Gaze

, by Hieronymus Bosch, shows the bending figure looking forward, steadily, intently, and with fixed attention, while the other figures in the painting look in various directions, some outside the painting. The gaze ( ), in the figurative sense, is an individual's (or a group's) awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups, or oneself. Since the 20th century, the concept and the social applications of the gaze have been expanded by phenomenologist, existentialist, and post-structuralist philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre described the gaze (or the look) in Being and Nothingness (1943). Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), developed the concept of the gaze to illustrate the dynamics of socio-political power relations and the social dynamics of society's mechanisms of discipline. Jacques Derrida, in The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Come) (1997), elaborated upon the inter-species relations that exist among human beings and other animals, which are established by way of the gaze.

, by Hieronymus Bosch, shows the bending figure looking forward, steadily, intently, and with fixed attention, while the other figures in the painting look in various directions, some outside the painting.]] The gaze ( ), in the figurative sense, is an individual's (or a group's) awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups, or oneself. Since the 20th century, the concept and the social applications of the gaze have been expanded by phenomenologist, existentialist, and post-structuralist philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre described the gaze (or the look) in Being and Nothingness (1943). Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), developed the concept of the gaze to illustrate the dynamics of socio-political power relations and the social dynamics of society's mechanisms of discipline. Jacques Derrida, in The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Come) (1997), elaborated upon the inter-species relations that exist among human beings and other animals, which are established by way of the gaze.

Psychoanalysis

In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Lacan's view on the gaze changes throughout the course of his work. Initially, the concept of the gaze was used by Lacan through his psychoanalytic work on the mirror stage. The mirror stage occurs when a child encountering a mirror learns that they have an external appearance. Theoretically, this is where the child begins their entrance into culture and the world. The child enters language and culture through establishing an ideal image of themself in the mirror. This image is someone the child can aspire to be like and work towards. The role of the ideal ego or self can also be filled by other people in their lives such as parents, siblings, teachers etc. In his later essays however, Lacan refers to the gaze as the anxious feeling that one is being watched. More specifically, it is when the object that one is viewing is somehow looking back at the subject on its own terms. The psychological effect upon the person subjected to the gaze is a loss of autonomy upon becoming aware that they are a visible object. Lacan extrapolated that the gaze and the effects of the gaze might be produced by an inanimate object, and thus a person's awareness of any object can induce the self-awareness of also being an object in the material world of reality. The philosophic and psychologic importance of the gaze is in the meeting of the face and the gaze, because only there do people exist for one another.

Systems of power

The gaze can be understood in psychological terms: "to gaze implies more than to look at – it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze." In Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (2009), Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright said that "the gaze is [conceptually] integral to systems of power, and [to] ideas about knowledge"; that to practice the gaze is to enter a personal relationship with the person being looked at. Foucault's concepts of panopticism, of the power/knowledge binary, and of biopower address the modes of personal self-regulation that a person practices when under surveillance; the modification of personal behaviour by way of institutional surveillance. In 'The politics of the gaze: Between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty', Nick Crossley (1993) argued that Foucault's account of the Panopticon and Panoptic power has deficiencies that Merleau-Ponty's philosophy allows us to overcome. In The Birth of the Clinic (1963), Michel Foucault first applied the medical gaze to conceptually describe and explain the act of looking, as part of the process of medical diagnosis; the unequal power dynamics between doctors and patients; and the cultural hegemony of intellectual authority that a society grants to medical knowledge and medicine men. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), Foucault develops the gaze as an apparatus of power based upon the social dynamics of power relations, and the social dynamics of disciplinary mechanisms, such as surveillance and personal self-regulation, as practices in a prison and in a school.

Postcolonial gaze

First referred to by Edward Said as "orientalism", the term "post-colonial gaze" is used to explain the relationship that colonial powers extended to people of colonized countries. Placing the colonized in a position of the "other" helped to shape and establish the colonial's identity as being the powerful conqueror, and acted as a constant reminder of this idea. The postcolonial gaze "has the function of establishing the subject/object relationship ... it indicates at its point of emanation the location of the subject, and at its point of contact the location of the object". In essence, this means that the colonizer/colonized relationship provided the basis for the colonizer's understanding of themselves and their identity. The role of the appropriation of power is central to understanding how colonizers influenced the countries that they colonized, and is deeply connected to the development of post-colonial theory. Utilizing postcolonial gaze theory allows formerly colonized societies to overcome the socially constructed barriers that often prohibit them from expressing their true cultural, social, economic, and political rights.

See also

References

Further reading

Armstrong, Carol and de Zegher, Catherine, Women Artists at the Millennium. MIT Press, October Books, 2006. de Zegher, Catherine, Inside the Visible. MIT Press, 1996. Ettinger, Bracha, "The Matrixial Gaze" (1995), reprinted as Ch. 1 in: The Matrixial Borderspace. University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Lacan: On the Gaze." Introductory Guide to Critical Theory — see external links. Florence, Penny and Pollock, Griselda, Looking back to the Future. G & B Arts, 2001. Gardner-McTaggart, A. (Forthcoming), International Capital, International Schools, Leadership and Christianity, Globalisation Societies and Education. Taylor and Francis. Jacobsson, Eva-Maria: A Female Gaze? (1999) — see external links. Kress, Gunther & Theo van Leeuwen: Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. (1996). Lacan, Jacques:Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. NY & London, W.W. Norton and Co., 1978. Lacan, Jacques: Seminar One: Freud's Papers On Technique (1988). Lutz, Catherine & Jane Collins: The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic (1994). In: Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994. Edited by Lucien Taylor. New York: Routledge. pp. 363–384. Mulvey, Laura: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975, 1992). Notes on The Gaze (1998) — see external links. Pollock, Griselda, Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity. Routledge, 1988. Pollock, Griselda (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Image. Blackwell, 2006. Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: an introduction to visual culture. Oxford University Press, 2009. p. 94, 103. Paul, Nalini: The Female Gaze — see external links. Schroeder, Jonathan E: SSRN.com Consuming Representation: A Visual Approach to Consumer Research. Theory, Culture and Society, Volume 21, Number 1, 2004.

External links

Notes on The Gaze Robert Doisneau, Un regard Oblique, 1948 — photograph illustrating gaze The Male Gaze , with photographs of several advertisements Aux Fenêtres de l'âme (Windows of the Soul), a Ron Padova film

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