Silently the Wolves are Watching:
An
Essay on the Lacanian Gaze
Copyright © 2001 by Raymond Barglow, all rights reserved
Raymond
Barglow
January 2001
Drawing by Sergei Pankejeff of his terrifying dream of
wolves outside his window. Pankejeff
was the patient whom Freud referred to as “the Wolf Man” in his written
remarks about this case.
Explanation is a way of gaining a measure of control over the explained. Only a measure, though. Freud said that three great revolutions in human thought have delivered “a severe blow to human self-love”[1] by showing how little we count. Copernicus removed us from the stable center of the universe to occupation of a small, whirling, peripheral planet. Darwin showed that our species is submitted to the same laws of evolution as is the insensate microorganism. Psychoanalysis adds to the humiliation by showing that even in the most intimate domain – that of experience and self – we are not masters in our own house, but driven rather by motivations we scarcely fathom.
These have been stages in modernity’s “disenchantment of the world” (Max Weber). The ”narcissistic illusion”[2] described by Freud as demolished over the past several hundred years by science (science as he understood it) was mirror-like. In that mirror, humankind could see a self-affirming reflection – an affirmation of ourselves as the "Crown of Creation" -- privileged, immortal subjects. Modernity challenged this vision and advanced a quite different picture – one featuring the forward march of science itself, whose 16th-, 19th-, and 20th-century milestones Freud noted. Science in this form, however, seems to have reduced nearly to the vanishing point the place allowed to subjectivity in a world that is objectively analyzed and understood
This picture is, we could say, our version of the Wolf Man’s dream. It has been argued -- fairly persuasively, I believe -- that Freud’s efforts to interpret that dream and to “find” the Wolf Man within it failed.[3] Freud was unable to reconstruct a narrative of the Wolf Man’s childhood sufficient to explain in a convincing way the content of his dream or his frightened response to it. Will our search to recognize ourselves within a scientifically described world prove more successful?
Visibility and invisibility play pivotal roles in our
lives, going back to when we were first seen or not seen in childhood.
It may occur to us sometimes that we are observed and examined – from
within a “scientific worldview” for instance – in ways that, even if they
should turn out to be human projections of a kind, seem to lose sight of us
altogether. We are submitted,
Jacques Lacan would say, to “the gaze.”
This essay falls into five parts. To go directly to one of them, click on a heading below:
Beginning at square one: what is “the gaze”? Examination of the non-person centered character of children’s perceptual experience – similar in this respect to scientific objectivity – brings out significant features of the gaze.
We can approach this subject as well by considering a range of, so to speak, “gaze phenomena.” Like good empiricists, we’ll gather some data, beginning with Freud’s famous case of Serge Pankejeff (the “Wolf Man”), who dreamt of wolves staring at him from a tree outside his bedroom window. Additional illustrations will be dawn from art, ethology, anthropology, Eastern religion, and astronomy.
How are we to account for gaze phenomena? I’ll approach this question through consideration of the work of Roger Caillois, which Lacan brings into his discussion of the gaze. That work connects diverse domains -- biology, sociology, psychoanalysis, and surrealism. The concentration here will be on Caillois’ examination of animal mimicry, including the “false eyes” of insects that ward of predators.
In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,[4]
Lacan talks about the gaze in relation to the visual arts. We will follow him
there -- although the path I propose to explore -- tracing the ways in which the
gaze gets appropriated and deployed -- is only hinted at in what he says.
We are looked at, in a manner of speaking, by things and
thing-like social relations. What
part do alterable institutions play in this reification? The gaze is by no means
only a projection, in the narrow psychoanalytic sense, but rather a
world-historical Project, exemplified by modern Capitalist and Communist
regimes, and culminating in today’s networked
system of nation-states. Is this
technocratic order – a kind of planet-wide Panopticon – modernity’s
inevitable, perhaps even terminal, outcome?
What possibilities remain for its historical transformation?
*****************************************************
What the visual representations discussed in this essay display in common is a kind of impersonal looking. In fact, that’s not a bad initial definition of the gaze: it is a form of looking that impersonally or non-personally targets its object, and in doing so it decenters the human subject. It seems neither to recognize -- nor for that matter to originate from -- a personal agent. Rather enigmatically, Lacan speaks of “the pre-existence of a gaze – I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides…. We are beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world.”[5]
As Merleau-Ponty puts it in The Visible and the
Invisible, “It is not I who sees, not he who sees; because an anonymous
visibility inhabits both of us …”
We are anonymously visible?
To whom or to what? Let’s
begin by approaching this biologically. Seeing
is more primary, biologically and perhaps psychologically, than speaking.
Seeing is an activity carried on by many animals, whereas language
characterizes our species specifically. Bees
and dolphins and chimpanzees communicate with one another, but it’s doubtful
that language defines them as it does us. Even for humans, however, a kind of
pre-personal seeing is antecedent to speaking -- a child looks about, perceives
a world, before he or she begins to name people and things. Sense perception
precedes recognition of an agent of perception -- the earliest seeing is
non-person centered. (I remember a remark made by Ann Haley to the effect that
-- if I understood her correctly -- in a hospital setting, whichever nurse holds
whichever baby, when they gaze at one another their contact can be at once
intensely intimate and, oddly, anonymous.)
Gradually, object and subject differentiate: “Cat.”
“See cat.” “I see
cat.” “I” emerges from
perception literally as an afterthought.[6]
Even after a child first recognizes and can speak with others, certain
commonplace facts about vision remain foreign for a time – i.e. the
realization that seeing is a person-centered activity, that it involves anything
like light rays that connect a perceiver to an object, that it occurs from a
particular vantage point or angle that frames and limits what is seen.
Seeing is not yet an arc, securely or not-so-securely attached between a
separate subject and an object, since the subject has not yet quite found his or
her individual location. This is a
linguistic as well as a perceptual matter. Adapting
one of Lacan’s examples,[7]
when I am first becoming acquainted with indexical expressions, I might say:
“I have three brothers Peter, Michael and Raymond,” a sentence that can be
said by any of the three siblings in my family.
This gets replaced by the more subjective “I have two brothers, Peter
and Michael,” which can be enunciated only by me.
Piaget rightly makes much of this, exploring first of all on a perceptual level a child’s dawning awareness of perspective.[8] This is a diagram of his experimental apparatus in the “Three Mountain Experiment “:
This pasteboard model is one meter square and consists of
three “mountains” of various heights and colors. One is green, another brown, and the tallest gray with a
white snow cap. A small red cross
caps one of the mountains, and a small house another – an attractive outdoors
setting for a child who will find his or her identity in Christian Geneva. In
the experiment, a child takes a seat at one of the sides of the display.
Then a wooden doll is placed at other locations around the model, and,
says Piaget, “the child’s task is to discover what perspective the doll will
‘see’ in each of the different positions.”
He or she is shown a set of two-dimensional pictures of the scene and
then asked “to pick out the one which is most suited to the view seen by the
doll.” In a variation, the child
“selects one of the pictures and then decides what position the doll would
have to occupy to take a snapshot similar to it.”
What Piaget finds is that even a child as old as 6, 7 or 8
years typically “completely fails to grasp the fact that a particular position
imposes a limitation on what will actually be seen, that it corresponds to a
given perspective. Instead, he
imagines that he sees the entire group of mountains ‘as it really is,’ in
some way which is common to any and every perspective.”
The child in Piaget’s experiment constructs a visual
experience, belonging to a doll, that doesn’t really exist. That experience,
Piaget discovers, is given by the child a kind of phantom objectivity, belonging somehow
to the scene itself. We are in the
domain of cognitive psychology here, but its findings are not without
psychoanalytic relevance. (An
adequate account would have to delve into unconscious as well as conscious
aspects of experience. Desire is
omitted from Piaget’s experiment, and he considers only a very narrow range of
perceptual experience. Irrelevant are, for example, children’s perspectives on
the little house and cross atop the mountains.
Piaget and his children do occupy a Protestant universe, which this essay
will revisit before we are done.) For
a younger child than those participating in the above experiment, seeing and
being seen might not require any perspectival angle at all.
A child reaches up to take a cookie from a platter on the dining room
table. Its mother is in the kitchen, located where she cannot see the table.
Just as child takes the object of desire in hand, it might occur to her,
even catastrophically, that she is being seen!
Something sees, and perhaps punishes. It is immaterial that a wall
separates the mother from the child, and that when the child looks back over her
shoulder, the mother is or is not standing in the doorway. Perhaps the obverse
is also possible: the child, peacefully at play, has a sense of being seen and
smiled upon, even when the mother is not immediately there. (It’s a mistake to
assume that, because these children’s experiences do not attach to any
discernible external agent, they must attach to an internal one, e.g. a
superego, ideal ego, or “internalized parent.”
Leaping to this conclusion reflects perhaps our own discomfort with
unowned experience. This may be
where a Lacanian critique of object relations psychoanalysis should really
begin.)
The gaze begins, but doesn’t end, here. This isn’t a
phase of our lives that we leave behind once we’ve learned to map subjective
perspectives upon an intersubjective visual grid. On the contrary, precisely this mapping preserves those
features of experience that are not person-centered.
Suppose for instance that I find myself meeting in a room with, say, a
dozen people. Together we form an
ensemble of subjects, each perceiving the world from his or her personal angle.
We typically address one another from that subjective location: “It
seems to me that …”, “I prefer …”, etc.
Now consider the observation “There are 13 people in this room right
now.” That is not just another
private assessment. It doesn’t
express just your view or mine. The
observation is made from an objective viewpoint that, in Lacan’s words, looks
“from all sides.” This
impersonal judgment places us in a mental photograph of a kind, one that amounts
to an external view of ourselves. “The
picture, certainly, is in my eye,” Lacan says, “But I am in the picture.”[9]
I see myself objectively counted in this picture, but no longer
personally recognized. At “the
level at which there is counting, things are counted, and in this counting he
who counts is already included.”[10]
At this level, seen from outside, I am literally an object – in the
mathematical sense, not the cozier object-relations sense, of the word -- to
others. If I understand Lacan
correctly, none of us is ever going to be entirely happy with this predicament.
Objectification, which historically assumed the form of Cartesian science in the
17th century, gives rise, Lacan suggests, to the possibility of an
impossible-to-satisfy subject.[11]
The gaze, then, isn’t exclusively primitive, nor fully accounted for
within the standard categories of psychopathology.
It characterizes our most “advanced” forms of knowledge.
Lacan does not accept, however, the traditional
subject-object dualism. The Moebius
strip, a circular band twisted so that it has neither a definitive inner nor
outer surface, is his metaphor for the dialectic between the private and public
“sides” of subjectivity. Natural
science need not efface this dialectic. I
doubt that disenchanting consequences associated with science --
“objectification” in a negative sense, the “death of nature,” anonymity
of social relationships, etc. -- are built into the character of scientific
explanation itself. Rather, these derive from science’s social contexts.
In particular, scientific objectification shouldn’t be confused with
the kinds of depersonalization that characterize technocratic structures and
mass media. In the name of a certain (Western) kind of objectivity and
universality, traditional cultures have been drawn into a planetary nexus of
communications and marked even to their own participants as provincial.
It is discontent with this modernity and this
objectification that fuels the resistance that ranges from protest against the
policies of world trade organizations to fundamentalist Islamic and Christian
repudiation of the modern.
This objectifying gaze is the problem.
Here’s another, no less scientific, but sublime in a way that may not
be found deadening or dehumanizing:
Moon’s view of earth (NASA ID AS11-44-6552) Photo taken by Apollo 11 spacecraft
The gaze needn’t be associated with terrifying and/or disempowering effects. On the contrary, it can be comforting: the Good Shephard never ceases to be aware of each sheep in the flock, seeing them "out of the corner of His eye," so to speak. Whether the terrain in question is sacred or worldly, the point is that we find an identity – as particular as that of any object -- within a mapped-out order that assigns us a location. This is partly a function, Lacan believes, of the field that he calls the “gaze”:
What
determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is
outside…. the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and
through which – if you will allow me to use a word, as I often do, in a
fragmented form – I am photo-graphed.”[12]
(italics and hyphenation in original)
Let’s
take this metaphor literally for a moment. Sometimes a hostile stare
greets the tourist’s camera in many parts of the world. This response is not
exclusively “primitive.” Suppose
that I am going for a walk in a foreign city, when a street photographer
approaches and offers to take my picture. In
weighing the attractiveness of this prospect, I imagine what the photo will show
– me standing before an architectural monument, say, or on a bridge of a
river, or sitting among others at an outdoors café. What the camera sees will
be me, viewed objectively. Whether
or not I accept the offer, I carry within, along with my passport and other
proofs of identity, such an image of myself as seen from outside by others or in
a mirror, and that image is no less essential to who I am than my other
belongings. At the same time I may very well find that this image is flawed, but
not because of any specific defect in composition, lighting, exposure, etc.
Looking at a photograph of myself – even a “good” one – I find
that something important about me -- the subject "inside" the
appearance, to use a poor spatial metaphor -- is missing. In which case the
camera functions like the gaze – I am not in the picture.
Essential
to Lacan’s take on this phenomenon is the element of desire, for the following
reason: a camera is indifferent to its object.
As just one more tourist, it has to be confessed that I am rather
inessential to the street photographer’s métier. Posing picturesquely on Pont Neuf, if I happen to tumble
backwards into the Seine below, the camera, having lost one object, will move, more
or less happily depending on whether payment has been made, on to the next
customer. Bringing this back home,
is it not Lacan’s point that even at this very moment, safely ensconced here
in my study and composing this essay – I am this tourist? And that you, mon semblable, reading this essay from some
other, not particularly distinguished internet node, are another?
Desire
is always desire of another, says Lacan, but becoming either the object or
subject of desire requires symbolic mediation.
The problem is that the gaze resides outside of language, in the
dimension that Lacan calls “the real.”
It does not allow a conversation. In
a dream for example, if one turns to face and speak with a pursuing monster, and
one is in luck and it answers, then at that moment it exits the gaze and becomes
a meaning-accessible being.
|
| Sergei Pankejeff with his sister Anna, about 1894 |
It
is true that this way of being seen does tend to be negatively polarized in
Lacan – associated with terror and death. But these consequences are not
essential to the gaze. Its negative function is nothing other than a decentering that
unsettles the subject by disrupting taken-for-granted identifications and
fantasied relationships.
This account of the gaze is far from adequate. I know this is a cliché – but one probably has to experience it. Let’s look at some illustrations:
The Wolf Man feels looked at not merely by the wolves individually but by the entire scene, with the window between this scene and himself affording no protection. The distinctive way in which human beings keep reality at bay, so to speak, is by putting symbols between ourselves and it. The Wolf Man has no way of talking or negotiating with what he sees in the dream, of bringing the form or contents of the dream into the domain of meaning. Without this mediation, without a symbolic filter that processes and makes accessible the real, we find it unbearable. (Certain spiritual traditions, however, would take exception to this conclusion. See illustration 7, below.) This is the source of the Wolf Man’s terror -- he sees too directly.
This
painting was made by an artist in central Cuba who can barely write his name
(the painting is unsigned). The
gaze is a seeing that occurs outside of language.
Being wordless, it often assumes an animal form – wolves in the example
above, vultures and maddened insects flying out from nowhere at the viewer in
this one. (In Hitchcock’s The
Birds, as Zizek points out, the camera’s “objective” aerial view above
the town is revealed to be that of the birds themselves.[16])
Note that the red heads of two of the vultures at the top of the tree are
“severed,” as it were, from their bodies by branches.
As in the Wolf Man’s drawing, there is also a peaceful quality in this
painting – the tranquil pastoral setting in the background.
Children
also love and are comforted by animals, of course – typically ones that they
can speak with. (Mickey Mouse and
Donald Duck are quite conversational.)
But it’s possible to over-emphasize the importance of language here. A child petting a horse can happily dwell within a wordless
communication. A very different but
still wordless animal-human communication is suggested by Adorno’s remark that
“The possibility of pogroms is decided in the moment when the gaze of a
fatally wounded animal falls on a human being.”[17]
 |
|
|
insect pupa |
caterpillar |
These
eyes aren’t biologically real – not a photon of light passes through them.
But the caption on the web page where I found these illustrations
captures their terrifying effect: “An eye appears suddenly in the shadowy
leafy world where a little bird forages. It could mean a predator close enough
to strike. Flee NOW! If you pause to scrutinize for even a millisecond, you may
be lunch.” Roger Caillois (whose
work will be discussed below) writes about the false eyes of insects.
It lieth, gazing on the
midnight sky,
Upon the cloudy mountain peak
supine;
Below, far lands are seen
tremblingly;
Its horror and its beauty are
divine.
The Medusa was one of the Gorgon
sisters, a cursed and monstrous woman, with serpents instead of hair, who could
turn anyone to stone who dared to look directly upon her face.
Perseus crept up to Medusa, using his shield as a mirror to see her (or a
magic cap of darkness, in another version of the myth), and cut off her head.
|
|
Each house a gaze.
In a Hitchcock film, I don’t remember which, someone approaches a
house. The house looks back
The effect would be ruined if someone in the house were to open the
drapes of a window and notice the visitor. (This is a Zizek example.)
The same effect is mobilized in many haunted house films: the maison d’être
ominously regards the approaching victim-to-be. |
Eyes are painted on various parts of the animal body. The pupil of these eyes is enlarged – to black-hole proportions, we might say. Are we seeing here one fish or two? Individuation is absent. The “evil eye” that steals a child or ruins a harvest is a common traditional belief. Eyes are perhaps more likely to bear positive attributes, benevolence for example, when they are paired and associated with a human face.
Stupa at Swayambunath temple in Katmandu: a “benevolent” gaze?
| The
impersonal quality of the gaze isn’t always experienced as malevolent. There
is a benign as well as an evil eye.
|
|
|
Painted
on the sides of a temple in Katmandu, four pair of eyes overlook and shelter the
city. They belong to no
one. This is a spiritual
tradition that, in its esoteric teaching, has no need for a personal
deity, nor for the personal acknowledgement that many of us regard as
indispensable.
The Western notion of “personhood”
may at one and the same time express a deep truth (recognition of the
uniqueness and value of every single human life) and harbor a
fundamental illusion (the presumed unity and autonomy of the subject).
Perhaps it is only that illusion that the gaze threatens. |
|
|
A
camera imitates human vision, by refracting light rays from an object and
inverting its image. A “celestograph,”
on the other hand, dispenses with any such mediation – e.g. an optical lens
– between itself and its object, and thereby reproduces the gaze.
According to the description at the “artnode” website (Stockholm)
where I found this image, “Strindberg dismissed the use of lens and camera in
this photographic project. He
argued that the lens in a camera or a telescope, and indeed the organic lens in
man's eye, distorted the true shape of the celestial bodies…. Strindberg prepared thin metal plates with photo sensitive
chemicals. He put them out on a
window-sill at night, exposing them to the night sky.
The result became a range of beautiful surfaces with irregular
configurations in a blue tone. What
any experienced photographer at that time would dismiss as a result of a more or
less accidental chemical reactions, Strindberg considered a genuine registration
of the sky. Strindberg struggled to
get acknowledged as a scientist and presented his celestographs and attached
theories at the Socitété Astronomique in Paris.” |
I
am reminded of Merleau-Ponty’s remark (EM, 187): “We must take literally
what vision teaches us: namely, that through it we come into contact with the
sun and the stars, that we are everywhere all at once.”
Does
the telescope help us not only to see what lies out there, but also to locate
ourselves? The Gods and goddesses
that once populated the Heavens have departed, Lacan notes.
Yet – contra Pascal – this may not render us invisible.
10.
Still life paintings of Georgio Morandi (1890-1964)
Merleau-Ponty
suggests that the visibility of things is their way of presenting themselves to
us, which is “why so many painters have said that things look at them.”
He cites Klee as an example: “In a forest, I have felt many times over
that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were
looking at me, were speaking to me…. I was there, listening.”[18]
I
experience something like this when I look at Morandi’s still life paintings.
The things of daily use represented in them bear more than a merely
physical relationship to each another and to the viewer.
It is as if Morandi succeeds in painting object relations in between his
objects. Although they are grouped
together fairly closely, each seems to look out expressively to the viewer in a
very individual way, expressing its unique “personality,” so to speak.
Before
leaving these illustrations behind, let’s locate in some of them what Lacan
calls “la tache,” the blot or stain. This is a point that cannot be
encompassed within the gaze, that blocks interpretation, while at the same time
pointing to the lack that organizes a subject.
In representations of the eye, “la tache” may be the black pupil that
makes the “window of the soul” impassible.
In the Wolf Man’s dream it is, perhaps, the truncation of the tree; in
the Cuban painting the carrion; in the San Francisco neighborhood, the cross
atop the hill, conveying an eclipse of subjectivity in this tract home suburban
setting; in the first Morandi painting above, the shadowy, occluded tier of
objects.
In accounting for phenomena such as those illustrated in
Section II above -- all of which involve a kind of anonymous or pre-personal
looking -- must we go beyond the explanatory frameworks provided by non-Lacanian
psychoanalytic theory -- e.g. that of Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Hartmann, Kohut,
and Jessica Benjamin? To
answer this question, I propose to take the gaze illustrations that Roger
Caillois offers us and put them through two alternative explanatory filters:
object relations psychoanalysis and social/political deconstruction.
The gaze is not entirely explained within these frameworks, I submit.
Caillois finds the origins and orientations of human sight
in our evolutionary heritage. At
first take, his approach seems Kantian: there are universal, a priori
patterns that structure the human mind and shape its experience.
But in Caillois, this structuring imperils the subject or self, instead
of founding its transcendental unity. Caillois
explores a realm of transcendental deconstruction: something in us unsettles and
disrupts, perhaps even tears down,
the unified subject.
"Drive," in this case,
means death drive: Caillois is mining the same mortal vein as Bataille and Lacan,
although he finds that the drive is active in non-human as well as human
domains. Drawing upon a gamut of
ethological observations, he provides an original twist to concerns that today
find expression in sociobiology: within the world of insects, fish and other
species we find mechanisms at work akin to those that shape human beings.
Like Lacan, and along the lines laid down by Hegel and
Kojève, Caillois sees self-formation as bound up with an intersubjective
dialectic. But Caillois argues that
this dialectic exceeds the hermeneutic framework of a merely human history.
Human patterns of defensive and offensive maneuver, he submits, are bound
up with those of many other species (an argument recently elaborated by Barbara Ehrenreich.[19]
Caillois rejects, however, evolutionary accounts of such phenomena in
terms of functional adaptation.) With regard to the false eyes, or "ocelli,"
painted on the surfaces of certain insects and fish (see illustrations above.)
that serve to deter predators, Caillois submits that they
resemble eyes, but ... do not intimidate on account
of that resemblance.... on the
contrary, the eyes intimidate because they resemble ocelli.
What is important here is the circular form, fixed and brilliant, the
typical instrument of fascination.... It
is fitting to recall here that every fixed circle is naturally hypnotizing.[20]
This argument is repeated in nearly identical form in Lacan's discussion in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, where he associates the gaze with pre-human seeing:
As Caillois reminds us very
pertinently, on the subject of … the manifestations that may remind us of the
function of the eyes, that is, the ocelli, it is a question of
understanding whether they impress – it is a fact that they have this effect
on the predator or on the supposed victim that looks at them – whether they
impress by their resemblance to eyes, or whether, on the contrary, the eyes are
fascinating only by virtue of their relation to the form of the ocelli.
In other words, must we not distinguish between the function of the eyes
and that of the gaze?[21]
Caillois finds what he takes to
be profound resonances between the roles of the ocelli in the animal kingdom
and, for example, human obsession with, and fear of, the monstrous, injurious
eye. His anthropological/literary
survey of such phenomena ranges from Medusa and the Gorgons in Greek mythology,
the vagina dentata, and the female praying mantis who beheads her male
partner, to vampirism and film noir’s femme fatale. In Medusa and Company, he concludes that
"quasi-universally and in any event most tenaciously, perhaps ineradicably,
… man fears the eye whose look stupefies, affixes to the ground, and suddenly
steals away consciousness, will, and movement."[22]
Caillois’ reading of
animal mimicry and of the human mythologies built up around it is subject to
psychoanalytic deconstruction, as is Lacan’s “gaze,” and the alleged
“real” from which it issues. There
really exists no such thing as “non-personal seeing.”
Seeing always involves an agent, one who sees. So-called “gaze phenomena” are instances of projection
that Lacan and Caillois obfuscate and reify.
From an
object-relations/self-psychology perspective, seeing is affect-laden from
infancy. Its psychological
character forms around a child’s earliest relations with a caretaker.
The ways in which a child is regarded, literally speaking, are crucial to
self-formation. We needn’t invoke Lacanian categories such as
“gaze,” “stain,” or “the real” to account for this.
In Caillois' discussion of gaze-like phenomena, which he and Lacan too
quickly universalize, there is an unacknowledged influence of an early and
faulty mirroring relationship with the mother – one that might well be
experienced by some children, but not by all.
At the very least, this contextualizes and relativizes gaze dynamics
considerably.
With regard to the intimidating
quality of the eyes that Caillois finds to be ubiquitous – that quality is
originally experienced by a child in relation to an intimidating m(other).
But this intimidation is a function of highly variable
child-rearing conditions, including the particular attitudes and practices of
the rearer(s), which have at most a metaphorical kinship with what goes on with
insects, fish, etc. Does not the
psychobiological perspective, which holds that human dispositions are continuous
with those of other animal species, naturalize and reify fears and behaviors
that are, in fact, products of specific human contexts?
As for Caillois’s remark that “every fixed circle is naturally
hypnotizing” – we have here an unwarranted, essentializing geometry.
A child’s may most fundamentally experience circles and eyes not as
entrapping but, on the contrary, as comforting, reassuring, and enabling.
Dorothy Dinnerstein[23]
and Nancy Chodorow,[24]
among others, have argued that children raised only by a maternal figure, with
men (or any other adults in the household) occupying relatively distant and
non-nurturing roles, are apt to grow up feeling at best, highly ambivalent about
their earliest caretaker, or at worst, abhorring and loathing the figure on whom
they too exclusively depend. (Difficult
social and economic circumstances also contribute a lot to the problems that
beset children raised in single-parent families.)
Moreover, anyone who has read their Melanie Klein will likely recognize
the cold, sadistic, and/or hypnotic mother in Caillois’ descriptions of
biological and anthropological gaze phenomena. But
if this mother represents only one way of parenting, among others, then
Caillois’ generalization no longer obtain.
That is, his theory may rest only upon particular, not necessarily
typical, childhood experiences, but have no application to lives in which
mothering does not play the predatory role he describes.
This critique might target, as
well, Sartre, Lacan, Bataille, and other psychoanalysts and literati preoccupied with
the bad, entrapping mother. As
children, they weren't the delightful apple of their mother's eye.
From their particular misfortune -- faulty mirroring on the part of the
earliest selfobject, Kohut would say -- we cannot warrant any generalizations
about the human condition or the constitution of the subject.
It is as if a poor soul stubbed his foot and proclaimed "Aha, the
human race is crippled!"
The
criticism above traces psychoanalytic theorizing back to a certain quality of
early family experiences, perhaps those of the theorist him- or herself.
For Caillois, Bataille and Lacan, the social etiology of their views is
also relevant. Their views
cannot be divorced from the political world to which they responded.
Caillois belonged to a coterie of French intellectuals that formed the
Parisian Collège de Sociologie in the late '30s.[25]
This circle influenced Lacan, as well.
Theirs was an avant-garde that self-consciously distanced itself from the
left, insisting, for instance, on a certain willed and even enjoyable trauma of
powerlessness and domination. They
were not alone, of course, in recognizing that something had gone wrong with the
Enlightenment ideals and optimism of Marxism.
During the same decade, the Frankfurt School constructed an analysis of
capitalism that, while invoking psychoanalytic categories, insisted on the
cultural/historical character of the disaster that engulfed Europe. Lacan's association of Immanuel Kant with the Marquis de Sade,
which exposes the underside of European humanism, is a central theme also of
Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.[26]
For Frankfurt School theorists, however, humanism's failure can be
comprehended only in relation to the European social context that occasioned it.
Writing in the Journal for Social Research, Walter Benjamin took
Caillois to task for his ahistorical notion of "voluntary servitude."[27]
Like their intellectual successors in the French New Right of the '60s,
Caillois and his circle legitimated authoritarian movements of their day.
Caillois in particular was always skeptical about egalitarian
aspirations, and tended to view social hierarchy as both admirable and
necessary.
The evil that preoccupied
Caillois and his circle, and that they represented as timeless, was bound up
with a historical predicament. In
the years between the Wars, Europe "fell prey" to fascism.
Many of those who were aware of what was happening, including
intellectuals, experienced themselves as impotent observers, incapable of
political response. Caillois'
exploration of fascination and hypnotic capture in the animal world points
obliquely to the cultural and political paralysis that, in the '20s and '30s,
seized him and some of his contemporaries.
Is what passes as “the gaze” anything more than a reification of
historically produced alienation?
The two perspectives above find contingent
circumstances (a particular family environment, a particular configuration of
social forces) at work in Caillois’ and Lacan’s theorizing of the gaze.
This is a telling criticism of sweeping generalizations about “the
gaze” or “the real,” on the grounds that such universalizing claims are
oblivious to underlying mechanisms of psychological projection.
On the other hand, reductive invocation of
psychological or physiological mechanisms to account for perceptual experience
is apt to overlook its phenomenological features – an insight that
Merleau-Ponty never tired of elaborating. At
the risk of conflating incommensurable theoretical frameworks of psychoanalytic
explanation, it may be helpful here to make a Lacanian distinction between
“imaginary projection” and “real projection,” the latter being relevant
to gaze phenomena. One can
then construe what Lacan calls the “phantasm” or “object a” as a kind of
“real projection,” although this reading might be somewhat misleading. The
problem with the “It’s all just projection” hypothesis is that it
presupposes a pre-existing “internal” mental world that is literally
“projected” out upon a pre-existing “external” world.
For Lacan, this dualist metaphysics is a symptom, not an explanatory
solution.
Caillois aims to look behind the internal
world that generates human projections. What he finds is a fundamental biodynamic:
It is not
surprising that ... humanity's organic structure and biological development,
combined with the identical external conditions of its physical world, should
have considerable resonances in its psychic world, tending to produce within it
a minimum number of similar reactions and consequently spawning within every
mind the same affective tendencies and primordial passional conflicts, just as
the identical mechanism of the senses brings with it -- to a noticeably
equivalent degree -- identical a priori forms of perception and of
representation.[28]
Hence, what we take to be historically contingent –
a matter of personal or social etiology -- may partake of necessary and
universal psychological structure. On
behalf of Caillois, one may offer the same kind of argument that Lacanians
invoke against object-relations psychogenetic explanations.
An uncanny aspect of visual experience, denoted as "the gaze"
by Lacan, is instantiated, but not explained away, by children's personal
histories with their parents. Early
experience, on this account, is necessarily characterized by contradiction and
estrangement that even knowledgeable, empathic parenting cannot do away with.
Morroring is, for Lacan, not simply an antidote to the gaze, as in object
relations psychoanalysis, but rather its classical instance, confronting a child
with an alien, objective self-image, however whole and perfect that image may
originally appear (in the imaginary register).
Lacan’s insistence upon this human condition links
him with sociobiological speculations. While
Lacan’s views about the symbolic environment that gives rise to human identity
link him also to the culturalist critique of biologism, the human subject’s
evolutionary origins are by no absent from his teaching.
Rather, Lacan’s discussion of the real, and of the gaze more
specifically, joins Caillois’ social ethology.
Consider for instance the paralyzing aspect of the gaze: a boy peering
through a keyhole suddenly notices that the adults he has been spying on have
become aware of his presence. As
they look toward the door behind which he is perched, he is frozen in place.
Now Caillois:
The insect knows how to frighten; what is more, it
provokes a very particular kind of fear, a hyperbolic, imaginary terror, to
which no real peril corresponds,... that ... confuses the victim and seems to
forbid him a reaction which is not paralysis or disorganization (desarroi)....
[The false eyes of the mantis] paralyze the best jumper.
With a single leap, the cricket could easily place itself beyond the
reach of the monster, but it remains immobile or even slowly approaches the
fatal apparition.[29]
The link here between human and non-human behaviors may be more than metaphorical. The common-sense academic psychology of fear, built upon the "fight or flight" dynamic, overlooks a third response, possibly no less basic or biological than the first two, that incapacitates the subject. A person is "frozen stiff with fear" or "petrified," we say in English. Who has not had the experience of waking up from a nightmare and feeling as rigid as a board in one's own bed? The point is that, notwithstanding the highly variable personal and historical circumstances of our lives, we are all subject to structures of perception and response that may link us to our evolutionary ancestors.
Absolutely still, one may escape notice, like an
inanimate object. Being
object-like, however, does not appeal only because it facilitates escape from an
external predator. Rather, from a
Lacanian perspective, the human subject is inevitably drawn toward the
annihilation of its own separateness. Camouflage
is protection, a way of staying alive, but only by simulating death. Inasmuch as one merges with the environment, the division
between subject and world is undone and one "loses" one's individual
self. This undoing is, of course,
not entirely successful. In a game
of hide-and-seek, the concealed child can bear not being seen only for the
briefest time.
Not being seen as we would like to be seen is,
however, perhaps our inescapable fate. We
are "objects," not only in the psychoanalytic, but also in the
scientific, sense.
The back cover
of the English edition of Caillois’ The Necessity of the Mind [30]
presents the reader with a color illustration of a medical operation, surgery of
the spinal cord. We see into the
heart of the operation itself: forceps spread apart surface muscle to reveal a
dense pink and red interior, out of which, from the gruesome depth of the flesh,
a face-like apparition stares out at us. Even the round fingerholes of the forceps resemble eyes.
Matter, abetted by science, looks at us impersonally, casting off the
mediations provided by symbolic inscription.
In a sense, what is shown here is what we really are. In relation to neither "mater" nor
"matter" is it possible to establish an entirely adequate
relationship. While it is true that
the photograph above is one-sidedly gruesome, and that physiology can as
well disclose the sublimely beautiful, the depersonalizing character of
scientific objectivity remains in play. Caillois,
in the early writings that Lacan references, does not countenance
reinterpretations of science and of our relationships with nature that might
restore a sense of wholeness and harmony.[31]
On the contrary, he writes of science's "absolute lack of any
exaltation" and of the "demoralizing aspect" ingredient in the
view of the human being as a "little hydrocarbonated animalcule.”[32]
True, this is a one-sided view of science – but it is one that captures
science’s exposure of the hubris involved in regarding ourselves as more than
protoplasm.
In Lacanian terms, science is one of the forms that
the gaze assumes. The
"scientific worldview" resembles God in that it looks at human
beings from no place in particular and sees in minute detail.
God, however, blesses us with a very personal and loving attention that
science discards in the name of impartiality and objectivity.
(Whether human beings can be satisfied with this remains to be seen.
While the worldwide resurgence of religious fundamentalisms suggests a
negative answer; other spiritual traditions welcome “impersonal” or
“transpersonal” science” as quite in keeping with a non-person centered
theology.) For Lacan, God and
science both function as “subjects-supposed-to-know,” but do so in quite
different ways.
Caillois’s view of science is not, however, a traditional, empiricist one. In what he termed "transverse sciences," including his own contributions to biology and anthropology, there is neither center nor system, but rather proliferation of forms, ineradicable fault lines, and fractured symbol constellations. Fractured by what Lacan elaborates in Four Fundamental Concepts as “the real” – a register to which the gaze belongs and that, exceeds the familial categories of psychoanalysis as well as the politics of Caillois’ cultural milieu.
I have suggested that phenomenological features of the gaze
cannot be entirely
accounted for within psychoanalytic frameworks that trace psychic functioning
only back to its familial origins and/or specific cultural contexts.
Something is left out of these accounts, which Lacan puts his finger on.
By way of clarifying this remainder, I’ll refract the gaze, as
elucidated by Lacan, through several centuries of European painting. The expressions of attraction and alienation in this art are
socially constituted as well as intensely subjective. Historically, mechanisms of social power as well as ones of
subjective mastery have been abetted by the gaze.
I
would like to consider three domains: scientific, social, and sexual.
In each, the gaze is appropriated by human agents who identify with and
assume its power. When we consider
the subject of identification in Lacan, it is usually imaginary or symbolic
forms of identification that we have in mind.
Identification occurs as well, however, with the gaze, in the register
that Lacan calls “the real.”
Here
is the terrain we’ll traverse:
Rembrandt, Anatomy Lesson of
Dr. Tulp
Steen, The Burger of Delft and his Daughter
Rembrandt, Sampling Officials of the Draper’s
Guild
Hals, Lady Governors of the Old Men’s Home At Haarlem
Manet, Nana
Manet, Olympia
Historical
note.
Genesis has it that the Creator fashioned the world and then “saw
that it was good.” But this was
still a personal kind of seeing, like a father looking admiringly at his
offspring (and denying that the mother played any essential part!). Among
the Jewish people, however, there were those who still found the Old Testament God too
remote and abstract. His son was sent to dwell among us, establishing a more personal
mediation between divinity and the world. The Protestants didn’t much
care for this kind of immediacy -- the Medieval Imitatio
Dei that confirmed a mirror-like intimacy with Jesus, with Mary and the
other Saints. The devotional icons
had to be smashed, and God liberated from mirroring relationships.
God was no longer anywhere to be seen, as He had been by Moses in the Old
Testament or, in the form of Christ, by Giotto’s St. Francis. Henceforth
He would be known only via the Holy Writ. Believers’
relationship to the Bible supplanted their relationship to the Church.
With the modernization of Northern Europe, the visual was downplayed in
favor of the verbal and the rational.
Human beings in some measure gave up the adoration of images in favor of
attention to the Word.
Lacan
disagrees with this story. Sight
was not eclipsed, but appropriated anew, within the imaginary and within the
real. The imaginary appropriation
has to do with a mirroring which is as basic to the “scientific world view”
(a good theory maps reality) as to Medieval Catholicism. The appropriation in the real is as gaze - and this is my
subject here. “It is through the
gaze that I enter the light and it is from the gaze that I receive its
effects,”[33]
Lacan remarks, in a passage whose religious heritage is unmistakable, although
it could express as well the role of new institutions, including scientific
ones, in forming a subjectivity that came to fruition during Holland’s
“Golden Age.” (This is terrain
that Michel Foucault has explored thoroughly, although his analysis differs from
a psychoanalytic one.[34])
Yes
God became more abstract and less visually imaginable. The irony, though, is that He has not stopped looking at us!
Even -- or I should say especially -- when we are being “objective”
and “scientific.” Rembrandt’s
17th-century Netherlands takes up science passionately, but by no
means abandons the Creator’s view -- as one of Rembrandt’s group portraits
illustrates.
Rembrandt’s
painting, above, draws upon the traditional iconography of Christ.
Compare the Anatomy Lesson with a drawing done by Rembrandt two
years later, Christ and His Disciples.
The
formal similarity is striking (especially since the left-most and top-most
figures in the Anatomy Lesson probably were added only later to
Rembrandt’s original painting.) The
postures and facial exprssions of several of Tulp’s attentive listeners
resemble those who listen to Jesus, and the corpse has become a sleeping
disciple![35]
Thematically as well, there is a resemblance.
Like religion, science reaches beyond the surface circumstances of
everyday life and claims to offer an authoritative account of the way the world
is put together. This link did not
escape the attention of Rembrandt’s 17th-century contemporaries. In Casper Barlaeus’ oration inaugurating Amsterdam’s
anatomical theater he declares:
Medicine
in this new form joined theory and practice.
By scrutinizing not only God’s Word, but also his work – for example,
the intricacies of hand and forearm structures that Dr. Tulp discloses –
medical science was able to advance beyond older, a priori conceptions of
human physiology. The recognition
by Dr. Tulp and his audience that belief stands in need of empirical
confirmation is indicated here by the doctor’s assumption of both a lecturing
and a dissecting role.
Earlier,
medieval anatomy lessons, content with the wisdom of Aristotle or Galen,
separated these two functions. The medical doctor distanced himself from the
dirty work of dissection:
|
|
The right-hand image above comes from
Johannes de Ketham's book, Fasciculus
medicinae, published in 1522. In
these pre-Vasalian demonstrations, a doctor lectures from Galen, while below, a
barber-surgeon cuts the cadaver. Discrepancies
between anatomical dogma and the body, if noticed, testified to a defect in the
latter.
 |
Interwoven at this time with the medical teachings of antiquity was astrology. The nature and optimal timing of surgery was figured according to zodiacal inscription like that in this woodcut from the Sarum Liturgy , Paris 1510. |
|
Around the dissecting table were arranged concentric circles of seats, to
which visitors were assigned according to social rank.
Amsterdam
passed an “Anatomical Ordinance” specifying that in the anatomical theatre,
“The spectators shall take their places, as they enter, so that the innermost
rows are reserved for officials, doctors and surgeons.” |
Dr.
Tulp, who served also as an administrative regent of Amsterdam, is singled out
in Rembrandt’s painting by his broad-brimmed hat, distinctive garb, and
masterful gesture. The cadaver that
he dissects is that of a criminal, Aris Kindt, who had been condemned and
executed by the state. The prone
body lying on the table, foreshortened, is expressive of passivity and death.
The shadow of one of the leaning spectators darkens its brow.
Social
order is both divinely and scientifically predestined here.
Tulp is confident that what he says to his listeners will be empirically
corroborated both by the observed body and by the open anatomy textbook at the
feet of the cadaver, just as the Creator’s plan, revealed in the Bible, is
daily confirmed by events on earth. The
structure of the human body mirrors the structure of the Christian social order,
including Tulp’s preeminence within that order.
A
shell niche in the painting’s architectural background surrounds Tulp’s head
as with a halo. (This is a standard
device during the Renaissance and thereafter for exalting a human figure.)
Indirectly, Rembrandt too is honored, as the artist chosen to depict this
lesson. His hands paint, those of
the doctor dissect -- a noble pursuit in either case.
There is a mirroring here: Rembrandt accomplishes in his art what Dr.
Tulp achieves in science.
Protestantism
makes itself out to be iconoclastic, giving authority to the word over the
image. What we see here, however,
is a new kind of showing, of seeing and giving oneself to be seen.
The agent of this seeing is, in a sense, science itself. “The corpus of
acquired scientific knowledge,” Lacan alleges, “is, in the subjective
relation, the equivalent of what I have called here the objet petit a.”[36]
Scientific knowledge, functioning as “objet petit a” – Lacan’s
name for the fundamental cause/object of desire -- is a form of the gaze as
fascinating as any other.
“God
is the creator of certain images,” says Lacan, “... And iconoclastic thought itself still preserves this when it
declares there is a god that does not care for this. He is certainly alone in this.”[37]
This ironic remark about Protestantism’s contradictory intentions
speaks to the patriciate’s guarded indulgence in visual enjoyment, especially
when it proves to be ideologically serviceable.
Not
everyone portrayed in the painting “sees” (in the narrow sense) the same
thing. One man cranes his neck
forward to verify in the anatomy text that what Dr. Tulp is saying and showing
is true; another looks out at the painting’s viewers and directs our attention
to the anatomical demonstration. Yet,
we sense that a unified vision, a gaze involving the triumph of a scientific
Weltanschauung over death, presides here. (Perhaps
there is also an ironic subtext intended here: it is death that triumphs,
mocking the anatomy lesson’s effort to master mortality scientifically.)
In
the first decades of the 17th century in the Netherlands, newly
independent of Spain, a ruling social stratum established its authority via
identification with a scientific worldview, now joined to the Reformed Church.
Occupying a Calvinist vocation, one could see oneself located in a
pre-ordained scheme of things. This
notion of a vocational destiny is inescapably visual.
One’s life is headed in a certain direction, and this journey is
perceived and validated objectively -- from outside oneself, as it were.
Calvinism
and science are such a seeing from outside, a gaze that originates from no
personal agent, but is nevertheless (or perhaps just for this reason)
penetrating and immensely powerful. What
overwhelmed me when I saw Rembrandt’s painting some years ago in The Hague is
this unified presence of knowledge, authority, and light.
(My father was a physician.)
The
Anatomy Lesson is as much social as it is scientific. Science happened partly because society was waiting for it,
as for the Reformation which revitalized Christianity.
One
of the main accomplishments of the Reformation was containment of the
disintegrative tendencies introduced into the Medieval Ecclesia by economic and
political rationalization. In 17th-century
Amsterdam, Calvinism aimed to reorganize every aspect of daily private and
public existence. The notion of a
“calling” formalized and systematized roles within a new institutional
framework. Governance encompassed
not only the political authority of the regents over their subjects, and the
authority of reason (as exemplified in scientific understanding) over the
passions, but also the institutionalization of many practices that had
previously been left up to personal discretion. Charity and attention to the infirm and aged, for example,
were revisited and transformed. In
previous centuries, beggars had wandered about from town to town, receiving alms
from those charitably minded. But
personal charity of this kind still left many homeless and destitute. The Netherlands Republics dealt with such “social
problems” more systematically – and on the whole more effectively --
establishing new laws and institutions to manage poverty and indigence.
These became procedural matters, subject to impersonal administration.
Jan
Steen’s The Burgher of Delft and his Daughter illustrates this.
At
first take, there is something odd going on here.
The painting’s presumable intention is to acknowledge the positive
qualities of the administrative official it portrays, including his benevolence.
Yet there is no indication that he will respond to the outstretched hand
of the woman who begs on behalf of her child and herself.
Instead of alms, he holds in his hand a paper which, one historian has
remarked, “may be the license announcing the woman and child to be themselves
of residence.” So licensed, these
indigents would qualify for public, institutional assistance.
Instead
of relying upon personal charity to take care of the poor and the sick, the
officials of Dutch cities organized orphanages, poorhouses, and hospitals to
administer to those deemed unable to take care of themselves.
In Steen’s painting, it is as if the burgher of Delft, gazing
impersonally upon this indigent family, is saying “I need not take care of you
personally, because procedures are in place for handling your situation.”
That is, they will be looked after by Delft’s welfare administration. The burgher’s compassion is official, reflecting the fact
that there is no longer a need for citizens to become involved with one another
on a personal basis. As for the
burgher’s daughter, she looks stiffly and impersonally out at the viewer of
the painting. Or we might say that
it is her station, along with that of her father, which looks at us, as if to
remind us that we too fall subject to the civic power that the burgher and his
daughter represent.
Rembrandt’s
Syndics of the Draper’s Guild works in a similar way.
Captured here is what Lacan, referring to the Doges’ Palace in Venice,
describes as “the gaze of those persons who, when the audience are not there,
deliberate in this hall. Behind the
picture, it is their gaze that is there.”[38]
As in the Anatomy Lesson, Rembrandt dramatizes the group portrait.
Here he achieves this effect by representing the deliberations of these
administrators as momentarily interrupted by a spectator who enters their
chambers.
It is as if the interloper is being looked at by these chambers,
whose affairs are as private as those of a “primal scene.” Once again, though, the looking is impersonal; although the
viewer might very well be one of the cases which the syndics process (listed in
the ledger on the table whose pages they turn), their view is that of the gaze,
of the institution which looks not only dispassionately but also impersonally at
those falling under its jurisdiction.
The
dramatic moment which the painting captures is absolutely still, for, as Lacan
says, the gaze “not only terminates the movement, it freezes it.”[39]
We see here what Lacan calls “the fascinatory element introduced by the
gaze.”[40]
The shallowness of the represented space, and the foregrounded flatness of the syndics’ table contribute to the sense that the viewer is confronted, not allowed entrance.
