Essay about analyzing two films
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Under Western Eyes
REPORTING BEGINS WITH LOOKING. VISUAL OBSERVA- tion is the essence of the reporter's function as witness. But the gaze upon which the journalist so faithfully relies for knowledge marks an exclusion as well as a privilege: the privilege of inspecting, of examining, of looking at, by its nature excludes the journalist from the human reality constituted as the object of observation.
A passage from James Agee's writing on conditions in the American South during the 1930s is remarkable for its self-conscious awareness of the power implied by the gaze. Agee describes the gathering of black farmworkers near the house of their white foreman:
They all approached softly and strangely until they stood within the shade of the grove, then stayed their ground as if floated, their eyes shifting upon us sidelong and to the ground and to the distance, speak- ing together very little, in quieted voices: it was as if they had been under some magnetic obligation to approach just this closely and to show themselves. (27)
They are obligated to show themselves to view for the white men, but they themselves lack the privilege of the gaze; though looked at, they are for- bidden from looking back. The foreman calls for the black men to sing, and they begin the song "now that they were looked at and the order given." When the song is ended, Agee hands some money to one of the men: "He thanked me for them in a dead voice, not looking me in the eye, and they went away." The gratuity offered to the singers in effect acknowledges the unevenness of the exchange. Gazed upon, they are denied the power of the gaze; spoken to, they are denied the power to speak freely.
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The scene, however, is more than a simple demonstration of power where it reveals signs of resistance on the part of the black farmworkers. The man receiving the gratuity thanks Agee "in a dead voice, not looking me in the eye," withholding his thanks even in the act of giving it. Here the avoidance of eye contact constitutes a refusal rather than a sign of sub- mission: it says in effect, "Forbidden from looking on you freely, I refuse to meet your eye when called on to do so."
With an eye for these complexities, Agee demonstrates how looking and speaking enter into the economy of an essentially colonial situation, in which one race holds, however provisionally and uneasily, authority over another. To look at and speak to not only implies a position of authority; it also constitutes the commanding act itself: "now that they were looked at and the order given." By entering into this economy of uneven exchange, Agee becomes an accomplice to the very system of authority, of control, and of surveillance that causes him so much anguish and that removes him from those people whose lives he would attempt to understand. For all his awareness of its ironies, Agee's position is nonetheless analogous to the classic position of the Western writer in the colonial situation: the condi- tions of access to colonized peoples also mark an exclusion from the lived human reality of the colonized.
In 1982 Joanne Omang, a reporter for the Washington Post, shared a ride in a van with a group of other North American and Western European reporters to a tiny, remote village in El Salvador. Here she tries to imag- ine the effect of their arrival on the handful of peasants who witnessed the scene:
The van emptied-men in sunglasses with headphones wielding shiny microphones on long stalks pouring out behind other burly men carrying huge TV cameras and photographers drenched in Nikons- men and women alike wielding tape recorders and notebooks. We were clearly invaders from another planet. (47)
These remarks are printed not in the Post itself, but in the Washington Jour- nalism Review, a trade journal. As a commentary on how her work is actually done, it would be out of place in a news report. Although reporters tend to know better than anyone else the limitations inherent in their methods of work, the standard journalistic forms do not easily permit reflection on the conditions-technological, economic, historical- that make reporting possible.
These conditions give the reporter a privileged point of view over what is surveyed, yet the nature of this privilege and the distance that it imposes
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between the seer and the seen rarely enters into the explicit content of jour- nalistic writing. In those cases where the particular advantage inherent in the reporter's position is openly acknowledged, we suddenly see the dy- namics of power that underlie even the most ordinary journalistic modes of surveillance.
In a series of articles on the Vietnam war written originally for the New York Review of Books in 1967, Mary McCarthy describes being taken up in a helicopter outside Saigon for "a ringside view of American bombing"- a routine part of the war correspondent's work. Her eyes wander over the great patches of earth scorched by the defoliation program and watch as a small plane below hits a bombing target. A typical day in the war includes 4-60 such bombing sorties "in support of ground forces." She comments :
The Saigonese themselves are unaware of the magnitude of what is happening to their country, since they are unable to use military trans- port to get an aerial view of it; they only note the refugees sleeping in the streets and hearing the B- 52s pounding a few miles away . ... The Air Force seems inescapable, like the Eye of God, and soon, you imag- ine . . . all will be razed, charred, defoliated by that terrible searching gaze. (32-33)
McCarthy's account shows, first of all, that her logistical, if not her ideo- logical, point of view is identical to that of the U.S. Air Force; her own airborne eye commands the same position as that terrible Eye of God. More importantly, her commentary implies that because of that position, the war for her takes on a different order of reality from that experienced by the Vietnamese. By looking down at the bombing targets rather than being on them, she literally sees another war.
In their disparate ways, Agee, Omang, and McCarthy are all concerned with the overpowering and potentially destructive effect of the gaze. But as any visual artist knows, the gaze is also the active instrument of con- struction, order, and arrangement. What one might call the ideology of the gaze takes on one of its clearest forms in the convention of the com- manding view. One knows the importance of the commanding view-the panoramic vista-to architecture, landscape painting, and sites of tourism, as well as to scientific research, military intelligence, and police surveil- lance : it offers aesthetic pleasure on one hand, information and authority on the other. This combination of pleasure and power gives the command- ing view a special role in journalistic writing, especially in the colonial situation, for it conveys a sense of mastery over the unknown and over what is often perceived by the Western writer as strange and bizarre. At
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the same time the commanding view is an originating gesture of coloniza- tion itself, making possible the exploration and mapping of territory which serves as the preliminary to a colonial order.
In ·his discussion of the intimate relation between power and visual surveillance, Michel Foucault recalls the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham's eighteenth-century design for a circular prison divided into individual cells, all of which could be observed from the single vantage point of an enclosed central tower (1977:200-228). This architectural design has served as the model for modern prisons such as Stateville in Joliet, Illinois, as well as for other institutions where discipline and productivity are most economically monitored by an arrangement where the eye can survey an entire operation at a glance, while remaining free to focus on the minutest detail. Hence the widespread use of the panoptic principle in schools, libraries, hospitals, and factories.
In analyzing this principle, Foucault notes that what guarantees control in the Panopticon is the analytical arrangement of space: the circular struc- ture of the building is divided into cells of uniform size, each of which can be seen from the same angle and at the same distance from the central point. The power exercised over those who dwell in this field of vision is therefore noncorporal: it depends on spatial configuration rather than on the use of force. This means that the position of visual authority is equally accessible to anyone who occupies the center of the structure: the eye of a worker or a schoolboy commands the same view as that of a prison warden. Furthermore, a series of partitions and blinds ensures that the observer remains invisible to those who are the objects of surveillance, making the Panopticon what Foucault calls a machinery of dissymmetry, disequilibrium, and difference. For the observer, sight confers power; for the observed, visibility is a trap.
I have borrowed the image of the Panopticon in order to suggest that its principle has bearing on any occasion where the superior and invulnerable position of the observer coincides with the role of affirming the political order that makes that position possible. The device of the commanding view in colonialist writing constitutes one such occasion. Like the supervi- sor in the Panopticon, the writer who engages this view relies for authority on the analytic arrangement of space from a position of visual advantage. The writer is placed either above or at the center of things, yet apart from them, so that the organization and classification of things takes place ac- cording to the writer's own system of value. Interpretation of the scene reflects the circumspective force of the gaze, while suppressing the answer-
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ing gaze of the other. In this disproportionate economy of sight the writer preserves, on a material and human level, the relations of power inherent 'in the larger system of order.
LANDSCAPES
The rhetorical convention based on the sweeping visual mastery of a scene is an important feature of nineteenth-century poetry and fiction, as well as of the narratives of explorers such as M~go Park and Sir Richard Burton. Mary Louise Pratt calls this rhetorical gesture the "monarch of all I survey" scene and notes its use by these Victorian explorers to convey moments of important geographical discovery ( 201). The convention is also essential to the writing of Henry Morton Stanley, one of the most daring and bril- liant journalists in the history of the British and American press. Stanley's characteristic rhetorical method is to place himself on some "noble coign of vantage" and to survey the scene below in such a way as to combine spatial arrangement with strategic, aesthetic, or economic valorization of the landscape.
In September 1871, the third month of his journey to the Mrican in- terior in search of David Livingstone, Stanley describes the land known as Unyamwezi. The rocky hill on which he stands is a "natural fortress," from which,
if you look west, you will see Unyamwezi recede into the far, blue, mysterious distance in a succession of blue waves of noble forest, rising and subsiding like the blue waves of an ocean. . . . Hills of syenite are seen dotting the vast prospect, like islands in a sea, presenting in their external appearance, to an imaginative eye, rude imitations of castel- lated fortresses and embattled towers. Around these rocky hills the cultivated fields of the Wanyamwezi-fields of tall maize, of holcus sorghum, of millet, of vetches, etc.-among which you may discern the patches devoted to the cultivation of sweet potatoes and manioc, and pasture lands where browse the hump shouldered cattle of Africa, flocks of goats and sheep. (1970 : 36)
Stanley's eye moves systematically out to the horizon, then returns to the ground which can be inspected in its minute particulars. It ranges freely over the scene, providing general outline and points of focus, bringing about spatial order from a fixed point of view. The rhetorical trope known as parataxis-placing things side by side-by the mid-nineteenth century
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had become a standard adaptation of language to the scientific method, in which the process of knowing the world became largely a matter of establishing natural objects as visually accessible (Stafford 34-) .
But the "imaginative eye" of the journalist-explorer goes beyond the mere arrangement of visual data. Pratt, in her analysis of a passage in Bur- ton's The Lake Regions of Central Africa ( 186o), identifies three parts of this rhetorical convention: the landscape is first aestheticized, then it is invested with a density of meaning intended to convey its material and symbolic richness, and finally it is described so as to subordinate it to the power of the speaker (204-). Returning to our passage in Stanley, we find that it conforms to Pratt's model: The "far, blue, mysterious" distances of the forest become, metaphorically, those of a blue ocean inviting voyage and adventure, investing the scene with aesthetic value. The metaphori- cal transformation of the syenite hills into fortresses and embattled towers confers a strategic value on the landscape, showing that it could be held, safeguarded, protected. The rich detail devoted to farm and pasture land points to the natural abundance of the land, while at the same time domes- ticating the scene, referring it both backward and forward to a mythic time and place-where sheep may safely graze.
In our own largely postcolonial world, the commanding vi~w still re- flects the writer's authority over the scene surveyed, but the perceptual appetite is more likely to find itself unsatisfied, and the writer's tone to be one of disappointment or disillusionment. For a 1984- New Yorker article on the Ivory Coast, V. S. Naipaul visited the president's ancestral village of Yamoussoukro, now being newly constructed as a modern city. Naipaul looks down from the sealed glass window of his hotel room to an enor- mous swimming pool surrounded by lounge chairs. Beyond that, he sees the golf course created out of the bush: "a foreign eye had drawn out the possibilities of what to an Mrican would have been only bush." His gaze lingers:
It was a great creation, the golf course-perfection, in a way. It repre- sented prodigious labor. Yet it was only a view; one look took it all in. And soon it wasn't enough. Splendor on this scale, in this setting, and after a hundred-and-fifty-mile drive, only created an appetite for more: the visitor began to enter the ambition and fantasy of the cre- ator. There was a main street, very wide; there was a market; there were workers' settlements. Something like a real town was attaching itself to the presidential creation. But the visitor, always quickly taking for granted what had been created, continued to be distracted by the
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gaps, the scarred earth, the dusty vacancies. And if you didn't want to play golf, there was nothing to do. (May 14, 1984)
N aipaul-born in Trinidad of Hindu parentage, educated at Oxford and resident in London-is an extraordinarily complex writer whose novels, essays, and travel accounts have confronted with stark vision the despair of a postcolonial world cast spiritually adrift. But even so gifted a writer shares certain conventions of representation with his less complicated literary and journalistic antecedents. Here, for example, Naipaul's description has an order comparable to Stanley's: beginning from a fixed point of reference, his eye travels steadily outward in a progressively expansive movement, ar- ranging and dividing the field of vision. This visual survey carries with it an assessment of aesthetic and economic value: the golf course is beautiful, thanks to the skill of a "foreign eye." The city itself is ambitious but empty and incomplete, marked by gaps, vacancy, absence. In the judgment passed within Naipaul's gaze, the African town has made progress, but has yet to achieve the status of a "real town," has yet to achieve, that is, the reality of modernity and westernization. In both descriptive passages, the precolo- nial and the postcolonial, the rhetorical construct based on visual authority acts as a concrete sign of the writer's privileged point of view in the larger political sphere. The writer literally sees the landscape of the non-Western world in terms either of the promise for westernized development or of the disappointment of that promise. Stanley gazes out at Mrica as it might become under colonial rule. Naipaul gazes at an Mrica which, left to itself, can only parody the splendors of the West.
INTERIORS
When it descends from the heights of mountain ranges and hotel rooms, the gaze of the Western writer penetrates the interiors of human habita- tion, and it explores the bodies and faces of people with the same freedom that it brings to the survey of a landscape. The eye of the writer and its technological extension, the camera, take us inside the dwelling places of the primitive and exotic: a night club in Saigon, sacred caves in India, a terrorist enclave in Beirut, the winding alleys of the Algerian casbah, a prison in Uganda, a peasant hut in El Salvador. An entire tradition in West- ern literature, from colonial American captivity narratives to the novels of Forster and Malraux, has built itself around this trial of penetration into the interi~r spaces of non-European peoples. In these interiors the con- frontation of cultures takes place face to face, or rather eye to eye, and it is
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here, at close range, that the gaze of the writer can have its most powerful effect.
Rudyard Kipling, accompanying the Calcutta police on their rounds, de- scends into the brothels and opium dens of "The City of Dreadful Night" (1888). As a journalist, Kipling penetrates a dark underside of the city ordi- narily off limits to Europeans. A policeman explains, "If an Englishman messed about here, he'd get into trouble. Men don't come here unless they're drunk or have lost their way." Together, Kipling and the police enter a shadowy establishment:
Two or three men with uneasy consciences have quietly slipped out of the coffee-shop into the mazes of the huts. The police laugh, and those· nearest in the crowd laugh applausively, as in duty bound. Thus do the rabbits grin uneasily when the ferret lands at the bottom of the burrow and begins to clear the warren. ( 1970, 18: 209)
Kipling's gaze identifies itself closely with the force and contempt of colo- nial authority, exposing the corruption of native Calcutta life when left to its own devices and finding a spatial metaphor for that life in the image of the deceptive, entrapping mazes. The searching, controlling gaze of the police is Kipling's as well. The metaphor of predatory violence underwrites the power of that gaze, while it reveals the duplicity of those who are its object: they do not return the searching look, but "laugh applausively, as in duty bound."
Of course, the journalistic eye is not always so clearly or consciously the instrument of colonial authority: it can be used to resist such authority or to regard, ironically, the privileges of the colonizer and the disadvantages of the colonized. But even where the Western writer declares sympathy with the colonized, the conditions which make the writer's work possible require a commanding, controlling gaze. The sympathetic humanitarian eye is no less a product of deeply held colonialist values, and no less au- thoritative in the mastery of its object, than the surveying and policing eye.
In a 1984 article on China, also in the New Yorker, Orville Schell writes about the Great Wall Hotel in Beijing, a new, first-class Western hotel based on the design of the Dallas Hyatt Regency. Here is an interior space that is actually exterior to the culture surrounding it, so that Chinese crossing its threshold are effectively taking leave of their own world and enter- ing the vertiginous space of Western capital. One of Schell's pastimes is to sit on one of the French sofas in the lobby and watch the comings and goings of the American, European, and Japanese businessmen. From this vantage point, Schell witnesses an unusual event: the arrival of two
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"unchaperoned" Chinese, elderly men dressed in the gray tunics and caps of the Revolution:
Once inside the door, they paused, doffed their caps, and gazed around in wonder. All eyes immediately fixed on their entrance. Their presence transformed the atmosphere of the lobby, which suddenly became not an isolated Western preserve but a confluence of two cultures, one living within the hotel and the other living outside .... After several moments of gazing around like wild animals on the edge of a clearing, one whispered to the other and gave him an encouraging tug on the cuff. (November 19, 1984)
Schell watches the two men sit down tentatively on a sofa opposite him and surmises from their conversation in a cultivated Beijing dialect that they have an appointment with a Frenchman visiting China on business. He hears one of them ask, "Has it been long since you ate with a knife and fork?" The other responds, "Paris, 1948."
Once they enter the hotel, the Chinese become in a sense subjects of a foreign power again, subject to the temptation and order of the West, and subject above all to the penetrating inspection of the Western eye. In this case the reporter is sympathetic to the predicament of these bewil- dered Chinese, but it is not entirely coincidental that, like Kipling, Schell should draw upon a metaphor of animal fear to describe their reaction, for the figure acknowledges the elements of territoriality and predation that enter into the colonizing gaze. What he describes as the confluence of two cultures seems more like a staring-down, with one side clearly dominat- ing. Despite the reporter's sympathy, he nonetheless enjoys a commanding view which unsettles the Chinese and accounts for the difference between his position of assurance and theirs of disorientation.
The Western journalist's essential position does not change even beyond the confines of a Western preserve in Asia. The eye remains mobile and selective, constantly filtering the visible for the sign, for those gestures and objects that, when transformed into the verbal or photographic image, can alone have meaning for a Western audience by entering a familiar web of signification. The journalist is literally on the lookout for scenes that carry an already established interest for a Western audience, thus investing perception itself with the mediating power of cultural difference.
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BODIES
The final field of visual penetration for the journalist is that of the human body. In classic colonial discourse, the body of the primitive becomes as much the object of examination, commentary, and valorization as the land- scape of the primitive. Under Western eyes, the body is that which is most proper to the primitive, the sign by which the primitive is represented. The body, rather than speech, law, or history, is the essential defining character- istic of primitive peoples. They live, according to this view, in their bodies and in natural space, but not in a body politic worthy of the name nor in meaningful historical time. The bodies, not only of so-called primitive p~oples but of all the colonized, have been a focal point of colonialist inter- est which, as in the case of landscape description, proceeds from the visual to various kinds of valorization: the material value of the body as labor supply, its aesthetic value as object of artistic representation, its ethical value as a mark of innocence or degradation, its scientific value as evidence of racial difference or inferiority, its humanitarian value as the sign of suf- fering, its erotic value as the object of desire. Reading the private diaries of Bronislaw Malinowski, Torgovnick notes the ethnologist's obsession with the bodies of the Trobriand islanders and finds that by contrast his pub- lished ethnographies serve to sublimate his erotic desire by "converting feelings into magisterial observation guided by pure, untainted theory" ( 231). Surveillance thus enables both visual possession of the body and an interposition of technique which safely conceals the body of the observer.
Stanley, among others, comments continually on the bodies of the Mri- cans he encounters, often subjecting them to anthropometric examina- tion-the measurement of body parts commonly practiced by nineteenth- century researchers. In his writings on the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition ( 1888), Stanley cites sixteen separate measurements for the body of a pygmy male-height 4 feet, circumference of head 20 V4 inches, circumference of chest 25V2 inches, etc.-while he describes a female in slightly more subjective language:
She is of a light brown complexion, with broad round face, large eyes, and small but full lips. She had a quiet modest demeanour, though her dress was but a narrow fork clout of bark cloth .... I notice when her arms are held against the light, a whitey-brown fell on them. Her skin has not that silky smoothness of touch common to the Zanzibaris, but altogether she is a very pleasing little creature. ( 1891, I: 368)
.
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The eye treats the body as a landscape: it proceeds systematically from part to part, quantifying and spatializing, noting color and texture, and finally passing an aesthetic judgment which stressed the body's role as object to be viewed. However, the conditions which make this leisurely inspection possible are in this case those of forcible arrest and custody. Stanley's party has been skirmishing with the pygmies as he cuts his path through their territory, and these particular specimens are brought to him as prisoners of war. The situation serves as a reminder that the freedom of the gaze depends on the security of the position from which it is directed .
. The counterpart to this detailed inspection of body parts is the sighting which takes in the entire body at once and removes it from its surround- ings by means of a framing device. My example is from Hemingway, and in moving from Stanley to Hemingway we move not only a half ~:>entury forward in time, and from the Ituri forest of the Congo Basin to the plains of East Mrica. We also move from the era of geographic exploration to its leisurely imitation in the sport of the big game hunter. And we move, finally, from robust nineteenth-century ideals of progress and civilization to a modernist sensibility that defines itself in terms of impotence, anxiety, and loss.
In The Green Hills of Africa (1935), Hemingway's "absolutely true" ac- count of a hunting expedition, there is a moment when the writer's eye narrows its focus from a landscape to a single human body:
We glassed that valley until the sun came onto us, then hunted around the other side of the mountain where the other B'wana ... had shot a fine bull kudu, but a Masai walked down the center of the valley while we were glassing it and when I pretended I was going to shoot him Garrick became very dramatic insisting it was a man, a man! (172)
Garrick is Hemingway's name for his theatrical Mbulu guide. When warned of the nature of his ostensible target, Hemingway turns to this man and asks, "Don't shoot men?" Taking the bait, the guide puts his hand to his head, saying, "No! No! No!" This little scene, perhaps harmless in intent, serves as a metaphor for certain aspects of the colonial presence in Mrica: the Masai, representative of the tribe that proudly rejects assimilation to the colonial order, here is framed in the sights of a gun barrel. The act of drawing a bead on him is used to instill terror in the relatively colonized Mrican guide, who may have reason to think that the white man could kill a Masai for sport, or out of ignorance.
Although Hemingway's irony is directed at his histrionic guide, the task
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of the critic of colonial discourse is to step back from the scene in order to ironize the ironizer. Thus we may say that Hemingway's practical joke works only at the expense of the joker: he mimics the terrible gaze which means death to those on whom it rests, but in doing so reveals his relative impotence in comparison with Stanley, who never took aim at an Mrican but in deadly earnest. There may be, for a man of Hemingway's sensibility, arriving late on the colonial scene, a nostalgia for the moral certainty of a Stanley, as well as for Stanley's power to follow his aim with a true report.
Western journalism is filled with situations where the observer, from an exterior position, views the bodies of the captured, imprisoned, incapaci- tated, or dead. In the postcolonial era the dead or dying body has become in itself the visual sign of human reality in the Third World. Visiting the sacred banks of the Ganges at Varanasi, a writer for the Sunday travel sec- tion of the Chicago Tribune evokes a scene reminiscent of the river Acheron in the nether world. From the top of a ghat overlooking the Ganges, he surveys the scene: "Several large fires, tended to by scrawny ascetics clad in loin cloths, cast macabre shadows over the water." Corpses placed on cere- monial bamboo stretchers await the fire. Setting out from shore, the writer marvels at the riverborne bodies of the dead-Hindu faithful too poor to be cremated. "The boatmen, anxious to please their patrons,_ keep a sharp lookout for floating corpses, straining their eyes and posturing themselves in the bow of the boat like Mrican safari guides" (June 26, I983). The bodies are surveyed as an object of touristic interest, a fact that the writer records with an irony directed primarily at the Charonic boatmen rather than at himself and the other "patrons" of this ghoulish sight-seeing. The scene becomes an image of Eternal India, exotic land of spirituality, poverty, and death, its essence untouched by the modern world.
Images of the dead and dying of course ordinarily occur elsewhere than in the Sunday travel section. At a camp for Cambodian refugees, Gail Sheehy describes the new arrivals: "Wasted by malnutrition they kept coming. With bodies shedding life as nonchalantly as feather falling off a bird, they kept coming." The camp already holds "twenty thousand people with fixed looks, their faces void of animation, their minds frozen"- another image seemingly inspired by Dante'sinftrno. Sheehy's article (Chi- cago Tribune, August I, 1982) contains a just and urgent humanitarian appeal which relies, perhaps necessarily, on scenes so familiar to the Western imagi- nation as to constitute a stock set of images. Thus she writes of the refugees, "They were stacked upright like sticks, they had to be removed from the truck like rag dolls." In such scenes the writer's eye colonizes the victims of famine or disaster by reducing the victim's identity to a sign of suffering
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and, by extension, of the catastrophic Orient. On a similar scene in a docu- mentary film about Malaysia, Roland Barthes remarks ironically, "They are eternal essences of refugees, which it is the nature of the East to produce" (1972:96). Such reduction in the name of humanitarian appeal involves a cost in human dignity: the human is effaced by the overpowering sign of the refugee.
The visual enframing and metaphorical transformations that characterize such images have a distancing effect: while calling attention to suffering, they also show it as out there: contained, defined, localized in a realm under- stood to be culturally apart. But the speed with which these images are brought to us do not bring us closer to that world or make it more real for us. On the contrary, the technology of the modern media alienates us from the reality of the foreign and remote by the very ease with which it produces images of that world; the images are produced at random and can be made to disappear by the turn of the page or the dial. Wayne Booth observes that television news, through its stereotyping and the structure of its presentation, creates "a sense that somebody out there, in there, is taking care of these issues in quick order" (48). Benjamin finds that newspapers achieve a similar distancing effect. The principles of journalistic style as well as the visual makeup of the pages, in which individual news items are not connected with one another, are designed "to isolate what happens from the realm in which it could affect the experience of the reader" ( 158-59): The reader is thus absolved of responsibility; the crime has been identi- fied, the authorities notified. The skilled order of presentation compensates for the reader's inability to assimilate these mass-produced images into the structure of private experience.
When we speak of the role of the eye in establishing knowledge of the world and authority over space, we are referring to a fundamental char- acteristic of Western thinking. What I have called the gaze and the com- manding view makes possible an understanding of the non-Western world as an object of study, an area for development, a field of action. The desire for a systematic visual knowledge of non-Western cultures has become the subject of analysis by critics of ethnology such as Johannes Fabian and Pierre Bourdieu. Fabian calls by the name of visualism ethnology's ten- dency to base its knowledge on visual observation and to define its object in the form of spatial images, maps, diagrams, trees, and tables. The prob- lem inherent in this bias toward visualization is that "primitive" cultures are reduced to synchronic objects of aesthetic as well as visual perception, while more generally, non-Western cultures are constructed as the other
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"in terms of topoi implying distance, difference, and opposition" -that is, as an ordered space for Western thought to inhabit (m, 121).
Fabian's visualism is close to what Bourdieu has called objectivism:
Objectivism constitutes the social world as a spectacle presented to an observer who takes up a "point of view" on the action, who stands back so as to observe it and, transferring into his object the prin- ciples of his relation to the object, conceives of it as a totality for cognition alone, in which all interactions are reduced to symbolic exchanges. (96)
Bourdieu notes that this point of view is generally available only to persons of privilege, from whose position the social world at large appears as a representation, both in the philosophical sense and in the sense offered by a painting or a theatrical performance. This authoritative and privileged, yet distanced, position is one held in common by the ethnologist and other Western writers in the colonial world.
Both Fabian and Bourdieu argue for a break with visualist and objec- tivist models of ethnology. For Fabian, this break involves the recognition that field work is a form of "communicative interaction" between the eth- nologist and the group under study-an interaction that takes place within a shared time and space. Similarly, Bourdieu calls for an understanding of the social world as human practice rather than as an abstracted, concep- tualized model. He includes within this practice the ethnologist as well, whose inquiry must consider the conditions (cultural, economic, political) that make ethnographic study possible.
If we were to transfer these principles beyond ethnography to other forms of writing, they would entail not only the writer's sense of how he or she must look to the group being observed, as Joanne Omang at- tempts when she arrives like an invader "from another planet" at a village in El Salvador, but also the writer's own perspective-including its moti- vations, its conditions of possibility, and its consequences-as a subject of awareness in the writer's own account. Such awareness is ideally combined with the recognition that writing not only follows the visual perception of space, but that writing itself, in its linear and syntactical structure, is a form of parataxis that spatializes and regularizes its object in time and space (Derrida 1976:201).
In La Tentation de POccident (1926), Andre Malraux's fictional correspon- dence between a young Frenchman and a young Chinese, the latter says of the Western mind:
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It wants to draw up a plan of the universe, to make of it an intelli- gible image, i.e. to establish between the unknown and the known a series of relations which would reveal that which has been hitherto concealed. It wants to subordinate the world, and finds in its own actions a pride that much greater for believing that it possesses the world already. (155)
Malraux makes the point that the nomination of the visible is no idle meta- physic, no disinterested revealing of the world's wonders. It is, on the contrary, a mode of thinking and writing wherein the world is radically transformed into an object of possession. The gaze is never innocent or pure, never free of mediation by motives which may be judged noble or otherwise. The writer's eye is always in some sense colonizing the land- scape, mastering and portioning, fixing wnes and poles, arranging and deepening the scene as the object of desire.