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February 9, 2004
Gary, here are the beginnings of a reply to your recent stuff relating to the eye:
The Max Ernst painting looks like an eye to me. I don’t know anything about its history either, but as far as I can see it’s just an eye. Isn’t the so-called ‘Cartesian eye’ a theoretical construction using the eye as a kind of metaphor, that is, a way of getting the theory? Do you know what I mean? The Cartesian eye isn’t really an eye at all. It’s a theoretical construction aimed at operationally presenting the world in a certain way. I’m thinking of Panofsky’s Perspective As Symbolic Form, where the Renaissance painting of say a battle scene isn’t ‘more realistic’ than the Bayeau (spelling?) Tapestry. Rather, it’s a way of selling the new perspective, the Euclidian story. It’s a kind of cultural induction, making use of something with which people are more familiar. In a similar way, we help people to pick up the idea of the periodic table by doing some things like mixing coloured liquids. This is said to take place in school chemistry laboratories. In actual fact, they are showrooms or little theatres. I’m getting off the topic. The point is, doesn’t the eye function in rather this way in the Cartesian story? Ernst’s painting doesn’t seem to capture anyone’s theory, Descartes’ or Bataille’s. Nonetheless, his Eye has a certain enigmatic quality typical of surrealism.
There seems to be a lot about looking in Story Of The Eye and it’s not just looking anywhere. The looking of concern is looking up women’s vaginas. This isn’t a peculiarly male preoccupation. Just about everyone wants to have a look up there. The question is, why? What is there to see in a vagina that there isn’t to see in, say, a mouth? Well, perhaps the mouth isn’t uninteresting in this respect either. In Gombrowicz’s Cosmos the mouth certainly takes on an erotic function of just this kind. I think Catherine Breillat has already answered the question: ‘The sexual organs of a woman are the doorway to the transcendent.’ Other people may disagree about this and think that it is wrong-headed. All the same, the view is that somehow through sex with a female it may be possible to escape the utilitarian order, even if only momentarily. This is the same as escaping the subject because the subject – the thing that so fascinates philosophers – is the bearer of the utilitarian order. This is sovereignty – casting off the yoke. It’s when I’m not being me, when I become an intensity without intention. That is why sleeping isn’t being in a sovereign state – because as Freud has shown, even when you are asleep you remain the bearer of the utilitarian order.
In Adelaide a few years ago there were a series of murders of young men. They died of massive anal injuries said to be inflicted by a mysterious group known as the ‘family’ and also said to comprise of a number of prominent figures in South Australian society. Eventually an accountant was arrested and found guilty of the crimes. It was reported that he picked up his victims, drugged them, and then ‘operated’ on their anuses, that he cut them open, that he dissected them. In short, they reckon he was a real pain in the arse.
This drive to dissect brings to mind an utterance by Marie, the heroine of Breillat’s film Romance. It one point Marie says, ‘I want to be opened up all the way, so you can see that the female mystique is a load of rubbish. I’d like to meet Jack the Ripper, he would dissect a woman like me.’
Bataille wrote:
‘There is nobility in your face: it has truth in its eyes, which you use to seize the world. But your hairy parts – those beneath your dress – are no less true than your mouth. Secretly do these parts open onto the world’s filth. Without them, without the shame that is always linked to their use, the truth ruled over by your eyes would be stingy at best.’ (Guilty)
If I understand this passage correctly, there’s a world ruled over by the eyes – the Cartesian world perhaps. There’s another world rules over by the hairy parts. The transcendent doorway is down there among them but it opens onto the world’s filth. That’s why, in the end, to use the Australian vernacular, the human being will be a filthy bastard. From this perspective, the eye is trying to muscle its way into the world of filth. But as soon as it does that it is dead, just like the priest’s eye that is inserted into Simone’s vagina, in Story.
This is the sort of thing that Barthes doesn’t really consider. His approach is a bit sterilised just when it should have been gloves-off. If Story becomes a poem then it doesn’t have any extra-poetic meaning, but it is no coincidence that it deals with the world’s filth.
It doesn’t need to sound as beastly as I’m portraying it. The world’s filth is another way of referring to the real day-to-day world, the order of blood and guts, the somatic realm, everything except the world of the mind. Only the mind is pure and wise, only the mind can look at the universal, the time-transcendent – so the story goes. But as Adorno - quoting Brecht - wrote, the mansion of culture is built of dog shit. There is no life of the mind that is free of filth. And every time the mind (eye) tries to master filth, filth masters the mind. Still, all this aside, as far as the eye going up the vagina is concerned, I’d like to try for a bit of transcendence in the here and now if that’s okay with you guys.
The Adelaide accountant isn’t much different from the people who believe in the transcendent power of vaginas. He thinks you can get there through the arse, but what’s the difference? (I think I’m going around the circles.)
I’ve been raving on and I’m sure I haven’t captured half of what is going on with eyes in Bataille’s writings, but I think you are right that it is something like the eye that looks through the lens of Newton’s camera (if that isn’t being too flowery). Once again, this is the problem with Barthes. Nonetheless, I think he did something really valuable in analysing and thus emphasizing the poetic character of the book. In so doing, he brings us back to the issue that keeps coming up in our conversations – that of the breakdown of the old literary genres in writing since the twentieth century.
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The Max Ernst eye could be a psychoanalyst eye that is turned onto secrets in need of disclosure.