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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   18159 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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One thing that frustrates me about media criticism is how interesting and nuanced concepts get abused and boiled down to lowest-common-denominator imitations over time

Most people don't know the half of it!

The term "gaze" that would go on to inspire the film/media studies concept of the "male gaze" was originally introduced by Lacan in his Seminar XI. Lacan was interested in exploring the way in which there's always a reciprocal interplay between observer and observed: you distort the image you receive (unconsciously), and the image in turn distorts you. The street goes both ways. There's no "I'm the Subject and I'm looking at you like an Object so haha I win" because that way of thinking is thoroughly un-psychoanalytic.

In our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constiuted by the way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it — that is what we call the gaze.
[...]
Maurice Merleau-Ponty points this out, that we are beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world. That which makes us consciousness institutes us by the same token as speculum mundi. Is there no satisfaction in being under that gaze of which, following Merleau-Ponty, I spoke just now, that gaze that circumscribes us, and which in the first instance makes us beings who are looked at, but without showing this?

The spectacle of the world, in this sense, appears to us as all-seing. This is the phantasy to be found in the Platonic perspective of an absolute being to whom is transferred the quality of being all-seeing. At the very level of the phenomenal experience of contemplation, this all-seing aspect is to be found in the satisfaction of a woman who knows that she is being looked at, on condition that one does not show her that one knows that she knows.

The world is all-seeing, but it is not exhibitionistic — it does not provoke our gaze. When it begins to provoke it, the feeling of strangeness begins too.

Any originality or nuance that may have once existed in the concept was excised by the Studies crew so that it could be turned into a political cudgel.

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