If you’ve never seen Chris Marker’s La Jette, do it now. The entire thing is just under 30 minutes and we assure you that there is nothing you could possibly be doing that’s more important than sitting down and watching the sublime brilliance that is this film. Don’t put off watching it until you get home: what if you – God forbid – get into a car accident and die? Then you’ll die having never seen La Jette, and your soul will stay empty and hollow for eternity. That’s in the Bible. You can look it up. Nota bene:
#1 sign that you might be reading stab-your-eyes-out-to-make-the-pain-stop film criticism: the phrase “the Lacanian gaze” appears in something other than a footnote making fun of people who use the “the Lacanian gaze” in film criticism (#2, incidentally, is about the phrase “the feminine (m)other” and proceeds pretty much the same way). Not that there’s anything wrong with talking about the Lacanian gaze. The concept is developed rigorously and robustly in Seminar XI on the Four Fundamental Concepts Of Psychoanalysis. The relationship it posits between corporeality, the scopic drive, and the real represents some of Lacan’s most intriguing work. So the problem with a lot of Lacanian film criticism is not that it discusses the dynamic of the gaze, but that it… lacks something in the way of rigor.
Take the stereotypical setup of Lacanian feminist film theory: a male viewer watches a female actress on the screen, transforming her into a passive sexualized object. The critic then cites Lacan about the horror of the gaze – maybe even polemically conflates some technical and nontechnical descriptions of fantasy – and then done and done. We can’t follow a ton of Seminar XI, but there’s at least one thing that Lacan is absolutely clear about – “having someone look at you” is not the gaze.
Zizek has this line about how the amazing thing about Lacan is that scholars keep finding whatever they want in his work – in this misreading, Lacan becomes a proponent of a particularly banal kind of second wave feminist pop ego-psychology. The problem is not necessarily that this gets published – we need jobs in universities, where there are nontoxic crayons and rounded scissors, lest academics go out into the real world and injure themselves or others. The problem is that there is a ton of explanatory work that can be done by reference to the gaze, provided that it’s firmly and rigorously linked to the rest of the Lacanian architectonic.
Part of the brilliance of La Jette is the way that it exemplifies the trauma of the gaze. The first clinical sequence – from where the whispering starts at about 4:30 to about 5:45 – perfectly displays the gaze as the sensation of being looked at from all sides without being able to find who is looking at you. A fuller explanation is after the jump, plus your required daily dose of Foucault bashing. Because around here, we make our own fun:
Of the layers upon layers of significance in that first clinical scene, perhaps the most disquieting is that no one ever looks at the viewer: the prisoners strapped to the chair have their eyes bandaged; the scientists are always looking downward and away; and the prisoners who survive are hollow, staring off into empty space. The cut to the face-like stone at around 5:33 is almost heavy-handed on the last point, reinforcing that while the viewer can see the eyes of the insane prisoners, there’s nothing looking back at the viewer. The overlap between the stone and the faces is so powerful that some viewers incorrectly remember the transition as a dissolve, where the prisoner’s face actually merges into the stone, rather than a cut.
The genius of that scene is how, nonetheless, the viewer feels the disquieting sensation of being watched. The long shots down corridors and sleeping quarters put the viewer in the perspective of the prisoner. The cuts inside the lab – from watching the scientists watching the prisoner to being directly confronted by the prisoner – bring the viewer, at least perspectively, directly under the eyes the scientists. And of course – the incessant background whispering.
The Foucauldian misreading here is to interpret the anonymous medicalized surveillance of the scene as panoptic. Following the standard Foucauldian line, we would understand the scene as the staging of the essential clinical setting: the prisoners are subjected by hidden and anonymous discourses – they emerge as meaningful subjects precisely to the extent that they are interpolated as docile and medicalized. This reading would be reinforced by the passive structure and impersonal tone of the voice over: “the prisoners were subjected to some experiments.” But this is precisely the opposite of how the scene should be understood and precisely the opposite of how the gaze functions.
And indeed, the film insists that the effect of the gaze is not stabilization but psychic disintegration: “disappointment for some, death for others, and for others madness.” That the prisoners suffer disappointment along the path to madness is crucial. Against the empirically untenable Foucauldian reading of a subject-ifying gaze, one might be tempted to read the prisoners’ conditions as the results of mere torture – as a collapse of either body or mind. But this reading can only be partial at best – it can account for death and madness, but not for disappointment. The presence of melancholy, rather, is a sure sign that we are dealing with something else – that the dynamic at work is essentially libidinal.
This, then, orients us to Lacan’s description of the gaze. What’s so frustrating about the standard misreading of the gaze is how exceptionally clear Lacan is on how everything relies on how the gaze is different than the experience of seeing someone watching you. The critical chapter 6, where Lacan undertakes the seminar’s discussion of the gaze, is even titled “The Split Between the Eye and the Gaze.” The eye can be seen and acknowledged – it is a “look.” But the gaze is precisely that uncanny sensation of experiencing of experiencing someone watching us and not knowing how we’re being seen.
In Sartre, the nature of the uncertainty of the gaze is reduced to simply the location of the gaze – making eye contact transforms the gaze into a mere look. Lacan generalizes this example and refracts it through a libidinal lens – the dynamic for Lacan has to do with the status of the subject for the other’s gaze. What the subject seeks to comprehend is how the subject is looking at her – how she exists through the eyes of the other than she sees. What disturbs us is that within our own field of vision, there’s something telling us that someone is watching us – something ‘doesn’t seem right’. We end up imagining how we’re seen by this other, thereby constituting ourselves as desiring subjects within their field. So in a technical sense, the gaze does not belong to the other as it does with Sartre (where we read about the other’s gaze) – but it is imagined by the subject in the field of the Other. Nonetheless, the gaze disappears when the nature of the scopic relationship is clarified – when in literal or metaphorical terms, the subject makes eye contact with whoever is looking at her.
This, then, is the foundation of Lacan’s theory of how scopic drive relates to desire – of how pleasure is blocked and created by the bodily and intersubjective dynamics of vision.
The dynamic of the gaze can certainly be a source of pleasure. The example we use in discussions – with significantly more success in undergraduate classes than in graduate seminars – is about being on the dancefloor in a club. A woman is dancing by herself, but she knows that some man is looking at her. The guy knows that she knows, she knows the guy knows that she knows, and so on all the way down. In other words, we are not dealing with anything epistemic. But if the guy stares at her too openly – or if she forces him to acknowledge that he’s watching her by making eye contact for too long – then the jouissance of the encounter violently dissipates. People actually have a word for what happens if the guy keeps looking after this happens: creepy.
The same dynamic, even more subtly, works when two partners are dancing together and one does the club eyes thing: looking up and ‘just dancing.’ The pleasure here is of course about being seen, but it trades on the conceit of not acknowledging the partner’s look – you don’t at the eyes of the person watching you, and their look is thereby transformed into a gaze.
Compare this to the standard feminist misreading of the gaze, wherein the woman acknowledges the man is looking at her and reacts by conforming to some male fantasy. This misreading is also in some sense also the Foucauldian misreading: power is being deployed productively to make the woman act like a ‘woman’, that is to say, seductively. The problem with untangling this particular misreading is that of course there is a certain reacting and conforming on the dance floor. Of course, in a straightforward and trivial sense, people dance with each other for each other. But it does not follow that the jouissance of the situation is structured – in some kind of eco-psychological way – in a way that rewards conformity to specific expectations. Rather, the libidinal economic here is essentially scopic.
Furthermore, there is an explicit disacknowledgment that one is being watched. And one more tension: the standard feminist narrative of the gaze often retains the Lacanian emphasis on the essential trauma of encountering it – but that is patently not the case in this example.
The key here is that on the dance floor, the gaze is ‘invoked’ from a certain subjective distance – it is not ‘imposed’ in its brutal essence. The ironic distance that the subject maintains to her actions – her assurance to herself that she is just feigning ignorance about the other’s look – is critical to preventing the libidinal economy from imploding. One of the fundamental problematics of psychoanalysis – and one of its most significant insights – is that despite this ironic distance the libidinal dynamics kick in just as if the subject’s naivety was genuine.
But what if the subject really is ignorant about the nature of the gaze that confronts her? What if she is, in a way, ‘genuinely’ subjected to the gaze? Here the subject intensely senses the presence of another but is unable to locate the source of the gaze. The pretense that sustains the encounter on the dance floor is not a pretense here. Rather, we are back in the La Jette montage where the viewers have the sensation of surveillance without knowing how they are being watched. Even the direct encounter with the eyes of the prisoners is not enough to dispel this feeling, since those eyes are hauntingly empty. The result of this deadlock is starkly illustrated in the film – psychic disintegration.
So the feminist misreading of the gaze as “conformity in reaction to being watched” sometimes ends up in the right place – but only some of the time, and for the wrong reasons. The gaze provides pleasure through ‘conformity’ only to the extent that it does not become overwhelming. Lacan emphasizes against Sartre that literally ‘making eye contact’ is just one of the ways to step beyond the horizon of the gaze – but it does nonetheless does carry the subject beyond that horizon by disrupting her relationship to the Other’s desire.
This is not a coincidence.
Lacan insists that desire is the desire of the other. This plays out as the subject addresses herself to the other with che vuoi – with “what do you want (from me)?” In a relatively straightforward sense, any answer requires that the other make his or her desire clear to a certain extent. If the other’s desire becomes too clear, of course, jouissance evaporates – the relationship “loses its mystique.” And similarly, if the other’s desire remains too opaque then the burden of jouissance becomes overwhelming – the relationship then dissolves into “I don’t know what you expect from me” (which, rephrased, is just “I don’t know what you want me to be (for you)”).
Regardless of these risks, the subject must still have a tenable sense of how she exists in the field of the other – either through willfully imagining it or by having it revealed contingently. That is, she must have a sense of how the other desires to see her. Having gained this sense, the subject “makes herself seen” to the other – and this is the Lacanian gaze. The libidinal dialectic of positing how we exist for the other and then “making ourselves seen” in that way – this is the dynamic of the Lacanian gaze gaze.
This dynamic, in the scopic register, reflects the subject’s structural relationship to the so-called big Other. Viewed from a certain angle, the Other is the Symbolic as a particular sense of the world – although of course this is also a description of ideology as such, which is why untangling language and ideology is so difficult. The terrifying ontological reality of the Other, of course, is that it is incomplete – more so, it is actually constituted by its incompleteness, its lack. Stavrakakis traces the reasons for the Other’s lack in Lacan and the Political – undoubtedly one of the single best introductions to the Lacanian architectonic – and describes it as perhaps the fundamental Lacanian insight. Rather than being in control of the subject, the Other cannot even control itself. In the register of the scopic, the Other is nothing more a stupid blinking voyeur, starring at the subject with boredom and incapable of being satisfied no matter how exuberant the subject’s exhibitionism.
To resist having to confront this lack, the subject constantly queries the Other – if answers are provided, the subject can convince herself of the Other’s coherence. Che vuoi is the most basic form that these queries take, because what the subject is ultimately after is the answer to her own desire (which is, again, the Other’s desire). If answers are not forthcoming, the subject begins to suspect that the Other is not answering because the Other cannot answer – because the Other does not have the answer to her desire. Channeled properly by the analyst, this gnawing doubt enables the subject to see through the Other’s pretensions and thereby to properly assume the subject position of the hysteric.
But if the subject’s disquiet is not worked through productively, the results will be disastrous. Shattered by the Other’s essential lack, the subject becomes literally unable to cope with the world. This is why Lacan insists that the gaze, in its essence, is horrible. We know that someone wants something from us – why else would they be watching us so closely? But – worse than not receiving an answer to che voui – we don’t even have anyone to address our query to. Desire becomes structurally deadlocked, with predictable psychic consequences. The clinical sequence in La Jette illustrates the subject’s disintegration with exquisite precision – depersonalization, anxiety, disappointment, and eventual insanity.
References:
* Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. 1st American Ed ed: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.
* Stavrakakis, Yannis. Lacan and the Political. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999.
Previously:
* Welcome to IIS
A thoughtful post, as always; I’m out the door but hope to come back later.
BTW: I gave you a shout-out of thanks for that iPod essay; it’s coming out in January.
Meanwhile: nice blog! I just discovered you. Will add you to my “roll” soon.