Gaze - The Libido for the Eyes (Lacan Instructions 5)

The gaze that Lacan talks about is very similar to the concept of libido. This is why I think it works in an analogical statement. Libido is to genital organs like gaze is to ocular organs. It's important, I posit, to understand the idea of desire that stems from the implications of that statement.

I think it's also important to note the power that the gaze has over the one being gazed at. For instance, the gaze has the power of transference. There is always something colonizing about being gazed at because that person is imposing themselves on your without you knowing.

The gaze reduces and annihilates the subject. But if the gaze is the underside of consciousness, how can we try and imagine it since it's always eluding us in some way. How can we think about the gaze when we think about Electracy? What is the underside of the consciousness here, is the layer between them the screen?  

And if someone sees the eye that is gazing at them then the gaze disappears. What happens, though, if someone sees themselves seeing them self? There is a past tense in Lacan's statement that allows for a shift in time, for a measurement to be made. There is here too an annihilation. But is it the annihilation of the gaze or the annihilation of the gazed at gazing back? How can we think about the camera or the telephone or just the simple act of Googling something? Lacan talks about the stain of the gaze. He says, "If the function of the stain is recognized in its autonomy and identified with that of the gaze, we can seek its track, its thread, its trace ... 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" (74). There is then an invisibility of the gazer gazing or staining in this situation. I want to ask, finally, the same question that Lacan asks: if "the gaze is that underside of consciousness, how shall we try to imagine it" (83).

The instructions for this blog is either easy or difficult, depending on how far the experimenter is trying to capture the gaze, but the implication that Sartre states is important to it: "In so far as I am under the gaze, Sartre writes, I no longer see the eye that looks at me and, if I see the eye, the gaze disappears" (84).  

Instruction 1: Take a picture of yourself projected on your screen. This can be your phone screen too if that is where you spend most of your time. 

Instruction 2: Think about non-reflective surfaces (like the Kindle Paperwhite edition), and how a gaze might be discerned from that. 

Instruction 3: Construct a series of Google poems, these can be Haiku or not. Who is writing these poems, you or the person/thing that is gazing at you through the screen?