The Glance: Kinaesthetics, Emergence and Power

Abstract

Why differentiate “glancing” from “gazing”? This translation and rendition of a text that has appeared only in Portuguese considers the distinctiveness of the glance in the Western tradition of visualicity, power, knowledge and gender. While the glance has been acknowledged in visual studies and phenomenology, twenty years on from the original publication there are few sustained attempts to consider its role in the repertoire of visualicity or the ways that the glance is an example of aesthesis: it connects kinaesthetic experience to knowing and to sociality or relationality. Foucault, Hegel, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard cite the glance as a flash (de Koonig) of power-knowledge and its exercise, generally as an attribute of masculinity (Hegel) or authority (Foucault). The glance is liminal foresight into the coming moment as a scan of the visual present as well as an anticipatory search. It expresses desire and is attracted by visual stimulii, knotting affect to visual physiology. The glance is additionally tactical, anxious and furtive, an exercise in counterpower that seeks to “rotate the world on its axis” (Buber) in a way that repositions subjects and objects of the glance in a relation.