Scopophilia

The Look of Desire

Lacan linked this scopophilic drive to G. W. F. Hegel's master-slave relationship when developing his theory of the gaze. Lacan demonstrated the dialectical association between the subject and the Other, which he claimed constituted subjectivity. The outside societal gaze, in effect, puts one in the social symbolically constructed “picture.” By knowing how one is being put in this picture, how one is situated in itthat is, by the way a subject is being framed by the societal gazeenables some agency to occur. One can “play” with the expected societal gaze to disturb it performatively and thereby mask identity. This raises the notion of simulacra where identity through camouflage can take place. One can mask or pretendthat is, feign a form of subjectivity precisely to avoid detection by imitating or mimicking the way the social order is “putting one in the picture.” Lacan made scopophilia more complex.

Visual and cultural theorists have taken up the notion of scopophilia as constituting a look of desire. Laura Mulvey is credited with initiating a politically feminist agenda into cinematic studies maintaining that the constituted screen that is technologically materialized through various apparatuses (television, cinema, the computer's World Wide Web, camera digitalization, cyber-screens and so on) plays with our scopophilic drive through voyeuristic, exhibitionistic, and narcissistic fantasies that enable desire to wander about in imaginative pleasure. In contrast, scopophobia is the fear of being looked or stared at. Spectators love looking at themselves in narcissistic fashion, especially when the images they see of themselves come close to the ego ideal they imaginatively hold as to how they should and do look. The confirming mirror is therefore the scopophilic drive, which assures us that we “love” ourselves in the way we believe we look. Cinema's attention to the human form, in the way cinema anthropomorphizes the image, provides ample opportunity to satisfy our needs for likeness and recognition. When we see other people as objects (as voyeurs), we covet a certain power, and we acquire power in exhibitionism through the desire of being looked at and confirmed as being beautiful and recognizable. Narcissistic scopophilia becomes an act of looking at other people and seeing them as surrogates of oneself. This is a confirmation of self-love. Spectators identify with characters in movies, as well as abjecting others, thus creating a tension between the sense of power they receive from observing others as being separate and different from themselves and the pleasure received in imagining and identifying with characters and people they are looking at.

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