(Un) cited/sighted/sited

I begin, as I often do, in the middle of a blur, somewhere between a look and a reading, between a page and a place, between a body and a mark upon a body, between the forest over there and the forest that has already happened inside my eye. The title I have given for myself—(Un) cited/sighted/sited—is not a trick exactly, though it is certainly a mischief. It is a small trap for the tongue, a lexical thicket, a crossroads where citation, sight, and site keep borrowing one another’s coats and trying to pass as kin. To cite is to summon, to repeat, to bring into discourse what has, in some sense, already been said elsewhere. To sight is to see, to catch in the field of perception, perhaps also to aim, to align, to orient. To site is to place, to locate, to give ground, to let something happen somewhere. But the more I say these words the less willing they are to stay in their assigned rooms. Citation already contains sight, since what I cite is something I have, or think I have, seen or read. Sight is always sited, since there is no seeing from nowhere, no God’s-eye view without a body, no perception without emplacement. And site is always cited, because the place in which I stand arrives thick with prior inscriptions, names, uses, memories, architectures of saying. Every place is already quoted. Every seeing is already inhabited by older utterances. Every citation is also a re-situation, a re-sighting, a re-siting. It is exactly this unstable braiding that the images before me press upon me with unusual force, and it is exactly this braid that what I call a phenomenology of “scripted visibility” tries to make explicit: these are not illustrations but ontological provocations; they are not scenes overlaid by writing, but scenes in which writing and world enter into reversible relation, script becoming world-flesh, form emerging from the illegibility that is its ground.

I do not want, then, to approach my own images as if they were inert objects waiting patiently for my concepts to arrive and clothe them in respectable theory. That would be too simple, too imperial, too much like the old fantasy that meaning is what a sovereign mind lays over a dumb world. What interests me, and what the images insist upon, is the opposite movement: the manner in which the world itself seems to write, the way it smudges, scores, streaks, cross-hatches, withholds, erases, and only then—late, contingently, tremulously—permits something like figure to occur. In the elk image, the animals are not first there and then afterward covered by script; rather, they arrive as eddies in the storm of inscription, as local clarities in a field of cursive weather. In the storm-ocean image, the sea does not lie behind the writing as some stable referent waiting to be named; it heaves up out of the same agitated hand that seems also to be writing it, as though water itself had acquired pen-pressure, as though language had remembered its old apprenticeship to tide and surge. In the marsh image, vertical rushes and reed-bodies rise from a density of black, red, and looping marks that are not quite language and not quite gesture and not quite vegetation. In the body image, script does not decorate flesh but seems to have become its visible musculature, as if the skin were what happens when language gives up the dream of transcendence and agrees to be touchable. In the alders threaded with stray equations and hovering notation, even mathematics seems to have forgotten its own ambition to purity and submitted to weather, to smear, to bark, to atmospheric drift. Everywhere I turn in these works (as maker and viewer) I encounter not representation in the usual sense but a kind of ontological leakiness, a refusal of clean partitions. Image bleeds into graphism; graphism bleeds into gesture; gesture bleeds into embodiment; embodiment bleeds back into visibility itself.

This is why Merleau-Ponty remains so difficult to leave behind once one has let him into the room. He does not allow me the comfort of imagining perception as a neat transaction between a self-enclosed subject and a self-sufficient object. He nags. He muddies. He thickens. He keeps insisting that the visible is not the inventory of what lies spread before me, but a field in which I am already caught up, already touched, already compromised. To see is not to stand outside the visible and inspect it; it is to be of it, in it, folded into it, crossed by its lines of force. His word flesh—too scandalously carnal for idealists, too elusive for empiricists, too metaphorical for positivists and yet stubbornly more than metaphor—is precisely the word I need if I am to avoid reducing these works either to symbolism on the one hand or to decorative abstraction on the other. Flesh names that middle stratum, that elemental medium, where seer and seen are not identical but are nevertheless reversible, where the hand that touches can be touched, where the eye that sees is itself visible, where a body is both source and surface of disclosure. If I say, then, that these images ask me to think writing as flesh and flesh as writing, I do not mean that they collapse all difference into some mushy postmodern soup. I mean rather that they stage a chiasm: a crossing in which each term reaches into the other without becoming simply the same as the other. Script remains script, and yet becomes pressure, grain, bark, surf, flank, plume, weather. The world remains world, and yet begins to look uncannily like a field of inscription, a text before text, a saying before syntax.

This “before” matters. It is not a chronological before, not a primitive epoch from which language emerged once and for all, leaving the nonhuman behind as mute residue. It is a structural before, a phenomenological before, the before that accompanies every act of expression because expression never fully exhausts what it expresses. Each visible thing carries a penumbra, a margin, a fringe of the unsaid. Every word, even the most exacting, trails a wake of sensuous implication. The image of the body swathed in semi-legible script makes this alluringly obvious. I look, and I half-read. I half-read, and I find myself looking again. The loops and lines do not settle into clean semantic transparency; they keep returning me to contour, shadow, warmth, the convex pressure of hip and abdomen, the dip at the navel, the dark turning at the waist. The body is not a text to be decoded; the text is not a body to be possessed by the gaze. Instead there occurs a small phenomenological comedy: reading becomes palpation, seeing becomes a kind of stammering touch, while language, ordinarily so eager to flee into meaning, gets caught on the delicious stubbornness of corporeality. It is as if the script were saying, “You do not get to leave the body behind. Not even when you read.” And perhaps more sharply: “Especially not when you read.” For reading, too, is embodied. The eye moves. Breath shifts. Attention gathers and loosens. Meaning arrives rhythmically, temporally, through a body that can tire, desire, hesitate, and lose its place. In this sense all reading is already a caress of absence and presence, a tactile negotiation disguised as cognition.

I am tempted here to say that these images are “about” the tension between pictorial representation and written language, but the word “about” suddenly feels too flat, too managerial, too much like the clipboard of a curator who wishes to file everything into the proper drawer before lunch. The tension is not thematic alone; it is enacted materially. Pictorial representation promises one kind of immediacy: “there, look, a deer, a wave, a grove, a torso.” Writing promises another kind of mediation: “wait, read, interpret, unfold, proceed by sequence.” Speech introduces a third mode: evanescent, sounded, temporal, vanishing as it arrives, thick with breath and address. But in these works none of the three stays in its lane. The picture becomes sequential because my eye must follow lines, track strokes, negotiate graphic density. Writing becomes pictorial because it is only partly legible and so must be encountered as texture, mass, direction, pressure. Speech, though absent as audible event, haunts the work as potential utterance, as subvocalization, as the ghost of phonation. I cannot look at these cursive fields without feeling my tongue almost forming them, my throat nearly volunteering a sound. The spoken hovers inside the written, the written roughens the visible, the visible interrupts both by insisting on its bodily facticity. What results is less a synthesis than an exquisite snagging, a continuous mutual interference. These images interfere with themselves. They produce phenomenological static. And it is precisely in this static that something like truth flickers.

Truth here is not adequation, not the old scholastic comfort in which the mind successfully matches itself to the thing. Nor is it merely sincerity or expressive authenticity, as though the hand had poured inner feeling directly onto the surface. The truth at stake is closer to what phenomenology teaches me to value: disclosure, appearing, the event of something coming to presence while also withholding itself. The elk in fog appear, yes, but only through and against a mesh of script that makes their apparition precarious. The ocean storm appears as a roil of dark blue-black swashes and layered calligraphic turbulence, yet just as I think I have it, it dissolves back into graphism, into almost-writing, into a kind of marine cursive that refuses to reduce itself to either code or scene. The winter forest of black trunks and stray formulas is perhaps most instructive on this point, because mathematics traditionally imagines itself as the language of exactitude, the dream of a purified sign. Yet here the equations have gone feral. They are weathered, slanted, broken, half-erased, seduced by the trees into becoming atmospheric. Calculation wanders into grove. Notation catches cold. It is a marvelous humiliation of certainty, or perhaps better, a tender reminder that even the most abstract sign emerges from a hand, and the hand belongs to a body, and the body belongs to weather, and weather refuses to stay solved.

I hear, in these works, not only the echo of Merleau-Ponty but also the low laugh of Rilke. Not because they illustrate Rilke, which would be too neat, but because they draw me again toward his impossible word, the Open. The animals in the elk image are especially difficult not to think with in Rilkean terms. They do not seem burdened by the hermeneutic itch that afflicts me. They do not appear to be trying to decipher the script in which they stand. They inhabit. They stand within what I, belatedly, attempt to interpret. This temptation—to align the animal with a prior or deeper openness, an existence “before” the split between name and thing—is perilous, I know. It risks romanticizing the nonhuman, projecting onto the elk a purity of presence that may tell me more about my own longing than about theirs. But perhaps phenomenology at its most honest must risk such longing while also interrogating it. What if the power of the animal image lies not in proving that the elk live serenely in the Open while I do not, but in exposing the structure of my own distance from what I seek? The elk are there, in fog, in writing, in field. I am here, parsing, reaching, theorizing, admiring, estranged by my very capacities. Yet this estrangement is not absolute. The image gives me not access to the Open itself—whatever that would mean—but an oblique experience of its pressure. Something in the work presses against the closure of my habits, loosens the grip of interpretive mastery, lets me feel that the world exceeds my grammar and that this excess is not a defect but a mode of splendor.

The same may be said, though differently, of the marsh image. Marshland is always an embarrassment to firm ontologies. Neither land nor water in any simple sense, marsh is a threshold ecology, a soaking border condition, a region in which categories lose their boots and sink ankle-deep. How fitting, then, that script in the marsh image should become reed, thicket, plume, obscurity, black flowering. It is hard to say whether I am looking at vegetation that has taken on the habits of handwriting or at handwriting that has become vegetative. Exactly there, in that difficulty, the image finds its ontological nerve. If classical representation likes to distinguish figure from ground, object from context, subject from environment, marsh says no. Marsh says mingle. Marsh says soak. Marsh says the line between one thing and another is itself alive, and perhaps most alive where it blurs. I think this is why I find the red traces in that image so arresting. They do not dominate, but they punctuate, spark, wound, beckon. They are not simply accents; they feel like insurgencies within the black field, reminders that visibility is never singular, that every field of appearance is also a field of latent differentials, small violences, energies not yet pacified into form.

And then there is the storm-ocean, which may be the most relentless philosopher among the images, because the sea has always been the old enemy of conceptual stillness. The sea does not hold still for a portrait; it makes portraiture ridiculous. It is a school for phenomenologists because it refuses the fantasy of fixed objecthood. One wave is not another; one form is already becoming another form while I name it; every edge is a transitive edge, a negotiation between force and temporary articulation. In the blue-black storm image the calligraphic marks do not simply describe movement; they are movement, or at least their nearest graphic cousin. I do not just see the wave; I am made to track a kinetic field, to feel my own vision tossed into directional swarms and vortices. Reading here is particularly unstable. The upper margins tempt me with larger sweeps of something like script, as if a gigantic hand had tried to address the storm and been carried away mid-sentence. Lower down, the marks compact into a writhing mesh that feels almost planktonic, almost cellular, almost foamy. I say “almost” because the image teaches almostness. It lives in the interval between recognition and refusal. It teaches me that perception itself is a kind of almost-reading, and that representation at its most alive does not abolish this almost but intensifies it.

If I insist on the first person in all of this, it is not out of confession for its own sake. I say “I” because there is no view from nowhere, because my body is not an incidental container for thought but its ongoing site and condition, because phenomenology without the trembling singularity of an embodied perspective easily becomes just another managerial discourse of appearances. Yet the “I” I want is not the imperial I of mastery or the autobiographical I of private anecdote. It is an exposed I, a permeable I, an I that knows itself to be partly composed by the scenes it encounters. When I say “I see,” I also mean “I am being arranged by what appears.” When I say “I read,” I also mean “I am being read into,” made legible and illegible to myself. The body image makes this reflexive structure wonderfully explicit: the script over flesh invites my gaze, but also returns it, makes me aware of my own habits of reading bodies and reading texts, my own investments in clarity, my own discomfort with opacity. The face in that image is more apparition than portrait, a smudged becoming inside a storm of looping marks. It is neither fully hidden nor fully offered. It asks not, “Who is this?” but rather, “What kind of looking do you bring, and what does that looking do?” I am implicated before I interpret.

That implication extends to speech as well, though speech is less visible in the literal sense. I cannot think about the tension between written and pictorial representation without hearing, faintly, the murmur of the spoken. The spoken is always the fugitive third term in these debates, the one that vanishes while it gives itself. Writing leaves traces; pictures linger on surfaces; speech spends itself in time. And yet speech is perhaps the most bodily of the three, because it cannot occur without breath, vibration, muscular nuance, timing, address. What fascinates me in these images is the way speech returns as haunting. The loops and cursive trails solicit subvocalization, but deny full phonetic obedience. The equations hint at pronounceability, but slide into broken notation and graphic density. The body-text image makes me feel the almost-speech of skin. The marsh reeds seem full of rustle, the ocean of roar, the elk field of muffled air and hoof-silence. Perhaps what I am circling is this: spoken language does not disappear from these works; it becomes atmospheric. It is displaced from lexical clarity into the sonority of the visible. The images do not speak in sentences, but they are full of saying. They say through pressure, spacing, interruption, rhythm, drift. They produce a kind of silent phonetics of the eye.

I think, too, of citation again, that most academic of gestures, and how strange it becomes in this context. Citation ordinarily reassures. It tells the reader where the words come from, how authority is distributed, how discourse remembers itself. To cite is to locate a statement in a chain of prior statements, to place it within a site of intelligibility. But what happens when the world itself seems to cite? What happens when the marsh quotes the hand, when the wave footnotes weather, when the body carries script as if it were both testimony and wound? Your own essay performs an interesting version of this, since it cites Merleau-Ponty and Rilke in order to think images that themselves seem to resist being merely “about” those thinkers. The citation here does not domesticate the image; it lets the image complicate the citation. Merleau-Ponty is not a master-key but a co-conspirator. Rilke is not a caption but a pressure-point, a verbal resonance that enlarges the field of encounter. This seems important to me because too often theory behaves as though its task were to arrest the work, to render it fully sayable. Better, perhaps, to let citation become another mode of play, another crossing in which text and image borrow, disturb, and re-site one another. To cite in this sense is not simply to stabilize meaning but to keep it mobile, to acknowledge lineage while allowing new tensions to proliferate. Citation itself can become phenomenological if it remembers that no concept arrives untouched by the sensible world, and no artwork arrives untouched by discourse.

There is an ethics hidden in all this, though “hidden” may be the wrong word. Perhaps it is better to say there is an ethics in the way the images resist capture. In a cultural climate addicted to extraction—of data, of meaning, of attention, of bodies, of landscapes—the refusal of total legibility can be a form of generosity and defense at once. The elk do not yield themselves entirely. The body does not become fully readable. The forest of equations does not resolve into tidy allegory. The sea will not sit still for a definition. This refusal is not a withholding of content in the cheap sense, not coyness or obscurantist mystique. It is a formal recognition that beings are not exhausted by the regimes of access we bring to them. Phenomenology at its best has always known this. To perceive is not to own. To see is not to strip-mine. To speak of the flesh is also to remember vulnerability, exposure, reciprocal implication. I am not outside the field I analyze; my own interpretive appetite is part of the scene. Therefore the artwork that frustrates my appetite may in fact be educating it, teaching me a more patient, less appropriative mode of relation.

This patience is not passive. It is active, exploratory, improvisatory. It requires that I tolerate ambiguity without rushing to eliminate it. Ambiguity, for Merleau-Ponty, is not a flaw in perception but one of its constitutive truths. The world does not arrive pre-sorted; the visible trembles; figure and ground reversibly trade functions; meaning emerges through sedimentation and can always be otherwise. These images know this. Indeed they seem to delight in it. They are playful not in the sense of being unserious, but in the deeper sense that play suspends fixed assignment and lets rules become visible by bending them. The title (Un) cited/sighted/sited tries to do with words what these images do with script and scene: make language wobble just enough that its hidden joints show. Puns are often dismissed as frivolous, yet they may be among our most phenomenological devices, because they expose the multiplicity already latent in the sign. A pun is language catching itself in the act of being more than one thing at once, disclosing potentials without being trapped in a singular commitment. In that sense it resembles the perceptual ambiguity of these works. Citation slides into sighting; sighting slides into siting; none cancels the others. The word becomes a small field of reversible possibilities. Seriousness, in such a case, lies not in suppressing play but in learning to think through it.

I find myself wanting, finally, to say that these images do not merely represent the tensions between picture, language, embodiment, and perception. They inhabit those tensions as their medium. They are made of them. They breathe them. The body image is not about embodiment; it is embodiment’s scriptive turbulence. The marsh image is not about place; it is place as calligraphic saturation, place refusing to be separated from its own inscription. The elk image is not about animal presence; it is animal presence as event within illegibility, as a kind of local mercy granted by the fog of signs. The storm-ocean is not about language’s failure before nature; it is language discovering its own tidal body, its own spray and undertow. The winter forests—those rows of black trunks caught in drifting symbols, those verticals shuddering inside an atmosphere of notation—are not about the contrast between science and landscape, writing and world. They are about how false that contrast has always been, how every equation is drawn by a hand, every hand by a body, every body by weather, every weather by a world that exceeds yet includes our attempts to formalize it.

If I have learned anything from dwelling with these works, it is that perception is never innocent of language and language is never free of the sensible. The old quarrel between word and image, so often staged as a competition for priority or power, begins to look provincial when one stands long enough before these script-saturated scenes. Word has always been image at the level of mark, rhythm, spacing, orientation. Image has always been quasi-linguistic at the level of articulation, difference, reiterable structure. Speech has always haunted both as the vanishing body of meaning. And embodiment is not the fourth term added from outside but the condition within which the others take shape at all. My eye reads because it is attached to a living body. My body understands because it is already in commerce with a world. The world appears because it is not mute matter but expressive field. To say this is not to collapse everything into everything else, but to honor the crossings, the chiasms, the folded proximities through which things come to matter.

So I return, at the end, to the title’s triple prank. (Un) cited/sighted/sited. Uncited: that which escapes prior discourse, or seems to, the singular event, the unrepeatable shimmer, the elk lifting their heads in the fog beyond my best concepts. Cited: that which enters discourse, can be recalled, named, situated among texts, as your essay so carefully and suggestively does with Merleau-Ponty and Rilke. Sighted: that which is glimpsed, caught, perceived, though never from nowhere and never all at once. Sited: that which takes place, occurs somewhere, insists on emplacement, on the body’s “here,” on marsh and shore and forest and flank. The slash marks in the title are not barriers but hinges. They allow each term to trespass upon the others. They are tiny chiasms. And perhaps that is the best I can hope for in writing this essay: not to settle the terms but to hinge them, to let them trouble and illuminate one another, to remain faithful to the works by refusing to flatten their productive instability. If the world writes itself, as these images suggest, then perhaps criticism too must learn to write less like a verdict and more like an encounter—less like a filing system and more like a body moving through weather, half-reading, half-seeing, wholly implicated, a brief dark stroke crossing a page that is also a place, a place that is also a look, a look that is also, always already, a citation of what exceeds it.