Vision, perspective, recognition, and identity are closely linked to power in the symbolic gaze. We are sense-perceiving beings, but perception is further from our experience than sensation is (and sensuality), which has several consequences. First, within visual perception, we tend to represent empirical 'data,' information, or stimuli about the world. We tend to view the world as made up of discrete resources or things, rather than in a process of becoming that we ourselves are woven into. Thus, our minds usually 'process' these things as coherent models, where the dynamics and changes are internal to the system itself, rather than relations shaping and transcending the system. Secondly, according to Lacanian psychoanalysis, the "I" is shaped by identifying with a mirror-image of ourselves at an early age. This reveals that from a visual standpoint, things appear unified and autonomous, while sensually they are multiple and relational. Third, and similar to this, perception creates the belief that self-consciousness and recognition constitute experience, which in sociological terminology is where the idea of the looking-glass self comes from (you are who you imagine you look like). The relations that perception allows, as a visual mediation, are external relationships that seem imposed on us, rather than internal relations sensed from within practice. So applying various 'lenses' to look at the world has the effect of translating our deeply practical stances into perspectives or worldviews. We then seem to be trapped within solipsistic mentalities and attitudes, as our experiential know-how is then devalued. The problem is that these visual metaphors are two-dimensional (because mirrors and images are flat), while lived experience is three-dimensional. Perception allows us to interact with things (which can be useful), but does not allow us to feel and be inside relations as well.This thinking is also part of the common sense of social movement activism. A common way of understanding struggles is as 'awareness raising' and seeking recognition for rights and citizenship. But the 'cognition' in recognition is not random. Questioning legitimacy often invokes a rational standard by which to include particular identities. For example, the Canadian trade union movement gained union recognition through strikes lead up to the end of WWII, which established a collective bargaining system (PC 1003, the Rand Formula) based on the rule of law. As a result of recognition, working-class experience was identified with wage-labour and full-time employment - legal statuses that may or may not reflect people's actual needs. Workers can't go on strike if they have a collective agreement (no wildcat strikes), can't strike in sympathy (so no general strikes), and must voice class struggle through the formal bureaucratic grievance procedure. This has limited solidarity among working-class people to those who are employed and paying dues. To take another example, the civil rights movement fought for and gained reforms affecting people of colour, women, gays, and many other groups. Yet, like the labour movement, their fight was primarily for recognition as equal members of society. This meant implictly siding against movements like the Black Panthers and an ambivalent stance toward decolonization - after all, wasn't America one of the superpowers from post-WWII onwards? Recognition institutionalizes praxis such that creative ideas are turned into formal and systemic ones - it is a great way to ensure security, but it also produces political paralysis. Maybe, as Salmon Rushdie suggests, creativity can regenerated by fragmentation, since as he writes in Imaginary Homelands: “human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions.” In Rushdie’s metaphor, each shard of a broken mirror gestures toward the imagined whole of which it came from, but this whole will always be non-identical once the parts exist as parts (even if you reconnect them they will show fractures). What this produces is a stereoscopic vision of the world, one more open to the exile than to the citizen. Perhaps the ability to perceive multiple dimensions simultaneously, as Palestinian cultural critical Edward Said suggests (using the term contrapuntal vision), can shape a new politics which is left of centre.
But we are still terrified and intimidated by the gaze, which is part of a system identified by Pierre Bourdieu as 'symbolic violence,' and by Michel Foucault as panoptic surveillance. Bourdieu's argument is that within domination, practical habits become visually represented in various 'official' forms, and that through this misrecognition, the dominant are able to accumulate various forms of 'capital' - economic, cultural, social, emotional, and symbolic. For cultural capital, credentials and art works are only the most visible forms, and these crucially rely on their owners' 'taste' (habitus) for refined expression, even though they seem to possess their own value. Panoptic surveillance (originally developed in 18th century English prisons), meanwhile, involves the mutual self-regulation of bodies through visual technologies (including the extension of discursive and conceptual apparatuses).
'Conduct' becomes normalized according to pre-existing standards which makes people subject to labelling, categorizing, and diagnosis - we all become the judges of ourselves and others. The gaze produces powerful effects, one of which is the transparency of individuals' self-identity. 'Know thyself!' is virtually a given in our society. Speaking from personal experience, it is as if every look is a
question, as if it is impossible not to be pierced and feel watched at
all times, regardless of if anyone is there to do it. So I feel great sympathy for Foucault when he says that: “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main
interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in
the beginning." As well as when he says that “maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.” There is a need to open up new possibilities, but in representing the world, the gaze keeps things in the present.The gaze activates a fight-or-flight panic hightened by mimesis. Someone who has learned by imitating others, rather than by trusting and working through their feelings, is vulnerable to fear and uncertainty because their responses depend on outside confirmation. As critical theorists Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in their difficult book Dialectic of Enlightenment: "The reason that represses mimesis is not merely its opposite. It is itself mimesis: of death....Imitation enters the service of power when even the human being becomes an anthropomorphism for human beings." The result is a world of self-preservation or, in the words of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, 'bare life,' where everyone is in fear of what could happen next, rather than excited about future possibilities.
I think it is crucial to challenge the optical illusion of a stable identity (and reference point recognized by the state) and the practical possibilities it conceals. Instead, we will be able to decompress life experience into more meaningful expressions (textual, verbal, and affective) and live ecstatically. Perhaps then all the terrifying gazes will become inviting glances.
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