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Boundaries of Sight and Touch: Memoirs of the Blind and the Caressed
Nicola Foster
Traditionally, major art exhibitions - at least over the last 150 years, if not since the establishment of the Academies - tended to focus on painting and sometimes also sculpture. Throughout modernity at least, there have been few major exhibitions of drawings; those which did take place were generally presented as being of interest for their historical value alone, that is: either as preparatory works towards the important major works of art (or design) and/or as art historical and historical documents of the past. Since the establishment of the hierarchies of art by the academies, drawing has suffered from a relatively low artistic status.
The focus of major contemporary art exhibitions has recently shifted away from paintings and sculpture towards installation, performance and various forms of mixed media, which often include much that could be described as drawings. An engagement with drawing is especially evident in the work of contemporary women artists. The recent exhibition Inside the Visible[1] (1994-1996), which sought to present the works of women artists from several countries around the world between the 1930s and the 1990s and included works by Hannah Hoch, Louise Bourgeois, Yaoi Kusama, Anna Mendieta, Jana Sterback, Eva Hesse, Nancy Spero, Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, Avis Newman and many others, could be seen to substantiate the above claim. As Catherine de Zegher - the curator of the exhibition - comments in her introduction to the exhibition catalogue, 'Much of the work exhibited could be described as drawings'[2]. However, these various forms of drawings are not presented as mere preparatory works, but as the so-called 'major' or 'finished' works.
If we accept de Zegher's implied claim that many of the so-called 'interesting' 20th century and contemporary works by women artists can be described as drawings, can this tell us something about drawing as a discipline? Can it tell us something about 20th century practice and theory? Can it tell us something about the work of 20th century women artists? Why do women artists in the mid and late 20th century seem to choose drawing as a medium for their so-called 'major' works when throughout Western tradition drawing has been allocated the status of mere preparatory work and has been accompanied by a low artistic status?
A renewed interest in drawing during the 1990s seems to have spread beyond contemporary drawings and the work of women artists specifically. In 1990 the curators of the Department of Graphic Arts in the Louvre Museum decided to put on a series of exhibitions under the title Taking Sides (Parti Pris), in an attempt to encourage a renewed interest in the generally neglected traditional drawings which form the Louvre's collection of graphic arts. The curators seem to have identified two specific difficulties in the traditional interpretation and presentation of drawings. They seem to identify the first difficulty in the methodology of the discipline of art history itself, and they seem to identify the other difficulty as a philosophical and theoretical one.
Hence, in their Introduction to the first exhibition catalogue of the series, the curators tell us that they specifically chose curators for this series of exhibitions, not from among the traditional art historians and historian curators, but from among 'personalities known for their critical abilities, however diverse these may be'[3]. It seems that by inviting philosophical and theoretical approaches to the interpretation of drawings they hope to circumvent some of the art historical difficulties and at the same time attempt to address the philosophical difficulties involved in the interpretation of drawing as a discipline.
While the curators do not say so explicitly, it is well known that throughout modernity which was dominated by formalism - emphasising the purely formal (and expressive) qualities of art forms - drawing as a discipline suffered from its alleged capacity to offer a form of direct graphic notation and thus to represent the visible and in so doing present the visible as knowledge. Put differently, art was/is understood in terms of invention and creation: art is understood as the production of something new which was not there before. However, drawing's capacity to offer a mere imitation of the past - a representation of a scene seen - posed difficulties in attempts to evaluate it as art. This is a philosophical and theoretical difficulty, not merely art historical. Hence the curators' choice of well known intellectuals[4] and philosophers to organise exhibitions on themes of their own choice.
The philosopher Jacques Derrida curated the first exhibition in 1990 under the title of Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. His choice of exhibited works and the long essay which accompanied the exhibition - published as the exhibition catalogue - sought to address, among other issues, drawing's alleged capacity to offer direct graphic notation and thus to represent the visible as knowledge. The exhibition and essay, Derrida suggests, focus on 'the origin of drawing. Or, if you prefer, the thought of drawing' (MB, 3). The translators add to Derrida's above claim - in their Preface to the English publication - and suggest that the exhibition and essay also focus on that which 'leaves us another way to understand the legacy of drawing and vision, the legacy of representation, [and] the legacy of legacy itself' (MB, X).
In what follows I would like to show how Derrida's philosophical approach to drawing and tradition - to the origin of drawing and the origin of tradition - can help towards an understanding of the discipline of drawing in Western tradition. Moreover, it can help towards an interpretation of drawing as a practice through which women artists seek expression as women, and as a language for expression as women, within Western patriarchal tradition. Towards the end of my discussion and through a reading of Luce Irigaray, I shall offer a brief, but specific example, of a specific artist - Nancy Spero - who chose drawing in the second half of the 20th century, as her preferred medium for expression as a woman artist.
Sight, Vision and Philosophy
Throughout Western tradition, drawing (in which I include photographic techniques), has been valued primarily for its capacity to reproduce an image of a scene or objects seen. A direct relationship has been assumed between seeing and drawing. The photograph, for example, is used in law courts as evidence. And yet, despite this assumed close relationship, drawing was seen to be capable of producing visual likeness, not truth itself. The practice of drawing has always been seen as an art practice. Art was understood in terms of imitation and as such seen to be illusory. Truth was sought in philosophy and the specific scientific disciplines.
Nevertheless, of all the art forms, drawing's capacity to reproduce likeness has been seen to be closest to science. Some forms of drawings are used by the sciences. Thus, unlike the other arts, drawing seems to occupy a strange position which is of interest to both art and science, between art and science. Drawing can be seen to occupy a position which is almost between the set of binaries which structure Western tradition.
Since Derrida is primarily interested in the deconstruction of Western tradition, and drawing seems to occupy an intersection point which structures that tradition, an investigation into the origin of drawing will also be an investigation into the origin of tradition, and thus a deconstruction of that tradition. According to Derrida, Western tradition is structured on a set of binaries in which one is prioritised over the other. For example: philosophy has priority over art; form (ideas) over matter; truth over fiction; culture over nature; vision over touch; men over women; and the list goes on.
Drawing seems to occupy an intersection point in the tradition because of its alleged direct relationship to vision, both as representing and inventing the scene and objects seen. And yet, drawing is a practice which is not only visual; the actual practice is done through the hands and is closest to the experience of touch. Hence Derrida's interest in interrogating that relationship through an exploration of the boundaries of vision and touch. Before I proceed to a discussion of Derrida's argument, I would like to offer a brief account of the centrality of vision (compared to touch) in Western tradition, on which Derrida's argument is based.
Throughout the tradition of Western philosophy from Plato to Descartes and Kant, sight has been described as 'the noblest of the senses'. Throughout the tradition it was believed that the five senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell) were our physical access to the physical world while the mind was our access to the spiritual or intellectual world. Probably the most famous discussion of the five senses is to be found in Immanuel Kant's published lecture notes under the title of Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View[5] (1797), though a somewhat similar discussion of the senses could be found much earlier in Plato's Timaeus.
Sight, Kant explains, is 'the noblest of the senses' because:
it is furthest removed from the sense of touch, the most limited condition of perception: it not only has the widest sphere of perception in terms of space, but it is also the sense in which we are least aware of the organ's being affected [...]. So sight comes closest to a pure intuition (an immediate representation of the given object, with no admixture of sensation noticeable in it). (APV, 35)
Unlike touch, Kant says, 'in which our external perception is immediate' (APV, 33), sight is mediated by light. Touch offers a double sensation: a sensation of the object and a sensation of touching at the same time. The two sensations are immediate and yet 'mediate' each other. For the sensation of touching 'mediates' the sensation of the object touched, and the sensation of the object touched 'mediates' the sensation of touching at the same time. The two sensations appear simultaneously, and as such appear as unmediated.
However, since light operates as a mediation for sight, the sensation of sight does not include a sensation of seeing and as such it offers the illusion of a seen scene which is independent of the seer. An objective scene seems to be seen. Moreover, the appearance of an 'objective' scene independent of the seer, is further strengthened by the fact that sight offers a single vision which cannot be allocated to either left or right eye. It thus seems independent of either. Touch, on the other hand, is experienced as the touch of the left or right hand. In touch, spatial recognition depends on the body, depends on the sensations of a specific hand. Since the experience of sight offers a single vision which appears as independent of the seer and thus 'objective', Kant follows the tradition by suggesting that sight is closest to pure thought, sight is closest to ideas.
Kant's articulation of an analogy between sight and ideas forms the core of the philosopher Martin Heidegger's characterisation of Western philosophy as metaphysics, and metaphysics as Platonism. In his published lecture of 1955 The Question Concerning Technology[6] (1962), Heidegger points out that prior to Plato the term 'eidos' was used in common Greek speech to mean 'the outward aspect that a visible thing offers to the physical eye' (QCT, 20). Liddell and Scott's Greek dictionary support Heidegger's claim: 'eidos', they say, meant 'that which is seen, form, shape, figure'. However, Heidegger points out, Plato uses 'eidos' to name ideas. Plato first distinguishes the boundaries of the 'visible world' (the sensible world which is changing and is accessible through the senses) from the 'intelligible world' (which is eternal and accessible only through the mind's recollections of ideas).
Having drawn the boundaries of both the 'sensible world' and the 'intelligible world', Plato uses the term 'eidos' - normally used for the former - to apply to the latter. Reality becomes eternal ideas, while the world accessible through the senses is continuously changing and thus illusory. This slippage in meanings 'connects' sight to ideas and vision to knowledge. Philosophy, Heidegger argues, becomes representational thinking, philosophy becomes metaphysics. By means of a slippage in meaning - or to use Derrida's articulation in his early work, by means of metaphor, since it both transfers and transforms - vision is 'connected' to knowledge, and this 'connection', Heidegger argues, structures and characterises Western tradition as a whole.
Sight, Vision and the Trace of Memory
In Memoirs of the Blind Derrida seeks to interrogate the 'origin' of this metaphoric connection between sight and visual representation, through an attempt to break open the traditional metaphorical connection between vision and ideas. Ideas, for Derrida, are communicable ideas. That is, ideas which are expressed through symbolic language in some form of writing; as such they are fixed and are capable of being exchanged. Derrida interprets drawing as a figurative form of writing. Like writing, drawing requires a language: this language may be visual and not discursive, but the structure of both is essentially the same, Derrida argues. Moreover, both writing and drawing can give rise to further exchanges and further writings and drawings.
And yet, Derrida is aware that in Western tradition, writing and drawing are seen to be two very separate practices. In Western tradition, writing is understood as mere notations of symbolic language, in which a combination of symbols stands in for an idea or description. Drawing, on the other hand, is seen to be closer to materiality: its characteristics are not seen to be a capacity for the notation of symbolic language, but the capacity to imitate vision. Drawing is thus seen to be closer to sensual vision.
Since Derrida is suggesting that drawing is a form of writing, he seeks to show that drawing is not mere imitation of a scene seen. Hence, Derrida says:
Even if drawing is, as they say, mimetic, that is, reproductive, figurative, representative, even if the model is presently facing the artist, the trait must proceed in the night. It escapes the field of vision. Not only because it is not yet visible, but because it does not belong to the realm of the spectacle, of spectacular objectivity - and thus that which it makes happen or come cannot in itself be mimetic. (MB, 45)
Derrida seeks to expose the gap - the moment of blindness - between sight as visual sensation and visual representation as a written/drawn idea which is repeatable and exchangeable. He thus goes on to claim that:
The heterogeneity between the thing drawn and the drawn trait remains abyssal, whether it be between a thing represented and its representation or between the model and the image. The night of this abyss can be interpreted in two ways, either as the eve or the memory of the day, that is, as a reserve of visibility (the draftsman does not presently see but he has seen and will see again: the aperspective as the anticipating perspective or the anamnestic retrospective), or else as radically and definitively foreign to the phenomenality of the day. (MB, 45)
Derrida's claim is that there is no direct relationship between the scene seen and its trace left in the form of a drawing/writing. The moment of visual sensation is a singular experience; the traced mark in the form of a drawing can become an exchangeable visual symbol analogous to the written symbols which stand in for exchangeable ideas. The singularity of the event might leave a trace, but the moment of singularity itself would be lost in the representation which is always already an invented universality. The singularity of the event can never be communicated; it might leave a trace which could be traced again and again, the trace could be repeated but the moment of repetition is an invented universality which forgets the moment of singularity.
Hence Derrida insists that there are two separate moments in both drawing and writing: 'two points of view', 'two paradoxes, two great "logics" of the invisible at the origin of drawing' (MB, 41). One is the singular moment which is necessarily forgotten at the moment of the universal: the moment at which the scene seen or remembered (the moment of singularity) is forgotten and all that is left is the trace as a drawing/writing which has become a symbol of the lost singularity in the form of a universality. Derrida is thus suggesting that a structure of sacrifice, not direct relationship, ensures the possibility of exchangeable universal ideas.
Derrida's discussion in Memoirs of the Blind opens with a quotation from Denis Diderot's love letter to Sophie Volland. The letter is of Diderot's attempts to express his love to Sophie: in the process of his attempts, he admits: 'I write without seeing [...] not knowing whether I am indeed forming letters [...which will] read that I love you' (MB, 1). Why does Derrida choose to open with an attempt to declare love in writing, by one of the Enlightenment's champions? No doubt, Derrida plays on the familiar saying: 'love is blind', but I hope to show later that other allusions are probably also in play. Diderot says that he is writing in the dark: Derrida wants to ask if ultimately the origin of writings and drawings is but a moment of blindness - a moment governed by absence of light both physically and metaphorically - a gap between seeing/knowing and writing/drawing. According to Derrida, this moment of blindness - this gap between seeing/knowing and writing/drawing - generates a form of symbolic (universal) language which is available for exchange.