Lacan's Gaze: A Summary

To contribute to this post, or challenge malaised's summary, please leave a comment. 

How can an object gaze back at a subject? Clearly it cannot, since it has no eyes. Therefore, I propose two hypotheses that might help understand Lacan's theory. Firstly, since Lacan was a psychoanalyst, we might consider that the perceived Gaze emanating from the object is in fact coming from with: from our unconscious. Secondly, we might do well to recognise that Lacan's doctoral thesis was about paranoia – once more the Gaze (if it exists at all) might be in our own head.

Lacan reworked Freud's concept of the mirror phase, where a child first recognises itself in its reflected self or in another child. According to Freud's theory, this is an important developmental stage where the child begins to understand the boundary between itself and the outside world.

According to Lacan, the mirror stage is followed by a transition from the 'Real' to the 'Imaginary'. These terms can be likened to Freud's Id and Ego respectively. During the imaginary/Ego stage the infant still believes that it is attached to its mother. It is only when it surpasses this stage and enters the 'symbolic order' (Freud's super Ego) that it represses the imaginary stage and recognises difference.

It therefore seems a reasonable assumption that his Gaze theory can be understood in terms of his concept of the mirror stage – that is, the mistaken identity of oneself in an object (reflection or another baby, but also perhaps many other objects). This is also reminiscent of Freud's concept of the uncanny – especially the instances involving automatons or dummies.

Lacan and Freud have been criticised by feminists for their patriarchal view regarding gender – especially in their definition of the female through its lack of a phallus. Julia Kristeva has used the Lacanian triad of real/imaginary/symbolic orders to propose a new reading of the psyche that is maternal in nature.

The Gaze in Film and Art

As early as 1975 Laura Mulvey discussed how representations of men and women in film could be analysed using Freudian psychoanalysis. She identified roles in films and the associated pleasures experienced by male viewers. She argued that these pleasures related to the construction of the male psyche, but she also went much further by identifying how this reveals and reinforces patriarchal bias in film... and also in psychoanalytic theory. According to Mulvey, the male viewer identifies with the male protagonist in much the same way that the child identifies itself in the mirror stage. The male viewer takes pleasure in the objectification of the female protagonist (both by the male actor and the male viewer) and feels a sense of power as he overcomes the threat that the female represents: the threat of the lack of a penis, or symbolic castration.

Margaret Olin applies Mulvey's work to art. Olin's contribution is to propose that the male Gaze can be subverted if the sadistic power of the Gaze or the manipulation of imagery is exposed. She proposed that single point perspective heightens the power of the Gaze whereas multiple viewpoints (fragmented perspective) has the opposite effect.

Although all the theorists discussed so far were writing in the 20^th Century, the Gaze that they described presumably existed long before it was identified as such. Not only should we be able to find examples in art history, but, in fact, we can find counter examples. Manet provided a challenge to the male Gaze in paintings such as Olympia (1863) and Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882). In both paintings the Gaze is very much focussed on the woman, who is gazing straight back at us. Both paintings also allude to prostitution.