It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.

Alain Badiou, 15 Theses on Contemporary Art

In a moment of imposed disorientation like our own, it becomes a kind of duty to recommence: to lift up one’s head and start saying once again what had been said time and time before, with slightly varying cadence. The arguments put forward in Anwyn Crawford’s Permanent Daylight are mostly not especially new; or at any rate, their newness is not altogether the point. The function of the piece is to remind the reader of certain travestied and forgotten things, and to consider a particular heartbreakingly common experience in the light of those things (heartbreak acts here as a kind of political attractor, a magnet for sense).

I can’t help but read Crawford’s plea for invisibility as a plea for subtraction from a particular regime of the visible - one which is conventionally called that of “the male gaze”, although what scans and surveys women’s bodies always and everywhere these days is far from obviously given over to the psychoanalytic legibility implied by that term.

What gazes? It sometimes appears to be men, actually; and then again sometimes not. It doesn’t seem to help all that much if women gaze back, at men for example: what you get when that happens seems to be simply more gazing, the extension of the sex class (to include some men, and only ever really a very few) rather than its abolition. But I think the essential problem with the notion of “the gaze” is that it tends to identify the surveillance regime governing sexual visibility as issuing from a gendered subject position, rather than passing through one (or, rather, several).

What is valuable for me about Crawford’s piece is the way that (following Nina Power’s arguments in One Dimensional Woman) it identifies women’s compulsory sexual visibility with the imperatives of capitalism rather than those of human animals with Oedipus complexes. Not that this lets men, actually, off the hook, or should do. But it is useful to be reminded that what we are dealing with, when we try to think about these questions, is a non-subjective order of visibility: a world, in Badiou’s terminology, the transcendental logic of which can be identified, challenged and transformed.