Session Four: Speech/Finding the Language

Elizabeth Dungan, Ph.D. Candidate
History of Art, UC Berkeley

Often when I describe my work to people, they say, "Oh, well, you must know a lot about death." And I am always amazed because that was the one thing that was not imaged through the medical imagery that I was looking at. That was something that might fall out of the medical journals and the articles that I was scrutinizing for visual material. And so that absence allowed me to start thinking about representations of death and the difficulties therein.

In consideration of some of Darcy's comments and also Shai's, I want to bring out this theme of vision that has been so dominant in the last two days, and also, of course, the imagination that is linked to the image. I think that vision has a relationship both to the imaginary and to the externally visible. And, obviously, Tina's titles and subtitles have structured the last two days in relationship to vision and visuality.

I've been struck by the number of ways that vision has come up as a metaphor for all the explicit topics. In one way, of course, these two days have been catalyzed by Jim's very first line, saying that he "could feel something, but he couldn't see it," and he was trying to work in the gap between the two. And the captions that appeared on the many images that he showed us often figured people who were offering themselves in relation to the eye, to the eye as an organ, but also to subjectivity. So, for instance, some of the captions were, "No one knows me, I'm an invisible person," "I look pretty good, except that I'm bald-headed," or "I used to be handsome," or "I used to be beautiful, and I'd like to see a picture of you when you're seventy-six years old." So all of those images were also structures of self, and they all were in relationship to the eye and visibility.

I was also really moved by the sights and visions that Sandra was alerting us to in the whole relationship to the loss of a loved one, the attraction, the seduction. She described the experience as a kind of mirroring process, a kind of mimetic relationship that is a kind of visibility. I think explicitly of the double sight that All Souls' Day brought about. That double sight came up over and over again. Shai talked about it in reference to schizophrenia. But we've all been talking about double sight: for instance, Michael's description of the early modern prescription for double sight with one eye to God. And I think Gary also raised that return to sight, this doubling-up of the sight, when he talked about embalming and the whole idea of re-presenting the body and allowing it to take a form that is visible to us, and emphasizing that last look, that that is a means of connecting. And while it might be an idealized representation, Gary brought up the problematics of that, of a presentation that is an address to the eye.

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And, of course, Jodi brought all of those words together with her discussion of recognition as a means of a potentially empathic relationship or a sympathetic relationship. In Jodi's terms, "recognition" is established through a self/other dichotomy that finds connections and interdependence through the sense of sight, through this facing-off between the self and the other.

But with all of these meditations on sight, I think we were all talking, too, about the kind of interruptions of that sight, the distortions, the deferrals of sight, the vagaries or the ambivalence of sight. And that came up even when we were talking about the case of moving all the peripheral things out of the room of the dying, in order to allow our look, our gaze, to be more focused or central. Or to go back to the very icon of this conference, Jim's photograph, we see that time has an apparent clarity, but the person, the father, the body--that figure in the background could stand for many things--is out of focus.

So all of those different kinds of visions, those different kinds of visual experience, say something about the position of the viewer.

And that leads me very briefly to the second theme I wanted to alert us to, and that is the spatiality of death. There is a notion of location that we have been talking about throughout the last two days. Of course, the opening of the door has been central to that, this moving into the space, or allowing death to be a spatial thing that opens out through us. And then, just recently, Patricia Benner was talking about holding open that world, holding open a spatialized sense of the world.

Spatializing death implies as well a kind of access, a kind of movement. And Gary, of course, pointed this out when he was talking about the importance of location in death, talking about the various experiences that shift depending on the location of death, whether it is on the fields of war, or at home, or within an institution.

In the notion of double sight, again, Sandra raised the idea of the doubleness of location: that Elliot could be there in "this pale shiny hospital cubicle," that was the space in which he was both living and dying in those six hours. Sandra reminded us of the concomitance of being both near and far, of looking upon someone who is dying and is interiorally and physically, presently, there, nearby, but is also one who is moving far away.

Finally, the reason that I'm bringing that notion of spatiality up after visuality, but in relation to visuality, is that both of those themes conjure up notions of relation, a kind of relational ethics that we end the conversation with. I want to emphasize that it is not only the very situated knowledge, or positionality, that Dr. Crussi was talking about that is important. How we navigate, how we work relationally, are also crucial; and sight--the process of looking--and physical location are integral to this work.

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