Glowacka

http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/237/218[2011-02-19 22:51:48]

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'Anarchic Vision': Ocular Constructions of Race and

the Challenge of Ethics

Dorota Glowacka

Figure 1: Adrian Piper, My Calling (Card)

1

What happens when the look is returned - when black people own the look and startle whites
into knowledge of their whiteness? -- Ann E. Kaplan

The impetus for the following discussion is an incident that occurred a few years ago, when I
was teaching basic English at one of the community colleges in Toronto. Desperate for ideas to
encourage my students to write, I put up huge pieces of colour cardboard on the classroom
wall and asked them to jot down associations they had with particular colours. The first colours
I used were orange and red, and the class enjoyed bringing up images of warmth, violence,
and vitality. Next, just for a change of tone, I thumb-tacked the colour black; only then, in the
split second between hanging up the board and turning around to face my students, did I
suddenly become aware of the colour politics in that classroom. About half my students were
black, many of them immigrants with poor knowledge of English. It was a moment of brutal
epiphany, compounded with a shock at my own lack of foresight. I had no choice but to deal
with the lapse in my ethical vigilance; I initiated a discussion about the ideological connotations
of blackness, based on excerpts from the movie Malcolm, but my feeling of unease persisted.
The haunting memory of that discomfort has pervaded my work, including the following
reflections on the possibility of an encounter between bell hooks, a black cultural critic who, by
her own admission, argues from the oppositional space on the margin of the mainstream
culture, and Emmanuel Levinas, a philosopher who speaks from the position of white male
privilege.

3

The urgency of this inquiry also derives from my uncertainty as to how I should

situate myself in that very discourse as a woman and a recent immigrant to Canada from
Eastern Europe. I am not a visible minority, but I often contemplate my 'audible' difference, the
caesura of my hyphenated Canadian identity, punctuated by my accent. And yet am I not also
inexorably 'sealed in my whiteness,' to use Frantz Fanon's phrase?

Vis-à-vis hooks' text, if I substitute her 'we,' a strategic pronoun of inclusion that designates a
community of black women, with 'they,' I perpetuate the 'othering' of the African-American
other; yet if I use 'one' or similar circumventions, I neutralize her specific difference. As a white
woman, I cannot include myself in hooks' collective category, and I wish to respect the
boundary she draws around her community of 'black folk'. It is at the nexus of these ethical
and linguistic perplexities that I would like to argue that Levinas' ethics of absolute giving to
the other can facilitate the dismantling of Western modernity's visual constructions of race. At
the same time, I will read hooks' work as a necessary corrective to the proliferating theories of
otherness that have proven insufficiently attentive to the multiplicity and specificity of racial,
ethnic or sexual difference.

4

Aware of poststructuralist critique of the Western privileging of

vision and visuality, hooks has complained that these interventions do not account for those
who have been rendered invisible and who, as a consequence, have striven for visibility on
terms other than those accorded them by the mainstream culture.

5

How we look, what we see, and how we are looked at is a central problematic for hooks,
whether in her film criticism, in which she calls for radical black female spectatorship; her art
criticism, where she advocates counter-hegemonic production and reception of visual arts; or in
her commentaries on gender and race, in which she demonstrates that racist and sexist
oppression is a function of how our identities are constituted in relation to being subjects and
objects of gaze. Her insistence on the need to scrutinize the ways in which we see resonates in
her recent writings, in which she has sought to formulate an ethics of love, intended to serve
as a foundation for a sound, well functioning, and caring community.

6

Since Western binary

constructions of otherness, the articulation of whiteness and blackness in particular, have
emerged within the economies of visuality and resulted in exclusionary practices within the
discourse of truth and knowledge, hooks formulates her critique of racist culture as a challenge
to these economies. While insisting on the understanding of race as a complex cultural

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Glowacka

http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/237/218[2011-02-19 22:51:48]

formation rather than as a 'visible truth', she also struggles to reclaim the black woman's
visibility in the realm of representation, from which she has been erased through the practices
of racism and sexism.

In her book American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender, Robyn Wiegman argues that
visuality is the central aspect of Western knowledge that has contributed to the articulation of
race and, subsequently, to the emergence of racialized discourse. The Western production of
the African subject as sub-human is related to the epistemologies of vision which reduce that
subject to an object and property through the logic of corporeal inscription. The perceived
subordinate particularity of the other, such as skin color, hair texture, shape and size of lips,
nose and buttocks, legitimates the visual paradigm within which only these characteristics are
recognized. The conceptions of race which ground racist ideologies in North America are shaped
by the adversarial topos of blackness and whiteness, thus establishing an epidermal hierarchy
within which the dark racial body is unclean, evil and sexually perverse, while the white body
subsists as the norm, the standard of purity, and the real and natural color of human skin.

7

As

colour becomes a signifier of differences between humans, the epidermal differentiations begin
to apply also to those whose alleged differences are 'deeper' than skin, extending beyond the
visible 'truth' of race. The rendering of the invisible visible by the racist discourse of 'one drop
of blood' allows for a repressive stereotyping of those individuals whose difference escapes the
eye at the first sight, and who might seek to evade the 'truth' of their racial belonging by
'passing'.

8

In a memorable episode of Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sethe, a slave woman at the Sweet Home
plantation, overhears the white schoolteacher's lecturing his students and asking them to list in
separate columns a black person's animal and human characteristics:

He was talking to his pupils and I heard him say, 'Which one are you doing?' And
one of the boys said, 'Sethe' . . .I heard him say, 'No, no. That's not the way. I
told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the
right'. I commenced to walk backwards, didn't even look behind me to find out
where I was headed. When I bumped up against a tree my scalp was prickly
(1988: 193).

This exercise in comparative anatomy is an act of cultural training during which the eye is
taught how to see and what to see. To succeed, the schoolteacher must rely on the discourse
of the body as the natural locus of difference. The classification of visible body parts enables
the white racist viewer to relegate the African subject to an inferior place in the chain of being
and, by the same token, to ascertain his own superiority. In Black Skin White Masks, Frantz
Fanon describes a similar experience of bodily fragmentation perpetrated by the white man's
'burning' gaze. When a white boy exclaims, 'Look, a Negro! . . . Look at the nigger! Mama, a
Negro!' Fanon experiences it as an assault on his corporeal schema, which, as he says,
instantly crumbles and gives way to a hierarchical, epidermal ordering that transforms him into
a slave of his appearance (Fanon, 1967: 112). Fanon quotes from Sir Alan Burns treatise Colour
Prejudice:

It [colour prejudice] is nothing more than the unreasoning hatred of one race for
another, the contempt of the stronger and richer peoples for those whom they
consider inferior to themselves, and the bitter resentment of those who are kept
in subjection and so frequently insulted. As colour is the most obvious
manifestation of race it has been made a criterion by which men are judged,
irrespective of their social or educational attainments. (Fanon, 1967: 118)

9

Fixed and objectified by 'white eyes, the only real eyes' (Fanon, 1967: 16), a black person is
defined with respect to the hegemonic and allegedly autonomous standard of whiteness. Such
an act of injurious misrecognition through epidermal ordering aims to annihilate the
subjectivity, individuality, indeed, the inalienable right to be, of the person who finds himself
within the purview of the racist gaze. It therefore cancels the ethical, as understood by Levinas.

Emmanuel Levinas speaks of ethics as moral responsibility for the well-being of another: 'With
the appearance of the human - and this is my entire philosophy - there is something more
important than my life, and that is the life of the other' ('Paradox of Morality'). For Levinas,
Western epistemology emphasizes self-knowledge and thus destroys the living relation with an
existent. The episteme of the Enlightenment calls for the translucence of the other who is
reduced to an object and absorbed by consciousness in the form of a concept. Yet Levinas
insists that the other person's alterity always exceeds what I can possibly know or understand
about him or her, overflowing the boundaries of my world. The fact that the other always

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remains heterogeneous to the structures of consciousness commands respect for that
irreducible otherness. Prior to viewing the other as a threat to my well-being or as an object
intended for my use, I relate to the other on the ethical plane, allowing it to appear on its own
terms, which may not at all correspond to mine. Indeed, for Levinas subjectivity itself is
constituted through bearing witness to the existence of another, and it is constantly put into
question by the force of that ethical obligation.

Levinas elucidates the paramount significance of light for the structure of ego cogito already in
his early work, Time and the Other, first published in 1947. He writes: 'Light is that through
which something is other than myself, but already as if it came from me. The illuminated object
is something one encounters, but from the very fact that it is illuminated, one encounters it as
if it came from us' (Levinas, 1987: 64). Self-reflexivity, specular recognition, is tantamount to
the appropriation of existence by the same. According to Levinas, vision, which has structured
the relation between self and other in the West, is synonymous with the arrogation of the
other's freedom. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas writes, 'Inasmuch as the access to beings
concerns vision, it dominates those beings, exercises a power over them' (Levinas, 1961: 194).
In ontology, phenomena are disclosed to the eye when they are illuminated within the horizon
of Being. As Levinas explains in Existence and Existents, vision and light enable both sensible
and intellectual apprehension of entities; subsequently, light is the condition of all beings
because they only acquire meaning as phenomena in the visible sphere. Illumination discloses
the world as the terrain available for exploration, making it possible for consciousness to
appropriate external objects for the inward structures of cognition. Light makes it possible for
ego cogito to synthesize the world as a totality of beings (Levinas, 2001). Vision seeks to
remove alterity from its unique realm beyond essence and to transpose it into familiar
concepts; it is an imperialist enterprise in which the other is seized to satiate the self's appetite
for knowledge. In Cathryn Vasseleu's apt paraphrase, for Levinas, 'lucidity of things and ideas is
primarily the egoism of finding oneself in the light' (Vasseleu, 1998: 78). Observation and the
resulting comprehension reduce alterity to 'whatness', and as Levinas says in Otherwise Than
Being, 'The question what is put by him who looks.... The what is already wholly enveloped
with being, has eyes only for being' (Levinas, 1981: 24). The luminosity of being disperses the
opacity that envelops and protects the other, enabling the self to reunite with the other, to
penetrate its surfaces and consume it. At the same time, through maintaining the other as the
object for contemplation, sight disallows proximity, which Levinas defines as the immediacy of
the sensible through which the other affects me. In this luminous sphere, the existent's infinity
with respect to the totality of being reverts to immanence, as he 'has a silhouette but has lost
a face' (Levinas, 1961: 44).

For Levinas, the face is the mark of the other's transcendence; it exceeds his or her
phenomenological existence and cannot be reduced to representation.

10

The face is 'an

invitation to the fine risk of approach qua approach, to the exposure of one to the other'
(Levinas, 1981: 94); the face, therefore, does not really appear in perception as an
amalgamation of facial features. It is 'naked', in the sense of being stripped of visual
characteristics, and it cannot be disclosed or 'seen' because it signifies in itself, without
becoming a content of consciousness. The meaning of the face, for Levinas, is then unrelated to
the significations bestowed on a person by his or her situation at the conjunction of gender,
race, class, and other possible social determinants. As he often repeats, the face escapes vision
and therefore knowing; rather than showing itself, the face speaks, addressing me as its
interlocutor. On the plane of the ethical relation, where my orientation toward the other is
founded upon unreciprocal generosity, gaze loses its avidity, and the disclosure of beings is not
primordial because it presupposes the exigency of justice. In this way, ethics is refractory with
respect to totalizing and objectifying vision, and it bestows on me a 'vision' bereft of images
that absorb the other's alterity, an ethical vision which, for Levinas, is synonymous with ethical
speech. The ethical essence of language is an attitude of listening, a responsiveness to the
voice through which the other expresses his or her needs. Saying, the ethical condition of
speech, is the fact of my response-ability, my readiness to answer before the face, opening up
the ethical relation which has been blocked by the look.

Despite Levinas' denigration of the gaze, the provenance of the 'face' as a rhetorical figure is
visual, even if he constantly transmutes it into speech. The ambiguity of the visual in Levinasian
ethics is also indicated in his oft repeated phrase, 'Il me regarde': the fact that the other is
always my primary concern, prior to the solicitude for my own well-being, means that
'[c]ontrary to Gyges who sees without being seen, here I am seen without seeing' (Levinas:
2000, 196). In the ethical relation, the other cannot be reduced to the status of the object in
which he is 'illumined by my alien light' but instead 'shines forth with his own light and speaks
for himself (Levinas, 1961:14). Contrary to the conditions of visibility that guide the Western

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man's ways of seeing, a being that is not placed within the sphere of my light can present itself
and begin to signify on its own terms. Analogously to his description of the face, Levinas says,
'[t]he eyes [of the other] break through the mask - the language of the eyes, impossible to
dissemble. The eye does not shine - it speaks' (1961: 199). In this evocative sentence, to the
Western metaphors that equate vision with knowledge, of which Descartes' 'mind's eye' is most
notorious, Levinas juxtaposes an unusual metaphor of the other's 'speaking eye'.

In Otherwise Than Being, the work that focuses on the formation of subjectivity in the ethical
relation, Levinas resorts to another syncretic figure of speech. When substituting for the other
to the point of assuming the onus of the other's deeds, a responsible self is constituted as 'the
listening eye'. This displacement of the eye through the use of a mixed, even monstrous and
definitely unaccustomed synecdoche serves to evict the I from the site it occupies under the
sun, from its panopticonic position of knowledge.

11

It also establishes the primacy of Saying,

which underlies the Said in which the other is thematized. In disclosure - where identities are
illuminated - the other manifests its visible surface to sight; its radical alterity, however,
remains impenetrable to the eye, and it perseveres in the sphere of visibility only in the form of
a non-phenomenal trace which disturbs my tranquility and certitude. Although the other is
always subjected to the questioning look that reassembles and synchronizes, its alterity has
already receded into diachrony that cannot be recuperated in representation. The tension
apparent in Levinas' discussion of the face - its trembling between the visual reference and the
Judaic prohibition of sight - exposes the fault lines in the construction of the Western ocular
regime since the radical invisibility of the other, i.e. my inability to seize her in representation,
is no longer predicated on the economy of what can be seen or discovered by the master's eye.

Significantly, bell hooks often describes her project as 'resisting representation',

12

with its

concomitant task of constructing 'oppositional gaze.' In Black Looks, she contends that 'We
experience our collective crisis as African-American people within the realm of the image'
(hooks: 1992); to address this crisis, it is necessary to learn how to look at blackness with
'new eyes'. hooks writes from the perspective of someone who, from childhood, has 'struggled
to break from the impositions of images that don't represent me accurately or well. Even
though this is a drag, it too is part of the struggle, part of the process of decolonization' (1998:
1). hooks often recalls her personal experience of 'the look' as a strategy of white domination:
she relates it to the experience of slavery, when white slave owners punished slaves for
looking. Within racist power relations, black people have been denied the right to gaze, which,
through the mechanisms of interiorized racism, has adversely affected black parenting; hooks
recalls how, as a child, she was punished for hard confrontational looking by the adults in her
family. Recognizing that the basic right to look is crucial for self-affirmation and a sense of
subjective agency, she wants to reclaim the look for the black woman and transform it into
both a tool of personal resistance and a means to forge a communal, perhaps trans-racial
space in which 'mutual gazing' would be possible. With this in mind, she criticizes the paucity of
critical thinking about visual politics in African-American articulations of black experience, which
she mostly attributes to African-Americans' loyalty to the idea of black solidarity. She
advocates that a powerful arena in which this lack should be redressed is art practice, which, as
in the case of abstract expressionist art such as Norman Lewis', need not necessarily be overtly
political art. African-Americans' struggle for freedom from racist oppression necessitates
affirmation of creative expression - of freedom in the sphere of visual arts.

13

If, as hooks tirelessly argues, domination and oppression are exerted through the control of
images and their production, black liberation must be carried out as a project of decolonizing
black imagination, as a battle over images, and a disturbance in the realm of representation.
hooks' call for oppositional black aesthetics is therefore an ethical call to action: black people
who do not make a critical intervention into the regimes of visuality that enforce racism are
themselves held accountable for the erasure of black voices. Art validates black experience and
allows for the deconstruction of racist images of blackness and whiteness. Likewise, writing on
black art, which forces the presence of marginalized black artists into public consciousness, is
an act of critical resistance that can lead to changes within existing visual politics. At this point,
I would like to focus on two examples of artwork by African-American female artists, Lorna
Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems, whom hooks often references for their ability to 'challenge
folks who think that by merely looking they can see' (1995: 36). At the same time, since I have
also found these two works particularly compelling, I would like to reflect on my own ways of
looking at them.

Fig. 2: Lorna Simpson, 'The Waterbearer', Courtesy: Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

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LOOKING INTO THE MIRROR, THE BLACK WOMAN ASKED, "MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE

WALL, WHO'S THE FINEST OF THEM ALL?" THE MIRROR SAYS, "SNOW WHITE, YOU BLACK
BITCH, AND DON'T YOU FORGET IT!!!"

Fig. 3: Carrie Mae Weems, 'Mirror/Mirror'

The first image is Simpson's 'The Waterbearer' (fig. 2). For hooks, this photograph poetically
documents the life of a woman who has not be allowed to tell her story. As a result, she has
chosen to turn her back on those who would not hear her and to create an alternate space of
testimony: 'Simpson's work offers us bodies that bear witness,' which convey the sense of 'the
impossibility to name accurately that which has been distorted, erased, altered to suit the
needs of others' (hooks, 1995: 100). The woman in the photograph refuses to return the
viewer's look and instead she looks into a space where the viewer cannot trespass. For hooks,
this image has the power to force the African-American gaze to register beyond surface
appearances and to transport it 'beyond the colonizing gaze' (hooks, 1992: 39). While learning
from hooks why it is crucial to undo the coercive images imposed by the white colonizer, I
believe that, for me, it is imperative to ask: why, as a white woman, am I riveted to this
image, enraptured and intimidated at the same time by the grace and stillness of this figure? Is
it because the striking, sensuous whiteness of the woman's dress and the gift of water pouring
out of the jugs baptize me into the awareness that I need to respect the space and the silence
of this stranger who prohibits me to stare her down? The whiteness of the robe confronts my
whiteness in unexpected ways, as a blank - and now starkly visible - surface that resists my
objectifying inscription and makes me aware of the absolute impenetrability of this image. The
invisibility of the stranger's face evokes the inviolable singularity of her look: I can never see
what she sees, I cannot appropriate her gaze, see with her eyes. The territory perused by her
look is hidden from the light that illuminates my world, inaccessible to exploration. The white
tunic deflects my look and allows the woman to gather her beauty into herself, although at the
same time the image offers me a gift of being able to touch the surface of her skin with my
eye and to trace her silhouette; perhaps it is a promise of seeing 'otherwise'. Against the dark
background, the image brings out a different light, which, in Levinas' words, 'is not thematic but
resounds for the eye that listens with a resonance unique in its kind, a resonance of silence'
(1981: 30).

The next work I will address is Carrie Mae Weems' 'Mirror/Mirror' (fig. 3), from the controversial
series of images entitled Ain't Joking (1986-1987), in which the artist referenced white
supremacist iconography in an attempt to exorcize the power of racist ways of looking. hooks
argues that Weems challenges 'conventional perceptions created by our attachment to fixed
ways of looking that lead to blind spots' (1996: 175). Similarly to Fanon's experience of
disindividuation in the confrontation with the white gaze, the mirror that a black woman looks
into becomes the locus of misrecognition and self-alienation. Instead of self-reflection and
positive self-identification, the surface of the mirror only registers a radical disjunction between
the viewer and her image, like a slash in the title 'Mirror/Mirror'.

14

The image also exposes the

fact that the mirror and its reflective surface are false in the first place: at a closer look, one
notices that it is only a frame that the black woman is holding.

15

hooks comments that this

work forces her to interrogate her own notions of beauty; in a racist society, the image that the
mirror throws back at a black woman is a white face that immobilizes her in the standards of
beauty with which she cannot identify. The mechanisms of both black and white females'
socialization into white supremacist ways of thinking are evoked by a reference to a popular
fairy tale. As hooks explains, for a black woman, the color politics of the white supremacist
society, as symbolized in the chromatic juxtapositions in this photograph, can only yield an
aesthetics that 'wound[s] us, beauty that hurts' (hooks, 1990: 112). Yet, once again, how is the
white female viewer to situate herself vis-à-vis this powerful and incredibly disturbing image?
The woman's naked shoulder conveys the sense of vulnerability to the penetrating white look,
while, subtly, her straightened-out hair is indicative of her interiorization of the white standard
of beauty. It is hard and uncomfortable to acknowledge complicity with the hateful gaze from
the mirror, so frigidly staring down a black woman. If, as hooks says, the black viewer is
confronted with her own, socially imposed, desire to conform to the white norm, the white
viewer feels suddenly insecure in her own sense of beauty and self-worth, evicted from the
aesthetic comfort zone by the uncanny encounter with what she is forced to recognize as her
own reflection. In effect, the white viewer is displaced from her privileged position in front of
the mirror and thrown back into her white skin that now contrasts unfavourably with the
luminous skin of a black woman. In front of this image, the white viewer is forced to question
her 'natural' right to look, suddenly uncertain who indeed does the looking; in hooks' words,
'the colonizing gaze shifts itself'. Provoked by the figure that holds in front of me the mirror of
my prejudice, in front of an image that demonstrates such resilience to appropriation, I have to

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react; to paraphrase Levinas again, 'I do not contemplate a face, I respond to it (1961, 88):
the epiphany of the face becomes an invitation to speak. Interestingly, when Carrie Mae
Weems' work was exhibited at the Dalhousie University Art Gallery in Halifax several years ago,
it was the local black community that protested against it, resulting in student sit-ins in the art
gallery and a political crisis at the university. Although the purview of this paper does not allow
me to delve into the far-reaching implications of this incident, it indeed indicates a need to
examine the ethico-political dimension of the supposedly neutral space of the white cube of the
gallery.

16

In her film criticism hooks often observes that '[o]ur eyes grow accustomed to images that
reflect nothing of ourselves' (1992: 125) and can only produce disaffection. In the era of mass
media consumption of black images, the critical look must also confront and subvert the
commodification of blackness and the seduction of simulacral visibility, in which unique cultural
and historical signification of black experience is compromised: visibility itself does not
guarantee that the images are inherently progressive. In her essay 'Eating the Other,' hooks is
concerned about the recent fashion, especially in the field of advertising, for dark ethnic bodies
- which she sees as the cannibalization of the other that, while compensating for their previous
invisibility, reduces them to an atavistic fantasy and spectacle (hooks, 1992: 21-39). The
overexposure of black bodies, as in the case of popular hip-hop video clips, can lead to further
stereotyping, thus reproducing the old forms of racist oppression. She also cautions against
covert negative inscriptions of blackness; for example, she draws attention to the
representations of black death in popular films such as The Bodyguard or Crooklyn, which
unwittingly reinforce the valorization of black death as worthless and undeserving of grief
(undated: 3). Even the recent representativeness of 'black' film makers and their productions is
by no means unproblematic: forcing one individual to speak on behalf of an entire marginalized
group only entrenches the perceived marginality of that group.

hooks refuses constructions of race in terms of black authenticity since they ignore the fact that
blackness is a culturally determined, ideological construct. Mockingly asking that 'the real black
person please stand up' (hooks: 1992, 13), she calls for rewriting of the metaphors of
blackness and whiteness beyond a mere inversion of stereotypes, as in the practices of black
nationalism and the dominant black aesthetics founded upon the slogan of 'black is beautiful.'
She is even more suspicious of attempts to erase color differences in the name of common
humanity, as proposed by the different shades of political liberalism, since they covertly
naturalize whiteness.

17

By contrast, in hooks' idiom, 'blackness' is deployed strategically as a

marker of everyday black experience rather than as an essentializing signifier of victimization
and invisibility. In her critical analyses, 'blackness' is a fluid, open category that becomes
synonymous both with the experience of exile, pain, and struggle and, in an affirmative sense,
with freedom and emancipatory ethos that disrupts the status quo. As she says in her essay
'The Aesthetics of Blackness,' identifying oneself as black means both being the subject of racist
abuse and being part of the culture that has struggled against such abuse (hooks, 1990: 103-
13). hooks' lyrical childhood memoir Bone Black is punctuated with a refrain 'Black is a
woman's color', which transforms blackness into the color of her everyday experience as well as
her feminine jouissance. Whenever she writes in her journal, blackness is the space she creates
with her words and which she enters as her own, intimate territory: 'This is my home. The
dark, bone black inner cave where I am making a world for myself' (hooks, 1996: 183). At the
same time, 'whiteness' is suspected to be white supremacists' fantasy that they represent a
superior standard to black people. After all, in her childhood memories of growing up in a
segregated South, hooks can only associate whiteness with terror and with faces staring her
down in hate. She recalls, in her memoirWounds of Passion, 'Whiteness is always on the other
side of the tracks. When white bodies cross the tracks, when they enter those dark dense
spaces of blackness, it is always only a warning, a sign of danger. When blackness stretches
itself across town, beyond the tracks, it is always and only to serve - a sign of submission'
(hooks, 1997: 46).

18

In the context of hooks' radical rewriting of the sedimented, racially motivated connotations of
blackness and whiteness, it is interesting to note that Levinas sometimes refers to the ethical
way of looking otherwise than within the horizon of being as black or nocturnal vision (the
practice in which he is probably indebted to his life-long friend Maurice Blanchot), offering a
fascinating transvaluation of the received notions of darkness and light. For Levinas, the
darkness of the night connotes the state of absolute dispossession that is prior to the claim of
belonging, while light allows us to appropriate entities. Although this intervention into received
connotations of darkness and light, with their concomitant associations of black and white, may
not be revolutionary, one should note Levinas' effort to articulate blackness other than in terms
of the negation of light, that is, outside the binary logic of the dominant of vision and its

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corresponding axiological systems. On the other hand, it also reveals a need to engage in
critical thinking about social significations of whiteness and the way it still remains a neutral
and therefore essentialist category.

Considering the oppressive, racist legacy of whiteness, it is debatable whether any kind of
reclamation of whiteness as an affirmative, ethical category, analogous to hooks' revisioning of
'blackness,' is possible or desirable at all. With her usual perspicuity, hooks cautions against the
recent attempts by white academics to substitute oppressive whiteness by 'a newly reclaimed,
radical whiteness portrayed as liberatory'. For hooks, such endeavors hardly change the fact
that whiteness remains the starting point for any revisioning of race relations, a comment I
take to heart when engaging with literature, art and critical theory by African-American writers
and artists (1996: 173). Suffice it to say, hooks' work poignantly exposes the dearth of critical
thinking about whiteness. Interventions such as Adrian Piper's performances, at the intersection
of race and gender, especially her 'Mythical Being' series in which she cross-dresses as a white
male, serve as reactants that suddenly make visible the fictionally constructed nature of
whiteness. In a very different way, and on the other side of the racial divide, so do
controversial video clips and now a feature film 8 Mile by a white rapper Eminem (Marshall
Mathers).

hooks insists on the urgent task of critically intervening into the cultural production of the color
hierarchy which has entrenched white privilege. She argues, for instance, that the pattern of
white people offering privileges to light-skinned black people has been mirrored in black social
relations as the black envy of light-skinned black females. Considering that, as hooks painfully
reminds us, the light skin in racially mixed people is often the heritage of rape of black women
by white masters - the colour caste system is the legacy of abominable racial and sexist
violence (2001: 32-54). The skin color hierarchies are covertly reinforced in popular culture,
Hollywood productions in particular, even in those that openly advocate acceptance of
interracial dialogue and relationships. Some memorable examples include the opening sequence
in Spike Lee's The Jungle Fever, which shows a group of black women comparing their skin
shades, or more recently, a light-skinned Halle Berry's Oscar-winning performance in Monster
Ball. As hooks cautions, since racist valorizations of skin have been largely internalized by black
people themselves, there is an increased need to forge black viewers' 'ontological resistance to
the white gaze' (1998: 1) and to reinvent skin outside the constricting politics of
epidermalization. That is why, akin to her re-imagining of blackness, hooks evokes skin
poetically, as 'a dark room, a space of shadows,' no longer a mere surface of racist inscription
but an inhabitable, sensuous sphere of self-affirmation. Within the racist visual politics, human
skin serves as the index of difference which facilitates hierarchies of worth accorded to human
beings by those in the position of domination. The perception of skin as colour-coded according
to an established value system corresponds to hierarchical ordering within the space of
visibility. hooks' poetic locutions seek to reclaim skin from injurious, visual metaphors and to
relocate it to the region of both sensibility and ethics.

Skin is the border that separates me from the strangers within the space we inhabit together.
In that sense, it is a protective layer that safeguards the boundaries of my inner territory. Skin
is also a sensitive membrane, a vulnerable organ through which I come into contact with others
and which is immediately affected by their actions. Skin is therefore never entirely my own
since I experience it as an envelope that protects me and makes possible the contact with the
outside world only in the context of encounters with others. Skin is the site of the pleasure and
enjoyment I derive from being with others, but it also makes me susceptible to violence and
pain. Indeed, skin often bears the indelible marks of traumatic encounters: a recurrent image in
Beloved is the scar tissue in the shape of a cherry blossom tree on Sethe's back, which is the
literal inscription of violence on her body. In the novel In Another Place, Not Here, by
Canadian-Caribbean writer Dionne Brand, Elizete, a black woman from the Caribbeans,
struggles to free herself from the memories of the past when she had to work in the sugar cane
field and suffered daily abuse at the hands of her husband. She is constantly thrown back into
relieving the trauma by the sight of the thick scars on her shins (Brand, 1997). Incidentally, in
both novels, the harbinger of the female protagonist's change towards self-affirmation and the
overcoming of trauma and shame is the moment when they let their lovers touch and caress
the scars. Skin is therefore also the place of genuine human contact, and as hooks often
recollects, the person who fostered and encouraged her interest in art was a white art teacher
in her elementary school, who, unlike others who recoiled from contact with black skin, never
hesitated to touch the children's black hands.

Levinas locates skin in the area of sensibility and foregrounds it as the tender and sensitive
area of exposure to the other. 'To be in one's skin is an extreme way of being affected' (1981:
89). Having the other in my skin signifies therefore the constitution of subjectivity in the ethical

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relation. The fact that the ethical self is enveloped in its skin means that it is unable to escape
responsibility. In making a gift of my own skin to another, my identity is constituted as bearing
witness to his or her existence. Since skin allows the other to affect me, it is a corporeal locus
of the ethical relation, a site where my responsibility to the other is enacted as proximity,
although Levinasian 'skin' is by no means reducible to the physicality of the bodily envelope.

19

Ethics is 'exposedness of skin prior to my intention', which causes me to turn myself inside out
into 'a concave without a convex' (Levinas, 1981: 49). Within the sensible, the eye is also a
living tissue, vulnerable and naked; as Levinas says in his essay 'Language and Proximity,' 'the
visible caresses the eye' (1993: 118). Saying, the ethical essence of language, is likewise
located in the sensible since it consists in 'denuding oneself of one's skin,' in uncovering oneself
and exposing the raw nerve endings to what affects me from the outside. To reiterate, in the
ethical relation I am 'skin', vulnerable and susceptible to being affected by the other who, in
turn, manifests itself to me as a face. At the same time, '[t]he skin of the face is that which
stays most naked, most destitute' (Levinas,1961: 86).

20

It is important to note that, in these

skewed metaphors, always grounded in a synesthetic transformation of vision into voice and
listening, light and visibility are opposed to vulnerability rather than to opacity or inscrutability.

Although Levinas consistently questions the privilege of sight, to say that he condemns looking
in order to accord primacy to the ear would belie the emphasis he places on the sensible, which
is experienced through all the senses, prior to the constitution of identity in consciousness. The
stratum of sensibility is accessed in enjoyment, in the sphere of material existence and feelings,
which is prior to the constitution of meaning, although it is my ability to be affected by others
that allows for the parameters of my world to unfold from my sense experience. I prefer
therefore to think of Levinas' critique of vision as a powerful intervention into the ways sight
has been constructed in the West rather than merely in terms of the prohibition of sight; as an
idiosyncratic, even disturbing interruption of our customary ways of seeing. Like hooks', his is a
'critical look' which forces me to recognize the other's unique power, outside the symmetry of
Hegelian 'recognition' in which the other, the not-I, is always returned to the same. Levinas'
insistence on the primacy of radical alterity, which challenges my right to be a master, shatters
the hierarchical structures of dominant visual economies. I would argue that his attempt to shift
the power of seeing from the side of a dispassionate observer, who absorbs the other in
knowledge and decides his or her fate and place under the sun, to the pole of the other who
always 'regards me', is a de-colonizing gesture of recognizing everyone's inalienable right to
look, and it opens up a realm where those who have been denied that right may emerge into
visibility on their own terms: '[Ethics] also signifies the dawning of a manifestation in which it
can indeed shine forth and show itself [when] its signifying is not exhausted in the effusion and
the dissimulation of light' (Levinas, 1981: 65). On the other hand, reading Levinas alongside
hooks reveals that his critique of the hegemony of vision, although empowering the other and
laying ground for the other to 'talk back', does not draw distinctions between different cultural
significations of invisibility and therefore is still insufficient to truly bring those who want to be
seen 'otherwise' into visibility.

In Yearning, hooks announces: 'This is an intervention. I am writing to you. I am speaking
from a place in the margins where I am different, where I see things differently. I am talking
about what I see' (1990: 152). hooks' model of ethical accountability entails assuming
responsibility for the ways we see the world. She argues for 'situated' looking, which is
synonymous with an ethical and revolutionary 'doing', with an act of resistance which calls into
question 'the white male's capacity to gaze, define, and know' (hooks, 1992: 127). hooks' re-
visioning of aesthetics is a challenge to the dominant specular regime, a "talking back" that
bears witness to black experience. Her own 'oppositional gaze' expresses yearning for positive
visibility by those who have been airbrushed from Western metanarratives. Although the critical
look offers images that disturb, even hurt, such as Weems' work or films like Boys in the Hood,
it is an ethical look, responsive to others and willing to take a risk. hooks herself has assumed
that risk repeatedly, exposing herself to ostracism in white and black communities alike.

I have approached my topic with a strange sense of displacement from the texts I am writing
about; yet, in different ways, both hooks and Levinas were telling me to confront my
discomfort, to pay attention to this feeling. My initial anxiety has not subsided, but I do not feel
uninvited into either text. I feel called forth to step into the space on the margin, the margin
which hooks defines not as a place to which the victim of oppression has been relegated by the
dominant culture, but as a site of radical, transformative openness and possibility (1990: 153).
In this space I will have to begin to see 'otherwise', to look with a 'listening eye', always
uncertain, yet still turned toward her or him who may not wish to return my look.

hooks and Levinas both speak from the position of their deep commitment to ethics, calling into
question the disembodied subject of ethics and resisting essentializing discourses of identity

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politics. Although in very different ways, for both, ethics is an epidermal ethics that challenges
Western epistemologies within which skin has been constructed as a sealed envelope that
protects the boundaries of my ego, grafted on the hatred of the other's skin. Both recognize the
singularity and uniqueness of one's skin, its irreducibility to epidermal stereotyping, whereby
skin becomes the locus of welcoming openness, of non-appropriative contact, and the
possibility of ethical speech. In this way, they attend to the singularity of the human other,
insisting on the ethical need to engage with concrete, suffering human beings and to come to
their aid. The fundamental notions of disinterestedness and gratuity in relations with others are
indeed 'the miracle of ethics before the light' (Levinas, 1981: 44). I believe that Levinas' ethics
of responsibility for the other has the potential to shatter the mirror which, for centuries, has
reflected the image of undisturbed white privilege; in this way, it enables the white viewer to
appreciate and respect hooks' project of reclaiming blackness. Engaging with hooks' texts, on
the other hand, reveals a striking insufficiency of an ethics that disallows the articulation of the
multiplicity of differences along the axes of race, gender or class, indicating that Levinas' ethics
of absolute responsibility must be engaged in ways that respect not only the singularity and
divinity of others but also their collective desire for visibility within the social fabric. The
adversarial nature of the symbolic 'face-to-face' in Carrie Mae Weems' mirror is a poignant
reminder that racist ways of 'looking' can also infect the discourse of colour-neutral, "human"
ethics. After all, when Levinas remarks that the best way to look at the face is not even to
notice the color of his eyes (1981: 85), we can infer that he means one should not notice the
color of his skin either. Perhaps only by bringing statements like that into relief through the
lens of engaged cultural critique such as hooks' can they begin to be read beyond their
troubling innuendo of color-blindness and instead contribute to what Cornel West has called a
race-transcending vision.

21

To reinforce the importance of hooks' 'oppositional look,' I would like to propose the term
'anarchic vision', to refer to the way of ethical looking with the 'listening eye'. Levinas often
makes references to the an-archy of that which falls outside being and thus refuses to be
assembled in representation, while arche, the origin, is synonymous with sovereignty, self-
possession and consciousness. Insofar as this anarchic, embodied vision intervenes into existing
power relations as they operate on visible bodies, it has the potential to challenge the discourse
of race predicated on an interpretation of vision that is collusive with those power relations. The
anarchy of the face is an infinite, unpresentable difference, which correlates with the 'light'
which is the face's own proper signification.

It is my hope that the unexpected encounters such as the one above will help redraw the
parameters of existing visual economies so as to inscribe them at the nexus of the ethical, in
the Levinasian sense, and the political, in hooks' understanding of the term, toward a political
ethics founded upon a commitment to respect the other's inviolable dignity. Levinas' dictum
that the supreme passivity of exposure to the other, which is responsibility for the free
initiatives of the other (1981: 47), can then be re-translated in the above context as my
accountability for racism inherent in the structures of the society and my responsibility not only
for how I see the world but also for the ways those around me choose to see it.

I would like to thank Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems for their permission
to reproduce images of their work in this publication.

Endnotes

1

Piper, A. My Calling (Card) #1: A Reactive Guerilla Performance for Dinners and Coctail

Parties (1986 - 1990) (Berger, 1999: 135).

2

Kaplan, A.E. (1997) Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze. New York:

Routledge, 4.

3

I am indebted to Ewa Plonowska-Ziarek, from the University of Notre Dame, for the initial

encouragement to stage such an encounter.

4

As Plonowska-Ziarek forcefully argues in her book An Ethics of Dissensus, neither the

discourse of politics, including the politics of radical democracy, nor the discourse of ethics can
'disregard racial and sexed bodies as the location of the historical struggles' (2001: 16). Against
disembodied models of subjectivity, which she considers ethically insufficient and lacking in
political viability, Plonowska-Ziarek develops an 'ethos of becoming', which is a non-theological,
incarnated mode of resistance to disciplinary powers, a proleptic movement towards new, as
yet unimaginable ethical configurations of the ways of being.

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5

For a comprehensive overview of this debate see Martin Jay's Downcast Eye: The Denigration

of Vision in the Twentieth Century French Thought (1993)Berkeley: University of California
Press.

6

hooks' book All About Love is subtitled New Visions. (2002) New York: William Morrow and

Company, Inc. She writes: 'Those of us who have already chosen to embrace a love ethics ...
know that when we let our light shine, we draw to us and are drawn by other bearers of light'
(101).

7

See Sander L. Gilman, 'Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female

Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature'. In Gates, H.L. (ed.) (1986)
Race, Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 223-257. Based on the
documentation related to the case of Sarah Bartmann, the Hottentot Venus, and the 19

th

century representations of prostitutes in both scientific discourse and literature and art, Gilman
describes the mechanisms of constructing the black female body as an index of pathological
sexuality.

8

Two famous literary examples are the protagonists of William Faulkner's Light in August and

Nora Larson's Passing. Adrian Piper, a bi-racial artist who identifies herself as black, quoted in
the epigraph of this paper, critically interrogates the phenomenon of passing, with the view to
expose the constructed nature of skin colour.

9

Burns, A. (1948) Colour Prejudice. London, Allen and Unwin, 16.

10

For an excellent analysis of Levinas' notion of the face, see Robbins, J. (1999) Altered

Readings: Levinas and Literature. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, especially Chapter
IV, 'Visage, Figure: Speech and Murder in Totality and Infinity'. In her book, Robbins discusses
Levinas' ambivalent attitude toward the aesthetic and his foreclosure of the rhetorical and
figurative dimension of speech.

11

Levinas certainly recognizes that Western sensibility is not used to such expressions, and

therefore he cautions that 'expression such as the eye that listens to the resonance of silence
are not monstrosities, for they speak of the way one approaches the temporality of the true,
and in temporality being deploys its essence' (1981: 30).

12

For instance, 'Resisting Representation' is the subtitle of bell hooks' book Outlaw Culture:

Resisting Representation, London: Routledge, 1994.

13

The parameters of this paper do not allow me to discuss Levinas' attitude toward art and

aesthetics in general, which for the most part can be described as hostile and distrustful.
Against such a view of Levinas' notion of aesthetics, I have argued elsewhere that his
discussion of aesthetics in the context of ethics opens up a possibility of an entirely different
conception of art. See, for example, Glowacka, D. (2000) 'Ethical Figures of Otherness: Jean-
Luc Nancy's Sublime Offering and Emmanuel Levinas' Gift for the Other', in Ziarek, K. & Deane
S. (eds) Future Crossings: Literature Between Philosophy and Cultural Studies. Evanston,
Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 168-90. See also Jill Robbins' Altered Readings. In the
context of my Levinasian engagement with hooks' commentaries on art, I find the following
statement by Levinas very helpful. In one of his rare commentaries on painting, in Existence
and Existants, he says: 'Paradoxical as it may seem, painting is a struggle with sight. Sight
seeks to draw out of light beings integrated into a whole. To look is to be able to describe the
curves, to sketch out wholes in which elements can be integrated, horizons in which the
particular comes to appear by abdicating its particularity. In contemporary painting, things no
longer count as elements in a universal order.... The particular stands out in the nakedness of
its being' (2001: 50).

14

Kobena Mercer refers to Weems' Mirror/Mirror as a commentary on a (de)formative

experience of the black subject's mirror phase. In Mirrage, 29. For a critique of Lacan's notion
of the mirror stage in relation to recognition, see chapter 'Vision and Recognition' in Oliver,
2001.

15

I would like to thank Charmaine Wheatley for drawing my attention to this important detail.

16

For a detailed account of those telling events, see Susan Gibson Garvey, 'Short Circuit: The

Story of an Exhibition That Provoked Unforeseen Consequences.' In Glowacka, D. & Boos, S.
(eds) (2002) Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the Boundaries. Albany: SUNY Press, 275
- 92.

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17

In the chapter 'Seeing Race' (2001), Oliver analyzes the rhetoric of the colour-blind society,

which has supplanted notions of social justice based on the need for restitution (such as
affirmative action initiatives). She argues that this rhetoric denies the social fact of race and its
effects as well as the 'white' provenance of supposedly neutral categories such as 'human' or
'American'. In a word, the call for colour-blindness is itself a symptom of racism.

18

For an interesting discussion of the phenomenology of skin in relation to Levinas' ethics see

Bernet, R. (2000) 'Two Interpretations of the Vulnerability of the Skin', in Bloechl, J. (ed.)
(2000) The Face of the Other: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. New York:
Fordham University Press, 43-61.

19

Plonowska-Ziarek notes the similarity in Levinas' and Irigaray's attention to the intersection

of embodiment and language, which 'exposes the ambiguity inherent in the linguistic
construction of the body' (2001: 52). I would like to add that, in his reconstruction of skin as
the locus of the ethical relation, Levinas' metaphorization of this human organ, which
nevertheless preserves its sensible and corporeal dimension, is reminiscent of Irigaray's
morphology of the female body, such as her famous articulation of the woman's 'two lips' in
This Sex Which Is Not One.

20

For the discussion of the Levinasian notion of the caress and its inflections in Luce Irigaray's

ethics of love, see, for instance, Oliver (2001), chapter 'Toward a New Vision', 191-216, and
Chanter, T. (1995) Ethics of Eros: Irigaray's Rewriting of the Philosophers. New York:
Routledge.

21

See West, C. (1993) Race Matters. New York: Random House, and hooks, b. & West, C.

(1991) Breaking the Bread. Toronto: Between the Lines.

References

Berger, M. (ed.) (1999) Adrian Piper: A Retrospective. University of Maryland Baltimore County
Press.

Brand, D. (1997) In Another Place, Not Here. Toronto: Vintage Canada.

Fanon, F. (1967) Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press Inc.

hooks, b. (1990). Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press.

hooks, b. (1992) Black Looks: Race and Representation. Toronto: Between the Lines.

hooks, b (1995) Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: New Press.

hooks, b. (1996) 'Carrie Mae Weems: Diasporic Landscapes of Longing', in Inside the Visible: an
elliptical traverse of 20

th

century art in, of, and from the feminine. Cambridge, Massachusetts:

The MIT Press, 173-79.

hooks, b. (1996) Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

hooks, b. (1997) Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

hooks, b. (1998) "Rebel's Dilemma." Shambhala Sun On Line.

http://www.shambhalasun.com/Archives/Columnists/Hooks/HooksNov98.htm

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hooks, b. (undated) 'On Death and Patriarchy in Crooklyn',

http://stevenstanley.tripod.com/docs/bellhooks/ondeath.html

hooks, b. (2001) Salvation: Black People and Love. New York: William Morrow, 32 - 54.

Levinas, E. (1961) Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alfonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press.

Levinas, E. (1981) Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press.

Levinas, E. (1987) Time and the Other. Trans. R. A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, Duquesne University
Press.

Levinas, E. (1993) Collected Philosophical Papers. Trans. A. Lingis. Boston: Kluwer Academic

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Publishers.

Levinas, E. (2000) God, Death, and Time. Trans. B. Betigo. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Levinas, E. (2001) Existence and Existents. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania:
Duquesne University Press.

Mercer, K. (1995) 'Busy in the Ruins of Wretched Phantasia', in Mirage: Enigmas of Race,
Difference and Desire. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 14-55.

Morrison, T. (1988) Beloved. New York: Penguin Books.

Oliver, K. (2001) Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis, London: University of
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Dorota Glowacka is Associate Professor in the Contemporary Studies Programme at the
University of King's College, Halifax, Canada. She teaches courses in critical theory, feminist
literature and Holocaust literature. Glowacka has published articles on American, French and
Polish literature and on Holocaust literature and art in the context of contemporary
philosophical debates on ethics and aesthetics. She is co-editor of Between Ethics and
Aesthetic: Crossing the Boundaries (SUNY, 2000).

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