McGowan, Todd. The real gaze: film theory after Lacan. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.
Ideology constantly works to obscure the traumatic real of the gaze because this real threatens the stability of the social order that ideology protects. This stability depends on the illusion of wholeness and the power to account symbolically for everything. The real marks a point of failure, not just of the subject’s look but also of ideology’s explanatory power. That is to say, the real traumatizes not just the subject that encounters it but also the big Other as well.
The hold that symbolic authority has over subjects depends on the avoidance of the traumatic real that exposes the imposture of all authority.
When the subject experiences the traumatic real, it recognizes symbolic authority’s failure to account for everything. This is the key to the political power of the gaze. Though the encounter with the gaze traumatizes the subject, it also provides the basis for the subject’s freedom—freedom from the constraints of the big Other.(16)
The encounter reveals to the subject the nonexistence of the big Other, its inability to provide support for the subject’s own symbolic identity. The big Other sustains its hold over the subject through the creation of a world of meaning: when one accepts the meaningfulness of this world, one subjects oneself to the big Other and its authority. This process of subjection allows the subject to exist in a world where things make sense. But retaining this world of sense depends on the continued capitulation of the subject to the big Other. The subject pays the price for meaning with its freedom. The encounter with the traumatic real, which is an encounter with a point of non-sense within the big Other (what the big Other cannot render meaningful), frees the subject from its subjection. In the moment of the traumatic encounter, the subject experiences the groundlessness—and ultimately the nonexistence—of the big Other and the symbolic world that the big Other sustains. The traumatic encounter reveals the nonsensical status of our master signifier. As Paul Eisenstein puts it, “It exposes the ridiculousness or stupidity of the principle that enables us to make sense of the world. It reveals the Law as something we institute, but whose ultimate ground cannot be found within the domain of reason.”42 Our dependence on the master signifier for meaning necessarily evaporates as we witness its failure to provide any. (17)
As a result of the traumatic encounter with the real, freedom opens up for the subject. The point at which the symbolic order fails—and our relation to this point—becomes foundational for us as subjects. One finds the basis of one’s being in the failure of ideology’s master signifier rather than in its success. This transforms the ideological subject into a politicized and free subject.
Our ability to contest an ideological structure depends on our ability to recognize the real point at which it breaks down, the point at which the void that ideology conceals manifests itself. Every authentic political act has its origins in an encounter with the real. This is not to say that the encounter with the traumatic real is magical. It simply opens up the possibility of freedom for the subject, which the subject must constantly work to sustain. Film’s ability to facilitate an encounter with the real represents a threat to the power of ideology. However, the history of the film, perhaps more than the history of any other art form, is also a record of capitulation to ideological demands. Classical Hollywood cinema and its contemporary descendants consistently provide a fantasmatic support for the ideology of capitalist society. As Theodor Adorno describes it in Minima Moralia, “The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth.” At the same time that it promises an encounter with the traumatic real, film works to domesticate every trauma by producing docile subjects. The coexistence of these countercurrents suggests that the ideological valence of film remains up for grabs—to be decided on a case-by-case basis. And we can look to a Lacanian film theory to provide a way of embarking on this kind of analysis. When we look at and analyze a particular film, the question concerns the relationship to the gaze—and, in general, to the trauma of the real—that the film takes up.
Does a particular film obscure the gaze throughout? Does it sustain the gaze as an unapproachable absence? Does it domesticate the trauma of the gaze through a fantasmatic scenario? Does it take this fantasmatic scenario so far as to undermine it from within? And perhaps most importantly, does it allow us to encounter the gaze in its full traumatic import? (17)