Re: <documenta X><blast> Visual
Bracha Lichtenberg - Ettinger (bracha@easynet.fr)
Thu, 17 Jul 1997 01:59:01 +0200
The terms visuel, vision, visible, invisible, gaze and image, are to be
handled with lots of care. Moving between different disciplines, we mean
different things by these terms.
=46or unconscious desire, bodily organs are not attractive as
need-satisfaction tools that lead to formulate demands, but as erogenous
zones that buds phantasies. In the visual field, no particular need (or
demand) seems to conceal the desire, hence the royal position of the scopic
amidst the drives. Psychoanalyzing the vagrancy of the scopic drive,
Lacan's inquiry is not oriented towards discerning the gaze from
need-satisfaction, but is free to fully engage in distinguishing between
seeing and the gaze, the eye and the gaze, vision and the gaze, insulating
what the subject is from its representations, and what is shown to it from
what it desires to see.
The Other doesn't look at me from the place where I look at him, nor from
the place where I would like him to look at me. And, "what I look at is
never what I wish to see." (Lacan, J., The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1981, p.103.)
Thus, the eye functions as an erogenous zone and the gaze as its objet (a )
at the level of a lack, and the meeting between the two is a missed
encounter. "The eye and the gaze - this is for us the split in which the
drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field."(Ibid. 72-73. )
To portray the course of the gaze in relation to the detached and concealed
archaic parts of the fragmented body's experience, one should consider the
entire system of psychic drives, uncovering the specific lack, separation,
or loss which characterizes desire on the scopic plane. Thus; relating to
Duchamps, Rosalind Krauss points out the concern "to corporealize the
visual, restoring to the eye [against the disembodied opticality of
modernist painting] that eye's condition as bodily organ, available like
any other physical zone to the force of eroticization. Dependent on the
connection of the eye to the whole network of the body's tissue, this force
wells up within the density and thickness of the carnal being, as, tied to
the conditions of nervous life, it is by definition a function of
temporality."(Krauss, R., "The im/pulse to see", in: (Ed. Hal Foster)
Vision and Visuality, Seattle: Bay Press, 1988, p.60-62.)
To be looked at by the mother is attached to the most primitive mechanisms
of survival, to the retrieval of the nourishing object, and to the
avoidance of danger. The impulse "to gazing", says Freud, is one of "the
component-impulses of the sexual instinct [which] have an object from the
very beginning." (Freud, S., (1916-1917). Chapter XXI , Introductory
lectures, S.E., XVI ) To be gazed at endlessly by the mother is a basic
narcissistic demand. It is the projection of this impulse, once repressed
under the influence of aggression, which produces the archaic phenomenon of
the 'double' as a persecutory instance.(Freud, S., (1919) The 'Uncanny',
S.E.: XVII. pp. 234-236.) The desire related to the object of the gaze can
therefore be perturbed and masked by needs and impulses. One has to invest
here, as always, in differentiating between need/demand/desire - albeit in
a very elusive way, as the impulse to gaze is ever so archaic. Thus, when
beyond appearance we search for a "lacking something", separated,
fragmented, and lost, this lacking something is not just any no-thing! It
is a particular nothing.
=46or Lacan, this nothing, or this lacking something has always the (same)
symbolic value of a lacking phallus; like that of the
appearance/disappearance of the real phallus (penis) in the "primal scene",
like that of the having/not-having of the imaginary phallus, which, in his
view - and in Freud's - is the only representative of the difference
between the sexes - with 'castration' as its only signifier. It is a
"nothing" presented as neutral within a phallic paradigm. The pre-genital
organs are subjugated retroactively, in the apr=E8s-coup, to the
genital-phallic yet "neutral" not-having/having, no/yes; the primary grains
of symbolization (fort/da.) are retroactively meaningful in terms of
off/on, absence/presence. (In "Beyond the pleasure Principle" (1920, S. E.
XVIII) Freud describes a child's game with a wooden reel. The child
accompanies the disappearance of the reel with the expression: "fort"
(gone), and its appearance, with: "da" (there). This essay of Freud is the
basis for a tremendous psych-analytical literature concerning the idea of
psychological loss, lack, absence, the other/mother as object, the objet of
desire and the playing object. The game of fort-da is the basis of
Lyotard's analysis of the matrix-figure upon hich Rosalind Krauss analysis
leans)
Even though in relation to the structure of the phantasy, Lacan emphasizes
not only the presence or the absence of the objet a, but also the
conjunction of the two - the coupure in which the subject comes to dwell,
his objet a always retains its phallic status, and the gaze is the objet a
of the scopic field. It is therefore a primal lost "nothing", with no
substitute, no compensation, no relief. The gaze arises such total despair
when it seems to supply someone else with what it can no longer supply me.
"When, in love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfactory and
always missing is that you never look at me from the place from which I see
you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see." (Four
Concepts, p. 103. ) The eye is relevant to scopic desire - just as the
breast is relevant to oral desire - only if a gaze which is beyond
appearance, a gaze which exists no more, a gaze which could have formed a
focus in the archaic relations with the Other (the mother) before they were
forever forcluded, repressed or transformed, is linked to it.
"The gaze has a certain dynamic: centrifugal, that which starts from the
eye, the seeing eye, but also from its blind spot. It takes off from the
instant of seeing and has that as its support. The eye, in effect, sees
instantaneously, that's what's called intuition, through which is doubled
that which is referred to as space in the image. There is no real space.
Space is a purely verbal construction which has been spelled out in three
dimensions and called geometry, the dimensions being those of the
kinesthetically-imagined hoist or ball, imagined in an oral-anal manner.
The object that I have called petit a [small a] is in effect but one and
the same object. I reversed its object name for the reason that the object
is [...] obstacling the expansion of the concentric imaginary, which is to
say englobing, conceivable, which is to say graspable by the hand."
(Lacan's lecture, unedited 10-I2-76; translated by Joseph Simas in
collaboration with B. Lichtenberg-Ettinger, taken from my book "The
Matrixial Gase," Leeds University, 1995.)
In the waking state there is an elision of the unconscious gaze and
its sight, but in the dream "it shows." Lacan Four Concepts 75. This it
that shows is prior to the text of the dream, it attests to the archaic
essence of the gaze, to its relations to the Id. In the dream, the objet a
emerges as the gaze on a scene from which the subject is excluded, where
there is a possibility of being seen for "free", with no seeing subject
there to observe that seen-being. This means that subject and gaze are
like the inside and the outside of glove. Similar relations exist between
the visible and the invisible, in Merleau-Ponty's description. (In big
difference from other ways to connect the visible and the invisible that
aroze in our discussions here: where what is invisible and behind the
screen is in fact in principle visible - but just not seen or not known to
the subject who is infron of the screen. This kind of invisiblity, for
Merleau-Ponty, for Lacan, for Lyotard, will not have the status of
'invisible', because the gaze as objet a bounds within itself the basic
lack that leaves the subject in ignorance of what is beyond appearance.
"The spectacle of the world [...] appears to us as all-seeing; the gaze
envelopes us and turns us into seen-beings, without showing itself to us.
In phantasy, there is an absolute being to whom is transferred the quality
of being all-seeing." "The world is all-seeing, but it is not exhibitionist
- it does not provoke our gaze. When it begins to provoke it, the feeling
of strangeness begins too." If it approaches consciousness, it is "in the
form of a strange contingency" revealed by an 'uncanny' feeling, an
Unheimlich signaling to us that we are on the horizon line of experience"
(Four Concepts 73. ) This kind of invisibility is treated when these
authors, each in its own way, try to deal with aesthetics.
The encounter between the eye and the phallic objet a of the gaze
is a missed encounter. When I look, the gaze which is external to me, which
is on the side of the Other, slips out, goes elsewhere; it is always
outside, turning us into pictures to be looked at. "I am looked at, that is
to say I am a picture." Four Concepts 106.Following upon Merleau-Ponty's
description of the scopic field, Merleau-Ponty, M., Le Visible et
L'Invisible , Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Lacan characterizes the gaze (of the
Other) as prior to the eye (of the subject), what is given to be seen as
prior to the seen, and vision as something to which we are subjugated. The
drive is concealed in the schize between the seeing eye and the gaze.
According to Merleau-Ponty, the gaze encloses us and turns us into
looked-at beings in "the spectacle of the world."
The gaze is the most slippery of all the objects on which the
subject depends in the field of desire. The instant the subject tries to
tame the gaze, it slips away or fades out. A conscious encounter with it is
only imagined, it is only an illusion; such an encounter is always a missed
opportunity. "The gaze I encounter is - you can find this in Sartre's own
writing - is not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the
Other". The gaze belongs to things. "On the side of things, there is the
gaze, that is to say, things look at me, and yet I see them."Lacan Ibid.
84, 109 )
"If a bird were to paint would it not be by letting fall its feathers, a
snake by casting off its scales, a tree by letting fall all its leaves?
what it amounts to is the first act in the laying down of the gaze." (Lacan
=46our Concepts 114.) The painter's creative gesture does not originate in
decision or will, but concludes an internal stroke, a stroke which also
participates in regression, but contrary to regression, it creates - like
in a backward movement, as in a reversal of the course of psychological
time - a stimulus to which the gesture becomes a reaction. The gaze as a
lack is the rear borderline of that movement, it is the beyond of it. The
gaze is also that which freezes it, hypnotizes it, attracts it, enchants
it; like an un-aural siren's chant, it is on the border of the Real, on the
side of ex-sistence. In front of the astounding power of the gaze on this
borderline horizon, consciousness - with its symbolic and imaginary layers,
the metaphor of which is "seeing myself seeing" - can only conclude this
move by attaching images and thoughts to what has a-priori neither an image
nor a signifier.
The artist engages in a dialogue with the lacking object and
therefore, says Lacan, something of the gaze is always contained in the
picture. But the viewpoint of the gaze is my blind spot as I cannot see
from the point from which I'm looked at by the Other, or from where I
desire to be looked at. There are phenomena that can only be formulated in
terms of a subject which is looked at from all directions in "an absolute
overview" and wherein "I situate myself in the picture as a stain". The
artist seduces the eye of the viewer, s/he offers some food for the eye,
but the viewer is invited by the artwork "to lay down his gaze as one lays
down his weapons." In this case, something is given - not to the gaze which
is in the field of the Other, but to what I call the subject's eroticized
aerials of the psyche, to the "eyes" of its phantasy: something that is
created by concession or surrender, by "the laying down of the gaze.
Art then touches us in a dimension which is beyond appearance. But 'beyond
apperance' is not just anything which we do not see, but quite specific.
=46or my part, it was important, in the 'beyond appearance' to conceive of
traces of the archaic mental object in its alliance with unconscious desire
both as a phallic gaze and as a matrixial gaze.
Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger