Blind Spot

For Lacan, we are the blind spot, the stain, the mark, the tattoo, that which is outside the image. Such a theoretical understanding is confirmed in the film book, as many essays address the "outside" of the frame.

"It may be what the photograph does not show, what cannot be seen, that truly constitutes the optical unconscious" (Gunning 23).

"We expect clarity to be a function of change. We expect to be able to decipher the (nearly) static image [. . .] it only reveals our blind spot, our inability comprehensively to see or understand a given image" (Tarantino 35-36).

Blind Spot

In order to combat this "blind spot" this "outside the picture" we might look to the model of the photographic essay and provide captions: “In a picture-story, the captions should invest the pictures with a verbal context, and should illuminate whatever relevant thing it may have been beyond the power of the camera to reach” (Cartier-Bresson 46).

Maybe it would be appropriate to think of the "blind spot" in the sense given to "driving." The pun is satisfying: while we are "driving" toward something, we always have a blind spot. We endlessly move in and out of lanes, maybe never reaching our goal. As we move, as we are "driving" our blind spot shifts. The blind spot is not just one thing, but keeps moving away, like the objet @.