Reciprocal Vision

Since the seer is caught up in what he sees, it is still himself he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism to all vision. And thus for the same reason, the vision he exercises, he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by things, my activity is an equal passivity— which is the second and more profound sense of the narcissism: not to see the outside, as the others see it, the contour of the body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen.

Merleau-Ponty, from The Visible and the Invisible, quoted by Victor Burgin in In/ Different Spaces (49)

It amazes me how closely this matches Walter Benjamin’s last definition of the aura of a work of art— art is that which returns our gaze. Merleau-Ponty uses the term chiasm to describe this space of intersection, a crossing over of two physiological structures.

It also seems relevant to think of this as an answer to the “narcissism of blogging.”

*Weird Postscript:I was thinking about the different models of representation— there is the optical model, which is basically a pyramid with the eye at the apex (like the panopticon). There is the model provided by Merleau-Ponty, which seems like a big X (chiasm) with everything converging in a singular event. And then, there’s Lacan with his torus— representation is like a big donut with a whole in the middle (chasm). For Lacan, life can never be a jelly donut. I never did like Lacan much.