Vision, Subject, Place

The Blind Cartographer, 2012




















My enquiry is formed by three overlapping questions; one is a question of vision, another the problem of subjectivity, and finally, the notion of place. Vision is commonly associated with knowledge and control, but subjectivity is shaped by the unconscious, desire and the unknown. Encapsulating this dichotomy is the problematic of locating of the subject in space – a crisis of locality and an anxiety over defining where we are (“you are here” signals the typical tourist map, thus marking one out as a stranger – naive to the local terrain). The anxiety formed by the layering of such theoretical problems is perhaps best expressed by the encounter of a landscape that looks back. Landscape as an image, has long been a means of suppressing anxiety, but the ‘look back’ can be considered as the gaze embodied by the Other or neighbour. Such figures displace the subject from the central place of the traditional Cartesian subject.

According to Slavoj Žižek, it is only when one ‘looks awry’, fully invested with desire that one witnesses that which reason, objectivity, and distance had previously prevented one from seeing. Crucial for Žižek is how fantasy and desire impact on lived reality. The depiction of the landscape as a borderless and banal zone, literally offers empty spaces in which some significance is sought. Desire emerges when “something” (object-cause) embodies “nothing”; something gives physical existence to the void.* The empty space that the subject encounters, according to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, situates it within a relationship constituted by fantasy and desire, the eye and the gaze, internal and external.** Space becomes active, and uncanny gaps, glitches and ruptures in visuality testify to the subject's uncertain place within the world.


* Žižek, SlavojLooking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). p.12.
** Pile, Steven. The Body and the City (London: Routledge, 1996). p. 129.