The Gaze Explained: Sartre, Berger, Mulvey, Foucault, Fanon

[00:00:00]good hello and welcome to the final episode of i suppose maybe season one i'll see if i end up doing another run of these uh these short videos these short videos these videos again in future so welcome to talky time the thing that i've inexplicably called that for some reason so these are basically if you don't know informal unscripted discussions i suppose you could say about whatever given topic we happen to be talking about and today we're going to be looking at the gays so we'll be looking at several people with relation to the gays so we're looking at saturn we'll be looking at john burger laura malvey bell hooks michel foucault and also franz fanon so looking at quite a couple of people and also i'll probably also bring up edward saeed so we're looking at quite a couple of people today now firstly there's a little concept that we need to discuss first of all the idea of a subject versus an object so generally in philosophy we would say that we humans are subjects which means that we are thinking things we are able to have thoughts and feelings and desires and goals and interests and whatever right that's what we're able to do we are a subject other things around us are what you would call objects they are other things there are things there are things that you can touch the things you can use etc etc etc now it has long been a um an aspect of of um difficulty i suppose in certain philosophical traditions and what have you about who gets to be considered right who actually gets to be a subject there's a lot of um you know racism misogyny all sorts of things that have been happening over you know human existence where we've been trying to say oh no the this group because they are a different color or this group because they have different genitals or this group because they're a different class whatever they are not subjects they're not thinking things they're just whatever and also of course other things um out there that we might think about um that we can classify as things uh when i said things before i didn't mean it in an object sense just stuff so other groups you know so obviously there's that human aspect but then there are other things like animals plants etc are they necessarily objects or do they also have some kind of an inner life now that's seeing as the previous couple of videos in like the previous like mini series in those other videos they've all been about animal studies stuff and eco-feminism and all of them would pretty much say that no animals are definitely subjects not going to go into that now because we've already essentially discussed that kind of an idea before i haven't really looked at plants before but you could make the argument that plants also are something that is capable of has some kind of a consciousness of some description it might not be a consciousness that we can fully comprehend but perhaps they do also have some kind of subjectivity to them but we're talking about here specifically how we are looking at things right now it sort of originates with sartre in his book being in nothingness which the book itself is quite a long very long difficult text that is all about it's it's about existentialism it's it's a foundational text pretty much the foundational text of existentialism and essentially it looks at what is a subject uh versus what is an object but the section that is important is at least to this particular aspect so now we're already thinking about a subject is like a thinking thing it's able to have its own consciousness it's etc etc right it has its own thoughts desires cool so that's a subject we are subjects cool now says that sometimes we can also be for others sometimes we exist for other people not just for ourselves like we don't just have our own personal subjectivity we also actually exist in relation to other people which is quite obvious and he then talks about the look now the look more commonly like now pretty much would be called the gaze or the in being in nothingness it probably is just called the look in my copy of it it's called the look but it's it is the gaze the same thing so this the the look of the gaze is the moment of essentially a realization of sorts that when someone right because now i'm i'm existing right i exist as my own thing i am myself i am a conscious being i know that i exist etc etc then what happens is i see another person and i see that that person is looking at me that person now it doesn't have to be not like they're staring at you but they they see you they look at you their eyes pass over you it doesn't matter they have seen you and by seeing you you realize that in them seeing you they have conceptualized you as an object in their world because we all have our own subjective worlds we all have you know everything that exists exists for me but that respects everyone everyone is like that the world that you experience is your world but then you notice that other people also have their own worlds and they look at you and you are no longer a subject you become an object in their world which is through the gaze by looking at you by perceiving you to exist and you then realize that you do essentially the same thing by looking at others you objectify them you turn them into objects because ultimately everything in the world around us is an object to us we are the only thing that is not an object and i don't mean like humanity i mean you as an individual person you are the only thing that is a subject in your world everything else is an object now it does depend on how you treat it depends a lot on how you treat an object but everything around us is technically an object uh everything alive everything not alive you know uh other humans other animals uh plants rocks tables they are all objects to us they are things that are physical we can see them touch them whatever they are things so this then creates the realization in your mind essentially that you are looked at and looking at you are both an objective fire and objectified you are something that exists as an object in somebody else's world and you make others an object in your world which is kind of like a grounding aspect to it now he didn't discuss a lot of other things with regard to this and other writers would essentially look into that so that's what we're gonna move on to right so that's your basic gaze idea now we're going to first look at now i've been in very brief turn them under objectifying gazes discriminatory gazes and regulatory gazes however they are in many ways they're kind of all all of them because even like say regulatory gazers are still objectifying gazers but i this is just as like a little thing to make a little bit easier for structuring so we'll first look at the most famous uh version of the gaze which i've considered an objectifying gaze here is the male gaze now this was originally formulated by john berger and then later elaborated on uh in terms of theater or not theater in terms of cinema i mean by laura malvey so we're looking at basically both of them now john berger in his in his book ways of looking it was also like a it was almost like a show but i've only read the book um so in this he elaborates on various various things about art pretty much about how we're looking at art and when he brings up the male gaze he's talking about images of g woman a naked woman or a sexually provocative woman and saying this is for the benefit of the male gaze right the male by looking by it being it's not even just because you're looking the male gaze is that the person who painted that picture right that person created it knowing that a male would want to see it it is there to accommodate a male and this is something that was then elaborated by laura malvey in her essay visual pleasure um not commonly exact the full title but your visual pleasure and that then looks at how in film everything is geared towards the male viewpoint uh it's very very easy to see this it happens like all the time probably the most egregious place i would say and it's one of my biggest criticisms of the i suppose you could call it a medium is an anime anime does it all the time there will be say you know um where the camera is specifically positioned so that you can see sexy also that you know you can you can see certain shots of say a woman bending over or a panty shot or something like that those are all male gaze things they're assuming that the audience is male and therefore accommodating to the male gaze they're saying okay you want to objectify a woman you want to see woman as an object cool well that's what we're going to do for you we're going to show you some sexy legs we're going to show you you know sexy breasts this character's going to have cleavage and the camera is going to really focus on that cleavage that is the male gaze from a cinematic perspective so these two go together john burger and laura mulvey although i don't actually remember if marvie mentions burger but mulvey is really the one who really applied it further and took it to better higher places um so the more the common idea of what the metal gaze is is definitely attributed to her as it should be and this then you can understand why film is then catered towards men and so women will feel like they are not treated as subjects in that sense now you can elaborate on the male gaze further and take it outside the realm of theater theater outside the realm of cinema say for instance when you are walking somewhere and a and you check out now this will be if you're a woman you are checked out by men you know they they look at you or of course if you're a man and you look at woman what you are doing if you are the man in a particular situation you are objectifying the woman and a lot of the time that's the thing woman it's not like oh i'm a sneaker a quick look at that woman's ass as she walks past much of the time women do notice this so you're not actually being like all clever and sneaky and getting a nice little peek this is part of it's it's part of oppression it's a a way in which women are objectified in our society in such a way that they are then meant to accommodate the male gaze they are meant to look appealing if you do not look appealing then you will not get you know the same kind of uh there's many things like if you if you don't if you're not an appealing woman then you'll be discriminated against for various reasons but if you are unappealing so let's say you you make yourself specifically so that men don't check you out let's just say that might not even work right men are creeps and they all often look at anyone and creep them out but but even though you're creeping them out they will still get less as woman if if they do not play the game and accommodate to the male gaze you'll see this in many places where a woman will not be treated the same if they you know say don't put the amount of effort in that no man would ever be expected to put in so this all becomes part of the male gaze everything is there to accommodate men if you do not look appealing as a woman well then obviously you're not you know worth our time now yes maybe you'll get cat called less probably not but maybe you get cat called this but you also quite possibly could be for instance passed up for a job because there are biases that men and men tend to be the ones in positions of power and with the ability to promote people and we have a bias towards people who are attractive and so that is a thing that then happens the male gaze is more than just oh it's it's for like gratification watching cinema no it has real world implications for people and also not to mention the fact that being watched by a man is voyeuristic creepy and it will make you feel like you are under threat this is from a woman's perspective okay i you know born raised whatever as a male i have never once felt uncomfortable in public whereas many many women do feel uncomfortable in public but this is a thing that is unconscious i basically eventually had to start when i was at university reading feminist theory and stuff before even realizing any of these things because you don't realize them because you're in a society that does not inform you of this and so men just continue being awful um without even realizing it and never educated about it and never never know and then when they're confronted about it they get angry because like no no i'm not being a creep okay you're just attractive i like looking at attractive woman and you don't even realize that that's creepy like a lot of men don't realize that that's that's actually like a violent act that is a form of pretty much light stalking like it's not it's not good it's not sexy so now going from malvi there was essentially a response to it uh by bell hooks the oppositional gaze which she's specifically also looking at cinema and she's saying yes malvi movie is correct there however however malvi is centering white woman and she says listen black men still get the shirt if you go like cinema cinema is especially back you know back in the day full of racial stereotypes still is but not maybe not as much as used to be full of racial stereotypes now black people also went to the cinema they also went to see these things and they saw these racist pictures of themselves however in the sense bell hooks look at this and says black people first off are even like worse represented in media so when when um black people are gazed at in cinema what have you it isn't so much for a sexualizing thing or usually say you're gazing at the black male body as a thing of violence it's dangerous savage and there are all these stereotypes that reinforce this view which also when you keep on seeing it when you keep on gazing at it it reinforces those kinds of beliefs in your mind so when racists see racist depictions they can they can just go oh you see that's the way it is and be reinforced and then use that to try to recruit others to their viewpoint now she looked at this and said no no that's obviously that all that that that stuff is is bad however black men still get to have the male gaze they still essentially get to check out woman the depictions of black men are usually terrible but the depictions of white women will be very sexy and what have you which then will still appeal to any male gays including black males and she here in the oppositional gaze specifically focuses on black female spectatorship when black women are the ones watching who have been massively underrepresented you don't even like really get many black women in cinema at least now it's better obviously this was written like long ago but essentially saying listen they just aren't that many black women and when the black women are depicted they're either invisible like they're just set dressing they're just they're there right they're not like characters or they are characters they won't be even sexualized they'll have other kinds of of roles things like the mammy role or something they they don't get any kind of representation really so she was saying listen mike mulvey is right but she didn't go far enough she didn't also mention black people and this has been a blind spot um well blind spots ableist language which you use by mistake but a gap if you want to be more academic and less ableist about your language a gap that you make or that has been noted in a lot of feminism especially early feminism was a complete exclusion of non-white people now it's better now but it is still you know generally not great you'll often see this in like for instance the area that i just did a lengthy series about eco-feminism pretty much like all of them are just white women like there aren't any like non-white people so this is a recurring issue in a lot of feminist work and the oppositional gay specifically is the idea that we that say black woman in this particular case they see this kind of lack of representation or just terrible representation and they don't even get the male gaze aspect so they instead become opposed to it they become antagonistic towards it essentially it's a form of of rebellion against it the oppositional gaze is where you are standing in defiance of something where you are opposing it because defiance actually there is a distinction between defiance and and opposition opposition is more active but that's essentially what you're doing you're opposing it you're actively fighting against it you are noting the gaze and then fighting against the gate she also brings up in this particular case how but this will get into more when it comes to phanon um but she mentioned the beginning of her essay a very like interesting point in that as a child she was told now she's a black woman and she was told as a child not to stare now first off we're kind of all told not to stare as children like it's a thing children do children stare that's what they do uh but it's considered to be rude however from her perspective black person staring let's say staring at a cop can be considered a threat which the cop will then you know i mean she was writing from an american perspective and if you know anything about american policing um you might know why it's not a good idea for a black person to be staring at a cop so you know not great there but that is a very important point there which we'll then go into when we talk about fun and we'll be speaking about soon um in the more sort of post-colonial black and white gazers kind of a thing now before we do that one quick little side because he doesn't really fit in anywhere else here but just to bring it up the medical gaze now this is uh michel foucault and when he was writing in the birth of the clinic he was talking about essentially how modern day hospitals clinics medical profession essentially came about and developed and changed over time and how at one point doctors were encouraged to see patients as subjects you look at the entire body right you look at everything then it started to shift it wasn't about the person it was about no no you are not a person you're an object like the way doctors see you is as a problem they see you as a problem that needs to be solved so they will look at composite parts they will not look at your whole they will not look at you as a subject they will only look at the individual things that are wrong and try to fix that thing but not because it's like oh no you're a subject but because you are a puzzle that can be solved that can be checked out that can be that can be worked over the medical establishment sees humans sees its patients not as people but as things to be fixed they are like mechanics now many of them may not think this way but this is the way you are trained to see things you're not trying to see it as a person for instance look at how um a lot of the time if they're going to perform a painful procedure on you they might not tell you fully that that the pain that's going to go into this they might not actually explain to you that this is going to be sore they will be like no this is the best option there isn't really another option and so you're going to have to go through this pain which yes maybe you do have to go through that pain but they don't really take into account the fact that this is we say painful or invasive or anything like that they'll just see it as well this is the way to solve the problem if you do not want to solve the problem that way i cannot solve the problem so you are trained as a doctor to not see people as people but as things a broken car that needs to be that needs to have the right parts replaced and fixed you are fragmented into pieces this part of you is broken well i need to fix that part of you i don't need to look at the rest and this is also where it's like sort of the one area in which i can have some sympathy for why um people for instance prefer homeopaths or some people prefer homeopaths because homeopathy tends to be more of a holistic approach they will not look at oh your leg is sore let's look at everything now homeopathy is um nonsense but that is a much better way really to approach the idea of medication and helping people than to just say i'm going to fix that one problem to rather look at the whole and try and you know make it operate better not just as a as a you know tool that needs to function but as a as a living subject that needs and wants and desires to have a better existence so that's the medical goals now we're going to move into these more discriminatory gazes now as i said like the male gaze is also discriminatory but this one is explicitly discriminatory so you're more post-colonial type gazes as you would have seen in someone like fun on black skin white masks or in edward saeed's orientalism now this where you get sort of the colonizer gaze slash white gaze uh colonized gaze black gaze now this is essentially an implicit form of violence that happens finally when speaking about this in black uh black skin white masks was basically talking about this exact thing where when the colonizer so the white person in this case sees you looks at you gazes at you they render you into an object that is inferior to themselves you are a thing in you if you look at the old colonizer states now obviously it would change now because now would be more so racist rather than just colonizer but if you look at the old colonial states the colonized people were not considered to be people they were effectively living tools that would do jobs for very very low wages or of course at the highest level of sort of exploitation it would have been a slave and then it would be more like a slave gaze versus a slave master gaze and that's also the thing that bell hooks does mention is that when black people were enslaved they were um do not stare if you stare at the master the master will beat you because that is as we looked at with satra when you look at something and that thing looks back at you you are essentially creating a relationship you are both acknowledging the other as a subject but as an object you're both acknowledging each other's objects objectness and that also affirms the subjectness so if you are being looked at by a slave like say you're a slave master you mean looked up by a slave you cannot not see that person as a person because you can see that they are gazing at you you can see that they have thought and understanding behind those eyes and that is a threat first of all because it might make you feel bad when you start thinking about it and go you know it probably isn't right that we can literally enslave human beings it probably isn't a good thing you don't want to think that first of all because you have your you know business tied up in this whole slave thing so you can't have that and also when the slaves start to see themselves as on par with you when they see you are also just a human like me they might rise up they might eventually realize that they could actually fight and no slave master wants to slave rebellion so that becomes it's it becomes an implicit form of violence according to final where when the white person is looking at you you cannot look back you cannot look back at the colonizer because if you look back at the colonizer you could be heard for that you could be perceived as a threat right he mentions like the idea that he was sitting on a bus or train i think probably a train and um there was like a little girl looking at him and he realized that he was looking at her and then thought oh that this a problem because immediately you just think that's enough if you're uh you know at all understanding of the world the expression you know there's a black man on the train staring at me that that scares a lot of people and that could then lead to you as say that say the white mother of that child going to a cop and saying that black man was staring at my daughter now a lot of the time you do stare you you watch you look at people it's an instinctive thing that we do we look at each other and that has been vilified it has been turned into something negative something bad that is to be punished and that cop could then come up to you as as a black person and say why were you looking at that child do you have any intentions here whatever and i mean they don't really care they could just do anything to you so the gaze while being something that like you can't touch the gaze it's not like a material circumstances but it has very very real um circumstances on you as opposed to very very real very material um downsides to being gays that slash gazing at something all right now edward saeed also essentially looked at this kind of thing um from a postcolonial perspective in which the west so like most of the white gays looks at um now he was talking about specifically oriental countries which are sort of eastern countries also oriental is such a ridiculously broad term like oriental includes arabic people indian people chinese people japanese people it's like all of them if you're to the east you are you are oriental um also i think mediterranean is also oriental so this was the way in which white people would look at and then discuss and describe the way in which certain other groups were perceived by them you know oh you're a white explorer and you've gone to visit the middle east and oh they have such a quaint culture there is and then you explain it in your books and you publish these things and there's essentially this gaze without even having to actually physically look that you are still looking upon the these other peoples and creating turning them into objects that have their own that have some kind of specificity to them that we can then see as inferior to our own we can be like oh look at them their culture is so backward or whatever uh look at ours in comparison to ours but this is all facilitated through a um an incomplete gaze it's not a personal gaze it's of gaze by proxy you know you're looking through the works of somebody else who might not be entirely telling the truth or who might not understand the culture because this is also a thing when you're from a different culture and you go to a certain place you can get things like culture shock um i'm remembering this like randomly but there i remember a concept i wonder if it's actually called let me see here um japan and it's called like paris syndrome or something paris syndrome let's see um yeah paris syndrome i'm right this is basically a form of intense um it's a form of intention disappointment it's a form of culture shock which you wouldn't think would cause like a problem but when you have been trained for such a long time let's say the french or the pinnacle of of class and and culture what have you and the japanese people go there and they are so like horrified by what they see that they get an intense form of culture shock that they can't handle because the proxy gaze that they have about this so-called great country of culture has been shattered by the reality of the situation of an extremely you know uh busy messy stinky city um the stinky thing i haven't been there but i've been informed by people that paris smells so i don't know if that is true but that is what i've been informed by someone before who has been there so when you go from another country then you go oh god this is not what i thought it would be the gaze has basically been subverted and broken and you've realized a reality of the situation that it isn't actually you know that's the whole thing with so we've been talking about the colonizers what about the colonized gays the colonized person the black person in this case usually or a person who's not white basically looks at the white people and because of the way in which white people presented themselves and they presented their culture people tend to think oh no they are better than us but then you go then it turns out they're not and um they're often terrible and that kind of breaks the illusion but the illusion is still there that like oh there's a there's a class there's a class to being french there's a you know there's a class to being british or german or something like that which isn't true you're just a human but those people the people who have been gazing now act the colonizer so the colonizers looking at the colonizer have been reinforced with this idea this projection of what is not real so yeah that's like a discriminatory overview of of the gays now the last one i want to look at is more of a regulatory gaze slash disciplinary and this goes back to foucault now developed this idea called panopticism now first we have to actually explain what a panopticon is all right a panopticon is a theoretical prison designed by jeremy bentham who i've actually mentioned before because he is a utilitarian he's like one of the founding members of utilitarian ethics and he created this idea for a sort of a perfect prison prison goes like this it's in a sort of cylindrical you know a circular structure with all the cells around and all the cells face a central guard tower the guard there's only ever one guard in there but there's like say a bright light or something obscuring whether or not you can see the god now here's the thing what this does then is that everybody in the prison does not know whether or not they are being watched the god cannot possibly watch everyone that's impossible however however you don't know if they're watching yourself at this particular moment are they watching me right now i can't do anything because you know i might be seen the probability of me being seen is very very low because of harm there's only one god and there's so many cells but it's a possibility he could be looking at me right now so i can't do anything and the idea here is that it enforces self-regulation you then do not do things because you're afraid of being seen now foucault basically said listen we have created our own panopticon you cannot do certain things right like you as a person there are certain things that are socially undesirable but you do not do them why do you not do them well you're choosing not to do them but you're choosing not to do them because you might be being watched someone might be watching you at any time somebody might be looking at you somebody might be noting your actions now this is becoming especially prevalent in the age of like a surveillance state we've got cameras everywhere and watching us but you do not want to do certain things because well what if the neighbor's watching what if someone is watching what if someone says something about this thing i've done and this then forces us to regulate ourselves so the police don't need to be an overwear overwhelming you know force on us for us to be like i'm afraid of breaking the law because what if someone sees me i and this is like an extension of the gaze like much further elaboration because you're being watched all the time you're being looked at but you don't know whether or not you actually are being looked at at this particular moment like for instance right now i'm in front of a computer many of us are in front of computers how do you know how do you know definitively that your camera hasn't been hacked it's like if it's a laptop how do you know that your webcam hasn't been hacked now yeah sure you could you could pop a you know you could put some stuff over it to cover it sure sure how do you know someone hasn't hacked your your speakers your onboard microphone how do you know how do you know that someone isn't listening to you right now and then when you go out how do you know there isn't a camera somewhere and when you're in public how do you know someone isn't looking at you how do you know and the answer is you don't and that's why you don't you know when walking down the street suddenly i don't know decide to like do a dance and urinate on a wall you don't do it because someone might be watching now technically it's within your freedom to do whatever you want but you don't do what you want because what if someone's watching what if somebody is rendering my actions into something objectified which can later be used against me so i do nothing i obey the law i act like a good little boy girl or anything in between and i do not do what i've been told not to do so that's sort of some elaborations on the gays there are many other sort of variations on it um the guys is a very interesting overall concept and i think before i finish off here i want to leave with a little funny story now i teach one of my subjects i teach at the moment is sociology and i had to teach sociology to a couple of guys um and i said to and usually i do this when i bring up a key term like this i ask them whether they've ever heard of it and usually it's a no but if someone has heard of it then they can talk about it and i can either you know say yes you're right or you need to look at it like this blah blah blah blah doesn't matter and i said to them have either of you ever heard of the male gaze and i got to the best ever answer because they then started talking about homosexual men the male gays and i was i was taken aback at first because i was like what are you talking oh no no no no no gays as in look as in look it's looking looking at something not not not gay people not male gays not the gay people gays with it with a zed and that is just to me in that moment was one of the funniest little academic hiccups but anyway we're going to end off there uh i hope this has been somewhat informative and yeah if you are interested in the other stuff i do because i do a lot of things this will be the last of the talky time videos for a while i plan on having a video out um later this month which is will be january when this comes out i'm recording these things like way ahead of time um because i'm uh i've been very very busy i don't know how busy i am when this came out but uh as i'm recording i'm a very very very busy person uh i have lots of things i have to do so that's why i'm recording all these so far in advance but it'll be done and there'll be a new video coming out which will be something uh i have an idea what it's going to be but i do not want to say definitively for in case but it should be fun either way and then i'll probably end up doing a couple of other videos about theory and at some point maybe i will start sort of a second season of talkie time we will see i think donkey time is good as a time in which uh i don't have much time on my hands and so i can just talk about the things that i'm studying but yeah that will be it for today so if you did enjoy this and you want to check out the other stuff you can look in the description there'll be all sorts of whatevers and you can do the likes share subscribe comments the things that you know they always tell you to do the smash your like button that kind of do that anyway other than that please have a fantastic day week month ahead and goodbye