Happy 2007

I'm reading 'The Tears Of Things' by Peter Schwenger. Here is a selection from Chapter 2.

'It is objects that look at us. Things look at me yet I see them. The picture is certainly in my eye. But I am not in the picture. Where am I then? If I am anywhere it is in the form of the screen. Not a cinema screen but one more like a Victorian fire screen positioned in such a way as to block out light and heat considered excessive for the complexion. The function of the screen is to erase the (object's) gaze from the world. How can we distinguish that which is screen from that which is not, if all we know is what we see, and we see only what we have been taught to know.

The screen, to an eye that is simulatneously overtaught and ignorant, seems invisible: we are not aware of its existence because its existence is all that we have ever been aware of. In a painting, however, the screen is palpably present in the form of the canvas. In this way a human being "isolates the function of the screen and plays with it" (quoting from Lacan's Seminar XI).

Objects may be depicted on the canvas, but they are preseen, as it were; this is one way in which their gaze is tamed.'