Lacan’s Mask-Screen
Maro Bellou
In Seminar XI, Lacan develops the idea of the screen as something that mediates the relationship between the subject and the gaze. The field of vision is not something neutral for the subject: there can be no naked vision, since the symbolic order always comes between the subject and the object. Precisely because the scope register is never completely independent of language, it cannot be transparent but lays “traps”.[1] Moreover, the human subject is captive to the imaginary, but the human subject is the only living being – unlike animals – who has the means to transcend it, and this is precisely what he can achieve thanks to the screen: “Only the subject – the human subject, the subject of desire that is the essence of man – is not, unlike the animal, entirely caught up in this imaginary capture. He maps himself in it. How? In so far as he isolates the function of the screen and plays with it. Man knows how to play with the mask as beyond which there is the gaze. The screen is here the locus of mediation.”[2]
Lacan places the image-screen at the point where the subject’s gaze toward the object and the gaze emanating from the object toward the subject intersect. In a figure known to us already from Renaissance studies of perspective, the subject from a position of superiority (over)sees the object, confirming through this geometric arrangement its dominance in the sphere of representation.
Lacan’s radical break with this arrangement is summed up in a characteristic passage: “I am not simply that punctiform being located at the geometrical point from which the perspective is grasped. No doubt, in the depths of my eye, something is painted. The picture, certainly, is in my eye. But I am in the picture.”[3] The subject sees and is seen at the same time, and for this very reason it resorts to the image-screen: to attenuate the pressure and brilliance of the gaze that looks at it.
The human subject may be captured by the gaze of the world, but at the same time can resist this captivity thanks to the mediation of the mask-screen. In a way, the screen works for the human subject as a counterweight to the immediacy of the invasion of the real. The mask-screen, to some extent – but only to a certain extent – frees or enfranchises the subject from the wild grip of the real. At the same time, the screen indicates the existence of something invisible but without making it visible, i.e. it declares the impossibility of the transition of the real to the lucid status of representation. There is always something in the scopic register that never rises to the surface of the visible. The real always appears with a mask; far from eliminating the real, the screen succeeds with its mediating role in “taming” it, mitigating the impact of its ineffable presence.