The
Object of Travel: the Gaze of the Tourist.
(On looking and not seeing…)
As the
ridge’s rise and fall serrates the light of the sky, so the resultant silhouettes
come to resemble something much more familiar… Whilst nearby the cliff’s stone
face does indeed seem to have just that turn of line or expression that
suggests to us something from quite another realm of human experience… Below
ground limestone and calcites challenge the imagination; if the eerie mutual attraction
of stalactite and stalagmite was not enough to also attract our curiosity, to
stimulate our thought processes (already primed by caverns, Nature’s cinemas, and
the play of light and dark), then the forms assumed by the ages-long accretion
of soluble matter, forms even more the matter of our thought, having materialized
into something that somehow looks strangely like…
On seeing what we want to see…
There are no tourists:
‘tourists’ are an appendage of a global image repository of which they are the
final point of extrusion, first point of contact with the world, its tentacles
and sensors, collecting images of places they touch and of themselves at such
places - perhaps as proof of existence of place? A narcissism machine that
fore-tends the Global Parallel Digital Zone, extension if not further creation
of Spinoza’s Mind, thought half of Being (its ‘self-consciousness’), Hegel’s
Spirit, our anthropology’s category of ‘culture’ – maybe tending towards,
indeed tending, a ‘third culture’? A non-organic electro-digital echo of our
human thought world, another layer of ‘life’ (which does not live as we do) of
which we, organic still, are but its feelers and most distant points of
extension and extrusion…
For me
it began with looking at stone landscapes, also at stone as used in gardens
East and West… but this later is a tamed variety, the everyday or garden form.
Stone in a landscape is an altogether different animal. Different
from landscapes as such, and very different from looking at other everyday
things… Or so I thought… or rather felt…
Watching
one’s self looking at landscapes (stone landscapes)… and watching others do the same…
Looking at stone landscapes, or indeed, any landscapes… or again,
at all and anything before us. At objects… (at
‘everything’). The theoretical viewfinder pans out exponentially. Our exclusive
‘zooming-in’ somehow flips into an all-inclusive wide-angle shot…
So it
begins with looking at some part, some special part, of a landscape and, on
reflection, after reflection, we find we are dealing with a sense that must
extend all the way to object-hood as such. Yet seeing… what? What are we
looking at?
But perhaps we should first ask: under what conditions do we look
at things? For we do not normally look at things, at least
not for long (exempting situations of desire, or board games or at things
happening on screens). For we quickly recognize them…. And then quickly
proceed to use them. Or, orientated, to navigate amidst them, navigate a
street, a social event; a place or a situation… The cause and effect couplet:
recognition and use… (in matters of geographic or
social orientation and resultant motion). So looking, continued looking, in
this instance, implies unfamiliarity (a lack of knowing what happens, or what
should happen, next…). A bit like going to the zoo, or people watching… or
getting (and feeling) lost.
(Or doing research… but this requires technological and
institutional frames – and maybe an open mind… though in reality usually a
primed mind… We know what we are looking for.)
Under what conditions…
A given context. Here: travelling. Together with a certain
baggage; our past, our history (culture and education). Prior experience.
We already know what we are going to see… (and
why we are going to see it). This given…
How do we then recognize things…
It
looks like…
It begins with a reactive response, a mental knee-jerk reaction,
maybe even a defense mechanism (an identity prop like most mental reactions to
stimuli, not just a mark of being human, but its reminder of who or what it is,
or thinks it is…), a immediate (but not un-mediated) response such that we
recognize something… what that something is, or patently, is, not… what it is
like…
Metaphor. Mimesis.
It
looks like…
Let us call this the first level of response (assuming a lack of
disgust or rebarbativity that forecloses on further
interaction). A ‘shallow’ level, with personification,
labels, comparisons, all manner of anthropomorphisms on the level of adjustment
to, and appropriation of the immediate environment, of the landscape, landscape
feature or object in question. Usually experienced as part of the short
visit, ‘daytrip’ or tour; a ‘short-circuit’ or feedback loop whose role it is
to provide an immediate safe response, entertaining, self-confirming (much like
the tour itself, then, stimulating but without posing further questions,
neither about subject nor about object viewed). And so the finding of likeness
or similarity is a strategy completely obviating the need for further
introspection. A well-practiced thought maneuver. Coeval with our thinking existence perhaps.
Immediate
or direct metaphoric personification; and not the (more frightening) kind where
we imagine a place as like a room, a home, but whose, whose place, the spirit
of the place, genius loci. The transformation of space in to
place (through indirect personification or the metaphoric sense of a dwelling
place).
On the level of image storage (rather than actual thought
response) this first level of mimetic appropriation or response quickly moves
to include snapshots of the strangely attractive, strangely attention-seeking
‘mimetic’ feature in question. There then follow the now inevitable ‘selfies’, as we join the attention seducing object on the
record; all with a short, even minimal, viewing time (‘experience’ as
augmented, valourised, in practice, replaced
immediately by image capture and storage (as if the object might run away…
somehow escape us and evaporate… (which indeed it may, for as we move away, we
forget… on to the next thing…))). Not really having taken time to look at ‘it’
at all.
Advertising
on television or other screens, other image platforms and ages, works in a
similar way: but there the comparison ends… for the ‘message’ of the advertising
in question (even if, on occasion, subject to irony, so put to the question) is
certain. The meanings of these (stone) landscape features
that so beguile us is unavailable… or hidden. As hidden as the advert’s
meaning is exposed? Hidden by whom?
‘Naming’, better, labeling, plays a foremost role in taming,
controlling, making safe and treating with a certain lack of respect,
personification as visual pun, read as a kind or geographical, or better,
geological joke (as is patently not the case with genius loci, where it is the
semblance of a room, or dwelling place, that suggests a dweller). After all
such ‘naming’ is a part of the process of putting oneself first (identity). As
placing oneself before the object in both senses of the term (indeed the
‘before’ of position implies the ‘before’ of priority, the subject must be first
aware of being before something, this ‘firstness’
then is expanded to include priority in all matters…). As placing oneself above
things, so labeling, and other such similar devices safely ‘naming’, that
safety extending to rendering harmless, making safe, if necessary (again always
using, personification, and other similar tropes or meaning shifting, of
sliding the meaning along to somewhere else…). As a humorous, funny, even
belittling, activity, importantly showing a lack of respect for the landscape and
the environment (groups that like to do this, in my experience, also like to
drop litter…). Yet by finding a similarity where there should not be one, we
continue to remind ourselves that the object is strange… The maneuver retains
the mark of what it seeks to conceal (Freud liked this stuff – psychoanalysis
would be impossible without it…). Again we have a kind of hiding behind a glass
shield, a cultural shield, humanizing (in reality always culturally specific…)
the inhuman, not least some disturbing feature of the environment, often one
not purely beautiful. For it is the inanimate that is covered by, or that
incites the likening to the animate, the personification or other likeness to a
living object, to an animal. Yet in the case of farmland or forest – a
clearing, a vale, even a brook or fold in a river can incite the sense of a
room… so the question whose room, so, via personification, the familiar making
sacred of the landscape, genius loci, the spirit of the place (mountains too,
famously are so rendered the homes of the gods or immortals). So
personification, if used, is used in a purely visual sense, a visual conceit or
pun, ‘it looks like a face’, ‘…or a nose’. Otherwise, a range of, often
domestic ‘wild’ life is used as the point of comparison. The
point of humorous deflection. Yet in jokes (all humour
is cruel Bergson rightly tells us) the ‘but’ of the joke is made plain, the
moment of cruelty is exposed, pointed out. However here the sense of discomfort
seems to be concealed, avoided. Yet this is nothing new, in humour
the object or other is often the target (or in more civilized usage, the self,
so avoiding any sense of scapegoating). Here we have a case of laughing
(together) at something that disturbs us – so rendering it harmless. Laughter,
as oft noted, reduces the tension in a situation – providing only we find
something to laugh at together (again, diverting humour
onto one self, playing the fool, as an acceptable way to defuse a tense
situation). So the landscape feature becomes the negative term in the
comparison, the thing, ‘put down’. But what was it that made us, ‘pick it up’
(or more colloquially ‘pick on it’ (or ‘pick up on it’)) in the first place?
There is one particular landscape, stone again (mountains,
cliff-’faces’, ridges, precipices, escarpments, caves, water-made stone
formations including stone exposed in the bend of the river and, of course
those strangely worn , naturally ‘sculpted’ blocks of stone, the Chinese so
love to collect, ‘stones’), where nature, the inhuman and inanimate, and a perceived
resemblance to something human or something ‘mixed’ met… A combination we
apparently find a little disturbing. A trace of the sublime is perhaps to be
found here (as suggestion of Otherness, eternity or size which provokes fear),
as if the landscape feature pointed outwards to other matters, older places,
older deities… if ‘pure’ geography, or geology (safely inanimate) then no
problem – we see the ‘rock of ages’ and feel confirmed in our existence now (a
little like the usual reading of the aesthetic of ruins), as surviving the past
(‘having the last laugh’ or, at least, being members of a belief system that
has the last word (read religion or ideology)). Yet the eruption of the animate
in the inanimate, the sense of the subject in the other, the sense of something
looking at us, or worse, something that will not look at us – to whom we are
nothing – this is ‘uncanny’ (again Freud captured this meaning, noting its
reliance on the familiar in the unfamiliar, more precisely, the appearance in
an unfamiliar context of an apparently familiar thing, better put, the
transgression of a boundary of meaning). This we find provokes existentially
uncomfortable thought… and feelings. Cute (animal) names, funny puns, humorous
allusions, short-circuit this, possibly threatening, line of thinking, so
making safe… The lack of respect, the making of jokes, of course makes the
name-giver and their immediate community feel better,
but poses risks for the objects concerned. Again this is a matter of respect
for the environment, and things over and above our immediate use (value) of
them. Even if that use value is part of the exchange on identity (we have after
all paid for the trip to be pleasurable, and not threatening…); the sacrifice
of the landscape the object, for our continued sense of comfortable identity… (the refusal, or foreclosing of the sublime in the landscape,
in the object).
Seeing
something new and seeing what we have seen before…
Seeing
what we want to see…
Yet… if one lingers… stops to look a little while longer… there
come larger reflections: stone, for example quickly loses its resemblance
aspect, stops being merely mimetic (a kind of mechanism for learning and making
safe we inherit from our ancestors).
And then there is the second level, associations, connotations;
the stone itself, landscape itself, accompanied by
reflections on geography and geology, and time, human, cultural and historical
as opposed to geologic or archeological time (complete with reflections on the
environment or human place in it all, again the aesthetics of ruins in a good
point of reference here). Then perhaps there may arise some thoughts as to a
‘pure’ relation to stone (to the landscape or object) as true, as truth, or
facts. But regarding object-hood, only science can do this, until we remember
that science too is a human creation, the objects do not tell us what we know
about them (or perhaps only on a figural level), we describe and measure
them….
So we are left (alone) with our relation to the stone, to the
landscape, and need to remember that it is our relation to it, and not some
secret about it, its inner(most secret) being, that we see, or feel. So it is
not that we are ‘penetrating’ the object in being open towards it, but rather
ourselves, so discovering something, not about the object (presenting to us, as
always, a stony face, giving away nothing) but about ourselves… This is why, in
the context of light-hearted travel, of a ‘pleasure cruise’ or ‘pleasure
outing’ such thoughts are so disturbing , so ‘out of place’
(but rather it is we who are ‘out of place’) so transgressive
that they must immediately be buried in a convenient humorous simile. From
this, the deeper level of ‘communing’ with the object… we find we are communing
with ‘ourselves’… with our very own ‘self’. It is not with the thingness of the
thing that we are faced, but perhaps the thingness (the prior to consciousness)
of the ‘self’... or rather, the impossibility of thinking this relation.
That
most familiar thing, we are most unfamiliar with…
For if familiarity breeds contempt, then unfamiliarity can breed
fear, whence the strategy of making familiar, mimetic familiarity, making
contemptuous, reducing it to a joke. (Haha, it looks like a….)!
Looking at stone and finding the terror of object and of the
object in ourselves, as unknowable, in excess – this is what the making
familiar, the mechanism of making similar is designed to obviate… to
fore-close. Protect from. With the risk of the loss of the
object. Of the sense of an object. Of seeing afresh.
Is it this then that we are protecting ourselves from? But what
is ‘this’…?
But what is it (that it is) that we are protecting ourselves
from…? Could it be a sense of ‘this’ as the greatest degree of proximity to the
self: but utterly unapproachable (experientially, that is; only indirectly as
science is it amenable to comprehension, in its object-hood). So within reach, ‘at hand’, yet beyond reach, out of reach.
Walled off by an insuperable barrier, our very existence, our way of
constituting reality, the present (our entirely constructed home: the Eternal
Present) the walls of our’ room’ in the world. Just as there is no reversal of
the arrow of time possible, so neither is the arrow of sight, invertible, not
even in the mirror (where we continue to see ‘out’, into the space ‘behind’ the
mirror, even as we think we are looking back at ourselves…). In fact all the
surfaces are reflective, but the light waves continues to bounce, from self to
mirror and then to the eye, travelling in time onwards as we believe it
‘returns’ the image to ourselves. The receptors and the decoding (and recoding)
that goes on ‘behind’ them, in the nervous system, is ‘where’ ‘we’ ‘are’… So a
sublime -impossible, ‘belittling’- encounter with our own object hood…?
With
the concomitant risk of the (fear of the) loss of self.
Better
to belittle something else – scapegoat the object!
An encounter with object-hood
(in the place of the self). Terrible.
Vertiginous. As nightmare. But why so frightening? As beyond comprehension, so
frightening (as having a self unlike ours… other, terrifying; or perhaps worse,
as having no self, a space of the self, where the self should be, but absent,
pure object, the ‘thing-in-itself’, as resistant, eternally resistant, to
comprehension, our mind’s hole it has dug for itself… a dark place or terror…
horror, repository of terrors, taboos, etc…). Appropriated, (or propriated) socially as the basis for taboo. Remainder/reminder of our earlier species relation to objects, to
the sublime terror and frightening incomprehension, occasioned by our relation
to our environment. Remaining as a minor (even
aesthetically appropriable) existential tremor. Reminding… occasionally…
of a sense…
(‘… as having no self, only a space for the self’… is this the
revelation we are frightened to hear.. frightened to
feel… indeed the substance of that feeling itself…?)
An
indirect route (stone mirror) to the self. Looking into the
mirror of stone.
The point being that the understanding of the object, that we
thought we had of the object, was of ourselves. And faced with the object…
knowing ourselves, as faced with something, as knowing our responses or even
programing in the apprehension of objects, as we go through the layers and
aspects of our relation to them…. (again to ourselves
and only then to them….(and ourselves too as part of ‘them’….)).
Can
stone landscape -or even stone itself- and our various
responses, act as a template for our relationships to the object? If we were to take stone as our object,
objectify stone, take it as our representative object… Relating to object as
object recognised (use value). Relating
to the object, as the other – to avoid its otherness (stone as personified).
Non-emotion response: relating as pure object (science, quantity; descriptive
leading to use or desire). Relating to ourselves as object and others too (us
as stone). Or as Other (a universalized sense of stone
as the whole) the sublime within again. But if too big, too incredible,
inclusive of sublime terror… (the stone hole we must
fall into). But also because of these options, a source of the sacred… our
value giving, which we learn we can give… to ourselves and others, to objects…
making the stone a sacred stone. No object without subject has its value.
The use value of this experience (‘travel’, we already know, or
we can quickly calculate, its exchange value) is not reflection… is not to
‘broaden the mind’ –as noted above, the Chinese say ‘Read ten thousand books
“and” (that is an additive, non-exchange, or exchange equivalence relation)
travel ten thousand miles’. That was travel as it once was … or perhaps as its
ideal once was… now the ideal would seem to consist of recording self at play
(for the peer group or other significant group of recognition, belonging
entity, community of identification to whom one feels one must advertise ones
exploits…).
Sunsets:
the watching of sunsets as an antidote to the above. It needs time to watch,
and provokes a wide range of thoughts and feelings…So far so good. But wait.
Most of the time is spent positioning ‘the shot’… and then, just as one of
Nature’s most stunning colour shows really is about
to begin, everyone leaves… Well almost. Seasoned sunset philosophers will
linger, savouring the hues from the varieties of
redness of the sunset itself to the mysteries of the enveloping dusk to the
onset of black night, leavened perhaps by moonlight and the stars… (if not blotted out by street lights or city light
pollution).
Looking for what… seeing what – where does this, this sense
(sublimity) come from. Look as I might I find I cannot answer… Nor find
anything resembling a satisfactory answer. And this is as it should be. Do
reduce it to something else would be to close the book. To
rest our eyes… Case closed. To see the object, is to leave something
open (and this includes the object that is ourselves) some recognition of our
position as viewer as foreclosing on a tidy end… on a borrowed discourse as
solution. And this includes the object in ourselves, we cannot look in, not
complete the act, the post mortem. The last word is an unfinishable
act, an act of gerund, or a verb in progressive or continuous mode, a doing and
not a ‘did’… A ‘saw’, ‘have seen’ (how quickly memory collects…) and not a
seeing…
(No ‘this’; no object; human subjectivity is constituted so as to
be subject to its environment, a subject formed from its (reaction to) its
environment (its input, mediated by the body and its memory)… not to be the
object, at least not to ourselves….).
(Yet one answer to ‘this’ is the same as the answer to our sense
of the ‘now’ moment as an eternal present, that is, we generalize,
universalize, and so put ‘outside’, the answer, as in the positing of
‘Eternity’ the Absolute Outside, out of the Eternal Present (also true of
would-be axioms and universals; otherwise how would they be universal?). The
same could be said for the positing of ‘God’ (plus not a little
personification) out of the Absolute Other…the personification of what is, of
all that is… as all seeing, as consciousness… of us, Absolute Subject, a
generalized subjectivity, but whose? Parallel intuitions.
Genius loci.)
An
answer, conveniently put ‘outside’, a ‘saw’ and not a seeing…
Radical
(constitutional) iterable unanswerability
indicates that we are still looking…
*
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2014