From Stain to Eye-Candy

José Armando García

There are stains that are hard to bleach out. They are like small little creatures, so pertinacious we confuse them with ticks. When we look again, we realize they are not animated, yet they continue to stare back at us every time we spot them in their indelibleness.

“Don’t stare at people’s defects” is common etiquette, which seems transgressed by the egocentric conviction that such a defect is in fact what attracts our gaze. Through the schism of eye and gaze, we find that such “conviction” implicates satisfaction. Yet, what gets satisfied: the spot or the spotting?

It is quite odd that the discipline of psychoanalysis was one of the first to spot an object in the gaze. It was all along in plain sight, but not clearly elucidated. It was part of the know-how of visual artists, but it was not recognized as knowledge. It wasn’t on the art critics’ radar until Jacques Lacan came onto the scene. He pinpointed an intangible object in the form of a stain. “That little glaring object that does not belong on the surface of the sea, and that you so promptly spot. Well! That little stain in the ever-shallow picture that the world is before your eyes, that stain is rather staring at you” –such is the paraphrased anecdote that a summery Lacan recounts in Seminar XI.[1]

Lacan traces the invisible thread that goes from the stain to the object of satisfaction: “We will then realize that the function of the stain and of the gaze is both that which governs the gaze most secretly and that which always escapes from the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with itself in imagining itself as consciousness.”[2]A vision satisfied with itself, or a mouth having a taste of its own orifice, is the formulation that finally grasps the two newly added Lacanian objects: the voice and the gaze. Yet the gaze as object could not be apprehended without the poignant presence of the stain, which serves as the echo or as a resonance for the object voice.

Thus we can ask: why is it that we stumble upon the object in the gaze by means of the stain? Defining the stain as a function can help. What is a stain overall? Beyond the superficiality and the image of wholeness that the world presents before our eyes, a stain is disruptive in its reveal; the stain is that very spot in which the gaze stops seeing and starts being seen. Ultimately the stain reveals that the image of the world is full of eyes that stare back[3], and by which the gaze dwells in satisfaction. Therefore the object is made out of the consistency that satisfaction supplies.

The expression “Eye Candy” – taken from advertising jargon – comes handy here to identify the point when the stain becomes an object of satisfaction, since that visual sweet spot is the superficial thing we can’t stop gazing at. 

References

[1]Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A. Sheridan, New York/London: Norton, 1998, p.95.

[2]Ibid., p 74.

[3] Elkins, J., The Object stares back: On the nature of seeing, New York, A Harvest Book Harcourt Inc., 1996, Pp. 70-72