gaze (1-)

But the look will be given just as well on occasion where there is a rustling of branches, or the sound of a footstep followed by silence, or the slight opening of a shutter, or a light movement of a curtain.

These are all potential points from which one might be seen, ie become an object. It is this ‘gaze’, the one seemingly embedded in and punctuating the world, which is so uncanny. To see why, we can contrast it with another type of gaze that has a more specific profile. Zizek:

“Imaginary identification is always identification on behalf of a certain gaze in the Other. So, apropos of every imitation of a model-image, apropos of every ‘playing a role’, the question to ask is: for whom is the subject enacting his role? Which gaze is considered when the subject identifies with a certain image?

This ‘gaze in the Other’ might be that of, for example, a harsh Paternal figure: …

he is humiliating himself, preventing his success, organizing his failure, and so on; but the crucial question is again how to locate the vicious, superego gaze for which he is humiliating himself, for which this obsessional organizing of failure procures pleasure…….

In any case, this gaze has content – it is, if you like, a definite question. But the uncanny gaze is different.

Zizek cites the proverbial cinematic sequence where a subject approaches ‘some uncanny object’ such as a house (say, the house in Psycho). The impression is that the house looks back. And this moment, when the object ‘sees’ us, is in a way more anxiety provoking that if a real person simply looks at us. This phantasmatic gaze, which may or may not be present, this gap in the visual through which something does or doesn’t peep, this has a peculiarly ‘castrating’ quality. What such ‘points’ represent is not an actual being-seen, but the very possibility of being seen from a position which the subject cannot occupy. The parted curtain, the dusty windows of the house on the hill, the wind in the door, these are the crevices in which this same impossible gaze nestles. Zizek again: “The gaze ‘stands for the blind spot in the field of the visible from which the picture itself photographs the spectator.” [EYS, 201]

Such ‘points’ or blind spots, then, are all the more ‘uncanny’ for not being attached to a bearer. We might for one compare it to the similarly uncanny disembodied voice, the voice that arrives out of nowhere, that may or may not be ours or god’s or no-one’s (perhaps it has arrived from the future). This is the ‘acousmatic’ voice that cinema theorist Michael Chion speaks of. Because this voice is not ‘sourced’, it greets the subject as a naggingly insistent demand, as if it were demand itself, prior to any content. The subject does not know ‘where it is coming from’.

The uncanny gaze, likewise, is not ‘sourced’. Under, for example, the parental gaze or the gaze of the beloved, one has an idea of the image that this gaze demands. Corresponding to – ie answering - these gazes there is an Imaginary response, there is a scene that can be staged, a masque that can be performed, and this ‘masque of the Imaginary’ is propitiatory. The question of who am I for this gaze, although not free of anxiety, has at least an imaginary security, an imaginary security and Symbolic fastening. The uncanny gaze of the house on hill, the mysterious object in the landscape, has no imaginary answer. This is what has been subtracted. The disembodied gaze, like the disembodied voice, is the voice or gaze minus the Imaginary. (And complimentarily, minus the Symbolic).

The disembodied voice and the disembodied gaze, because they are not sourced, greet the subject as a demand minus content, we don’t know, in each case, ‘where it’s coming from’. But what this uncanny experience in fact reminds us of is that there is, in any voice or any gaze, this accompaniment of empty demand. The unanswerable agitation of demand as such.

Comments

[Matt]

Oh god, what a (monstrous) post.

An absolutely essential point, and one which nimbly cleaves the world of humans in two, namely between those who 'get' David Lynch, Bob Dylan, William Burroughs, Andy Kaufman, Johny Depp, and so many others, and those who don't. Those who "just can't stand __'s voice." A sometimes fun (sometimes dangerous) litmus test to perform on would-be friends, one might even say.

But not an end in itself, especially when in some of the above examples it becomes habitual, mannered, crossing over into madness. Rather it seems a necessary starting point. One wonders if there are distinctions to be made (perhaps wrt. nihilism, or madness) between this empty Symbolic-defying voice (DL) and something more hopeful, something marked by an even greater loss, say 'neuter' (MB).

[Amie]

Mark, you might already have seen it, but may I recommend Antonioni's Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo. For some reason the title in English is "Michelangelo Eye to Eye", though it should be "The Gaze of Michelangelo."
I'm not going to try and describe the 17 minute film, because the slightest description becomes dizzying, but it involves Antonioni "gazing at" Michelangelo's Moses.

[zozobra]

You don't need Lacan to get Lynch or Burroughs. Burroughs' writings are more representative of stimulus-response theory and a sort of massive psychopathology, ala Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, and some of Wilhelm Reich's ideas. Lacan's ideas seem overly conceptual, ironic, and mostly unverifiable. The beats at least had the honesty and courage to look at-- gaze at---cities eviscerated by a-bombs, at concentration camps, to describe the reality of extreme poverty, and the lives of whores and pimps without the existential subtleties or pretentions. Perhaps some frenchmen did this as well--Bataille, Celine, and Genet (tho Genet delights more in shit than in the truth), but I do not think the french filosophes engaged the world as did the better beat or surrealist writers.

[mark]

Matt, tbh I can no longer listen to Dylan's cracked, nasal voice. The man's like a relic of his former self. And I'm not sure I've exactly understood your point in the first para. Also, who or what is MB?

Amie - I'll try and watch that film. Thanks also for the Orphuls recommend elsewhere.

[Matt]

Sorry, Mark and JG, I was being a bit facetious.

It's true you don't need Lacan, but I suppose he helps, or is in some way there already in this the 'age (still) of psychoanalysis' as Hitchcock sensed it well.

I only meant to wonder where this "unsourced" gaze or voice as elaborated above might overlap with such concerns as 'a laughter from the outside' that others have discussed, or laughter as an 'event' even, that seems to sweep the world away, more than just strip it of its symbolic freight, etc.

Mark,

No, really? I love his voice. And well he only ever sounded like an angel once, when he quit smoking for two years and did 'Lay Lady Lay' etc. I think his voice now is great, just perfect. Did you listen to "Time Out of Mind"?

Maybe he's the wrong example, but what people "just don't like" about his voice, I suspect, often has to do with a poor appreciation of the balladeer folk tradition as he transforms it, a tradition of narration that speaks as if outside itself, outside of the speaker, letting the story speak ("I'll know my song well before I start singing"–or to make a bit of a stretch, as Maurice Blanchot says, "let writing write").

The link between all these artists is an appreciation for the subconscious, which led them to avoid the sentimental sap (at least without deliberate irony) of say...a Donovan.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/1347199.stm

[Natalie]

I just want to say that I have been using the Un Chien Andalou pre-eye-cutting scene as a desktop for years now and it was uncanny to find the very same on this blog, a site that I appreciate for its critical insights as well as its aethetic sense.

[zozobra]

I do love the pic.

Have you read Freud's essay on the "Joke"? ("Der Witz..." and something). I am not a Freudian but F.'s analysis of the joke scenario--that the comedian makes jokes to an audience (full of women-potential sex partners) always at the expense of some foil or stooge, thus proving his fitness or superiority over the foil--seems quite convincing; Freud reveals the brutality of humor--that some person or group is symbolically castrated by the Wit in his hopes to impress/seduce the sex-object. Somewhere I believe Lacan touched on this as well. The joke is a sword-thrust.

[zozobra]

And since you seem to be invoking, with Un Chien Andalou, the ghosts of surrealism past, perhaps we should recall the delightful malevolence, the hints of sadism, and the spite of Breton and his posse: that may not imply going so far as Dali and his drowning cats or sympathizng with the Vichy (and Breton did condemn the nazis as vociferously as he did the Stalinists), but there is always a hint of violence and anarchy to the authentic surrealist, and there is misanthropy and better, misogyny, a-plenty in the writing and the Ahht (what could be better than Ernst's Maria spanking her infant Jeee-sus). That type of non-PC spirit of humiliation--masculine, even--is sorely needed in academia and among the non-conservatives; a Nancy Pelosi perhaps even more deserving of a piss bath then the yokels and yahoos. I think Buñuel and Sal would agree.

[Jodi]

" ...has no imaginary answer. This is what has been subtracted."

Why do you say substracted as if the answer were there before? Why not say that the uncanny gaze expresses a gap in the Symbolic (the unidentifiable point from which one is seen) that cannot be filled in or answered by the imaginary?

"...minus the Symbolic." Isn't this already posited by the very notion of an uncanny gaze? Symbolic identification is the necessary correlate of imaginary identification. If you are saying that the uncanny gaze is a blind spot (the 'for whom' that remains unknown, invisible, yet present) you've aleady accounted for Symbolic identification.

And, why demand? That's what puzzled me. Why not something like a presence that may or may not be demanding. The problem is that we don't know. We don't even know if it has anything to do with us or not. Like Kafka's gate or door or whatever it is (public service announcement: proceed with caution; I may be the worse reader of Kafka ever).

Anyway, how do you get to demand? Typically, the gaze is linked to drive. What's wrong with drive in connection to the uncanny? I would think that the relentless circling stained by obscenity would work well with the uncanny.

[Mark]

"Subtraction" merely expresses the difference between the 'sourced' gaze and the empty gaze. It is meant more in the sense of a formula than a narrative (X id first present, then subtracted). However, from the point of view of the subject, for whom imaginary and symbolic securities = the default position, it is indeed exprienced as substraction - no?

'Demand', yes, but empty demand, a demand without content. Your invocation of K. is indeed apposite, as this empty demand, this nagging insistence is what we find so often in his work. And not despite the fact that "we don't even know if it has anything to do with us or not" but because.

It's (kind of) like the ominous ring of the telephone in some old films, with long silences in between: precisely becuase we don't know who it is, or if it is for us, does the ringing solicit us, exert its magneticsm. Perhaps 'demand' is misleading if one is thinking of it in apposition to 'drive' and in a strict Lacanian sense.

[CHARLES WYMAN CREASER]

is the CAN a story ? it sounds very interesting is it titled THE can? can you give the title of the book and where i might find it?