#tosb

[eisthenameofme]

So i read that book (The Object Stares Back by James Elkins) and I'm ready to go over it by sections starting with the introduction. There are also six chapters and an envoi. I'm going to be tagging all future posts about this as TOSB (or anything else anyone wants me to tag it with). This is a selection of quotes from the introduction.

."Seeing does not interfere with the world or take anything from it, and it does not hurt or damage anything. Seeing is detached an efficient and rational. Unlike the stomach or the heart, eyes are our own to command: they obey every desire and thought.

Each one of those ideas is completely wrong."

."Seeing is like hunting and like dreaming, and even like falling in love. It is entangled in the passions - jealously, violence, possessiveness; and it is soaked in affect - in pleasure and displeasure, and in pain."

."Ultimately, seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer. Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism."

."That idea begins, I think, in childish fears. There's an uncanny feeling when a darkened doorway becomes a roomful of eyes and every shadow seems to grow a face."

."Each object has a presence - a being and face of its own - and if we take that seriously (not as a vague intuition but as a fact of vision), then the world is full of eyes. Seeing is being seen, and the world is so crowded with things that see and stare that we can stand to be aware of only a tiny fraction of them: more would overwhelm us."

."There are things we don't see, even when we are looking straight at them, and other things we stare at obsessively, so that we are blind to everything else."

."Those twin blindnesses are necessary for ordinary seeing: we need to be continously partially blind in order to see. In the end, blindnesses are the constant companions of seeing and even the very conditions of seeing itself."

."Instead, what I have tried to do is write an interdisciplinary account of vision, keeping to the common ground of ordinary language in order to be able to speak differently. Vision is too close to our lives to be left languishing in its opaque disciplines."

[eisthenameofme]

Granted i did not go into The Object Stares Back completely unsuspecting of any TMA elements, but i decidedly Was Not Expecting to be immidiately hit in the introduction/first chapter with the author going on about inherent pain/violence involved in seeing, sight mutually changing the nature of the observer and observed, and inherent possessivness in all looking and then immidiately going into connections to the Web.

[eisthenameofme]

I keep wanting to comment on the relationship between the Web and Beholding but the way I view things has been Permanently Altered by That Fucking Book and I keep trying to reference it as if it were an actual canon lietner instead of just definately related to the Eye in this universe.

[eisthenameofme]

Excerpts from  the first half of chapter 1 of The Object Stares Back.

."But vision, I think, is more like the moments of anxious squinting than the years of effortless seeing. Looking at the world is not a matter of raising the eyelids and turning the eyes in their sockets; or, to say it more exactly, that idea is a lie we tell in order to make sense of ourselves."

."The first thing to be said is that this informal notion of just looking will not do, since the eyes never merely accept light. Instead, there is a force to the light: it pushes its way into our eyes; and conversly, there is force to the eyes: they push their way into the world."

."'The observer looks at the object.' That sentence - that version of the fiction - condenses the three irreducible elements of vision: the subject, the act of seeing, and the object that is seen. It looks as sturdy as a description of seeing could be. Yet it also comes apart: first, because looking is suspect, and then, because it is build on the very simple but mistaken idea that the observer and the object are two different things."

."Probably, though, I looked as if I had been caught: hooked by the object in the display case. Some objects have an irresistible effect, as if we were tied to them by little wires. It could be that the salesperson had been watching me from a distance , the way some spiders hide at the edge of the web until a moth becomes so tangled that it's safe to approach."

(This is the first really noticable place this book points to a Web/Eye alliance, but decidedly not the last.)

."The threads that tie us to objects are invisibly fine, and normally we scarcely notice their lottle tugs and pulls. But the webs of vision are there nonetheless."

."Thinking of it this way, I begin to wonder if shopping isn't like being hunted. Instead of saying I am the one doing the looking, it seems better to say that objects are all trying to catch my eye, and their gleams and glints are the hooks that ensnare me."

."Just looking is just hunting, but it is not quite right to say it is only hunting. There is also something quietly hypnotic about just looking, something less like hunting and more like dreaming."

"Just looking is like dreaming, but dreaming fitfully,  tossing and turning and not knowing quite what's happening.

And the dream also gives pleasure. The shoppers who struggle, and then let themselves become even more entangled, and then struggle again, are often hoping to lose. They want to be caught - that's part of the game of shopping - and they let themselves be swathed in threads. When I am entranced by something, I tend to forget everything else."

."So just looking is like hunting or being hunted, but it is also kin to hypnosis, nightmares, and dreams. Those meanings draw near to yet another, because there is also a deep parallel between looking and loving."

."It's strange that love stories begin to fill my mind when I meant to think only about looking, and that is what I want to say about the phrase 'just looking.' It is not possible; there is no such moment. All seeing is heated. It must always involve force and desire and intent."

."There is no looking that is not also directed at something, aimed at some purpose. Looking is looking at or for or just away. Everything that the eye falls on has some momentary interest and possible use."

."My eyes can understand only desire and possession. Anything else is meaningless and therefore invisible."

."When I say, 'just looking,' I mean I am searching, I have my 'eye out' for something. Looking is hoping, desiring, never just taking in light, never merely collecting patterns and data. Looking is possessing or the desire to possess [...] and there is no looking without thoughta of using, possessing, repossessing, owning, fixing, appropriating,  keeping, remembering and commemorating,  cherishing, borrowing, and stealing. I cannot look at anything - any object, any person - without the shadow of the thought of possessing that thing. Those appetites don't just accompany looking: they are looking itself."

"I would almost say that the moments I spend looking at the view are not looking at all: they are the gasps between looking, the balm that lets me use my eyes as pitinlessly as I can. Seeing is incessant searching from the first moments we focus are bleary infant eyes all the way to the closing secind when we last see the world."

"Even so, it would be wrong to insist too much on any of this, because we get along in the world by pretending, or perhaps I should say deeply believing, that vision is passive. [...] And in a way that's a sensible attitude, since it lets them get on with the business of seeing without being tied down to metaphors of spider's webs and helpless moths. I can't see the way I normally do if I'm constantly thinking of how each harmless glance is tangled in some sticky web of unthought urges."

[eisthenameofme]

Excerpts from the second half of chapter 1 of The Object Stares Back.

."Seeing is effortless and mercurial, or so it seems, and it appears we prefer it that way. But we cannot permanently forget the harshness and pressure of seeing. Seeing is at the very root of our way of getting along in the world, and a single look can have all the force of hatred and violence that may end up being expressed in more brutal ways. Consider, for instance,  a particularly harsh example of seeing, one that bears evidence of the intimate connection between the habitual incessant searching of seeing and some less pleasant thoughts, especially unhappiness,  displeasure, violence, and pain."

."This is the violent side of seeing, where the mere act of looking - an act that can also be the gentlest, least invasive way to make contact with the world - becomes so forceful that it turns a human being into a naked, shivering example of a medical condition. "

."This seeing is aggressive: it distorts what it looks at, and it turns a person into an object in order to let us stare at it without feeling ashamed. Here seeing is not only possessing [...]; seeing is also controlling and objectifying and denigrating. In short, it is an act of violence and it creates pain.

Yet it seems to me that all seeing has this property, and even though it can be modified or diluted, it can never be eradicated."

."[...] I want to say that displeasure is something that accompanies all seeing, not just medical photographs. John Pecham, a medieval scientist who thought long and hard about seeing, came to the conclusion that in order for vision to work, it must hurt just a little. [...] All seeing, I think, is painful."

."If I listen very carefully, there is displeasure in every glance. Looking is not only active - it is a form of the desire to possess or be possessed - but potentially violent. [...] And in an exactly mirroring fashion, the pleasure of finding the object I'm looking for or discovering some glamorous picture of myself are continuous with the temptation to succumb to the morbid fascination of the eunuch's portrait."

."Sometimes the desire to possess what is seen is so intense that vision reaches outward and creates the objects themselves. [...] But if the desire grows large enough, it can impel us to make what we want to see out of whole cloth."

."[...] those images are not just passively recorded in my mind. Looking immidiately activates desire, possession, violence, displeasure, pain, force, ambition, power, obligation, gratitude, longing... there seems to be no end to what seeing is, to how it is tangled with living and acting. But there is no such thing as just looking."

."We construct theories about how all seeing is fraught with gender constructions and power relations, but then we study works of art as if we were just trying to appreciate them - as if we had no desire to possess them by writing about them and reproducing them in our books, as if we had no urge to capture and domesticate the odd things of the world. [...] We write books about art and leave ourselves out, as if we weren't involved."

."But I think there's much more wrong here. The whole sentence is suspect: there is no such thing as just looking, and there is also no such thing as an object that is simply looked at by something else called an observer. Looking is much to complex to be reduced to a formula that has a looking subject and a seen object. If I observe attentively enough, I find that my observations are tangled with the object, that the object is part of the world and therefore part of me, that looking is something I do but also something that happens to me - so that the neat architecture of the sentence becomes a morass."

."This painting (figure 3), which has the traditional title Icon with the Fiery Eye, is in a church in Moscow; but it also exists in many different sizes and shapes on postcards and in books, including this one. Each one is a different face. Even the reproduction on page 37 will change, depending on where you are right now as you're reading this. It will look different if you're on a sofa, or eating, or reading in bed. [...] Each time you glance at this picture it will mean something slightly different."

."And we are no less guilty of failing to speak about our own ways of seeing: our own irreligion, our assumptions about what is of interest."

."Within limits, I do not want to see things from a single point of view: I hope to be flexible, to think in as liquid a way as I can, and even to risk incoherence.  And above all, I want to continue to change - I do not wish to remain the same jaded eye that I was a moment ago. Art is among the experiences I rely on to alter what I am."

."At first the students have a hard time looking at one image hour after hour, week after week. As the semester wears on and they spend five hours a day, two or three days a week, standing in one place and looking at one image, they tell me that they begin to have dreams about the paintings - and some of them also report nightmares. Many students rebel against the power of the images, and they complain that the paintings dog them, recurring like hallucinations when they are trying to eat or watch television. [...] Over the course of the semester the paintings have surprised and bored them, chastised them in their daydreams, scared them in nightmares, and eventually seduced them."

."An image is not a piece of data in an information system. It is a corrosive, something that has the potential to tunnel into me, to melt part of what I am and re-form it in another shape. Some things in me are different because of that image, and that means - if I am willing to let down my guard and be honest about how this works - that I am not the same person I was before. [...] If pictures are corrosives, it is because light itself is an acid: it burns into me; it remakes me in its own image."

(This is one of my favorites)

."When it comes to seeing, objects and observers alter one another, and meaning goes in both directions."

."These are not things that happen sometimes, or under special conditions. They are not subtle nuances or refinements to the way we look at objects. Instead, they are the conditions of seeing itself. A picture is the ways and places it is viewed, and I am the result of those various encounters."

."And so looking has force: it tears, it is sharp, it is an acid. In the end, it corrodes the object and observer until they are lost in the field of vision. I once was solid, and now I am dissolved: that is the voice of seeing."

(This is also one of my favorites)

(And at this point I'd just like to add that this book is somehow exactly what I would expect as the result of someone listening to TMA and intentionally trying trying to write a book connected to Beholding. It is very decidedly feeding my obsession.)

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