The Denigration of Ocularcentrism

Since Plato’s allegory of the cave, light and the role of sight have been accorded a unique position in the Western tradition. They have stood as a metaphor for truth and objectivity and the very axis of modern rationalism. More recently, however, this status has come under significant criticism from Continental thought. Martin Jay describes convincingly a “denigration of vision”in the twentieth-century French thought:

The modern era . . . has been dominated by the sense of sight in a way that sets it apart from its pre-modern predecessors and possibly its postmodern successor. Beginning with the Renaissance and the scientific revolution, modernity has been normally considered resolutely ocularcentric . . . . Whether we focus on ‘themirror of nature’metaphor in philosophy with Richard Rorty or emphasize the prevalence of surveillance with Michel Foucault or bemoan the society of the spectacle with Guy Debord, we confront again and again the ubiquity of vision as the master sense of the

modern era. (1993b: 114)

According to Jay, “Cartesian perspectivism”is often assumed to be “equivalent to the modern scopic regime per se”(1993b: 115). Descartes’radical division of mind and body leads to a logic of expression, according to which the intelligible activities of a knowing subject is entirely separated from the passive mechanisms of a physical body.

In objectivity, the world is severed from the observer; in knowability, communion is re-established through the mediation of light. Jay summaries major features of ocularcentrism as follows— linear perspective was taken to be a faithful

representation for everything that could be visually represented; in addition to linear elements, it emphasized measurability, predictability, detachment and control; it implied a fixed, monocular viewing position, reducing the importance of narrative or discursive content in favour of formal and logical structure (1993b: 118).

Indeed, many of the twentieth-century French intellectuals were extraordinarily suspicious of the visual implication in modern thought while no less sensitive to the importance of vision itself.¹¹ With a shared distrust toward ocularcentirsm, both Levinas and Blanchot abandon the traditional philosophical preoccupation with ontology based on “the eternally present order of vision”(Levinas 1989:157).

Blanchot is urgent to explore the antinomic relations between night and day, blindness and insight, obfuscation and enlightenment. Denouncing the alleged French passion for clarity, Blanchot suggests, in works like La folie du jour (The Madness of the Day), that noontime, the hour of greatest visibility, was also the hour of greatest danger, the time when looking at the sun brought blindness. Nor was the night any more conducive to lucid vision. What he proposes is the “othernight,”the murmur of un-negatable being, which withdraws from the dialectical opposition of day and night.

Blanchot subverted the contemplative appreciation of the starry heavens that has been a fundamental premise of Western metaphysics, demanding instead “the writing of the

disaster”—thus literally “dis-aster”— which means relinquishing any fixed star in the visible firmament as the ground of meaning (1986b: 5)¹².

Blanchot’s concern with “the duplicity of vision”parallels Levinas’s claim that ethics is thwarted by a visually based ontology. Levinas is an idiosyncratic

philosopher in the history of Western philosophy, not only because of his reversal of the traditional subordination of the ethical to the ontological, but also because, in a tradition which privileges the specular, his theory of ethical subjectivity is theorized within the metaphor of touch. For Levinas, vision is emblematic of habitual economy and its tendency to grasp and possess. Vision is a violence and a form of adequation. Denouncing the fundamental narcissism of vision, Levinas regards the phenomenologically given world as a self-defined totality, which Derrida describes as such— “everything given to me within light appears as given to myself by myself”

(VM 92). In other words, any emanation of light belies the desire to take hold of something or appropriate something for oneself. For Levinas, light is the medium which sustains and bridges the difference between a subject of perception and perceivable things: “Light makes objects into a world, that is, makes them belong to us”(EE 48). That is, in a world of light, everything other than the self belongs, through intentionality, to the self. The egoism of intentionality is based on the establishment of a sense of being at the center of a panoramic objective world:

Light makes possible . . . this enveloping of the exterior by the inward, which is the very structure of the cogito and of sense. Thought is always clarity or the dawning of a light. The miracle of light is the essence of thought: due to the light an object, while coming from without, is already ours in the horizon which precedes it; it comes from an exterior already apprehended and comes into being as though it came from us, as though commanded by our freedom. (EE 48)

Therefore, the lucidity of things and ideas is primarily the result of egoism which seeks to find oneself in the light. Levinas thus indicates (not without tones of melancholy) the limited freedom of the ego as a self-defined totality: “The ‘I’always has one foot caught in its own existence”(EE 84).

Levinas’s disclosure of the appropriating and subsuming nature of light and ego calls to our mind Lawrence’s exposition of the crisis brought out by the modern form of consciousness, which might be recapitulated in Heidegger’s word: “The impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his

construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion. It seems as though man everywhereand alwaysencountersonly himself”(1977: 27). The mind/body split, which leads to what Lawrence called “the masturbating consciousness,”is often connected by Lawrence to the Cartesian self-consciousness whereby each individual finds the hub of reality in him/herself, in his/her own ego. His poem “New Heaven and Earth”charts the violation of the distinctions between self and other, lover and beloved, even creator and created, as a result of the appropriation of each of the second term by the first one:

When everything was me, I knew it all already, I anticipated it All in my soul;

Because I was the author and the result, I was the God and the creation at once;

Creator, I looked at my creation;

Created, I looked at myself, the creator:

It was a maniacal horror in the end.

I was a lover, I kissed the woman I loved, and God of horror, I was kissing also myself.

I was a father and a begetter of children,

And oh, oh horror, I was begetting and conceiving in my own body.

(CP 257)

Lawrence here presents the perverse energy enclosed in self-knowledge, self-love and self-creation. The articulation of solipsism reaches a horrified completion and climax in images of fertility— i.e., auto-eroticism leads to auto-conception.

In his critique of modern consciousness, Lawrence considered its split to be the result of an overemphasis on the logical, visual, and verbal processes associated with the head. In his opinion, both vision and language—or conceptual

thought—segment the fluctuating world. What is more, the privileging of these mental functions serves to entrench what is constructed by eye and intellect.

This is the habit we have formed: of visualizing everything. Each man to himself is a picture. That is, he is a complete little objective reality, complete in himself, existing by himself, absolutely, in the middle of the picture. All the rest just setting, background . . . . This has been the development of the conscious ego in man . . . since Greece first broke the spellof‘darkness’.... Previously, even in Egypt, men had not learned to see straight . . . . Like men in a dark room they only felt their own

existence surging in the darkness of other creatures. (P 523)

Lawrence understood the alienated ego as the product of verbal-conceptual thought;

the highly intellectual and visual culture has further reified the split within the self.

Like the horrified “I”in the above poem, “Man isgiven up to hisdualbusiness,of being . . . the living stuff of life itself, unrevealed; and of knowing. . . the manner of that which has been,which isrevealed”(STH 40-1). As a conscious ego, man is thus burdened with the antinomic nature of his own existence—i.e., as both the knowing subject and the object to be known.

For Lawrence, the possession of eyes suggests the facility to categorize, calibrate and fragment what is seen into sections and sectors. Metaphorically also, the“innereye”suggeststheway thebrain can superimposeimagesofitsown making upon what the physical eye looks at. In “Fantasia and Unconscious,”Lawrence uses the analogy of the tree, which “had no face and no answer”(FU 45), to open his discussion of the tyranny of sight:

This marvelous vast individual without a face, without lips or eyes or heart.

This towering creature that never had a face . . . he turns two ways: he thrusts himself tremendously down to the middle earth, where dead men sink in darkness, in the damp, dense undersoil; and he turns himself about in high air; whereas we have eyes on one side of our head only, and only grow upwards. (FU 43-4. Emphasis added.)

A tree, Lawrence thus claims, cannot be looked at and known; to relish its existence, one has to “sit among the roots and nestle against its strong trunk, and not bother”(FU 43). Since the tree has no eyes, it has no sectored vision either. Lawrence reflects how the Greeks and Romans sought in their philosophy to put a face on nature and natural objects, segmenting them into features and facial characteristics: “Everything had a face, and a human voice. Men speak, and their fountains piped an answer”

(FU 45). On the contrary, the tree, as Lawrence describes it, grows according to a blind intuition which is immensely preferable to the limited linear eyesight of

“seeing”creatures. Thus, trees emanate a sense of “profound indifference,”because they possess a vastness of life that eludes human categorization and definition.

Lawrence’s critique of the imperialist implication of vision has been given in many of his novels. For instance, it is manifest in Kate’s reaction to Ramon and Cipriano in The Plumed Serpent:

‘Ah!’she said to herself. ‘Let me close my eyes to him, and open only

my soul. Let me close my pry, seeing eyes, and sit in dark stillness along with these two men . . . . The itching, prurient, knowing, imagining eye.

I am cursed with it, I am hampered up in it. It is my curse of curses, the curse of Eve. The curse of Eve is upon me, my eyes are like hooks, my knowledge is like a fish-hook through my gills, pulling me in spasmodic desire. (PS 184. Lawrence’s italics. ).

This passage relates thematically to Lawrence’s general view that sight is the most physically distanced of the senses and therefore closest to the abstraction of intellect, which has caused the alienating nature of modern consciousness. The regime of vision constitutes an appropriation of otherness, a refusal to allow the other to be other.

Doubtlessly, Lawrence criticizes the tyranny of sight mainly because it is related to the light of reason which, in shedding its rays, appropriates and thereby abolishes things. Since the eyes are, in purely physical terms, the most elevated of our senses, they are conventionally linked with rational understanding, as suggested by the conventional metaphor “understanding is seeing.” Visuality is thus linked to rationality. Denying the pleasure of gazing into the Dionysian abysses, the Socratic eye is engaged in the production of knowledge, wherein the getting of wisdom is based on the doctrine of recollection. That is, the knower seeks to understand and to integrate their external world in terms familiar to the self. Denouncing the Socratic model of knowing, Lawrence declares: “Know thyself! Which means, really, know thine own unknown self. It’s not good knowing something you know already”(P 719). Being extraordinarily sensitive to the otherness lying beyond boundaries of man’s conscious mind, Lawrence is suspicious of the Socratic model of ethics which is based on epistemology—i.e., the more you understand, the more virtuous you are.

For Lawrence, quite the contrary, any system of values or code of ethics that we

construct must acknowledge “the vast, incomprehensible pattern of some primal morality greater than ever the human mind can grasp”(STH 29).

In a more determinate tone, Levinas also advises the similar caution that concepts discovered within the self would not alter the self or the world because they would mediateone’srelation to externalbeing by dissolving itsalterity. Taking a step farther than Lawrence, Levinas specifically formulates a difference or an otherness that exceeds the totality of the visual, and in doing so challenges the privileging of the subject of light. His proposition of an otherness that transcends egological existence is thematized in the face. Taken from the vocabulary of vision and light, the face manifests that which transcends the light. Therefore, the

Levinasian face must be divorced from the Hegelian specularity of intersubjective recognition. Instead, Levinas considers the face as an irreducible other, which eludes the speculation of the gaze:

The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum—the adequate idea. (TI 50-1) Thus, for Levinas, there is no encounter of presence in the face. It is, beyond the egoism of existence, a visitation unpresupposable within the visible world.

However, in attempting to philosophisize without light, Levinas is confronted at the outset with a certain dilemma indicated by Derrida: “It is difficult to maintain a philosophical discourse against light”(VM 85-6). In order to attack the use of the metaphor of the sun in Western thought, which associates illumination with

intelligibility, possession and apprehension, Levinas attempts to propose a sense of

infinity which is beyond the metaphysics of presence. The difficulty confronting Levinas is expressed by Derrida as a problem of light:

Who will ever dominate it, who will ever pronounce its meaning without being pronounced by it? What language will ever escape it? How, for example, will the metaphysics of the face as the epiphany of the other free itself of light? Light perhaps has no opposite, if it does, it is certainly not night. (VM 92)

For Derrida, Levinas’s attempt to do away with the violence of a universality of light for the sake of an ethics of alterity would be to abandon what to philosophy appears to be the natural means for counteracting the blindness of mysticism. Put differently, it would be to base ethics on the martyrdom of Reason. As Derrida sees it, Levinas poses the question of ethics as simultaneously the inauguration of responsibility and the impossibility of its representation.

In some sense that is also the dilemma Lawrence is compelled to face in his portrayal and critique of modern civilization—that is, though feeling that the great disease of the age is that we are all far too conscious, he had no other way of conveying this except through our consciousness. However, unlike Levinas’s treatment of light in his early work, Lawrence’s attack on the highly visual and intellectual culture is not, despite his intermittent lapse into extremity or hyperbole, basically meant to scrap rational light as such in favor of pristine darkness. “Any creative act occupies the whole consciousness of a man, comprising instinct, intuition, mind and intellect”( P 573). His concern about mental consciousness is dialectical rather than simply avoiding it; he intends to use its very power in order to surpass it.

As Burack puts it, Lawrence “uses the analytic tools of the modern mind against itself”(493). In other words, what Lawrence really repudiates is not consciousness or self-consciousness, but its presumptuous claim that it can grasp, by its usual tool of

concept, the present movement of a living being in its wholeness. That being the case, Lawrence does not present mere pre-conscious, pre-linguistic naivete as an alternative to the violence of mental knowledge. Instead, he suggests that “we must know, if only in order to learn notto know”(FU 76). Learning, which always involves consciousness, inevitably leads to self-knowledge, but the accumulation of knowledge that so complicates our experience can never simply be suppressed, reversed, or eliminated.

Influenced by Nietzsche’s idea of the artist as destroyer-creator and as transvaluer, Lawrence sees the “double rhythm of creating and destroying”as

precisely “the dual rhythm of initiation”(SCAL 70). In Apocalypse, Lawrence sees the poetic imagination as cyclic rather than linear: “Thepowerofsuggestion ismost mysterious. It may not work at all: or it may carry the unconscious mind back in greatcyclicswoopsthrough erasoftime:oritmay go only partway”(A 115). Put another way, it may involvea“curveofreturn”to pastculturesand creative models, followed by resurgence and development. It is the dialectical encounter with

otherness that generates new thinking. In his novels, Lawrence devised a particular dialectics: words such as “light/ darkness,”“visible/invisible,”“knowing/unknown”

hint at elusive qualities that can be caught only in endless repetitions and movement.

This very elusiveness made it hard either for the author to give his conception an adequate expression or for the reader to grasp a clear understanding of it. However, as has been noted, Lawrence is not conducting an argument wherein the restatement is merely unnecessary repetition. On the contrary, new contexts make the same word or phrase express a further development. As characters toss key words about,

Lawrence revealsthesewords’dialecticalpossibilitieswhileavoiding superimposition of a theory.

In what follows, I intend to explore the way Lawrence’s fiction marks a

significant transgression of the dualistic thinking, from the basic image patterns of light and darkness to the celebrated antithesis of the African and Nordic “ways”of knowing.¹³ Lawrence does not merely reverse the conventional assignment of values but rather rejects the conventional taxonomies. For him, both poles of any conventional duality are clearly interrelated, dependent upon each other by definition.

In a kind of linguistic labor, Lawrence chips away at any given signified of each of the poles, changing its shape little by little, but never letting it conveniently settle into a final form. To register the mutinous and discordant power in his fiction is not to concede that the novels are flawed or undermined by contradiction. Quite the

In a kind of linguistic labor, Lawrence chips away at any given signified of each of the poles, changing its shape little by little, but never letting it conveniently settle into a final form. To register the mutinous and discordant power in his fiction is not to concede that the novels are flawed or undermined by contradiction. Quite the