Seeing Vision: Gesture, Movement and Colour in Painting in Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Staring: How We Look

Abstract

My chapter begins by asking the question: what is vision? For among the many works contributing to the study of vision in a range of fields, such as literature, art, art history, film study, psychoanalysis, philosophy and science — including Disability in relation to any of those fields — we may notice that instead of asking what vision is, this question is often approached and reformulated in the form of another question, namely, what is visioned?¹ That is, these studies on or related to vision are somehow always re-directed to the object(s) of vision. However, I want here to consider how objects are allocated to play such a role rather than assuming they simply or spontaneously have this role of determining the nature of vision. In other words, I want here to consider closely the implications of the fact that the object of vision can only be defined as the object of vision in the light of it being seen as the object of vision — both the referencing, the production and the construction of it as the object of vision are unavoidably and inseparably attributed by vision itself; by a vision visioning the object of vision as the object of vision. And this in turn crucially relies on vision itself as also an object of vision, an object that is similarly under evaluation and even under a production and a construction of it in the very production and construction of visioning something.