The Gaze

Definition

The gaze names the structured, impersonal regime of looking — as distinct from any individual's glance — through which subjects are positioned, measured and given social meaning. In the wiki's sources the concept appears in two registers. (1) The critical gaze (Irigaray via Burns): "More than other senses, the eye objectifies and masters" — the interpretive act itself as an instrument that assigns bodies and buildings their places, with the reflexive warning that the criticism claiming to expose the gaze re-exercises it ("pinning her back against the wall"). (2) The symbolic gaze (Lacan via Edelman): the men's room as "the very site of the symbolic gaze, as a space that monitors the circuitry of visual relations propping up a 'reality' in which each look of the subject is filtered through the gaze of a symbolic order that, in every sense of the word, solicits him" (p. 106); its most condensed form is the penis as "the visible gaze of the symbolic, the part of his body least his own, that takes his measure and grants him a privileged place in the structure of social meaning" (p. 106). The gaze in both registers is architectural before it is personal: it is distributed in sightlines, partitions, mirrors, apertures and room-types, and its power lies in making subjects police the visual relation themselves — "to see that what is publicly displayed is never directly observed" (p. 105).

Key Thinkers

• Lee Edelman — the gaze's spatial architectonics: the men's room as the symbolic gaze's built site; looking policed as "how their looking may be looked upon in turn" (1996/2006).
• Karen Burns — the gaze as critical power: the eye that "objectifies and masters" (Irigaray via Pollock), exercised by the criticism that names it (1997/2006).
• (Referenced, not paged — see log: Jacques Lacan, the gaze and the symbolic order; Laura Mulvey's cinematic male gaze; Michel Foucault's visibility apparatus, paged at panopticon.)
• Diana Fuss & Joel Sanders — the gaze's clinical geometry: the patient "exposed on all sides to a multitude of gazes" (the figurines, the antique heads, the analyst's visage) while the analyst himself remains "barely visible, almost entirely eclipsed by backlighting"; "an externalized gaze relayed back upon itself" in the mirror (1996/2006). See mirror, transference.

Related Concepts

• Voyeurism — the gaze's aperture-form: the singular spy at the peephole (Duchamp, Kienholz) versus the dispersed, mutual gaze of the men's room.
• Panopticon — the gaze institutionalized: Foucault's visibility as trap; Edelman's "factory for turning into cameras themselves" as its horizontal, gendered variant.
• The Men's Room — the gaze's room-type: mirrors "returning its look to itself"; the "vigilant nonchalance" that performs the gaze's law.
• Power — the gaze as capillary power: positioning subjects in "the structure of social meaning" without a sovereign watcher.
• Interpretation — the critical gaze as reading: Burns's reflexive lesson that reading assigns the places it claims to describe.
• The Uncanny — the gaze doubled: the uncanny as "a troubling… of the gaze," the subject "sensing himself unexpectedly observed," viewing himself "through the eyes of another person or thing that seems… to usurp his subjectivity" (p. 107).
• Quadrature — the gaze's prehistory: the anchored observer at the fixed point from which truth and illusion join (La Coe).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Men's Room (Edelman 1996/2006) — the symbolic gaze's built site: "the very site of the symbolic gaze" (p. 106); "the gaze of the symbolic order sees male bodies into social meaning" (p. 108); the doubled glance ("remains alert to observe the glance," p. 105); "Are you looking at me?" as the anxiety that condenses "the capacities of gay men to transform, or to queer, the consistency of the reality produced and assured by the gaze of the symbolic" (p. 105); the uncanny's "doubling… of the gaze" (p. 107).
• A House for Josephine Baker (Burns 1997/2006) — the critical gaze: Griselda Pollock's Irigaray-inflected premise that "More than other senses, the eye objectifies and masters" (note 3); the Baker readings as the gaze's racialized operation — and Burns's reflexive check that retrieving Baker "as an exemplum of alterity is to keep pinning her back against the wall."
• Spatial seductions (Meninato 2018) — the gaze's aperture: the voyeuristic structure as a designed spatial device shared across Duchamp's Étant donnés and Kienholz's The State Hospital.
• Thick Edge (Borden 1996/2006) — the gaze at the corporate gate: the Sartrean "'other's look'" that confers spatiality on the viewer; the mirror-gate returning "not a view of Broadgate but… of themselves playing a role within it."
• Berggasse 19 (Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006) — the gaze's clinical geometry and its third topology: "the patient suddenly finds himself exposed on all sides to a multitude of gazes. Viewed from both left and right by a phalanx of ancient figurines (all displayed at eye-level and arranged to face the patient), as well as from behind by a collection of detached antique heads and from in front by Freud's imposing visage, the patient is surveyed from every direction" — while the watcher's own face "remains barely visible, almost entirely eclipsed by backlighting from the window behind him" (p. 118). The mirror-on-window adds the relay: "forcing the subject of reflection to confront an externalized gaze relayed back upon itself," interrupting "the reassuring classical symmetries… of seeing and being seen that constitute the traditional humanist subject" (p. 119). See mirror, mirror-stage, transference.
• Ornament and Order (Soulillou 2002/2006) — the gaze as ornament's birth-condition: "To ornament there must be two. Ornament is born under the gaze of another, as a flower blossoms under the light. It is the mark of socialization" (p. 316) — Kant's desert island as the limit case: without "the gaze of another," without "the inter-sexual differentiation" or "the intra-sexual differentiation of hierarchy," ornamentation has no pleasure and no possibility. The gaze here is not surveillant (Edelman) nor mastering (Burns) nor clinical (Fuss & Sanders) but socializing: the look under which an ornament is ornament — the gaze as the condition of the ornamental field's existence rather than its policing. See ornamental-ground-plan, woman-as-decoration, aesthetic-judgment.

Open Questions

• Edelman's gaze is mutual and horizontal (every patron watches every glance); Burns's is critical and vertical (the critic's eye masters its object); Foucault's is centralized (the tower); Meninato's is singular (the peephole). Is "the gaze" one mechanism with four geometries — and which geometry does the designed interior actually install?
• If "the gaze of the symbolic order sees male bodies into social meaning," can design refuse the gaze (sightline geometry, partition, opacity) or only redistribute it — is there a gaze-free interior?
• The wiki's privacy and thick edge traditions treat visual control as a boundary problem; the gaze tradition treats it as a subject-forming one. Where does looking stop being about access and start being about identity?
• Soulillou's socializing gaze ("Ornament is born under the gaze of another," p. 316) is the first register on this page that is enabling rather than objectifying or policing — ornament requires the other's look to exist at all. Is there a gaze-geometry the page's typology lacks — the mutual, constitutive look of a social order acknowledging its members — and is the decorated interior its principal site? See ornamental-ground-plan.