Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Segregation in UK: White People Told to Stay Away" video.
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"The male gaze"(see Wikipedia). Goodness, that's a blast from the past! Yes it was centred around film theory as i recall, depicted in the 1960 British movie "Peeping Tom" and "Death in Venice". According to Wikipedia it originates with Jean Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" (1943) a bizarre kind of Hegelian Cartesian, reworking of Heidegger's "Being and Time". Heidegger destroyed Sartre's metaphysical reversal of essence privileged over existence to existence privileged over essence in his critique of Sartre and humanism in "Existentialism is a Humanism" lecture (1945), found in his "Letter on Humanism" ( 1946). "The reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement". I heard a roomer back in the day that when Dreyfus visited Heidegger, he saw that Heidegger a copy of "Being and Nothingness" on his desk, and Dreyfus asked him what the thought of it and Heidegger said "its sh1t". Although Sartre became the central figure in France in the years after the war and in the student movement, really to my mind de Bouvier's " The Second Sex is much better. Both were still in an Hegelian struggle with Hegel's Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic they had gotten from Kojeve and Hyppolite. That is they remain trapped in the Hegelian system of master/slave reversal when they conceive that to break out of it is to reverse it or set up another opposition of conflict with the master/slave conflict. This is still the trapped within the system opposition approach today when for example in modern politics the way to deal with the race theory position of reversal of white/black privilege to black/white privilege is to have a counter revolution, a return to white/black privilege.
The thinkers that were to have the influence on the left now (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze) were much closer to Heidegger. Although Sartre himself turned to Marxism later he remained much more of an influence in the American reworking of individualism and the Western movie character as an existentialism. In the 1970's you ahs long haired revolutionary Marxists and long haired existential free individual "cowboys on motorcycles", and buddy movies. I think that's still true today.
So to be naturalist about it, i go for a walk over the fields most mornings. There are loads of rabbits, and they are very attuned to the gaze. Its very weird to me that considering such differences between me and the rabbits, they totally recognise as a immediate and stand out event when i look at them. Eyes looking at them, feature predominantly in there cognitive vision, even when i am very far a way as to be of no physical threat.
Heidegger's response to the tradition of Critical not so much of "The Gaze" as predatory an objectifying, but of the whole tradition, that sets our sense of vision as privileged over other senses and more fundamental modes of human existence than can be "captured" by just looking, or indeed just focusing on "just looking", not then a move of reflection that is looking at just looking. These art all moves that remain trapped within the privileging of vision and intentionality as a sight in the disclosure of human being Dasein.
So whereas from Sartre we have a critical reflection on the Gaze as objectification, that might mean stare back at them or blind them ("Equius"), Heidegger wants to up end the whole privileging of understanding sight as our primary relation to the object, our primary mode of being. For Heidegger our relation to objects is not in the first instance visual, but practical and contextual. In this he sees the whole Western Tradition from Plato to the mid 20th century's a repetition and continuation of a privileging of sight in understanding human relations to the world and others. Epistemology and Science as a whole then begin from a position that it too late, since it is based in a long sedimented tradition of visual metaphors for the relation of human being to the world. Heidegger's term Dasein for human existence means it makes no sense to say something like Dasein's primary visual relation to the world its a contradiction in terms really. As such we cannot then think that to set up, as a limit or control of a persons scopic relation to objects, we need a reflection like to look at the relation of looking at an object or make looking at an object an object to look at etc to infinite regress of reflection and regulation. These remain mere moves within the game. like regulations and segregations "looking at the "looing at the object"".
to return to the movies Its is interesting that recent work has shown that Kant's whole metaphorical Architecture for the "Critique of Pure Reason" draws on metaphors form what was at the time high tech theatre special effects. It is argued his terms for transcendent thought of objects as illusory extensions ordinary thought about relations to real objects, are all drawn from the "Magic Lantern" shows and the use of mirror to project "ghostly" images on stage to scare the audience. It foregrounds the the gothic imagery n Kant and the German Idealist and German and British Romanticism. Its great of me since it shows the strong link between Kant's Critical works his early writings "Dreams of a Ghost Seer".
Perhaps then in response in response to the Male Gaze and the White Gaze, instead of Staring back we just say they suffer from an illusion generated by mirrors and projections of bad French Cartesian philosophy. They might have got away with it if it wasn't for those pesky kids".
While over the fields yesterday i got chatting to a guy walking his dog. He told me about an Australian beetle where the male the reflections from the female's shell is what attracts them. The population is in state of collapse because, those male beetles turn out to be "tricked" by the reflections from discarded beer bottles. So there are hundreds of them crawling over every empty beer bottle. I leave it to you to figure out what type of beer bottle they go for!
(For analytic philosophy on this see Martin Jay "Downcast Eyes" 1993)
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25:00 mins in. This is my subjective and speculative view, but perhaps one way to historicise this can draw on the post war cultural political movements. So there is a 1968 anti authority anti state student movement that mixes far left Marxism and individual freedom and art. Then the Punk movement makes this into a radical freedom, Anarchy. Also a radical creative art movement emphasizing destruction, negation of tradition and individual imagination. I remember most of the original Punks by 1978 had realised it had no where to go and looked towards something different. I was a Mod at the time and went to a major holdout Punk event and it was totally alienating and i realised it was not for me. The rest of the post Punk movement first split into different factions, and then in the early 1980's at places like Stonehenge and Glastonbury started to form alliances between previous opposites that mixing Rockers, Hippies, and Punks, into a kind of Gothic paganism and far left politics with a return to nature environmentalism. Everybody was united in opposition to Thatcher's Conservativism even though that was a kind of Anarchy. In the 80's this was a lot of fun, but i returned to Glastonbury in the late 90's and it had degenerated into a middleclass ideological elite. The Convoy were now the marginal outsiders at the far end of the field, behind the experimental wind mills. It brought to my mind the recollection of where i had come form The Mod band "Secrete Affair" and the line "We're not the punk elite. Who are the Punk elite?".
Perhaps then what has happened is that the new generation have found in science a way to continue the Punk movement as a radicalisation of creative freedom from tradition in terms of human nature. Its ironic that back in the day there was a real anti medical science attitude, and for a return to traditional "natural" medicine. Increasingly they sounded like conservatives to me. Indeed they invited Roger Scruton to speech at our Collage then Crewe and Alsager now Manchester Met, just before a total student strike in which we kicked all the authority out off of the the campus and took it over, and the 70's Glam Rock bank "The Sweet" came and played. This was just before the Christmas break so not too well strategized. To have been there, and to have been young, was pure bliss.
Anyway I went back to hanging around with rockers while being a Mod and reading Coin Wilson rather than Sartre and Marcuse.
(A good way to follow some of this is rather than sociologically, would be the through the life and work of Genesis P-Orridge from Brian Jones Mod to psychedelic, hippy, punk, Acid House, industrial rave parties though to performance and instillation artist and many more I've never heard of. I was sure he had a lecturing job at Berkeley and/or got an award and/or did a prestigious series of lectures there, but I can find no reference to this. Genesis P-Orridge (1950-2020. I’m not sure if he would think this was at all appropriate, but Rest in Peace))
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