The Pleasures of the Visual

Seeing is exhilarating. It is extraordinary how much pleasure we are able to derive from sight alone. So it would seem, going by the intense pleasure we derive by merely seeing things.

Last month, I took a brief vacation in Corbett national park, where the only question worth asking seemed to be if anyone saw it, by which one of course meant a tiger. One needed to get up roughly at bedtime, stand in a queue for a few hours, spend a couple of hours hurtling over roads made entirely out of potholes, ooh and aah exaggeratedly when encountering pug marks, only to returned empty eyed, having had to make to do with seeing what one was told was a rare exotic bird and some horned deer.

The quest for visual pleasure seems to be a relentless one. One wakes up early to catch a sunrise in the mountains, pays a hefty premium to get a sea view room and travels to obscure ends of the world to see the ‘scenery’. We photograph things in an attempt to convert memory into possession and an experience into a frozen image. And then of course, there is pornography- an entire industry based on providing a visual substitute for the real thing. Looking at dirty pictures or down someone’s cleavage seems capable of generating pleasure of a kind that is not immediately easy to explain.

In some ways, we live in a world where sight replaces experience; it allows us the sense of an experience but from a comfortable distance. In some cases, one could argue that sight aspires to be the past tense of experience. It is the advance for what might eventually turn out to be experience. But even otherwise, sight alone has its advantages. Touch makes us a part of an experience while sight allows us to be separated from it. We become observers of the world, and emphasise the difference between us and the rest of the world. Seeing things from a distance becomes a sign of objectivity and detachment. The sense of sight is an elective one; we choose what we see and what we don’t. It gives us a sense of measured control over our surroundings.

The role of sight as sentinel of the mind can be discerned in the language that we use. We see things clearly, put them in perspective, focus on what is important, watch ourselves guardedly, and display traits of being visionaries. Sight makes us capable of discernment, other wise we are ‘blinded’ by our biases.

The bias for sight is in some ways a move away from our animal origins. As Ferenczi points out, at some point in the evolutionary process, because of our upright posture, the animal nose was replaced by the human eye. Smell is a primordial sense that guides us invisibly. We are not aware of how we respond to smells; it works in the murky swamp of our unconscious. Sight is swathed in the light of the day. It comforts us because we think we know what we see. It gives us a sense of cause and effect, right and wrong. The rationality of the modern age meant that we stopped seeing visions and started seeing sights. The seer became the watcher and the timeless relentlessly transient.

The technologies of our day celebrate the visual with for we buy nothing that does not give us visual pleasure. Instagram is a celebration of the visual- it presents a view of the world from the perspective of every individual’s eyes. Of course, technology allows the visual to surpass what the eye can see. Every thing must above all, look good, only then can we focus on what it does for us. Take food, for example. Increasingly, the visual aspects of food have become the doorway to enjoyment. Sight allows us to stop at the surface of things, and in a world that celebrates relentless motion, it becomes easy to seek flickering stimulation that arrests the mind. The paparazzi are a sign of a time when voyeurism is by itself enough; for their pursuit is not one of engagement but visual contact. The tele-photo lens extends sight into space; its objective is intrusion, not revelation.

Sight gives us the illusion of control and knowledge by placing us at the centre of the universe. Everything is seen from the vantage point of our eye and the world exists for our consumption. When we ‘shoot’ the tiger using our digital camera or ‘capture’ the first light of the day as it breaks through the mountains, we exercise ownership of a world of which we are but an infinitesimal part. Sight reverses the power equation between ourselves and the world; no wonder for us seeing is enough.

Of course, increasingly what we see is no longer a faithful representation of reality. Digital manipulation has rendered the visual nothing more than a version, one possible account out of many of the world we live in. I saw it with my own eyes is no longer the certificate it once was. The eye which was journalistic in its intent, feels freer now to be a voyeur. It is now the tourist among our senses, consuming things without experiencing them. And no, I didn’t see a tiger.

(A Modified version of this article has appeared previously in the Times of India)