Page - 15 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

VOYEURISTIC stimuli 15 ety where not only is everybody being watched and objectified by an unknown eye (camera, internet, God, etc.), but also where each indi- vidual can him- or herself randomly operate the machine.26 Paradoxically, voyeurism becomes a reciprocal surveillance mechanism, as one becomes aware of also being watched. Again, by applying the term voyeurism to late medieval arts I refer rather to its broader cultural implica- tions, which involve the desire to see, to know, and to control. According to Freud, the origin of voyeurism is the scopophilic instinct; its source is the organ, the eye; the aim is to eliminate the tension produced by the instinct through the act of seeing.27 As a ‘perverse scenario’, voyeurism is a practice in which seeing is the principal means of obtaining pleasure, control, or knowledge and in which the ultimate object of desire is the see- ing itself.28 Seeing in medieval discourse was not mere- ly a physiological activity but also, and mainly, a cultural and moral practice, a metaphor of a transition from skepticism to faith;29 it was understood as both passive and active, submis- sive and performative. From Augustine to the High Middle Ages most medieval writers had clung to the theory of extramission seeing, whereby the eye was regarded as emanating vis- ual rays, intensified in the presence of light, that depart and travel to meet an object, are formed by that object, and then return to the eye.30 The rays are impressed with the form of the body they encounter, a form that is corporeal, and one that must in turn be communicated to the incorporeal soul. It is an active, dynamic, and reciprocal process, involving a direct physical relation between subject and object. Since the eye can clearly project signals and emit emotions with remarkable power, a ‘sick eye’ can distort understanding and an ‘evil eye’ can bewitch and harm.31 Extramission theory thus adheres to the notion of an active performative seeing, in which the viewer is an active agent. During the Late Middle Ages, under the influence of Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253) and Roger Bacon (1214–1294), extramission was gradually synthesized with and then replaced by the intromission theory of seeing.32 Intro- mission is an assimilation process, in which the eye is regarded as a passive receptor of light and the viewer has a passive role in the act of seeing. In the intromission process, external rays emit- ted from objects imprint their impression on the merely receptive eye. It is a process whereby the external visible forms emanating from the objects pass uninterruptedly into the perceiv- er and reproduce their essential qualities, an after-image, and simulacrum in the receptive 26 For Foucault’s study of Jeremy Benthams’s panopticon model prison as the most explicit version of the ocular tech- nology of power, see M. Foucault, Discipline and Punishment. The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan, New York 1979, pp. 195–228, esp. pp. 140, 202, 217. 27 Freud, Instincts and their Vicissitudes (cit. n. 24), p. 122. 28 Kelly, Telling Glances (cit. n. 24), p. 8. 29 When Jesus restored sight to the blind they recognized divine truth and faith, thus becoming exemplary believers; once Thomas saw and touched Jesus’ wounds he believed, and although Jesus praised those who did not see and yet believed, seeing is still legitimized as believing. If seeing is believing, a deliberate reluctance to see is understood as denial and heresy. The veiled eyes of Synagoga, for instance, are a symbol of her moral and spiritual blindness, her disinclination to recognize the Christian god and her rejection of the Catholic tenets. 30 See, Camille, Before the Gaze (cit. n. 6), pp. 204–208; Hahn, Visio Dei (cit. n. 4), pp. 174–176. 31 See C. Maloney (ed.), The Evil Eye, New York 1976; H. Kessler, Evil Eye(ing). Romanesque Art as a Shield of Faith,” in: C. Hourihane (ed.), Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century. Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn, Princeton 2008, pp. 107–135. 32 See D. C. Lindberg, Lines of Influence in Thirteenth-Century Optics: Bacon, Witelo, and Pecham, in: Speculum XLVI, 1971, pp. 66–83.