In this blog post, I will be talking about the theory of the gaze, my understanding of it and its use in my work.
Because this theory is so broad and complicated, I will try to summarize it as much as possible. I will be taking words and opinions that I used in my dissertation because its something I used as a research for my studio practise.
The main reason for me to focus on the theory of the gaze was its misunderstanding in the modern art world and overall society. In the social media realm, the male gaze is something mentioned quite regularly as its very important in the feminist world. But in the arts world on the other side, the theory of the gaze is then used as the theory of the male gaze. In various magazines, galleries and so forth, the gaze is automatically connected to the theory of the male gaze, which is why I decided to dig deep into both and tried to create the differences between each.
But here, I will just speak about the theory of the gaze. The gaze historically speaks the most about psychoanalysis, but there is actually way more than that. The theory expands from phenomenology, which is the philosophy introduced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, further used by Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Husserl’s perspective on phenomenology starts on his publicly presented thoughts about the transcendental perspective followed by his answers surrounding the fundamental worries about human knowledge. This transcendental phenomenology was unnatural and therefore needed a lot of answers, which is why there is plenty of introductions to it as convincing motives for the adoption of it. One of which being the Cartesian way. It was because of his interest in Wesenschau; translated as look into essences, which suggests the ocularcentric thought influence. Although he retained a visual bias in the idea of it, he still undermined the spectatorial distance between viewing subject and viewed object in the Cartesian epistemological tradition. There are two important parts which need to be depicted. One of them being that we as viewers become more concerned with the thing’s presence rather than our cognitive relation to these things. The second one is the way we take these things to be there as a matter of course…. self-evidently and unproblematically.
Those together then propose the idea that all judgements concern the world.
On the other side of phenomenology was then Heidegger and his questioning of Being. His idea was to oppose the Western philosophy that states that Being must be thought of something thats permanent and unchanging. He opposed to it with the idea that Being is a temporal unfolding aka the time itself. Heidegger connects this to the Hebraic emphasis on hearing God’s word rather than seeing the manifestations. One of the main points is that to answer questions like ,,what there is or why there is anything at all” we would have to engage in onthology which central question concerns the meaning of being. Heidegger’s interest in the Greek attitude of wonder, which ‘lets things be’, lead him to linking that the basic state of sight shows itself in a peculiar tendency of Being which belongs to everyday-ness… the tendency towards seeing. Based on his opinions, we designated the tendency by being curious. Curiousity is not confined to seeing, but it expresses the tendency towards the peculiar way of letting the world be encountered by us in perception. Heidegger is known to not be happy about the technological way things became at that time as that time carried the distancing of subject and object to the extreme, making the presence-at-hand (something in front to be seen) more important than ‘readiness-to-hand’; using something without visualizing it first. Thanks to his critique of the primacy of vision, Heidegger was being seen as stressing the priviledge of the ear instead before being placed in the Romantic lineage of visionary innocence. Following that, and the claims around the light which presupposes the openness to the Being, Heidegger is known to introduce two visual modes. The assertoric one and the aletheic gaze. Assertoric gaze is meant to be inflexible, monocular, abstracted, and aletheic gaze on the other hand is multiple, inclusionary, horizontal, and unaware of its context.
Now, we move forward to Sartre and his hostility towards any redemptive notion of vision. His point was that the hypertrophy of the visual leads to a problematic epistemology which supports the hegemony of space that then produces a dangerously inauthentic version of the self. Sartre in his writings constantly comes back to the mention of the evil eye, or the mortifying power of the gaze, which is speculated to be connected to the trauma he experienced as a teen. Because of the death of his father, Sartre found the same role in his grandfather. The grandfather, obsessed with photography, made Sartre’s thoughts play the role of the camera eye turning the other into stone, as he would be caught in the field of gazes while posing for the photographs to be taken. One of the things that happened was that Sartre, only thanks to mirrors found that he was not the handsome man he was told to be by his grandfather. Sartre is then known to introduce a break between consciousness and sights of the ocularcentric tradition, challenging the compression of the eye and the I as he was able to overpower the pressure of the play of mirrors and the defining power of adult gazes.
Merleau-Ponty follows Husserl with thinking that the existence of a thing is indicated by multiple profiles. It is the nontranscendental perspectivalism that reconveys people with the objective world. Merleau-Ponty also took a risk with taking liberties with Descartes’s claim in which its not the eye but the soul that sees, and created his turn on it as its is the soul which sees, not the brain. Thanks to that, the world seemed to be the space which was measured from ‘me’ as zero point of dimensions in which we live from the inside.
All those then indicate that the gaze has no owner, which contrasts the theory of the male gaze.
Jacque Lacan’s insight surrounded three orders. Imaginary, which introduces us to the real concept of the mirror stage (infant with its misrecognition faces the ideal ego that corresponds to what ‘he himself was’ and the ego ideal that corresponds to what ‘he himself would like to be’). The Symbolic which organizes it by its giving of directions is the second order. It is depicted by the use of language as the constitution of identity is connected to the Hegelian idea of recognition, and is known as the pre-existing order. The last one and also the harderst order to be understood is the order of the Real. This order resists symbolization and is positioned outsided outside the Imaginary and the Symbolic… it exists only in the realm of the impossible. It does not stand as a word for reality and is impossible to be heard or seen.
Lacan’s theory uses the cones of vision in which screen shares its place with the image. Screen here has the use of protection. It is the protection between the gaze and the subject which tames it.
This blog post is long, but very important for my practice as all those points stated by each of the philosophers support my work.
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Carman, T. (2003) ‘’What is Fundamental Ontology?,’’ in Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse and Authenticity in Being and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Modern European Philosophy), pp. 8-52. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511498060.002
Fróis, J. P. (2010) ‘’Lacan in Art Education’’, VISUAL RESEARCH, 36(2), pp. 1-14
twentieth century: moore to popper. 4th edn. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=1968876 (Accessed: 17 February 2022).
Heidegger, M. (1964) The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking. Available at: https://grattoncourses.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/22the-end-of-philosophy-and-the-task-of-thinking22.pdf (Accessed 21 February 2022).
Heidegger, M., Macquarrie, J., Robinson, E. (1962) Being and Time. Malden, MA, Blackwell.
Husserl, E., Alston, W. P., & Nakhnikian, G. (1964). The idea of phenomenology. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff.
Jay, M. (1993) Downcast eyes: the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought, Berkerley: University of California Press.
Johnson, A. (2018) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/ (Accessed: 6 February 2022)
Jonas, H. (1982) The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. Chicago.
Sarup, M. (1992) Jacques Lacan. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf (Modern cultural theorists).
Shand, J. (2015) Central works of philosophy v4: twentieth century: moore to popper. 4th edn. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=1968876 (Accessed: 17 February 2022).
Smith, A. D. (2015) Edmund Husserl: The Idea of Phenomenology. Central works of philosophy v4 : twentieth century: moore to popper. 4th edn. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=1968876 (Accessed: 17 February 2022).
Solomon, R.C. (2001) Phenomenology and Existentialism. Available at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8dIGi8LgtQMC&pg=PA400&lpg=PA400&dq=%E2%80%98%E2%80%99one+congeals+consciousness,+one+darkens+it.+Consciousness+is+the+no+longer+a+spontaneity;+it+bears+within+itself+the+germ+of+opaqueness.%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=fYq3clF1on&sig=ACfU3U3DTQEMOtwAklcRpk_Zd2uqzEvvDA&hl=cs&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiN2fPQl5P2AhXxnFwKHag2ANwQ6AF6BAgGEAM#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%98%E2%80%99one%20congeals%20consciousness%2C%20one%20darkens%20it.%20Consciousness%20is%20the%20no%20longer%20a%20spontaneity%3B%20it%20bears%20within%20itself%20the%20germ%20of%20opaqueness.%E2%80%9D&f=false (Accessed: 22 February 2022).
Stratford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2003) Edmund Husserl. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/husserl/ (Accessed 3 February 2022)
