Embarking or being embarked?

“The way we usually look at the world is through a grid:

that of cultural conditioning that has been infused from the earliest childhood.

It's this grid that I want to change.

I'm looking for replacement grilles that can result a renewed look.”

Jean Dubuffet

“The theory itself is a practice as much as its object.

It is not more abstract than its object.

It is a practice of concepts and it must be judged on

the other practices with which it interferes.”

Gilles Deleuze

Starting again with some questions that had been discussed in Brussels:

Above all, sociology is a question of vision: point of view, lighting, angle, depth of field, focal length and of course focus. Do we not speak repeatedly of the “sociological eye”?

A shot of Wim Wender's film Der Himmel über Berlin will serve as a pretext for sketching a reflection on how, in its wanders, intellectual risk-taking embarks the pathic dimension.

Sociological apprehension is first and foremost a fictional construction of reality, which is itself a fictional construction of the real, as an intersubjective, empathic and heuristic process. To speak of a sociology of the gaze is to cast a sociological eye on the gaze. Thus, in a movement of self-reflection, we cannot but propose a sociology of the sociological gaze itself.

Offering the possibility of this meta-gaze requires that we reflect from both a methodological and epistemological perspective: can a visual sociology afford to ignore the matter of the production of the gaze? What vision does it have of itself? If we consider the relationship between image and gaze in terms of domination, what sort of reciprocity could then emerge?

If Marcel Duchamp said “The viewer makes the painting”, then for today it is the gaze that produces the image...