“Through the Eyes of Descartes”
Cartesian Theater and Inner Images
The Cartesian question of mind in Meditations is linked to perception; how do we perceive things in the outside world, and how is perception related to mental activities such as imagination and memory? These questions extend well beyond metaphysics. Anthropological and psychological issues of affect and physical entrapment are equally at stake—opening for theories of the drive that presage psychoanalytic theory. In Treatise on Man, Descartes inscribes a relation between physical affect and perception. In Formation of the Foetus, which is the final part of Description of the Human Body, the visceral origin of this relation is sought through a method of dissection. The way in which this method complements and exceeds the metaphysical writings concerned with inner images in Meditations is not often made an object in Cartesian scholarship—the writings in natural philosophy, to which the anatomy belongs, is almost always kept apart from the metaphysical work. However, as so many times with Descartes’s work, things can be seen from multiple points of view: perception is a phenomenon of plural implications.
This search for some kind of origin, connection or ending is drawn toward a fleeting point of fascination—situated in a dissected eye, brain, or heart. In the Cartesian medical arts, in text and image, the gaze is particularly apostrophized: as the gaze of curiosity perhaps, or as the gaze of learning—but at the same time, in the splitting open of organs, it becomes trapped at its own vanishing point. In works such as Optics, but also in those on anatomy, emotions, and passions, Descartes takes us beyond the question of perception, toward the origin of the gaze—a point at which drives deriving beyond the reflective cogito intersect with the intellectual elaboration of mental images. In speculating on the inside of the human body, its streams and flows, temperatures and textures, laying open the nervous system and the tubes of transport that run between brains and limbs, Descartes inscribes a gaze of fascination that transcends the sheer anatomical aims of visualization—a scopic drive of dissection.
The Cartesian studies of various states of consciousness, such as the sleeping dream, the in-between of dream and state of wakefulness, or the very moment of waking up, are particularly occupied with the quality and meaning of inner images. The scholarly inquiries on this theme are most often made with regard to the metaphysical inquiries of Meditations, as inquiries into the philosophy of mind. But in Descartes’s own writings, the distinction between physics and metaphysics is not always so clear-cut, as we have demonstrated in the chapter on his visceral aesthetics. A similar argument can be made about the Cartesian inquiries into inner images—although they often have metaphysical implications, they can be seen in conjunction with the visceral impact on the inside of the body, which is connected to perception. The multifaceted investigations into various forms of consciousness can be seen regarding corporeal instigations and effects. Just as in psychoanalysis, mind and body are not simply separated or simply joined but overlaid with conflicts. In his writings Treatise on Man, The Formation of the Foetus, and Passions of the Soul, Descartes shows, just like Sigmund Freud, that the subject that thinks and feels is rooted in biological life. This, in turn, suggests the existence of a theory of the drive, the gaze of which is its primary mode of existence.
Figure 6.1. L’Homme: Et un traitté de la formation du foetus, Paris, 1664, Royal Library Stockholm.
Figure 6.2. Dioptrique. In Discours de la methode, Leyden, 1637, Royal Library Stockholm.
In Optics, Descartes inscribes a distinct breaking point between the I that sees—which is not only a subject of perception but also of reason—and the “eye” that sees, the eye of dissection. Breaking points, in general, are inscribed in all of Descartes writings. We find them between passivity and activity, inside and outside, dream and wakefulness. In Meditations we find a breaking point, between the I that doubts and the I that exists; signifying itself through a shifter through which the subject will forever become split to itself. Here, Descartes assumes the biggest challenge of the skeptic, to think without relying on sense perception. The sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds are merely the constructs of a malicious demon, “delusions of dreams which he devised to ensnare my judgment.”1 This famous passage introduces not only a subject split between res cogitans and res extensa but also a subject scrutinizing its own inner images.
The separation between the inner images of dreams of fantasy—and the metaphysically secured knowledge of the cogito—is made possible through a distinct break performed with an older, Aristotelian worldview.2 But Descartes’s discussion of imagination and his reflections on inner images in general are not only there to posit a distinction vis-à-vis the cogito. It could well be the case that one cannot know the cogito unless one passes through the images. But this entails analyzing how inner images are produced.
We may doubt all our senses, says the first chapter of Meditations, but some things seem more certain than others: “I am here, sitting by the fire, wearing a winter dressing-gown, holding this piece of paper in my hands, and so on. Again, how could it be denied that these hands or this whole body are mine?3 Descartes visualizes himself in different states of consciousness, as if seen from a third eye, from the outside. A variant of the same occurs in the third meditation, which reflects on what it means to think without images. All mental images will be regarded as “vacuous, false and worthless.” The objects of sensory experience and imagination are thought not to exist, although sensory perception and imagination are very much in existence as inner images.”4 In denegating “mental images” of all things that belong to the extended world, Meditations describes not only the difference between the conscious self that has a conception of itself and the world outside of it but also the self thinking itself thinking without images. Such a consciousness, a cogito that thinks without images, can only be postulated through a radical negation. But consciousness cannot actually remove what is experienced as a world of inner images; it can only postulate its removal “as if.”
Daniel Dennett has described the problem with this split in and of consciousness. In Meditations, Descartes observes experience to be shaped as a series of inner images. In these observations, he establishes a limit between inner and outer, between arrival and registration, “which is the necessary and sufficient condition for conscious experience.”5 Even if Descartes makes clear that consciousness is not the same thing as a representation of the outside world, there is an idea that inner images and sensual experience correspond. If we assume, Dennett argues, that our consciousness is equal to the inner images that we have of our experiences, we need to postulate that there is a part of us that registers these inner images, that, so to speak, watches the inner screen of our mental activity. Descartes postulates a little spectator, or a little homunculus or a small man studying everything that happens inside the brain. To explain the function of this homunculus, however, you need another one. And then another one—the idea of consciousness acquires the form of a reflexive unity where thought reflects on inner images. Consciousness ends up being construed as “Cartesian theater.”
The critique of the Cartesian theater is, in turn, also widely criticized, but still a point of reference in the philosophy of mind. But the homunculus—that is, the figure of a split mind watching itself analyzing its own state of consciousness—does not necessarily give witness to an inconsistency of argument. What Descartes does, rather, is to demonstrate that subjectivity is inherently split. In doing that, he is positing a kind of split between conscious layers and the unconscious workings of desire and drives that have become a standard conception in contemporary psychoanalysis.6 In figuring how we relate to ourselves through memories, fantasies, and other layers of inner images, he is not giving any psychological account of the self. He places us in front of an unknown point of production, an alterity or point zero. Inner images are active formations rather than imprints of an exterior on things and object.7 The subject of thought points to the existence of something that does not think of the self so much as it thinks in the self. We encounter an unknown point of reference that captures the cogito, without being the cogito.
In his seminal work The Four Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan shows the psychoanalytic subject to be a consequence of the Cartesian insight that the “I,” which enounces its own being, points to the conditions for its own enunciation. The density of those conditions are imaginal—the cogito can pronounce its existence, but has difficulties grasping itself beyond its inner images. In Lacan’s subject, the unconscious is situated in a language that, as Freud has shown, is prone to condensation and displacement. These are linguistic mechanisms. But they are also pictorial—the dream language is always displaced with the view of being as rich as possible in terms of inner images. Whereas Descartes introduced the subject, it was Freud who used the dream to demonstrate what subjectivity means: “In the field of dream you are at home. Wo es war, soll ich werden.”8 This does not mean that the ego comes to rise, victorious over the unconscious, but rather that it cannot be seen as distinct from the unconscious. To psychoanalysis, the subject cannot be thought beyond the weave of inner images through which the subject reflects and affects itself—it is to be thought as a point of desire and drives rather than certainty or knowledge. Thus, psychoanalysis has demonstrated that the cogito is a point of radical negativity, negating not just the realness of things in the outside world but also itself, when it appears as nothing but an inner theater.9 The Cartesian reduction of the subject to pure cogito implies that the very thing that goes under the notion of Cartesian theater covers the subject as pure void or negativity. It serves as a kind of shield over an empty space, an imaginary cover—filled with fantasies and dreams.
Inner Images and Mnemonic Traces
At the same time, the cogito is not all there is. If the cogito is the metaphysical endpoint of consciousness, the anchor of skeptical subjectivity asserted as negativity, there is also a subject of a phenomenal physicality, of corporeality and of sexuality, to be explored. If one looks at the Cartesian examination of “inner images” such as fantasies and dreams, it becomes clear that Descartes himself posits multifaceted layers of consciousness. Inner images such as fantasies, memories, and dreams belong not to a single form of consciousness but to topologies and layers that deserve not one explanation but several.
In the fragments that were left after Descartes death, called Les Olympiques, which were repeated in Baillet’s biography forty years after his death and were also copied by Leibniz, Descartes writes about a dream. This scene has often been repeated in the literature on Descartes and given a symbolic status. In the dream, he makes his way toward a Jesuit cloister, and his path is crossed by strong winds and unlikely events as well as corporeal lameness. At the same time, a phrase comes to him, where the genius of poetry is described through the idea of “enthusiasm”: “One could find it surprising that the most profound thoughts are to be found in the writings of poets rather than philosophers. That is because the poets have written under the dominance of enthusiasm and the force of imagination; the seeds of science are in us as the sparks of flint; the philosophers extract these seeds by reason, and the poets make them spurt out with their imagination: therefore they shine even stronger.”10
Sketching what might be figured as a model of production of inner images, Descartes points to the intertwinement between writing, thinking, and dreaming. He knows that what appears to be the most intimate in the self, a flow of dreams and fantasies, gives witness to a fundamental split between the ego, which seeks to designate itself—by language and reason—and the subject that is the location of thought, which comes in multiple forms.
Descartes’s problem of thought, then, although focused on the certainty of the cogito, explores a much wider notion of consciousness that precedes Freudian studies of the unconscious. Freud was aware of this himself: the dreams of Olympica became subject to analysis. To the psychoanalyst, they do not lack an obvious sexual symbolism: Descartes dreaming that he would be presented with a big melon from a far-off land. The maternal breast is displayed with all its insignia. But Freud does not see any content of interest for interpretation for the psychoanalyst. To him, the dreams are too intellectual, too put in place: they are dreams “from above” that are more like philosophical constructions than streams of consciousness.11 In addition to the sexual symbolism of the maternal body, Freud misses out also on typical visceral conflicts that haunt the dreamer in his own work. Descartes has a dream of stickiness—he is flung to a wall by strong winds, unable to move, all the while others seem to pass him by. This corresponds to what Freud talks about as a “typical dream”: movement being impeded. That this occurs in dreams in general, he says, can only partly be explained by organic stimulation occurring in one’s sleep. Organic causes cannot do away with “the apparent freedom of the determination of the dream-picture.”12 This is what Freud will also apply to his own dream of impeded movement; the analysis of typical dreams is situated between organic input and the production of the dream-work. It is precisely this divide, and conflict, between corporeality and inner image that Descartes explores, and which is figured in the Olympica. The movement of the mind does not correspond to the paralysis of the body.
The inner film of consciousness gives witness to a variety of forms of production of which dreams are one kind. There are many others. From a Cartesian point of view, it is not a problem that what I know about myself appears in the form of an inner theater: this is congruent with the multifaceted way in which consciousness appears. In Descartes we find the preamble to the psychoanalytic idea of the layers of consciousness as forms of images created out of a flow of inscriptions of memories, dreams, and experiences, but also of physical imprints.
Freud posits that perception and consciousness are not simultaneous. Perceptions are construed as traces before they pass into consciousness or are brought up as memories. The psychic apparatus that gathers these traces consists of different layers of inscriptions. Perceptions leave in the psychic apparatus a trace, which we may call a memory-trace, Freud writes.13 Perceptions first hit a system which retains nothing of sensory impressions. Behind this there is a second system “which transforms the momentary excitation of the first into permanent traces.”14 It is the second system of lasting traces that forms the basis of association. Traces can be remnants of emotions, images, or language. In the psychic apparatus, they are associated with each other, displaced and condensed, without us being aware. Here, inner imagery becomes possible because of the cut between remnants of perceptions and actual perceptions.
Descartes repeatedly stresses the way in which the traces of the mind allow for a circulation and association of inner images and words. In Passions of the Soul, he uses traces as a concept to describe the conditions for such an associative stream of thought. A trace, to Descartes, is a kind of inscription in the mind that paves the way for other perceptions to actualize themselves.15 Like Freud, Descartes assumes traces to attach to each other through qualities of intensities and excitations. Unlike Freud, he does not posit any resistances to be present in the psychic apparatus. Descartes likened the scene of internal vision to that of memory; memories, like imagination, can be willfully produced. For this to happen, however, they need to be gathered as memory traces in the brain; just like Freud uses the idea of the trace to construe a psychic apparatus of association at the end of Interpretation of Dreams, Descartes uses the idea of traces that facilitate perceptions of the same idea to enter the mind.16 Inner images may serve as a link between a variety of traces. Perceptions are internalized as memory traces and take part in an associative flow between traces. Perceptions are mediated by traces in the brain and moved around by the agitation of the spirits, so that we “feel” what we see; it is this sensual and visceral quality to perception that moves inner images in dreams, fantasies, and works of art.17
The associative stream of dreams, fantasies, and memories are linked to traces in the mind—“the spirit, agitated in various ways and coming upon traces of various impressions which have preceded them in the brain, haphazardly take their course through certain of its pores rather than others.”18 Whether construed by dreams or wakeful imagination, internal images are less vivid than live perceptions; they are more a “shadow” or a “picture.”19 It is precisely this secondary character of trace, as a shadow or picture, that makes a sensory impression part of an associative stream, evoked in dreams, imagination, and works of art. But the traces evoke not only inner images. The traces are internal also to the evocation and circulation of affects. These are explored in their own terms and as aspects of the imaginative faculties of the soul. They are produced by external or internal physical causes and by imagination and internal imagery, such as writing, dreams, and memories. What Descartes describes, then, is not only a multifaceted notion of consciousness but also an associative flow that links different layers of consciousness to each other, also through imprints that are not just ideas of the mind but are very much inscribed in the body—through affects, muscles, and physical needs.
Imagination and Perception
In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s lengthy critique of Descartes, in “Eye and Mind,” he argues that the perspective in which Descartes remains caught is one of center-periphery, where images and colors are imprints of a world that is posited as “real.” In a way similar to Dennett’s critique of Meditations, Merleau-Ponty sees Optics present not a subject of seeing but rather a third party observing the seeing. The Cartesian theorization of images excludes the kind of immersion “from the inside” from which a painter construes a world.20
However, Descartes does not separate the painter from the subject—the subject is a painter in its production of inner images. In Optics, Descartes explains how perceptions are created through lines of light that transpose into inner images. The light that hits the eye forms traces that are interpreted by the mind, though perception is not a natural mirror of the external world. Perception in general is like the perception of a painting, or engravings, not depending at all on resemblances—on the contrary, the less alike, the more developed the perception. Engravings consist in “a little ink placed here and there on a piece of paper,” and it is precisely this scarcity of signs that allows people, landscapes, and horizons to develop before our eyes.21 As Husserl has shown, images do not represent an object in its actuality—we are, as Husserl explains, conscious of the “as if” mode of the representation. This is also a temporal suggestion: artworks have a hovering quality with regard to perception; they refer to a presence that is not quite a presence.22 The hovering of the “as if” in time—as if the object is present, or perhaps has been present, or could be present—perhaps takes on a particular quality with engravings, given the repetition of their very form, the object of representation being withdrawn through the repetitive act itself.
Perceptions are created as light reaches the inner side of the eyes. These perceptions then become inner images that are related to other images, memories, and imaginations (fantasies). Between sleep and wakefulness, our perception is more conditioned by physical states and neurological traces than things in the outer world.23 The same goes for visual impressions in states of dream: dreams “are like paintings,” in which one can only trust the realness of colors.24 It is not merely visual images that flow by; corporeal memories and emotions also find their way into the stream of consciousness.
Inner images result as much from the mind and from a visceral, physical inside as from appearances. This occurs in states of wakefulness as well as in dreams. Images stimulate our thought without being simulacra, or little copies of the representations printed into or minds. And the mind can be stimulated by “many other things other than images—by signs and words, for example, which in no way resemble the things they signify,” Descartes writes in Optics.25 Engravings—which are precisely what Descartes used in his books—do not need to be exact copies of what they represent: we will still forestall us humans, storms, woods . . . a hint of likeness is enough. As Merleau-Ponty has argued, perception in Descartes is a kind of decipherment.26 This is well in line with Descartes’s own idea that inner images and dreams are subject to decipherment—as they are in the Freudian analysis of inner images.
Feelings and ideas, inner images and corporeal movement may all have a variety of sources. Some inner images are woven together in a flow or weave between states of consciousness, where the “illusions of our dreams and likewise the waking reveries we often have” are created not by the will but by a consciousness that “wanders carelessly.”27 Some wakeful imaginations are like dreams.28 These inner images are extra mysterious to Descartes, since they are neither perceptions created by stimuli from the outside nor creations brought forward by the will. They are not complete perceptions but “shadows” and “pictures,”—that is, they belong to an inner world that Descartes, even in trying to literally dissect it, never fully accessed.29
Art and writing, also, are produced by various forms of production that may belong to various states of consciousness. The capacity to release associative chains of thought is intrinsically linked to poetry. The images of poets come to them; they have minds stored with all possible pleasures of imagination. The enjoyment of poetry cannot be taught through theories.30 It is a distinctly subjective process. It has to do with associations between objects, but also with stored memories and emotions. Associations are not merely figural; traces bind perceptions as visual imprints and emotions. In Principles of Philosophy, Descartes suggests that “spoken or written words excite all sorts of thoughts and emotions in our minds.”31 Literature affects us not only on an intellectual level. Writing is an associative stream and poetic language that stimulates a flow of images. “If the tip of the pen is pushed across the paper in a certain way it will form letters that excite in the mind of the reader the thoughts of battles, storms and violence, and emotions of indignation and sorrow; but if the movements of the pen are just slightly different they will produce quite different thoughts of tranquility, peace and pleasure, and quite opposite emotions of love and joy.”32 The inner images produced by writings are linked through a kind of après-coup logic; it is the movement of the pen that produces the emotions, as if the signs are the result of a flow and not of intentions. Writing is produced in a zone where signs orient us between imagination, perceptions, memories, and other kinds of thought, but not necessarily at will. Descartes understood writing as a free flow or exchange between words, images, and other remnants of the mind, including emotions. But poetry is not a willed expression of emotions: emotions erupt in and with the flow. Affects and emotions may come to us in states of sleep or wakefulness, unattached to any external cause. These emotions are no less real when we experience them; in the haze of being half-asleep, half-awake, we may still sense with our bodies and with our minds as if we were wide awake.33 The cause of such emotions lies not in the external world but within us. Emotions take part of the trail of associations, the constant flow of thoughts that circulate between the mind and the body.
Imagination, in turn, is not just an unregulated activity of the mind. Instead, imagination makes us perceive things that have no correspondence in the world outside of us. It is a conscious act of creation that allows us to create worlds beyond the reach of the physical one.34 Even the body itself may, for instance, be a source of imagination, so-called corporeal imagination. In Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1628), Descartes uses the concept to point to a sixth sense, which in modern language could be called kinesthesis; we can apprehend the movements of other living bodies through the movements of our own. Such a corporeal apprehension does not depend on clear perceptions; we may apprehend and sense the movement of other bodies also if we only have a vague perception of them.35 We may imagine movement, our own and others, and as we do, we may sense it in our own bodies. Movement is linked to inner images, feelings, and ideas. Both imagination and dreams are joined to a production of emotions that are part of a circuit that may be only semiconscious.
Gaze and Scopic Drive in Treatise on Man
The introduction to Treatise on Man introduces the assumption that man is constituted both of body and soul, and its jointure: “These two natures would have to be joined and united so as to constitute men resembling us.”36 The first two editions of the treatise, published after Descartes death, used sumptuous images that followed Descartes’s intentions in their description of the inside of the body. The images are more than illustrations—they are hypotheses. But they speak not only of a connection between body and soul. They speak of a connection between the gaze and the body that has archaic origins. It goes all the way to the moment of conception. The gaze, the emotions, and the fantasy of the mother, to Descartes, makes its imprint on the fetus—this will be discussed in the chapter of “The Thinking Fetus.”
The question of the gaze is inscribed in the overall project of natural philosophy: How do we acquire a knowledge of what we cannot see? Descartes used images to make visible what does not present itself to the eyes, such as the particles in Meteorology and streams of light in Optics. The inside of the body, and its jointure of body and soul, which is the focus of Treatise on Man, is also a space that we cannot see without dissection.
One cannot underestimate the importance of the anatomical sketches, which mostly had no original to copy, but which were certainly made in fidelity with Descartes’s intentions and style. Here, one thing stands out in contemporary research: the overall fixation on the eyes and their supposed connectedness to a corporeal inside. Descartes sketched the function of perception, as in the perception of things in an outside world, which was the primary aim with Optics. He also sketched the relation between the eyes and the inside of a body of affects, pains, flows, and memories, marked since its inception by its origination in the maternal womb. In this genealogy, which actualizes psychoanalytic theory, corporeal instincts are attached to the gaze. The gaze, in turn, is fixated on organs that are otherwise covered or unavailable to the human eye, such as the inside of the body.
Descartes first wrote Treatise on Man, which was to be included in Le Monde, in 1632. But for fear of punishment for its scientific standpoints, he delayed publication. In the end, the first edition was produced in 1662 by Florentio Schuyl after Descartes’s death. Published in Latin, De homine Figuris leads us to understand that the purpose of the book is to figure the essential physical and anatomical makeup of a human being. The text of this edition was based on two copies, one by Van Zurck, a friend of Descartes, and the other by Pollot. The second contained two drawings copied by Schuyl, while the others were drawn by Schuyl himself.
The edition has a preface that designates two of the drawings to a manuscript made by Alphonsus Palotti. The originals have been found in Descartes’s own work—that is, they were made by Descartes himself.37
The edition, which introduces sumptuous anatomical images and folds, includes skeletal constructions, blood vessels, nervous systems, and muscles. Descartes’s aim is to figure the relation between perception and sensual stimuli, nervous system and corporal movement. This is accomplished through the detail in which the tubes, as Descartes calls the inner system of the bloodstream and nervous system, are connected. Some images figure whole humans in situations where stimuli and movement are introduced. But the bulk of the images, modeled after Descartes’s own original drawings, figure visual perception and the relation between gaze and ocular construction—that is, eye, muscle, brain, and nervous system.
Figure 6.3. De l’Homine Figuris 1662, Leyden, Royal Library Stockholm.
The second, competing edition of L’Homme is the 1664 edition illustrated by Claude Clerselier, which was translated into French.38 In this edition, Clerselier introduces a manuscript that was not completed, “Description of the Human Body,” to which he adds the title The Formation of the Foetus. Descartes originally intended the title to apply only to the final, fourth section of the text, but Clerselier apparently considered the title suitable to convey the main purpose of the text.39
Clerselier wrote a preface to the edition where he describes the figures used by the artists Gérard von Gutschoven and Louis de La Forge. The aim was to explain the intentions of the text, illuminating the passage of the spirits to the movement of the muscles.40 This passes through the eyes, as is made clear in an image that, according to Clerselier, is retained from a Cartesian manuscript.41 Just like in the manuscript by Schuyl, the focus on the eyes and the gaze is maintained throughout. Many see the images as interpretations of the philosophical problem of the distinction between mind and body.42 Perhaps Clerselier did: he then engaged de La Forge for the illustrations to demonstrate the existence of a possible union. As a result, de La Forge identifies a relation between an invisible and a visible sphere in Descartes’s works and makes the transition between those two spheres the focus of his figures.43
But to Descartes, the mind-body issue was not only a question of speculation; his desire was visceral and graphic. He described a feeling of discontent with the limits of metaphysics when it comes to examining the relation between mind and body, inner images and reality. Overcoming these limits by a scalpel, he writes to his Mersenne with great enthusiasm: “Now I am dissecting the heads of different animals in order to explain what imagination, memory etc., consist of.”44 In Optics, published a few years later (1637), Descartes describes the refraction of light in conjunction with the dissection of eyes. The aim of this work was not so much to present the role of the physical eye as it was to discuss the nature of perception from a viewpoint that we would today consider more as brain research than as anatomical finds. We cannot assume that perceptions are identical to external objects; the sensory impressions that pass through the eyes are always prepared in the brain to become adequate occasions of what we call perception. It is the mind, not the body, that senses; this pertains also to vision. It is not the eye that sees, but the mind.45 With this insight, to which the dissection of eyes contributed no small part, Descartes made the philosophical doctrine of simulacra come to an end (i.e., the idea that the world is planting images in us that resemble that which is outside, or that perception would be a natural mirror of the external world). Instead, perception is prepared in the brain. In Descartes’s drawn figures of perception in Optics, the gaze is joined to the light of the outside world and refracted in the dissected eye. Perception, as described in the text and made out as figures—is not produced by a second little eye inside the brain; it is produced by movements in which mind and body are joined. This is not primarily a prephenomenological analysis of a body moving in the world—although it can be interpreted that way—what joins mind and body is rather the kind of movements that we find in nerve endings in the eyes, ears, and tongue, responding to stimuli.46
Descartes is as interested in what eludes vision as he is sensual experience itself—in the small, invisible parts of nature that we cannot seize. In his natural philosophy, Descartes thinks like a painter. Unable to represent depth and volume of something that he does not fully fathom through sense experience, he expounds on what comes to the fore in the form of materiality or sense perception, and he begins to add volume and depth from there. In the case of perception, the main thing is light.47 Identifying light as the main element of perception, Descartes’s notion of the image, outer and inner, develops toward a theory of the gaze.
Natural philosophy in general, and the analysis of perception more specifically, passes through works of art. Scattered signs on a paper may still make us experience a full landscape, battlegrounds, storms, and so on—if we are to grasp what perception is, this is where we need to begin.48 It is the same with inner images. They cannot be understood as the decoding of outer signs, as Merleau-Ponty notes; they are rather the decoding of “signs given within the body.”49 One may take these “inner” signs to consist of emotions and memories. But the Cartesian propositions on perception depended on the anatomical practices of dissection as much as on prephenomenological descriptions of images and painting. And come to that: dissection, and the very specific gaze of fascination that came with it, was a recurrent theme in paintings of his own times.
At the table of dissection, Descartes’s theory of perception becomes intertwined with what contemporary psychoanalysis calls “the gaze.” The gaze is a central concept in the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan; it points to that in perception which eludes conscious elaboration of the intellect. It eludes, also, our sense of the real; the gaze is a phenomena that transcends the gap between consciousness and the unconscious, occurring in sleep as well as in wake reality. Whereas perception may be construed as the subject’s elaboration of reality, its colors, sounds, and things, the gaze is rather the impingement in the subject of those things. It shows itself as the involuntary attraction or fascination with things, as the unwilled directedness of perception through details in an image. After having read Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, Lacan formulates the gaze as something that transcends the limits of the situatedness of the body, its muscular capacity, and its involvement in movements and actions. The gaze does not speak to the eye of the viewer; it preexists the perception of the world of the embodied subject. It is experienced not as perception of an image but as that which in the field of vision presents itself as contingency, fortitude, but also as a haunting, a quality of stickiness to the real. The gaze is a haunting of what Lacan calls castration anxiety; as such it presents itself through gaps and wounds, but also as immeasurable experiences of fascination and beauty. In the gaze, the world sees us watching; it may allow or not for a sense of the real to unfold, or it may retreat to a state of dream, or illusion. This uncanny directedness in the subject that sees itself seeing, and then is forced to retreat to its own sense of uncertainty, is the gaze functioning as what Lacan calls objet a. It is a concept that on the one hand designates the inexorable lack that follows with castration, on which the structure of the subject is construed. On the other, however, it is also a concept that transcends the limits between inside and outside, and the limits between eye and I. Given that it is driven by fascination and beauty, while stretching also to know the secrets of its own evanescent origins in images and pictures, Lacan’s notion of the gaze as objet a can also be placed within the sphere of a visceral aesthetics.
The gaze, to Lacan, is to be understood through what Freud discusses as the scopic drive: the somatic entrapment in the wish to examine, through the eyes, the limits between what can be seen and what cannot be seen. The image in general, and the baroque painting in particular in its attempt to perspectivize the infinite, is a trap for the gaze in its capturing of the scopic drive. It can appear, such as Lacan has demonstrated, for instance through a vanitas motive, such as a skull almost invisibly inserted in a scene. It can also appear through the many illusions that are at work in baroque painting—through the sticky illusion produced by a trompe l’oeil, for instance, such as a painting in a painting, or a portrait in a portrait. Through doubling, luring, or creating illusions, painting points at the stickiness of the gaze.
Rembrandt painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp was painted in 1632, the same year Descartes wrote Description of the Human Body. In this painting, a group of students gather around a surgeon opening a cadaver. The students are all leaning toward the open incision in the body, attempting to see the inside. Through the incision, a glowing light seems to emanate due to Rembrandt’s distinct use of white and red coloring. What the painting captures is the gaze into the incision, through the embodiment of light.
The very capturing of the gaze is situated at the intersection between the inner and the outer—at the very limit that Descartes himself wanted to explore through the dissection of eyes. These images derive from the anatomy lessons in which Descartes himself took part, as a physicien. In the analysis of the living body, we perceive a dead body, a corpse split open. The fascinum engaging the scopic drive is captured in a body that cannot return the gaze. The gaze becomes a vanishing point, so that the scopic drive is retracted onto itself. What we find here is an anamorphosis, an inverted use of perspective, which, as Lacan has pointed out, shows “an original subjectifying relation.”50 Rembrandt’s painting incorporates the same split as Descartes in his dissection of the eyes—he not only points to an ego seeing the world but to a gaze returning the vision. This is how the scopic drive becomes inscribed in the Cartesian explorations of the anatomy of perception—not only do I see the world but my gaze is also directed by a pulsating drive that directs my gaze. Such a drive is in the field of the other, in the Lacanian analysis. This field is itself inhabited by a vanishing point—the evanescent point of vision that unlocks the stickiness of the real.
Figure 6.4. Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) © Mauritshuis.
Freud identified the point in his analysis of Leonardo da Vinci’s practices of dissection. The modern anatomical practice of sketching dissected corpses traces its origin to Leonardo da Vinci. It is also in the study of da Vinci that the psychoanalytic speculation of the gaze begins—through Freud’s text on “Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood.” In da Vinci’s own words, his motivations are sparked by his ambition as a painter; he wants to understand the way muscles and joints are conjoined in order to better render the movement of living bodies. Complying neither with the legal nor the ethical framework that surrounded such practices in his time, da Vinci, just like Descartes, went to great lengths to pursue this understanding of the human body. Only medical doctors had the right to dissect. Da Vinci lacked such recognition and so pursued his studies outside of the legal frameworks.51
Cartesian Conception
This desire for knowledge, according to the legend promoted by renaissance art historian and critic Giorgio Vasari, is also what interfered with da Vinci’s artistic ambition and ability.52 Freud reinforces this legend, in turn, in relaying that da Vinci increasingly became a riddle to his contemporaries due to his turn away from art to science, in the end engaging in the “black art” of the alchemists in his treatment of the dead.53 In Freud’s analysis, da Vinci’s fascination with knowledge as dissection is intertwined with a certain asexuality and frigidity. Above all, it can be seen as a symptom of fear of the female organ of procreation.54 To Freud, each child carries fantasies about their own origin. The phase of infantine sexual investigation involves an indistinct conception of aggressive sexual relations. Da Vinci, who made drawings of an infant in the uterus as well as a drawing of the female sexual organ, sublimated these infantile desires into a quest of scientific curiosity. Freud retells an early childhood memory of da Vinci in which a vulture strikes the child’s lips with his tail. To Freud, this memory is equally to be associated with homosexual desires and fantasies of suckling a breast. Ultimately, the desire of the male organ is only a negation of a fear of castration: in da Vinci’s proud celebrations of masculinity, Freud sees depiction for “the unhappy creatures on whom the cruel punishment has, as he supposes, already fallen.” To Freud, the perforation of the female body, depicted as images of the fetus, is then associated not just with the inside of the body in general but with the female organ of procreation, which is associated with an “uncanny and intolerable idea.”55
Descartes’s treatise, in both editions, omits all figuration of the womb or sexual organs, although they are discussed in the text. But in the Latin edition by Schuyl, there are other details that are worth pointing out in this context: as was sometimes the practice in early modern anatomical literature, several folds are introduced so that the reader can lift the lids and look inside the body. The human body is figured, in this way, both from the inside and the outside. This also applies to a sumptuous figure of the heart, which is a figural transposition, with lids, of Descartes’s description of how the valves are shut and open with small lids. There is also an image of the human brain comprising a whole page. Given that the organ is cut into two distinct sides, with a smaller organ in the middle and a part resembling hair in the upper part of the brain, the image carries the distinct semblance of a female sexual organ. Given that the sexual organs are left out of the treatise—the process by which the Cartesian treatise makes visible what cannot be seen in human anatomy, makes the semblance fitting.
The idea behind Treatise on Man is to describe a mechanical system of the body that proves that certain movements withdraw from the soul and the will—which is also how Clerselier, who published the treatise, understood the intentions of Descartes.56 In the beginning of his treatise, Descartes explains that his pedagogy relies on his readers having “at one time or another, seen various animals opened up, and gazed on the shape and arrangement of their interior parts, which are very much like our own.” The most important component of this image is that of the blood, which nourishes a heart that is fueled by heat, and the “animal spirits,” which form a system within the bloodstream that is propelled by a fine wind. The animal spirits “dilate the brain” so as to receive impressions from thoughts as well as sense impressions.57 Descartes then goes to great lengths to describe, in graphic detail, the internal veins of the heart, which he has not only looked at but also explored with his hands in animals. Descartes distinguished between “fluids,” which are blood, humors, and spirits, and “solids,” which are bone, flesh, nerves, and membranes.
Figure 6.5. De l’Homine Figuris 1662, Leyden, Royal Library Stockholm.
Descartes then proposes his theory of conception: what differentiates humans from plants, he argues, is that the seeds of plants disseminate in ways that depend on the very hardness and immobility of the plant. But this is not the case with humans. Infant humans are soft; in the womb, its pores are wide open, which will shape its formation.58 The seed of human beings is produced through the copulation between the two sexes, as “an unorganized mixture of two liquids, which act on each other like a kind of yeast.” These liquids are ordered as particles that act and press on each other, some of the particles even becoming as agitated as fire. These movements and pressures are “putting them gradually into the state required for the formation of parts of the body.”59 The description of the movements in this monoliquid, which he calls seed and may consist of two parts, but which still disregards any female element in itself, resembles the conception of particles in Meteorology. The finest particles of weather, as well as that of the human body of procreation, withdraw from the eye, but the way in which human life is conceived is precisely the shape, size, and motion through which they form. Seed, in Cartesian anatomy, is formed in a variety of ways. It is imprinted upon and it carries imprints, which then shapes both the inside and the outside of the womb before the birth of an individual.
Figure 6.6. L’Homme: Et un traitté de la formation du foetus, Paris, 1664, Royal Library Stockholm.
The seed, to Descartes, is formed in the maternal body, imprinted by a variety of limbs and organs through its spread by the blood flow and animal spirits—for instance, through two distinct “spermatic veins.” The seed is a “mass,” and the first organ to be formed is the heart.60 In the graphic description of how the fetus is informed, the internal of the body is made up of small particles in different shapes that are more or less active, some of them shaping the inside of the womb through a seed marked by the qualities of the nerves—for instance, others pressing against the outside of the womb so as to create other limbs and other organs. Descartes goes to great lengths to explain the formation of the heart, the arteries, and the aorta.
To the heart belongs the valvules, lids of skin that close the pulmonary vein and the vena cava—these are depicted in the 1662 edition of L’Homme with images by Schuyl, created as cartoons of trompe l’oeil with tiny flaps of paper as lids of skin, which can be lifted on the page and looked into. The heart, as it is explained, is the most complex formation of the particle of the seed. It is also crucial for maintaining the relation to the child in the womb.61
In images such as these, where we find an intertwinement between a dissecting eye—which figures the dissection of the gaze—and what contemporary psychoanalysis would interpret as the scopic drive: what we see is a female sexual organ, figuring as a brain, and a heart erected as a penis, or clitoris. Using the Freudian analysis, which points to the female organ as a figure of castration in da Vinci, we may conceive of the sexual organ as a kind of vanishing point—it is both nowhere and everywhere to be seen. The brain-vulva and the clitoris-heart become, to use a figure of interpretation deriving from Lacan, images of anamorphosis. Anamorphosis is an inverted use of perspective, which, in Descartes own analysis of the gaze, points to “an original subjectifying relation.”62 In his anatomical description of the gaze, Descartes not only points to a subject apprehending the world but also to the limits of its perceptive capacities: an origin of the gaze that the subject cannot make appear. The brain-vulva and the clitoris-heart line the limits of what we cannot see: the origin of the gaze, the origin of life, the origin of the formation of the fetus, and so on. The brain, which is supposed to figure the point at which perception is completed, becomes a trompe l’oeil vanishing point. The point of attachment of the scopic drive becomes more or less explicit. But it is already present as a vanishing point in Descartes’s own text. The dialectic between the “eye” of and the “I,” the physical eye and the subject of metaphysics, are both caught in that vanishing point of the gaze, the female sexual organ that is nowhere and everywhere to be seen.
Figure 6.7. De l’Homine Figuris 1662, Leyden, Royal Library Stockholm.
Figure 6.8. De l’Homine Figuris 1662, Leyden, Royal Library Stockholm.
Figure 6.9. De l’Homine Figuris 1662, Leyden, Royal Library Stockholm.
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