Abstract
Performativity is the salient feature of each practice. This account helps to explain seeing as an act not of arbitrary construction but of constitution that retains receptive and mediating features. I borrow the term by J. L. Austin to show that seeing is a specifically executed act that cannot be properly explained without taking into consideration the way in which it is performed. The how is not a contingent, external form for the what, but rather determines what it specifically is. Seeing cannot be reduced to the thing seen any more than speech to the thing spoken. If we conceive of acts of perception as analogous to speech acts, it becomes clear that they constitute far more than a means of obtaining knowledge.
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Notes
- 1.
G. C. Lichtenberg (1984, J 1310).
- 2.
- 3.
N. Bryson (1983). With this distinction, Norman Bryson attempts to overcome Gombrich‘s psychology of perception and show how Western Art is socially and historically determined.
- 4.
For a more detailed account of the concept of personhood (Sturma 1997).
- 5.
The integration of the body in seeing and the usefulness of seeing as an alternative form of touch is illustrated by Volkmar Mühleis’(2005) study of work by artists limiting the dominance of the visual in visual arts by dealing with haptic and holistic types of experience.
- 6.
For a more detailed account see L. Weiskrantz (1986).
- 7.
Although the voice too is characterised by sonic performance, it is a subjectively perceptible medium of expression. The expressivity of seeing, however, must first be put into speech in order to be perceptible to others. See the anthology D. Kolesch and S. Krämer (2006).
- 8.
The faculty of Imagination as a form of representation is the main inspiration for Lyotard’s reading of Kant. See J.-F. Lyotard (1988).
- 9.
Is he doing his wife a favour by getting some exercise or by preparing the garden for winter? Or is doing his wife a favour only incidental to his actual concern of getting some exercise in the fresh air? If he were to keep digging while his beliefs about his wife changed, the framework of the story would also change. In the first instance, it would be the story of a practical measure in a household with garden. In the second instance, a story about a husband’s relationship with his wife. The intentions cannot be described independently of the interpretive point of view. They must be divided into primary and secondary status. Activities thus become what they are by contextualisation. See also the discussion of Charles Taylor in Chap. I.2.c.
- 10.
- 11.
Wölfflin speaks explicitly of a “history of seeing” that together with period influence is responsible for the style of an epoch.
- 12.
Gottfried Boehm (2001) has described something similar for seeing of the whole and parts in pictures. A focus on details is necessarily blind to the image as a whole. Conversely, a seeing that takes in the whole surface at once necessarily overlooks details of figures, brushwork and so on.
- 13.
- 14.
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Schuermann, E. (2019). The Performativity of Practice. In: Seeing as Practice. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14507-1_4
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