Long Sunday

Gaze (i)

A gaze is an interruption. What is ‘interrupted’ can either be a continuous activity (eg looking through a keyhole) or a continuous space – a landscape, for example. The interruption ‘embarrasses’ the subject in a peculiar way.

In the example from Sartre that so impresses Lacan, this is what happens: the keyhole spy, voyeur, is cut short, ‘pulled up’ in his activity by a noise*. This noise is enough to re-orientate him, re-compose his space. He is returned to his body and to his self. The noise can be anything, a creaking door, a rustle of branches outside. Suddenly the voyeur is in the visible field, not its clandestine final vanishing point. There is, thus, a kind of ‘exposure’. It is as if the voyeur had been ‘snapped’, captured.

A familiar cinematic sequence: someone scans a landscape with a pair of binoculars or telescope; this scanning follows the pre-given contours, but suddenly this someone spots another pair of binoculars looking straight back, and stops abruptly. Perhaps at first it is only a glint of reflected sunlight – the binoculars see it and immediately track back, fixated. This second pair of binoculars is only the most literal materialisation of the gaze. It represents another ‘centre pin’ from which the visual might be arranged, a rival centre of optical gravity.

But it is not just you that has been seen, exposed; it is your lewd will-to-look. Here it is before you, nude and blushing.

* “far from speaking of the emergence of this gaze as something that concerns the organ of sight, he refers to the sound of rustling leaves, suddenly heard while out hunting, to a footstep heard in a corridor.”

Theatrum Mundi

The ancient sense of man as spectacle for the gods is of course preserved in that old Shakespearean trope about the world being a stage - except the motif is pre-Shakespearean, inherited and transformed by him. This is the key. The world as stage is an emblematic image, one of a number that Shakespeare incorporates into his work only to hollow out and re-inflect. And the nature of this re-inflection is a seismograph registering a fundamental historical transformation. The medieval trope of the world as a stage involves the sense that we perforce play roles that we have not invented, and the sense of terrestrial unreality. It is inextricably bound up with a view of the world where supernatural agents determine human destiny, and where the secular is a place of illusion in contrast to a higher non-secular realm The seven stages of man, enacted on this stage are enacted in our spite, unconsciously. The ‘roles’ implied in this metaphor are ones we suffer, not create. And these roles are enacted for a gaze that is beyond our comprehension or ownership. There is some Other point of view from where our imaginary comforts and symbolic titles are hollowed out and rendered meaningless. Our truth lies outside us in the telescopic lenses of the gods, and this truth cannot be known or counterfeited by us. All in all, then, the metaphor points to the limits of agency, the hubris and vanity of our projects: emptiness, illusion, powerlessness. Understandably, the uses of the metaphor were religious, homiletic. The affects corresponding to this metaphor are those of melancholy.

Spectacles for the Gods

Heidegger’s essay on the Age of the World Picture remarks on the distinction between a time when man was a spectacle for the gods, the object of a perception which was itself beyond conception, and a modernity wherein man is fundamentally the perceiver of a world that offers itself to him as or is posited as a picture. Benjamin, in his Artwork essay, also alludes to man’s former status as an object or show for the gods. Fascism, he famously remarks turns humanity into a spectacle for itself. At the same time, the gigantism of this spectacle – the rallies, the giant screens, the massive advertisements careering towards the random city dweller from the sides of buildings, magnifies man to God-like proportions. The modern citizen is miniaturised before the Olympian powers of industrial society but also watches them, agog, and lives vicariously though them.

The older sense, of an inhuman presence watching humanity means that there is a dimension of existence which is incalculable, unknown, beyond your ownership or objectification. The subjective stance corresponding to this doctrine is, therefore, a kind of humility and receptivity to an Otherness which has preceded us both temporally and ontologically and which we can, so to speak, never get round the back of. If we are all, equally, objects for an inconceivable Other, we are less likely to become objects to onanother, so it goes. According to some, the place of non-human Other is supposed to be a kind of guarantee of humaneness.

A Crack in the Picture

While I was trying to write a post on the idea of ‘being looked at,’ I came across Nabokov’s lecture on Kafka’s metamorphosis. The relevant point here was the use of the ‘picture’ metaphor. N. is talking about Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde:

The fantastic side of the setting—Utterson, Enfield, Poole, Lanyon, and their London—is not of the same quality as the fantastic side of Jekyll's hydization. There is a crack in the picture, a lack of unity.

So ‘picture’ here, as we might expect, stands for compositional unity, coherence, unitary perspective. It denotes a world that slots together according to certain rules. In literary terms, then, it means genre. Jekyll, says N., is a ‘A Gothic character in a Dickensian setting’. Two different genre-rules co-exist in the same story. What this does, presumably, is to prevent us inhabiting either of these genres, for each rubs up against the other and in so doing ‘shows’ itself. Each genre is thrown into relief against the other and therefore ‘denaturalised’. As a reader, we ‘don’t know where we are’. The element of willed deception (‘yes, I agree to inhabit this generic world’), of imaginary security, is foreclosed.

Ignore, for the time being, whether this is a satisfactory comment on Dr.J&Mr.H. The reason it attracted my attention, in composing my Lacan related post (which may nor may not see the light of day), was this notion of the ‘crack in the picture’ as a place where different compositional or ‘generic’ fields rub up against one another and cancel one another out. Each is put ‘out of joint’, and so, simultaneously, is the spectator.

And this little example, it seemed to me, might be a useful analogy in talking about the ‘gaze' in Lacan. For when N. talks about the ‘crack in the picture’, it is in that such cracks or folds that Lacan locates what he calls the gaze, at least as I understand it. This is where the gaze nestles. And the gaze is what puts the spectator’s world ‘out of joint’.

The ‘picture’ conceived as a compositional unity, presumably reaffirms the pov for which the picture is composed. The crack or fold, in disturbing that unity, at once renders that pov incomplete and implies, albeit negatively, another place of seeing, however empty or hypothetical. That’s all I have to say for the moment. In fact, I am saying practically nothing, merely soliciting comments. Consider this post a prelude to some other thing.