Men dream of women; women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women; women watch themselves being looked at. Women constantly meet glances that act like mirrors reminding them of how they look or how they should look. Behind every glance is a judgement. Sometimes the glance they meet is their own reflected back from a real mirror. A woman is always accompanied, except when quite alone, perhaps even then, by her own image of herself. While she is walking across a room or weeping at the death of her father she cannot avoid the image of herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she is taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others and particularly how she appears to men is of crucial importance for it is normally thought of as the success of her life.[1]
47 years ago John Berger described the experience of women as spectacular objects, and in 47 years little has changed. This is not surprising. Women have been watching men watch them for thousands of years. In a Persian Period (539–332 BCE) compilation of Hebrew love poetry, for instance, the woman says of her ‘Peeping Tom’ lover, “Lo, there he stands at our wall, Peeking in the window, Peering through the lattice.”[2] Ivory carvings from across the ancient Near East, known as ‘woman at the window’ carvings, show a woman looking out a window, with the perspective taken in each image that of someone on the outside looking in.[3]
Image 1. An example of the “Woman at the Window” ivory carvings. Phoenicia, 8th century BCE. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum, www.britishmuseum.org, accessed 20 May 2019.
Though Berger’s was a Marxist and not an explicitly feminist critique of visual art it has nonetheless been influential in feminist cultural theory.[4] Women, he argues, are positioned as passive under male spectatorship.[5] “Women watch themselves being looked at,” and this being looked at determines not just the relation between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The woman “turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”[6]
Berger predominantly addresses visual representations generally, sometimes visual representations of women, and rarely, despite the above quotation, the experience of being looked at. In fact, despite multiple theories of looking, from Freud’s Schaulust to Ettinger’s matrixial gaze, rarely do theories of looking address the experience of being looked at.[7]
Perhaps the most influential theory of looking is Jacque Lacan’s Freudian or post-Freudian theory of ‘the gaze’ (le regard).[8] Lacan’s theory of the gaze became influential in cultural studies particularly through Laura Mulvey’s appropriation and Foucauldian adaptation of it in her “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”[9] Mulvey adapted Lacan’s theory of the gaze toward a feminist film theory in which the spectator in cinema, aligned with the camera, is male, and the object to be looked at the passive female.[10] While Lacan and Mulvey might be helpful when analysing cinema, or generally the relationship between a viewer and the two-dimensional image, Lacan’s source material is more applicable to the lived experience of being-looked-at-ness.[11]
Sartre’s theory of the look not only privileges the experience of being looked at and possible responses to the look, it also positions the experience of being looked at as central to one’s relations with oneself and others. Sartre describes ‘the look’ (le regard) in Being and Nothingness.[12] In attempting to establish the existence of others, Sartre argues that “at least one of the modalities of the Other’s presence to me is object-ness.”[13] That object might be a person, and there is consequently a permanent possibility of my being seen by that person. The object seen by me can be replaced by a subject who sees me. “‘Being-seen-by-the-Other’ is the truth of ‘seeing-the-Other.’”[14] In looking, we become aware of our own objectivity, our consciousness being both “a pure point of view on the world” and “also an object within it.”[15] With the appearance of the other I “pass judgment on myself as an object” and “I become a new being, a being for others.”[16] One of his principle findings then is that “I get my most vivid and compelling sense of myself when I see myself reflected in the eyes of another.”[17]
Sartre illustrates the look with a passage of phenomenological fiction Hazel Barnes calls “one of the great philosophical myths.”[18] A man “moved by jealousy, curiosity, or vice” peeps and listens through a keyhole. The man is purely his actions, a “pure consciousness of things,” and the things behind the door a “spectacle” “to be seen” and “to be heard.”[19] With the sound of a footstep on the stairs, the man now becomes reflective consciousness, but he also sees himself as someone else sees him and he feels shame, for he “is indeed that object which the Other is looking at and judging.”[20] The look of the other is the “death of my possibility.”[21] It “objectifies me, petrifies me, degrades me, disintegrates my universe, alienates me from my possibilities and strips me of my transcendence.”[22] The other’s look transcends a person’s transcendence, solidifies and alienates their potentialities and they becomes a static object.[23] In looking at the other a person measures their own power, but when the other gives the look back the person loses their power.[24] It is not necessary, though, for there to be an actual other present. It is enough for the person to posit an other, and this might be in the windows of a house, or in rustling bushes, or the creak on the stairs.[25]
There are several possible responses to the look and these tend to be in bad faith.[26] Shame is the starting point for Sartre’s theory of the other, after solipsism, and the primary response to the look. For Sartre, shame is being known by the other, and “reveals my body as being seen by the Other.”[27] It is the existence of the other, “my original fall,” and connotes being cast out of paradise.[28] Shame is recognising that we are as others see us, even if they look upon us benevolently.[29] It can in turn induce at least two responses. The first is to allow myself to be “fixed by the gaze,” caving in and denying my own subjectivity.[30] In the second response I can “turn back upon the Other so as to make an object out of him [sic] in turn, since the Other’s object-ness destroys my object-ness for him.”[31] The conflict between self and other as it flows from Sartre’s theory of subjectivity is summarised by Merleau-Ponty in “Metaphysics and the Novel”:
It is thus that one surmounts or, rather, sublimates the experience of the Other. We easily escape from transcendence as long as we are dealing only with things: the transcendence of other people is more resistant. If another person exists, if he too is a consciousness, then I must consent to be for him only a finite object, determinate, visible at a certain place in the world. If he is consciousness, I must cease to be consciousness. But how am I then to forget that intimate attestation of my existence, that contact of self with self, which is more certain than any external evidence and which is the prior condition for everything else? And so we try to subdue the disquieting existence of others.[32]
I can allow myself to be dominated by the look, or I can use the look to dominate the object of my look so they cannot look back, “but in either case we are escaping from freedom into an ossification based on mauvaise foi.”[33]
One might also feel fear at the look, “the feeling of being in danger before the Other’s freedom.”[34] Another response to the look, not necessarily in bad faith, is to identify oneself with the other’s freedom. This freedom is the other’s “for-itself,” their capacity to turn me into an object-for-them. To identify with the other’s freedom requires me first to accept that I am the in-itself the other takes me for, but it also requires that the other is “enamored” of me, “to be the epitomizing object in his [sic] universe, to be the limit toward which his [sic] freedom reaches – to love me.”[35] The ideal of love according to Sartre is allowing oneself to become an object toward which the other devotes their freedom.[36]
Sartre’s theory of the look was initially set out in Being and Nothingness, but there are traces of it in work as early as Nausea, and it threaded through the remainder of his work, albeit altered with the passage of time. Nausea’s Roquentin speaks of “the power of my gaze,” and he is alienated and petrified by the look of the other.[37] In the play “No Exit” (1944), the three figures, Garcin, Inez, and Estelle, though dead, are vulnerable to the views and opinions of others.[38] Trapped together in the afterlife, the play is about being-for-others, with Garcin spouting the famous “Hell is – other people!”[39] Later, in St Genet: Actor and Martyr (1952), the look of the other is Genet’s “original crisis,” it surprises and rapes him, and turns him into a life-long object.[40] Even in The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), in which Sartre is sometimes thought to have abandoned his earlier philosophy, he writes of the “us-object,” a large group which can situate itself in opposition to an external threat.[41]
An excerpt from K. Imray, "Mr Handsome and the Look" (Dissertation, Deakin University, 2020).
Notes [1] John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Directed by Michael Dibb. London: BBC, 1972a). [2] .הנה זה עומד אחר כתלנו משגיח מן־החלנות מציץ חחרכים Translation that of Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Anchor Bible Series, 7C; New York: Doubleday & Company, 1977), 3. [3] J. Cheryl Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women, JSOTSS 125 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 73. [4] Suzanna Walters, Material Girls: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 51. [5] Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972a. [6] John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972b), 47. [7] Bracha Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace (Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2006); Freud’s theories on Schaulust (scopophilia) may be found across a selection of his writings, including Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (Leipzig; Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1915), 22. [8] See Michael A. Peters, “Pedagogies of the Image: Economies of the Gaze,” Analysis and Metaphysics 9 (2010): 42–61, and Todd McGowan, The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), for helpful summaries of Lacan’s gaze. [9] Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. [10] Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 11. Philippa Kelly (“The Language of Subversion: Discourses of Desire in Painted Woman, The Children’s Bach, and Messages from Chaos.” Southerly 54, no. 1 [1994]: 143–156 [146], emphasis original) notes that while “Mulvey does thereby acknowledge the female’s resistance to confinement within the male gaze, this resistance is theorized as something that a female is, rather than something she does.” [11] Lacan encountered Being and Nothingness in the mid-1950s, first developing his theory of le regard and then distinguishing it from Sartre’s le regard in 1964 (Peters, “Pedagogies of the Image,” 46; Elizabeth Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal [Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006], 182). [12] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. H. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1993). [13] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 253. [14] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 257. [15] David Detmer, Sartre Explained: From Bad Faith to Authenticity (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2008), 92. [16] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 222. Sartre was influenced by Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, mediated through Beauvoir’s early drafts of She Came to Stay, and in Being and Nothingness he identifies himself as the Master and the other remains the Slave, “the inessential consciousness who never becomes essential” (Evans, “Sartre and Beauvoir on Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and the Question of the ‘Look,’” 100). [17] Detmer, Sartre Explained, 92. Sartre’s work is often as much psychology as it is phenomenology. Inevitably, the literary studies in this thesis are at once phenomenological and psychological. [18] Hazel Barnes, The Meddling Gods: Four Essays on Classical Themes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974), 22. [19] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 259. [20] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 260, 261. [21] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 264. [22] Guillermine De Lacoste, “Sartre’s ‘New Gaze’ in Saint Genet: A Lacanian Reading,” Sartre Studies International 10, no.1 (2004): 44–60 (45). [23] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 263. [24] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 266. While the earlier translations of Sartre’s work retain his masculine pronouns, and I have retained those pronouns in quotations, I have otherwise tried to use gender neutral language. [25] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 364. [26] Sartre (Being and Nothingness, 268) lists fear, shame and pride, and recognition of slavery. [27] Richard Pearce, “On Being A Person: Sartre’s Contribution to Psychotherapy,” Existential Analysis 22, no. 1 (2011): 83–95 (89); Holveck, Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Lived Experience, 81. [28] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 263; De Lacoste, “A Lacanian Elucidation of Sartre,” 28. [29] Joseph Catalano, Reading Sartre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 152. [30] Nancy Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 113. [31] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 473. [32] Merleau-Ponty, “Metaphysics and the Novel,” 29, emphasis original. [33] Weightman, “Jean-Paul Sartre,” 102. [34] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 268. [35] Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism, 113. [36] Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism, 114. [37] See Evans, “Sartre and Beauvoir on Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and the Question of the ‘Look,’” 101. [38] Robert C. Solomon, Dark Feelings, Grim Thoughts: Experience and Reflection in Camus and Sartre (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 181. [39] Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit, trans. S. Gilbert, in No Exit and Other Plays, 1–46 (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 45; Solomon, Dark Feelings, Grim Thoughts, 178. [40] De Lacoste, “A Lacanian Elucidation of Sartre,” 20. [41] Steve Martinot, “The Sartrean Account of the Look as a Theory of Dialogue,” Sartre Studies International 11, nos. 1 & 2 (2005): 43–61 (45).