Critical Ethical Vision

Alia Al-Saji’s Critical Ethical Vision discusses the ethical dimension of perception. In conversation with feminist philosophers Linda Martin and Kelly Oliver, both racializing and sexist perceptions are discussed under the same framework of objectifying vision. Al-Saji contrasts Merleau Ponty’s objectifying vision and his account of the painter’s vision; the later being closer to the kind of critical ethical vision that can “accommodate a critical reflection of its own conditions and an ethical attitude to the otherness of what it sees.” The practical remedy to “body-bound (and error-ridden)” viewing of the world as a collection of objects is to view it instead for its incorporeal, affective and unseen properties with the “Eye of the Mind” (375). Seeing rightly recognizes the essential and historical properties of a person, their dynamic volitional character, their spirit and heart with a unique, free, and autonomous will rather than the reductive properties of their bodies and the stereotypes that follow from the categories we classify these bodies in, stereotypes we’ve been socialized to sort bodies into most often incorrectly. 

Racist and sexist ways of seeing are habitually and socially apprehended to objectify the other. Al-Saji argues that critical vision offers an avenue for habits that don’t “make the world into objects.” With Oliver who claims a “loving vision” as an alternative, Al-Saji and Alcoff propose a more socially conscious ”anti-racist vision” that sees the “conditions, material, historical, social and discursive of racializing perception.” In turn, a feminist vision recognizes how bodies are gendered, excluded, and occluded based on their sex and gender (376). Al-Saji grounds critical-ethical vision in the attunement to affective “dimension generative of visibility” that takes up the memory of the “materiality of life” and its supervening social dimension. A history of racial and patriarchal domination configured the present day along with a history of still active resistance. C-E vision incorporates the other’s vision by seeing with the other. Not by assuming their frame of reference necessarily, any more than acknowledging their own lived experiences and historicity, and more aptly, to see in a world in which others are actively and dynamically seeing or sensing with us (377). Seeing with the other in a shared visible world. 

Objectifying Vision

The “profane” objectifying vision that Merleau-Ponty contrasts to the vision of the painter reduces the world to an observable world of material objects. This view of the world as made up of isolated “and self-enclosed solids” neglects both the humanity and dependency of community members. It comes with the attitude “as though [they] meant nothing to us and yet [were] predestined for our own use” (377). 

The vision assumes an absolute distance between seer and seen, “soaring-over” others, a habit that forms in choices, “eye movements and bodily kinaesthesis.” Objectifying vision is not aware of the nature of its own habits of envisioning (378) and “generative power.” In reducing the world to bodies, living beings’ bodily schemas are taken out from their temporality, their situation, and construction within historical and social formations, and thus their liberty of reconstruction. Objectifying vision views lived bodies as solely ‘biological’, unchanging, and “oppressed by their nature” (378-79). The histories of eroticizing, alienating, or repressing female and black bodies are taken out of purview (379). Al-Saji elaborates that Merleau-Ponty held two forms of invisibility for objectifying vision, the “material and historical genesis of vision” including the social hierarchies and geographies of power that generated the opportunity for sight. The impact of reducing the world to bodies and neglecting the historicity of the present is reinforcing social modes of repression. In Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like A Girl” the patriarchal gaze reduces “feminine” bodies to objects and creates a lived tension in women. This tension is between socio-culturally constructed identity of the “hesitant, fragile, and constantly self-referred” and the self-evident human power of constructing one’s identity freely. Al-Saji shares a woman feels at once “called on to act, yet at once feels one’s concretely feminine body to be incapable of such action” (381). Although feminine capacity and life choices extend beyond “biological essentialism”, the objectifying gaze both makes a cultural claim about a biological fact then hides the cultural (and thus pliable) nature of this claim. 

Critical Vision of the Painters 

This vision considers the social structures that “configure what we see”, it takes up the past, is self-reflective of habits of sight, grounded in felt affect, and embodied in behavior. The Painter’s vision “sees for the sake of seeing” and makes “visible the invisible.” Artists’ vision is individuated sees anew every moment and is experienced through different memories. Bergson’s account of the line for example, configures not only the “physiognomy of a visible thing”, but is in fact alive, and generative through a “temporal élan that materializes forms in its movement of expression”, a “rhythm of existence” (383). For a Painter, even “color and line have material and historical flesh.”

When Merleau-Ponty sees a painting he says: “I would be at great pains to say where is the painting I am looking at. For I do not look at it as I do a thing; I do not fix it in its place. My gaze wanders in it as in the halos of Being. It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, than that I see it.” (389) To see with the painting “according to it”, Merleau-Ponty struggles to ground the Being of the painting in the materiality of space, instead of a mere object, the painting contain a whole world of affect, meaning, style and memory. 

A painting has its own “affective atmosphere” and “disrupts our habitual rhythms and perceptions”. It engages us affectively before we can even reduce the painting to an object, and thus promotes a “receptive seeing.” (388). Merleau-Ponty elaborates two senses of seeing with others. The first is always present, there’s a “history by contact”, that always implies others as members of my field of vision, “a lateral passivity and dependence on others” (389). In short, a debt our vision owes to the parents, community, friends who made my sight and habits of seeing possible, who instructed my gaze. The objectifying gaze forgets these immaterial debts along with the history of a “non-familiar and alien” other’s discrimination for their otherness that leads an objectifying gaze to reinforce the representation of bodies as “exotic or threatening in itself” (389. It appropriates the “flesh of others” to whom my attachment is rendered invisible” (389). Despite depending on the other in my community, the objectifying vision passively, with indifference, reinforces their differences and their history of discrimination and exploitation underlying the treatment of these differences. 

A critical, ethical and loving vision is attentive to seeing with others rather than “disregarding [the visible] its affective roots in sociality and history.” It does not reduce a person to a constructed then forgotten bodily schema attributed to the biology of women or people of color.