A Room with a View
Alicia Arenas
“The eye and the gaze - this is […] the split in which the drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field.” [1]
J. Lacan
When oriented by the ideal, the subject’s vision decorates the horizon with its preferred view of the world – including its own image – in order to enjoy, or to suffer, depending on the inclination of the fantasy. “The regulatory function of form” [2] hides what slips within the field of vision: the presence of the gaze. An unconscious operation veils the gaze by projecting it outside, toward the field of the Other.
This defensive strategy alone includes its reversion. The new perspective situates the subject in the picture, as photo-graphed [3] by the Other. Therefore, when a contingency illuminates the scene, a gaze emerges from outside disorganizing the previously constructed view.
The effect of the illumination varies, it can open up to the way of desire producing an awakening in the subject, or conversely, it may initiate an anxiety-provoking struggle that involves imaginary castration (- j). In any case, the new perception unveils what our defenses try to deny by separating it from consciousness.
The split between the eye and the gaze can also be staged, as it happens with the trompe-l’œil, an image that tricks the eye with a fake realism that provokes a sudden encounter with the split. What makes it work is the trick of presenting a veil that suddenly reveals its fakeness. Lacan associates that with the lover’s discourse, where the lover says “What I look at is never what I wish to see.”[4] It happens as well with the link between painter and viewer.
In Seminar XI, Lacan refers to the tale of Zeuxis and Parrhasios; two artists from the 4th Century BCE, who produced frescoes on the walls. There was a competition between them both, about whose paintings were more realistic. Zeuxis painted a bunch of grapes that the birds attempted to eat. After which he went to see Parrhasios’ work and when in front of it, he asked for the curtain to be lifted so he could see the painting underneath, only to realize that the painting was the curtain itself. It was then that Zeuxis had to accept that Parrhasios was the winner because even though Zeuxis was able to trick the birds, Parrhasios’ work deceived the eye of a human, a fellow artist. Lacan uses this story as an example of a triumph of the gaze over the eye, adding that “The relation between the gaze and what one wishes to see involves a lure. The subject is presented as other than he is, and what one shows him is not what he wishes to see.”[5]
References
[1] Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, New York/ London, Norton & Company, 1977, p. 73.
[2] Ibid., p. 71.
[3] Ibid., p. 106.
[4] Ibid., p.103.
[5] Ibid., p. 104.