the blind gaze
joan copjec's read my desire is undeniably one of the best psychoanalytic writings of the past few decades. chapter two, the orthopsychic subject, is (in my estimation) the chapter that has had the most outside influence. copjec takes on dominant film theory to argue against the way it, in her words,
...conceives the screen as mirror; in doing so, however, it operates in ignorance of, and at the expense of, Lacan's more radical insight, whereby the mirror is conceived as screen.
— Joan Copjec, Read My Desire, p. 16
by "the screen as mirror", copjec refers to the way the concepts of "gaze" and "apparatus" have functioned in film theory. she argues the gaze is conceived primarily as panoptic, borrowing more from foucault than lacan; the subject is constituted by discourse and as such is only visible to itself through socially constructed categories and norms. this works hand-in-hand with althusser's study of apparatuses, in which "the subject was brought to accept as its own, to recognize itself in, the representations of the social order" (p. 21). although it sounds facile to say, a movie is always made for a viewer, and the viewer is expected to identify with a certain position when viewing the film. importantly, this position is one of "mastery", in which the film is fully intelligible to the subject and organized around the expected viewing position.
the issue with this conception of gaze is that it amounts to a soft determinism, in which the subject is always already the product of social forces. desire, under this framework, is merely what is instilled into the subject by social norms. the issue is that this framework renders impossible the experiences of guilt and conscience. if the desire of the subject is inherently produced by and aligned to social forces, then there is no misalignment between the self and the social, and guilty desires suddenly become impossible. this problematic allows us to theorize a desire that is not a product of social determinism and thus conceptualize what resistance might look like.
copjec finds this theorization through lacan's conception of gaze, which differs drastically from the understanding of gaze-qua-mastery that she identifies in film theory. the visual field is always oriented through signifiers, but signifiers refer to other signifiers and not directly to a signified. the visual field therefore always gestures towards an absence (the absence of the signified). this is the lacanian gaze; that which is missing from the image. as copjec writes,
When you encounter the gaze of the Other, you meet not a seeing eye but a blind one. The gaze is not clear or penetrating, not filled with knowledge or recognition; it is clouded over and turned back on itself, absorbed in its own enjoyment. The horrible truth, revealed to Lacan by Petit-Jean, is that the gaze does not see you. So, if you are looking for confirmation of the truth of your being or the clarity of your vision, you are on your own; the gaze of the Other is not confirming; it will not validate you.
— Joan Copjec, Read My Desire, p. 36
and this is how copjec, through lacan, addresses the gap found in the panoptic conception of the gaze. the subject's desire comes from the impossibility of following the law of the Other, because the Other's law is not obvious or self-identical but rather unintelligible and split by the instability of the signifier. one can never answer the question "che vuoi?"
looking and being looked at
many read copjec's critique of apparatus theory as primarily directed at laura mulvey's visual pleasure and narrative cinema, the seminal essay that essentially defined the "male gaze" in film theory. nevertheless, copjec (very conspicuously) never explicitly names mulvey in her critique. in the interest of better understanding the context in which copjec operates, i read mulvey's essay for the first time.
i argue that while there are certainly points of alignment between mulvey and apparatus theory, mulvey's analysis of "the look" is not entirely reducible to apparatus theory, making her an inappropriate target for the work copjec performs in read my desire. specifically, mulvey differentiates between two types of looking, scopophilic and narcissistic, which are not entirely compatible with one another. i argue that copjec's critique of apparatus theory offers us the tools to split the two, and that while it critiques the explanatory power of narcissistic looking, it does not necessarily critique scopophilic looking.
mulvey herself makes this split explicit:
Sections II. A and B have set out two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation. The first, scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen. Thus, in film terms, one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen (active scopophilia), the other demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator's fascination with and recognition of his like. The first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido. This dichotomy was crucial for Freud. Although he saw the two as interacting and overlaying each other, the tension between instinctual drives and self-preservation continues to be a dramatic polarisation in terms of pleasure. Both are formative structures, mechanisms not meaning. In themselves they have no signification, they have to be attached to an idealisation. Both pursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality, creating the imagised, eroticised concept of the world that forms the perception of the subject and makes a mockery of empirical objectivity.
— Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, p. 10
notice, however, how distinct this reading is from the one copjec provides in a later chapter, cutting up:
The Lacanian aphorism - desire is the desire of the Other - is often taken to mean that the subject fashions itself in the image of the Other's desire. It is this that I have been taking as a problematic political position, but my particular interest is in the problem this position presents for feminism. For when this assumption is combined with the uncovering of a masculinist bias in the ordering of social relations, then woman can only be comprehended as a realization of male desires; she can only be seen to see herself through the perspective of a male gaze. Lacan's answer to this mistaken interpretation of his formula is simply that we have no image of the Other's desire (it remains indeterminate), and it is this very lack that causes our desire. It is first of all an unsatisfied desire that initiates our own, one that is not filled up with meaning, or has no signified. That that desire is unsatisfiable is a secondary truth resulting from this primary condition.
— Joan Copjec, Read My Desire, p. 55
in mulvey's reading, the "male gaze" refers to the look of the spectator at the screen, while when copjec critiques the "male gaze", she refers to the presumed gaze of the Other at the subject. the connective tissue between the two is apparatus theory, in which the subject who looks at the screen is imagined to do so because they are positioned to identify with the gaze of the Other.
while copjec offers a strong critique of the idea that the gaze of the Other will produce a subject who then aligns with that subject position, she never addresses the previous logical connectives within apparatus theory. i argue that the connection between a subject who looks at the screen and the gaze of the Other is not self-evident. through this, we may abandon a certain conception of the Other's gaze but still retain mulvey's analysis of the spectator's look.
i mentioned earlier that aspects of mulvey's analysis do align with apparatus theory (although they do not exhaust her theoretical framework). i'll return to this argument here. i argue that mulvey's analysis of the narcissistic look, while not isomorphic with standard apparatus theory, does nevertheless share enough commonalities that copjec's critique still applies.
in the section entitled woman as image, man as bearer of the look, mulvey maps the psychological processes of scopophilic and narcissistic looking onto the gendered subject positions of woman and man (respectively) in cinema. the woman serves as the object of the look ("connote to-be-looked-at-ness", p. 11), while the man serves as the image of the ideal ego with which the spectator identifies.
admittedly, mulvey's narcissistic look is not entirely reducible to apparatus theory. mulvey, following lacan, specifically points to the identification with the male protagonist as a misrecognition; it is not a wholly congruent relation but rather one in which "he imagines his mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than he experiences with his own body" (p. 9). nevertheless, copjec's critique of apparatus theory still applies to mulvey's narcissistic look. on narcissism specifically, copjec writes:
Narcissism, too, takes on a different meaning in Lacan, one more in accord with Freud's own. Since something always appears to be missing from any representation, narcissism cannot consist in finding satisfaction in one's own visual image. It must, rather, consist in the belief that one's own being exceeds the imperfections of its image. Narcissism, then, seeks the self beyond the self-image, with which the subject constantly finds fault and in which it constantly fails to recognize itself. What one loves in one's image is something more than the image ("in you more than you"). Thus is narcissism the source of the malevolence with which the subject regards its image, the aggressivity it unleashes onto all its own representations.
— Joan Copjec, Read My Desire, p. 37
contra mulvey, one cannot be satisfied with the narcissistic look, because the identification with the male protagonist is never satisfying. mulvey offers an explanation in which the subject identifies with the male protagonist to paper over its own lack, but copjec demonstrates that this identification can never be satisfying. mulvey's analysis explicitly assumes that the subject finds satisfaction in identification, but copjec demonstrates that this analysis is insufficient. rather, we must theorize the ways in which the subject fails to identify with the male protagonist, how the attempt to identify is always already a failure.
copjec, in these lines, thus gives us the tools to critique the key link that apparatus theory makes between the subject's look and the gaze of the Other. copjec focuses mostly on the gaze of the Other, arguing that it is blind rather than panoptic, but this analysis also allows us to demonstrate that the subject's look is not necessarily aligned with the gaze of the Other. the subject does not look at the screen because they identify with the social positions instituted by social authority.
the male look
i argue then that mulvey's "male gaze", which refers simultaneously to the spectator's scopophilic look at the woman and its narcissistic identification with the male protagonist, fails to fully explain the experience of identification, which is always a mis-identification. what, then, remains of mulvey's analysis of scopophilia?
here copjec is less explicit. in fact, for a text which many read as critiquing mulvey, it's surprising to find that copjec never even uses the term "scopophilia". nevertheless, copjec's analysis of desire gives us the tools to read mulvey's analysis of scopophilia in a new light.
to return to mulvey's essay, she describes scopophilia as "the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object" (p. 9). a naive reading would concur that the subject is erotically satisfied by taking the woman as an object, but even mulvey herself complicates this reading. she writes that
But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified.
— Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, p. 13
while i do not concur that the anxiety that woman provokes is tied necessarily to biological castration and the penis, it complicates the reading of mulvey as merely arguing that the subject is satisfied by the look. rather, the look is always in tension with some fundamental lack (in mulvey, the lack of the penis).
to read mulvey, as with many early psychoanalysts, through the lens of structural linguistics rather than through biology, one notes something interesting about scopophilia. mulvey argues that the male unconscious responds to the anxiety that woman poses in two ways: fetishistic scopophilia and voyeurism.
fetishistic scopophilia denotes a situation in which
...the powerful look of the male protagonist (characteristic of traditional narrative film) is broken in favour of the image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator. The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator's look.
— Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, p. 14
(which mulvey reads as characteristic of sternberg's cinema.) on the other hand, voyeurism (which mulvey argues is used in combination with fetishistic scopophilia in hitchcock) where
The power to subject another person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned on to the woman as the object of both. Power is backed by a certainty of legal right and the established guilt of the woman (evoking castration, psychoanalytically speaking).
...
Hitchcock's skillful use of identification processes and the liberal use of subjective camera from the point of view of the male protagonist draw the spectators deeply into his position, making them share his uneasy gaze. The audience is absorbed into a voyeuristic situation within the screen scene and diagesis which parodies his own in the cinema.
— Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, p. 15
to make a similar move to the previous sections, i again argue that fetishistic scopophilia survives copjec's analysis (albeit not unchanged), while voyeurism is much more problematic. her discussion of voyeurism is where mulvey most strongly resembles what copjec refers to as the foucauldianization of the gaze, where the gaze is imagined as a spectator who enjoys full mastery over the screen and identification with the screen. interestingly, mulvey's language here ("draw the spectators deeply into his position") seems to be somewhat at odds with her earlier discussion of identification as mis-identification.
on the other hand, fetishistic scopophilia is much more compatible with copjec's analysis of desire. what i find interesting is that mulvey situates it almost exactly in terms of lacanian fantasy/ideology. ideology is the process by which the subject imagines its lack as contingent rather than structural. similarly, mulvey points to the fact that the depiction of women on screen is a site of anxiety, which is then resolved through imagining the woman as fetish or perfect object. but this resolution is always imaginary; no object can ever provide access to the object-cause of desire.
the "male look" here can be articulated very well in lacanian terms. the subject looks at the woman and imagines them as providing access to the object-cause of desire, which papers over the fundamental lack in the subject. the presentation of women in cinema exists as an ideological structure by which men project the fantasy of woman as the object of desire.
conclusion
what would a lacanian analysis of the male gaze look like? i'd argue the most promising avenue is from mulvey's own conclusion:
...the structure of looking in narrative fiction film contains a contradiction in its own premises: the female image as a castration threat constantly endangers the unity of the diagesis and bursts through the world of illusion as an intrusive, static, one-dimensional fetish. Thus the two looks materially present in time and peace are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego.
— Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, p. 18
i've argued that copjec's critique of apparatus theory applies somewhat sporadically to mulvey's actual analysis of the male gaze. it offers a useful framework through which to critique mulvey's analysis of narcissism, but an articulation of the male gaze in terms of scopophilia is still possible. i've previously gestured to the idea that a properly lacanian analysis of mulvey's narcissism would focus on the misalignment, rather than the identification, of the subject with the male protagonist. while this is outside the scope of this essay, i'll make a preliminary attempt here.
cinema often follows a structure of fantasy. it positions a subject, who then experiences a contingent lack, and resolves with the fulfillment of that lack (mapping cleanly onto the three-act structure that is now conventional in hollywood cinema). the "male gaze", as mulvey analyzes it, analyzes the way in which the women are positioned as the objects of desire, tying resolution to the sexual fantasy of possession. and yet there is a fundamental disconnect between the male spectator and the male protagonist on screen. the male protagonist offers the fantasy of possession, but the male spectator can never resolve the lack and thus can never fully identify with the male protagonist.
it is, however, this failure that allows us the possibility of a more radical cinema. the non-coincidence of the spectator and the protagonist allows for resistance to the narrative structure of cinema. (there is, i think, a remarkable alignment with copjec's argument that the untamable nature of desire allows for an understanding of subjectivity that is not fully determined by social forces, and thus represents a point of resistance against the social order.) the lacanian must understand the male gaze as unsatisfying, and thus conceputalize cinema that does not rely on it.
in the end, we return to mulvey's own words:
It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article. The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point of film history hitherto must be attacked. Not in favour of a reconstructed new pleasure, which cannot exist in the abstract, nor of intellectualised unpleasure, but to make way for a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film.
— Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, p. 8