So...The Gaze is a sort of sinister, creepy idea. I am not quite sure how I feel about the fact that we are almost never NOT under the Gaze in some sense. First of all, we spend the first years upon years of our lives living with a family and attending school with others...real alone time was not (probably?) frequent. Even now, more of our waking hours, I'm sure are spent WITH others than without others and this may continue to be true throughout our lives.
Now I know humans are social creatures. It could be argued that we NEED interaction--we NEED some sort of consistent Gaze--to be "fully" or "really" human. At the very least, we can say that being a part of some society does enable a human to do certain, I would argue, uniquely human things like conceptualize communicable meaning and use such communication to posit values. But discussing Fanon in class, we got a very clear sense of the trauma of the Gaze: it gives one a sense of being looked at as an object or like an inkwell is an inkwell and, most disturbingly, it opens the door for very real discrimination and abuse.
So where is the balance? Of course, Sartre posited a positive aspect of the negative objectification by saying something like "those moments of being under the Gaze force one outside of oneself, to look at oneself, and return to oneself in resolution" (totally my own words from class notes). Is this a hint as to how being under the Gaze for most of our lives is in fact not ALWAYS bad? Surely we would not say that being devalued and abused as a human being is necessary for "finding oneself," so can we really say the Gaze enables humanity? Am I wrong in trying to equate being-a-part-of-society with being-under-the-Gaze?
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