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Article Excerpt
Lacan's assertion in Seminar XI, "things look at me," leads him to painting, where the canvas enacts the dynamics of the screen. This essay analyzes these dynamics in Georgia O'Keeffe's Red Cannas. There the object becomes an alien "thing"; the subject becomes another kind of Thing, the equally alien Freudian complex. Between these two things shuttles, interminably, the gaze.
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In an era in which "otherness" has been foregrounded in a variety of ways, a relative latecomer is that other of the subject, the physical object. Toys, pebbles, flowers, crockery, and such--these are the accompaniments of daily life, but their domestic status does not mean that they are domesticated; there is something unheimlich, uncanny, about them. Obscured by their very familiarity, they are fundamentally unknown, not at home with us nor we with them. We may own objects, but we cannot possess them; indeed, in many cases it would be more accurate to say that things possess us, for the emotional attachments that bind us to certain objects are driven by forces of which we are largely unconscious. This is the territory that is now being explored, in various ways, by today's object-based criticism. It is not, of course, a territory that has gone wholly unexplored before this. The long tradition of still life in painting; contemporary sculpture whose "thingness" is curiously redoubled by references to everyda y objects (Claes Oldenburg, Richard Wentworth); novels about things rather than people (Raymond Roussel, Georges Perec, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nicholson Baker); poems that focus intensely on the physical object (Francis Ponge, Rainer-Maria Rilke, William Carlos Williams)--these are a few instances of artists thinking about objects. And theory, as well, has made the object its subject: Heidegger, of course, but also Baudrillard, Foucault, Lacan, and a host of others. The current turn to objects has at hand, then, abundant material and a broad choice of methodologies: phenomenological, psychoanalytical, cultural materialist, historical, sociological. Whatever approach is taken, that approach is tested to its limits by the object, which remains irrevocably other than that which attempts to think it. Hence its value, and its generative power.
In this essay, I focus on an optics of the object, that of Jacques Lacan's richly suggestive Seminar XI. Influential though it has been, this seminar is not often read in such a way as to foreground the physical object. Yet, in important ways, Lacan develops his theory of the gaze out of such objects, objects that are not merely the passive recipients of looking. Rather, in a reversal of the common view of vision, it is objects that look at us. He states: "On the side of things, there is the gaze, that is to say, things look at me, and yet I see them. This is how one should understand those words, so strongly stressed, in the Gospel, They have eyes that they might not see. That they might not see what? Precisely, that things are looking at them" (Four 109). This startling assertion is perhaps most comprehensible in the special case of a painting: an object with a subject, an object depicting a subject's way of looking, which momentarily imposes upon ours. So Lacan's question "What is the gaze?" (32) leads nat urally to the title of a whole section of the seminar, "What is a Picture?" In this essay, I will first read Lacan's theory through the lens of the physical object; I will then extend this reading to the analysis of a painted object, a flower rendered by Georgia O'Keeffe. "The look of objects," we will find, is simultaneously the way they appear to our eyes, which look at them, and the way that they may be said to look at us. Through this elusive simultaneity, we can arrive at an understanding of Lacan's concept of the gaze.
First, however, we must get a clearer sense of what is meant by Lacan's assertion that "things look at me"; this can be conveyed through the story of the sardine can. It is a story told by Lacan about himself as a young intellectual, at a time when--as with many young intellectuals--he was attempting to escape from his mind into the world of the purely physical and the values presumably found there. Naturally, the attempt was a failure. He didn't fit in with the Brittany fishermen with whom he worked shoulder to shoulder, and this was perhaps the real point of the lame witticism delivered by one Petit-Jean. He pointed out to Lacan a sardine can floating like a little boat on the water, winking and glittering in the sun. "You see that can?" he asked. "Do you see it? Well, it doesn't see you!" (Four 95). Petit-Jean found this joke highly amusing; Lacan less so--and this was not only because it underscored the fact that this young intellectual was "out of it" in the fishermen's world but also because Petit-Jean' s assumption could be questioned, as we shall see. The whole section on the gaze in Seminar XI can be seen as a belated last laugh on Lacan's working companion.
Of course Petit-Jean's joke is really only common sense. That is why it's a bad joke, since jokes always turn common sense inside out--which is also, of course, what Lacan does in his seminar. The sardine can cannot see you, it seems, because seeing is what the eye does, and the sardine can has no eye. Both physiology and philosophy have long ago exploded the assumption that seeing is done by the eye, alone and unaided. However, Lacan is after something subtler here, which is not the eye's seeing but, rather, the gaze. The difference can be gotten at by way of two diagrams given by Lacan, both in their own way misleading. The first diagram funnels the objects of the world, by way of their images, into a point that is both the physical eye and the subjective "I." The second diagram inverts the first. At the place where the "object" was found is now found a point of a different kind, the "point of light," which expands in the manner of a projected film. Here we are beginning to get some sense of what might be meant by the...
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