"The Eye Jumps": On Seeing Without Reading

• In Event: Impersonal Intimacies: Rethinking Relationality in the Ontological Turn

Abstract

Objectives
The paper proposes research practices consonant with a programme of “seeing the world without reading it”, as envisaged by Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 189) as a counter to philosophy’s rage for imposing order and hierarchy on events through explanation and signification. It attempts to detach the ethnographic eye – long implicated in the colonial work of surveillance and discipline – from its customary function of ‘reading’ events for the order that might be discerned and the meanings that might be extracted. Instead, the paper attempts to access the mobile relationality of the haptic, synaesthetic and ‘polyvocal’ eye that connects heterogeneous entities at levels and speeds above and beneath those of the individual organism. The eye that sees without reading senses impersonal intimacies and uncanny relations that evade capture by representation.

Theoretical framework
The paper is informed by Deleuzian philosophy. It takes off from the invocation in Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 204) of an ancient, primitive eye that sees without reading and forges instead promiscuous connections - “consuming remains; extracting surplus values; connecting words, bodies, and sufferings, and formulas, things and affects; connoting voices, graphic traces, and eyes, always in a poly-vocal usage” (1983: 204). The operation of the eye in this primitive, “territorial” mode of representation, in contrast to the subordinating work of representation in its later, “imperial” mode, is according to Deleuze and Guattari, nothing other than “a way of jumping that cannot be contained within an order of meaning, still less within a signifier”.

Mode of inquiry
The paper implements diagrammatic or divinatory methods that attempt to draw lines from the known to the unknown (Deleuze, 2003). It elaborates practices of ‘intensification’ that tap into the abstract forces and intensities that compose events. Ramey (2012: 125), after Deleuze, describes intensive thought as attunement to affective thresholds “where the mind is invited to fuse its faculties in acts of conjecture that connect otherwise independent circuits of sensation, habit, memory and understanding.”

Data
The paper is primarily concerned with conceptual development. However in exemplifying the altered relationality of ‘seeing without reading’, it also effects a speculative or ‘precursive’ jump (James, 1996) that traces promiscuous relations across disparate data fragments and other materials, in ways that overstep the bounds of the familiar.

Conclusions and significance
The paper provides insights into how the inquiring eye might, to a certain extent at least, renounce its complicity in the arrogance of exegesis in order to sense more complex and unpredicted forms of relationality. In this respect, it also represents a contribution to the development of decolonising methodologies.

Author

• Maggie MacLure, Manchester Metropolitan University