An Analysis On Gaze Theory

Looking relations are never innocent. If we focus on vision or visional practice, we can find many social/political elements of vision. In20th-century’s critical theories and practice, many thinkers choose "gaze" as the theme of their research work.Many commentators have been tempted to claim cultures or ages "ocularcentric" or "dominated" by vision. It is generally agreed that classical Greece privileged sight over other senses. From Plato to Descartes, in a long time of history, vision, whether see of the eye, or mental gaze, is considered to be "the noblest of the senses".Jean-Paul Sartre’s attitude to the look is very important to the theory of gaze. According to one commentator, there are more than7,000references to the look scattered throughout Sartre’s work. Sartre distinguished between the eye, a bodily organ, and the gaze, an action. We cannot see the look, but we can feel its force. Our identity is created by our awareness of the look of the other. For Sartre, the looker was active, aggressive, and the looked-at the victim of the gaze. It is the one looked at who is objectified, reified, turned into a thing, while the look is the agent--the imaginary agent of that objectification.Lacan put together Henri Wallon’s psychological research with Hegel’s theory of the gaze to produce his own theories of the mirror phase and of the dialectic of gaze and desire. Lacan is interested in the development of the "I" of the mirror phase, founded on an illusory self-recognition, and in the development of what he calls the "social I", whose own desires reflected the desires of others and, in so doing, plunge the subject into aggressive relationship with those others.Among French intellectuals in the1960s and1970s, Michel Foucault wrote more than one book to study the gaze of surveillance. Foucault was unquestionably fascinated by visual issues. The Madness and Civilization showed the extent of his appreciation of the role of vision, or more precisely, specific visual regimes, in constituting cultural categories. According to the Birth of the Clinic, the new medical gaze differed from the Cartesian privileging of internal vision at the cost of actual senses, and rejected its belief in a ideal Spectator. Instead, it emphasized the totality of observes, whose "sovereign power of the empirical gaze" played over the solid and opaque surfaces of the body."the great myth of a pure Gaze that would be pure Language:a speaking eye." According to Discipline and Punish, being observed by an unknown and omnipresent’eye" was generalizable experience. Foucault analyzed the social mechanism of an all-seeing sovereign, which was one of the main sources of the theory of gaze.The question of who is looking and who is looked at is the foundation of gaze theory.Many thinkers talked about looking and their ideas about vision formed the gaze theory. But we still have another question, on what ocassion do we choose gaze as the theme of research? That is, what the academic context of gaze theory? The answer is related to Otherness in western philosophy, Feminism, post-colonialism and post modern culture studies. More specifically, western philosophy holds that the one who is looking is subject, the one who is looked at is object, and the object is Other. Feminism is actively involved in critcizing the male gaze and post-colonial critics have pointed out the existence of a colonial gaze. The culture studies reveal that in the post modern time, we don’t konw who is looking or who is looked at, the only thing exsits is the look itself.Visuality, desire, otherness and identity are the key problems that gaze theroy most concerns: visuality, desire, otherness and identity politics. Visuality makes look possible, means everything become clear and makes the opaque transparent. It enables the spectator to move from a state of ingnorance to a state of knowledge. Desire is the key word when feminism criticizes the male gaze.Generally speaking, from the feminists’ point of view, man is "bearer of the look" and women connote ’to-be-looked-at-ness". Otherness is the sesult of looking. From the post-colonial’s point of view, the West is always looking, and the East is always looked at. The west is subject, and the East is object, the other with otherness. Gender, race and subjective are key words in the social and culture studies when it concerned with "look" and "to be looked at". All these ideas lead to the dissusion of "identity politics".For many thinkers, gaze is a subjective, mastering gaze. While commentators have come to acknowledge the "male gaze’ and "race gaze", the return of the gaze is also possible in both theory and practice.Now another kind of gaze is attracing many commentators’ attention, such as the tourist gaze and the gaze of the star. which focus on spctators’ identification with the gaze. Identification with the gaze provides a sense of complete mastery, and the spectator can also looking for mastery in a more mild way.