-
CHAPTER 8: The World at a Glance
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
CHAPTER 8 The World at a Glance EDWARD S. CASEY [Mt. Ventoux] is the dominant feature of Provence . . . it has a presence; instinctively when within range, one looks at it the first thing in the morning to see what the weather will be like, glances at it during the day, looks again the last thing at night. —Michelin guide for Provence (Paris, l979) [Landscape] is a portion of the earth’s surface comprehended in a glance. —J. B. Jackson, Landscape At the same time, however, I can direct my glance at the perceived spatial world with its orientation. If I do that, the other [world] vanishes: And this vanishing is not a mere darkening, but a being pressed down to an “empty” presentation. —Husserl, Phantasie, Bild-Bewusstsein, Erinnerung THE PRIMARY PARADOX OF THE GLANCE The glance—not the gaze or the regard (which is Sartre’s territory) or studied scrutiny (the prescribed attitude of so much of Western philosophy, from Plato to at least Descartes) or even bare contemplation (an ascetic ideal). The glance has none of the gravity of these more austere and traditionally sanctioned kinds of looking. It is a mere featherweight by comparison. Instead of bogging down, the glance alleviates. Rather than petrifying things—as in the case of the Sartrian regard—the glance graces what it looks at, enhancing and expanding it. The glance does not make entities more “entitative”; rather than ballasting them with Being, it endows them with the lightness of Becoming. 147 148 EDWARD S. CASEY The spirit of gravity, which seeks to fixate and to identify, is dissipated in the mereness of a glance. Apophansis, that urge to predicate and judge that has held some two millennia of Western thought in thrall, is suspended in the glance. Instead of a logic of statement—of affirmation and confirmation—the glance returns us to the original and literal meaning of “apo-phansis”: to show something from itself. From off its very surface. Which is precisely what the glance is uniquely capable of doing. Even the most penetrating glance stays on the surface rather than piercing it and going behind it. This is not to say, however, that the glance lingers on the surface. It would not be a glance if it did. From one surface—of one thing or group of things—it is deflected to another. The glance moves on. Contrary to what Husserl (cited by Derrida for a quite different yet ultimately parallel purpose) claimed, the look does not abide.1 Not if the look is a glance. But what is the glance? What happens in it? (What happens to it is all too clear; it is bypassed, outright neglected in almost all of Western philosophy , which assumes that the glance can only be concerned with trivialities. But to be concerned with the surface is not to be concerned with what is superficial.) What happens in the glance is this. A glance takes in—it takes a lot in, namely, all kinds of surface. In so doing, it takes us places, all kinds of places. For places are what hold surfaces together in more or less coherent congeries, giving them a habitation if not a (local) name: giving them a “layout.”2 If we can say of surfaces what Socrates says of shapes—namely, that they are “the limits of solids”3 —they are not only the surfaces of things but of places as well. In these two regards, that is, by taking in surfaces and taking us places, a glance takes us out of ourselves, out of our customary egoic identity. It suspends this identity as surely as it dissolves the apophantic obsession with identification. In its egoless ecstasis, the glance refuses to succumb to the grasping that is so endemic to any settled sense of self and that is, for Buddhists, the essence of samsara, human suffering. By effecting this release, the glance can take us virtually anywhere—to almost any surface and place of the world. Indeed, it brings us to the world itself. The world at a glance: the world in a glance. I said that the glance “takes in.” I meant this rather literally. The glance not only goes out; it comes (back) in. It is in-formative. As performative of perspectives, it is informative of the world. For it is by glancing, just glimpsing , that we learn a great deal of what we know about the world. A great deal more...