The Gaze and Its Signifiers: Stain, Dirt, Garbage

Abstract

The article analyzes the concept of pollution as a deviation from the order or destruction of the meaning that ensures the establishment and reproduction of this order. We can talk about visual pollution only if we clarify how we see the meaning of visuality. To describe and reveal this meaning, the article proposes and develops the concept of gaze-returning, and it also defines a number of criteria that allow us to characterize some visual phenomena as dirt or visual garbage. The phenomenon of dirt in visible space is associated with the figure of the gaze and the possibility of investing in this space the experience of other senses and the body as a whole. The foreignness of these components of visuality can work to strengthen it — to articulate differences and fix them, and finally, to the technological reproduction of visual images; however, the same components contribute to the simulation of the gaze and the displacement of the living experience of vision by its technical signs, which is the reason of the problem of destruction of the visual order.