The Gaze

For Lacan, our position is not the one looking. Rather, we are the ones being looked at. It does not matter if we are actually surveilled 24/7 by cameras or private detectives. Following Sartre (but departing from his concrete example), "The gaze that I encounter--you can find this in Sartre's own writing--is, not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other" (84).

Offering his own example, Lacan refers to a fishing expedition: "It was a small can, a sardine can. It floated there in the sun, a witness to the canning industry, which we, inf act, were supposed to supply. . .You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn't see you!" 

But Lacan insists that it does see him: "it was looking at me, all the same. It was looking at me at the level of the point of light , the point at which everything that looks at me is situated--and I am not speaking metaphorically" (95).

He interprets: "it is rather it that grasps me, solicits me at every moment, and makes of the landscape something other than a landscape, something other than what I have called the picture"

Instruction: Notice what the 'gaze' is telling us and be willing to be "surprised" by the world. To be fixed in its gaze. It seems like this object, this little glimmer of light, this is the 'wide image' -- that which is no longer a "picture" but a figure, the objet @.