The Stain

http://vanessaattia.wordpress.com/felt/

It is fortuitous that Vanessa's Felt, which I used as a model for my Mystory, contains a major Lacanian figure: "the stain." "The stain" is our position in a picture. Instead of being a self-conscious, transparent, Cartesian subject, we should see ourselves as the blind spot, that which cannot be seen. Lacan contrasts this with the idea that we are a subject which is able to represent our Weltanschauung or philosophy. This would be a conscious exploration of our position. Instead, we are positioned by the invisible interpellation within the field of the gaze (explored in another post).

Instruction: Recognize our position as the blind spot, as somehow outside the frame of the picture: "if I am anything in the picture, it is always int he form of the screen, whcih I earlier called the stain, the spot" (97).