Deleuze Transcript 12 ASIDE ONE

Various French thinkers have specified some of these processes, but perhaps the most relevant one for this plateau concerns the work of Lacan. There is just a casual reference to this work, together with the work of Sartre, but in essence, Lacan argues that infants gradually come to see themselves as separate individuals, distinct from their mothers and from their environments and that a crucial stage arises when infants can see themselves in a mirror. They are able to identify themselves with an image before any social or linguistic inputs: this image is surprisingly permanent but it also hints at an eventual alienation of self. The mirror structure offers us an idealized self,contrasted with actual egos, which produces all sorts of defence mechanism in the individual psyche. This becomes a metaphor for the ways in which social arrangements reflect back to us the sense of ourselves – we receive an individual name, we are addressed as an individual, given an individual record card in school, asked for our individual opinions by politicians, and so on. We master a language that allows us to make individual utterances like – ‘I think...’ or I want...’ But this means, in effect, that we must depend on others to complete our desires. Hence the paradox of the subject -- we live with 'a freedom that is never more authentic than when we live within the walls of a prison' (Lacan , p.508) .

Lacan is vigorously critiqued throughout ATP (and Anti-Oedipus), not least because of this idea that our desires are defined by 'lack' from the beginning. They also do not like the later work which, notoriously, connects Freudian theory to classic linguistic structuralism

Sartre’s work on the look is equally gripping and I had never read it properly until D&G prompted me. There is an excellent, if sometimes dense, essay I found online concerning the development of subjectivity and intersubjectivity (Martinot, nd). By looking at other people I acknowledge their presence and importance but it is tempting to see them as objects for me, not subjects. Similarly, I recognise that I appear to the other as an object too. If we interact, we approach something like the ‘biunivocalism’ discussed below – I act as subject then the other does in turn but we never both act as subjects together. This impasse can only be solved by admitting to the conversation some socially agreed and shared medium – language or culture – that is another source of knowledge of self and other going beyond the alternate presentations of objects.

While I am here, there is also a good deal of discussion elsewhere on the notion of the 'disciplining gaze'. Foucault developed this argument in his discussion of prison systems that subjected (sic) prisoners to a constant controlling one way gaze. The idea came to some prominence in feminist work on the cinema — Mulvey, for example, argued that the dominant gaze in mainstream cinema is a male one, where women are subjected to patriarchal ideas.

References

Lacan J (1980)  Ecrits: A Selection. Associated Book Publishers (also in pdf: http://faculty.wiu.edu/D-Banash/eng299/LacanMirrorPhase.pdf)
Martinot, S. (nd) The Sartrean Account of the Look as a Theory of Dialogue. Online https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~marto/dialogue.htm