THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS, Part Five

[Note: this is the fifth installment of an essay, "Coppelius, Oedipus, and the Phallic Stare: a rare instance of bidirectional cognitive metaphor?" being posted serially. Below Dunster recommends that the reader scroll down and view the sections in ascending order.]

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Visual Pleasure
In her influential 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey addresses the cinematic concept of the “woman as image; man as bearer of the look” (Mulvey, 1973: 2186). Mulvey follows Lacan’s theory of male subjectification (see Lacan, 1949), according to which the abstract concept of the phallus exists both in the male unconscious as well as in language, and is that entity which bestows subjectivity. Men and women thus grow up, conditioned by the mind and by language, to assume the roles of subject and object, respectively. Mulvey explains how this relation is characterized in popular film, claiming that, “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly” (Mulvey, 1973: 2186). Throughout the section, Mulvey furthers the significance of “looks” in film, which supposedly represent looking in the western world. It is clear to her that “in their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey, 1973: 2186). The spectator, of course, has the freedom to look at the main male character as well as the female lead. Still, she claims, this look is not an objectifying one, but an identifying one. The male character is not so much an object of the male spectator’s gaze, but rather the bearer of his gaze upon the woman, the spectator’s lieutenant, as it were (in the original sense of lieutenant, "place-holder"). The male actor, then, is the idealized subject with whom the viewer identifies, while the female character is the object of the gaze of both the male role as well as the spectator.

Mulvey’s essay has been highly controversial, and rightly so, but it is of significance to this project in at least three ways. First, it is a well-known example of a piece that affirms the connection between the eye and the psychological concept of the phallus. While traditional psychoanalytic theory has been contested by most Anti-Essentialist theorists, especially feminists, the subject-object relationship between male and female is widely acknowledged as a distinction that clearly exists, but must be overcome. If we define the phallus, then, simply as the difference between man and woman (common sense tells us that both the physical interpretation of the phallus, as well as some psychological factors, are part of or even constitute this difference), we have a connection between the phallus and the gaze, as the subjective male gaze at the female object is widely acknowledged.

The issue of essence
The presentation of an essential male-female difference could get me in big trouble with contemporary theorists. Let this trouble be momentary: the main discussion of the eye-phallus metaphor does not hinge on such a distinction being essential. If the distinction is (“merely”) socially or mentally constructed, very well; so are conceptual metaphors. Furthermore, humans operate largely on socially and mentally based premises (for better or for worse; this, after all, is the contention of contemporary Anti-Essentialism), and conceptual metaphors may result from these premises—they may, in fact, perpetuate them. Also, if language codes differences and other relationships, then conceptual metaphors exert an astounding influence by virtue of corresponding metaphorical linguistic expressions.

The second point Mulvey’s essay highlights, inseparable from the question of essence, may be one we have all been holding on to since the first mention of the THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS metaphor: everyone has eyes, but only half the population has a phallus! Is every gaze, including every female one, conceptualized through some phallic image, however subconsciously? Or can we only understand the male gaze, having no pervasive female metaphor? Worse yet, are we chained by the metaphor, or whatever lies behind it, to the laws of looking as put forth by Mulvey? Intuition tells us no. But it is very significant that the eye-phallus relationship exists, given that most of us feel equally able to conceptualize a female look as a male one. This ability does not discredit the past and present existence of the metaphor, but it may alter its quality in the future. A complete change would be extremely difficult, though, given the metaphor’s deep embedding in language, including its very sounds, and in prominent ancient works. There are those who would be for such a turnabout, but their task is a nearly impossible one.