Looking Through Images by Emmanuel Alloa

Author:Emmanuel Alloa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

5

Media Phenomenology

1. THEORY OF BLIND SPOTS, BLIND SPOTS OF THEORY

How can we see how we see? Or, put differently: Where is the visible before it becomes visible? Can we catch a glimpse of the visible in the moment of its emerging visibility? If existence, as George Spencer Brown’s famous formula has it, “is a selective blindness,”1 then, from a phenomenological perspective, this cannot mean an act of distinguishing but a rhythmic process of rising and ebbing saliences in which some figures emerge and others are submerged. For something to be seen, something else must necessarily remain unseen, or: every per-cipere is an ex-cipere.2 As Jean-François Lyotard rightly remarked, however, this asymmetry contains the basic contradiction of Husserlian phenomenology:3 although assuming an asymmetrical field of object and horizon—and thus depth—allows phenomenology to advance to a concept of experience that intellectualism and empiricism struggle in vain to achieve, both object and horizon remain within a smooth projection of the world, as it were, to which all relief must be added artificially. Moreover, by insisting on the asymmetry, phenomenology in turn becomes ensnared in hierarchizations that it escapes only with great effort.

If the object appearing and its conditions of possibility are no longer simply assigned to the orders of visibility and invisibility, if the relationship between figure and ground is thus thought as a dynamic relationship that can in principle be reversed, the question arises: What makes the figure a figure and the ground a ground? Such a desubstantialized and liquified world calls for something different, something that is capable of generating identifiable objects in the magma of appearances. Confronting this ongoing phenomenalization is a mobile eye capable of orienting itself within it and of recognizing eidetic invariants in the manifold of adumbrations. To note the iterated in the empirical stream, to capture the identical, that is, to cognize something as something at all, the singularity of its appearance must be disregarded. That is why, if phenomenology is to be pursued and the sense of phenomena to be saved, Husserl must think of the adumbrations starting from the identical object shining through them, not the other way around.

Time and again, therefore, Husserl’s genetic phenomenology has to struggle with its own hidden teleology, which unravels the unfolding phenomenon from its ideal end or from an adequately focused center. This unabashed Cartesianism of insight thereby still participates in a central perspective paradigm that has governed thinking since early modernity. The asymmetry of the retina, with its foveal sharp-sightedness and marginal indeterminacy, gives rise—figuratively—to an ideal of clare et distincte vision that spreads even to those intellectual traditions that seek to account for the halo surrounding appearances, their indeterminate potentiality. Caught in such efforts at centralization, phenomenological eidetics, according to Lyotard, necessarily remains dependent on starting from the fully constituted object: the adumbration is then conceived of as presumptive anticipation of the complete object, and the object is conceived of as the complete synthesis of all adumbrations. What risks getting lost here is the fact that

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