Part I: Lacan, the Look, the Gaze, the Screen
Using Lacan's Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis as read by Jacqueline
Rose in Sexuality in the Field of Vision (190-94).
The Look
Consider Rose quoting Metz
"What fundamentally determines me in the visible is the look which
is outside" (190).
To understand how we as subjects are constituted by the look from outside
think of this example (provided by Colin Gillens):
Remember being a kid and one day being sick (or playing sick)
and not going to school. What happened to all the people as school?
When did you realize that even if you weren't at school their lives went
on without you. Your friends still played and had fun. Your
teachers still taught.
When we are very young we play hide and seek with our parents and figure
that, well, if I bury my face in a pillow and can't see them, then they
can't see me. I'm hiding. At this early age, the world exists
only because of my sight. But later, as with Colin's example, I exist
only in as much as the others see me. As Metz says, the look from
outside determines me.
The look Metz (and Lacan) is talking about here is a bit more technical.
So, lets fine tune the idea we're discussing.
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First, Lacan is working against the Cartesian optics which he illustrates
with the observer as a "geometric point" looking out and seeing objects
(191). From the Cartesian perspective, what I see is my property;
I own it in the sense that I experience it personally in the privileged
realm of the interiority of the subject. Lacan will invert the Cartesian
triangle and in doing so show how the subject is dependent upon the outside
for his/her sense of self.
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In the inverted triangle, the subject ("me") becomes "pictured."
As Rose explains, "Thus the subject of representation is not only the subject
of that geometrical perspective whereby it reproduces objects as images:
it is also represented in that process" (191). How does this happen?
The subject ("me" again) gets "illuminated by the light emitted by the
object of its own look, and thereby [I am] registered simultaneously as
object of representation" (191). Notice that to be "represented"
the thing I see does not have to be another person. Lacan uses the
example of a sardine can. The can cannot see him since it does not
have eyes, but it does look at him.
This is the look in its technical sense. Here the subject ("me")
is seized by the object of its (my) own look (192). I exist only
as much as the world around me "looks" at me. So, what goes on inside
me (thoughts, ideas, opinions) only exist if I can make them visible to
the look. See how Lacan has inverted Descartes's interiority of the
subject? Good.
The Screen
How can the subject avoid being captured by the look? The answer
is the screen. Okay, now how does this work.
1. Lacan explains that since we know we are being seen, we can manipulate
the "self" that is seen by the look (of others, including objects): "Indeed
man knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is the look.
The screen here acts as the site of mediation" (192).
2. Also, the screen also helps us to see objects: "an object veiled
from sight by an over-intense light can be discerned only if a screen is
interposed which partially obscures the light and/or the observing subject"
(192).
So, the screen works both as a way to manipulate what people see about
me (#1) and allows me to see objects yet stands in the way from me ever
having the objects fully (#2). Lacan explains this dual function,
"The subject presents itself as other than what it is, and what it is given
to see is not what it wants to see" (192).
The Gaze
Finally, we can employ the look and the screen to understand the gaze.
As Rose explains, Lacan uses a scene from Sartre's Being and Nothingness
to illustrate the gaze. In the scene, a voyeur at a keyhole is suddenly
startled by the sound of approaching footsteps.
The voyeur is caught. He is caught by a look, someone is about
to catch him without his ability to screen his desires. Additionally,
and most importantly here, the voyeur realizes that he can never see himself
from the point of view of the one who sees him. He realizes not simply
that he is the object of another's look, but that he is in the field of
the Other. What I mean here is that all of sight and the desire that
we have when we see objects (and people) is only possible because sight
is structured for us (just as language is structured for us even before
we learn to speak). No one controls the syntax of seeing just
as no one controls language, but seeing, like language controls us.
(Rose refers to this element as the castrating effect on the subject.
The subject is powerless.)
Part II: Lacan & Blade Runner
At this point you may be wondering what this has to do with Blade Runner,
and the more astute of you may see already where I'm going.
Victor Gischler in his astute "Image
is Everything: Lacan and Blade Runner" explains how the subject uses
the "orthopeadic" or the "prosthesis" to stand in for his lack of feeling
whole and balanced. Gischler's reading is quite fine, and I think
we can build from it.
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Instead of orthopeadic or prosthesis, I think of the screen.
Each character manipulates the way he/she wants to be seen by others.
Such manipulation is using the screen as a mask.
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We have already discussed how the Cartesian triangle works in developing
a privileged interiority and sense of self (see my summary
of Blade Runner). The inverted triangle of the look in which
the subject exists as represented works throughout the movie as well.
Gischler's essay deliniates how being seen and who is doing the seeing
affects the "selfhood" or human-ness of the replicants. (See especially
paragraphs 10-12).
Last on the list of terms is the gaze. Think of the blimp
with its lights and sayings about the off-world colonies. Think of
the Japanese woman on the billboard. These serve as figures of the
Other, the sense of always being seen and the structure of seeing.
Other figures fit into this category: the owl, the eye at the opening of
the film, perhaps even Tyrell's glasses.
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