Lacan

Reading about Lacan’s theories in Hatt & Klonk’s "Art History; A Critical Introduction to it’s Methods", was very helpful in understanding Lacan’s writing. The gaze as defined by Lacan is the sensation of having the world look back at you, I suppose he means that we are never alone. As Hatt and Klonk say “There are then always two viewers; the eye which finds logic and completeness in the image, which sees a stable relationship between the self and the world, and the gaze which disturbs vision, and reminds us that no matter what the eye may seek, there will always be something missing.” This missing thing is the “castrated maternal phallus”, an idea which I find difficult to accept, because it pre-supposes the child who sees something missing in the mother is a boy. When I first read Freud as a girl, I found his idea of penis envy ridiculous, and as a woman who has born a child, I find the more recent “womb envy” theory more reasonable. Just sayin. Lacan’s version of the gaze differs from a more recent feminist idea of the male gaze, in which for much of the history of art, the viewer was assumed to be male, and in a position of power. An example of of a painting meant for the male gaze is Titian’s “Venus of Urbino”, in which the male viewer might actually posses the woman in the painting. Lacan discusses mimicry, and I’m not totally sure to what purpose. He references Roger Caillois, who was a sociologist, not a biologist, and who discounts mimicry in animals as an adaptation. Lacan says here that “On the one hand, in order to be effective, the determining mutation of mimicry, in the insect, for example, may take place only at once and at the outset. On the other hand, its supposed selective effects are annihilated by the observation that one finds in the stomach of birds, predators in particular, as many insects supposedly protected by mimicry as insects that are not.” Lacan is referring here to Batesian and Müllerian mimicry, in which a species will develop the appearance of a species that is noxious tasting, or poisonous species. An individual predator will learn to avoid the noxious species, and the the non-noxious species benefits from the resemblance. Caillois died in 1978, and Lacan wrote about mimicry in 1964; Batesian and Müllerian mimicry is a well proven theory. Nature is very efficient, if this adaptation didn’t work most of the time, mimicry in animals would not exist. I could be wrong, but it seems like Lacan is saying that species adapt by literally imitating the noxious species, rather than adapting through the process of natural selection. Lacan should have studied his Darwin a little better. For me, it becomes difficult to take everything Lacan says with complete seriousness when I feel that some of his assertions are based on flimsy evidence. In the beginning of his discussion of the mirror phase, Lacan describes the recognition of self as critical to the development of the theory of mind. He uses the classic “mirror test”, long the gold standard in distinguishing humans from other species in the ability to recognize the self. Lacan uses chimpanzees as his example, and goes on to say that chimps, who he incorrectly refers to as monkeys, quickly tire of their image in the mirror, once they recognize that it is themselves that they are looking at. I am not sure that this is true, or what studies he referenced. In any case, since Lacan wrote this in the early 60s, the mirror test has been much more fully developed, and it is now known that all great apes, elephants, orcas, dolphins, and a bird, the European magpie, can recognize themselves. Especially for those mammals with large brains, the implication is that they can recognize others as well, and may even feel empathy. Interestingly, I watched a show on ape intelligence on Nova last night, and ape do learn from imitation (mimicry), but only humans apparently actually teach each other new things, a much more efficient way of learning.