Neutral Seeing: Saenredam, Barthes, Burgin

Having established important theoretical links between both Barthes and Burgin in the previous chapter, this chapter turns directly to the book's key consideration of 'zero degree seeing'. It provides historical overview to Barthes' Writing Degree Zero before going onto explore a visual equivalent of the zero degree. The starting point is Barthes' essay on seventeenth-century Dutch painting, notably his commentary on Saenredam, whose complex, interlaced rendering of space and augmented perspective sets up a way of picturing that is echoed in the modernist writing of Robbe-Grillet, and Burgin's practice of a 'theoretical vision'.The notion of a 'zero degree' form in the arts remains an enigmatic idea, and not least for potential critique of and through political aesthetics. This chapter takes on the challenge (as does the volume more broadly) to offer an assessment of both what constitutes 'zero degree seeing' and how any such 'form' must always continue to evolve.