Stares Back").

The bit on cyclophobic adaptations is good enough (by which I mean worthy of a return) to blockquote here:

The world is full of eyes, and sight is everywhere. But there is a special category, another kind of eye that is neither real (like my eyes) nor metaphorical (like the "eyes " of rainbows and halos). It sees, and yet it is blind. I mean the fake eyes some insects grow on their bodies in order to frighten away predators. Butterflies and moths tend to have these eyes on their lower wings, so that they can keep them hidden under the upper wings until they need to flash them in some animal's face. The feect startles practically any animal that can see: it keeps away birds, lizards, frogs, and small mammals, and it also scares many people. So many animals are frightened of eyes that biologists have a word for it—cyclophobism. (75)

Posted by Derek Mueller at February 10, 2011 10:30 AM to Reading Notes