30 March 2009: "Does n e 1 know what these ppl r doing?"

This post is about the McGuffin. To illustrate his point about the power of misdirection, Carles presents an image of a group of youths staring at something the we beholders of the photograph can't see. This is an homage, perhaps, to the filmic device of the "mysterious briefcase" whose contents are never disclosed, used to great effect in Repo Man and Pulp Fiction. But its art-historical roots lie even deeper, going back at least to the most majestic aesthetic evocation of unseen space, Velázquez's unsurpassed masterpiece, Las Meninas. As Foucault details at length in the introduction to The Order of Things, the painting is a careful orchestration of vanishing points the brings to a sublime tension the implied simultaneous presence and absence of the beholder. We are at once the subject that the artist in the painting is depicted as painting, and an invisible ghost, standing in the place of the royal subjects shown in the distant mirror without displacing them.

Though greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself. But, inversely, the painter's gaze, addressed to the void confronting him outside the picture, accepts as many models as there are spectators; in this precise but neutral place, the observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange. No gaze is stable, or rather in the neutral furrow of the gaze piercing at a right angle through the canvas, subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles infinitely. And here the great canvas with its back to us on the extreme left of the picture exercises its second function: stubbornly invisible, it prevents the relation of these gazes from ever being discoverable or de­finitely established. The opaque fixity that it establishes on one side renders forever unstable the play of metamorphoses established in the centre be­tween spectator and model. Because we can see only that reverse side, we do not know who we are, or what we are doing. Seen or seeing?

The interlocking web of perspectives on possible representations of the same given reality reveal our epistemology as a palimpsest, made of layers or incrustations of sensory data, among which we must perpetually alternate. As Carles says of the image he uses to evoke this metaphysical complexity, "I think that they are in some sort of temporary space." Of course, all space is provisional to the extent that we constitute it in time through our ability to perceive it as distinct, as (in this case) walled off from the rest of the club.

But Carles is explicit about the dangers of this sort of epistemology: "Every group of friends might have a sectioned-off temporary structure, kinda like a cubicle at an office job." Thus the social construction of reality becomes rote, a routine labor devoid of the spontaneity that should come from direct experience of the real. The provisional spaces we set up to permit experience end up proscribing experience, even they they create the illusion for outsiders that many potential experiences are taking place at once. Carles demonstrates this conundrum with his facetious list of what may be possibly going on in the unseen realm of the photograph. The most telling item: that the group is "b) looking at how keut they look in pix." We annihilate space by always surveilling ourselves, removing ourselves from the scene in which we observe ourselves. The life lived on webcam consumes itself, freeing its subject utterly.

Ultimately, as Carles points out, space in a capitalist system is reducible not to time, or to shared perceptions, but to property: "Just kinda weird how if u think about ‘space‘ it’s just a series of boxes that people can either be inside of or outside of. Weird that ‘property’ even exists." The hope Carles extends is that property relations can be overcome by a reconceptualization of space, of the notions of "outside" and "inside" -- to banish "belonging" as a category in an all-inclusive social order. An order in which we coexist with/as royalty in the same all-encompassing gaze.