The Cinematic Mode of Production (Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture) by Jonathan Beller

Author:Jonathan Beller [Beller, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: University Press of New England
Published: 2012-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

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The Scopic, or, the Agency of the Visual Object

We have begun to observe the crises that the technological development of the image represents for language, for the order of representation. The “noise” of the image on language links the emergence of the unconscious with the visual, and, as I shall further elaborate, it is the visual that provides the basis of Lacan’s ocularcentric theory of the subject. In the work of Lacan, the struggle of the symbolic with the unconscious is founded on the struggle of the symbolic with the visual. It should be noted that Lacan studies Freud’s unconscious, which emerges, coincidentally, with cinema. This unconscious, which in Freud first appears as ruptures in language, in Lacan’s analysis is derived scopically.

In the latter half of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, one may grasp that the subject as an effect of the signifier is transposed from a visual relation. Citing Merleau-Ponty, Lacan specifies that in terms of our being (as distinct from our function as subject), “we are beings who are looked at in the spectacle of the world. That which makes us consciousness institutes us by the same token as speculum mundi” (FFCP, 75). Having specified the mise-en-scène of human being, Lacan immediately introduces an important qualification: “The world is all-seeing, but it is not exhibitionistic—it does not provoke our gaze. When it begins to provoke it, the feeling of strangeness begins too. What does this mean, if not that in the so-called waking state there is an elision of the gaze, and an elision of the fact that not only does it look, it also shows. In the field of the dream, on the other hand, what characterizes the image is that it shows” (FFCP, 75). The emphasis here is on a certain bivalence of the gaze that Lacan will develop at some length. We are seen in the world, but it is only with the inauguration of our seeing that the dialectics of subjectivity emerge. For Lacan, the bivalence of seeing is embodied in a split between being and meaning, the eye and the gaze. “In so far as I am under the gaze, Sartre writes, I no longer see the eye that looks at me and if, I see the eye, the gaze disappears” (FFCP, 84).

The point is that this involution of the eye and the gaze introduces into perception an imaginary dimension. In Sartre’s example, there is a demonstrable oscillation, “when I am under the gaze, I no longer see the eye,” that is, I imagine being looked at by the Other and in doing so perceive myself as seen. “If I see the eye, the gaze disappears,” that is, when I look, when I see the eye as an object or image, I do not see (that I am seen). In each direction, as it were, of this fundamental dynamic between self and Other, something is missed. The imaginary element (the point from which I am seen) is in the field of the Other.

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