English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

When I was first introduced to this idea that the object stares back, I always took it to mean that the object refuses our assumed ability to make meaning out of it. So to answer a question asked in class, I'd say that the object's agency is an effect of my conciousness - the object, by being present (victim), forces me to acknowledge the violence of my gaze. A victim becomes a martyr when he stares back and demands to be acknowledged.

By the same token, we were reading Mary Ann Doane in our Film Theory class and she makes a comment about how the audience does not enjoy a sustained shot of the visula object, we prefer the strip-tease. She says it's because the visual object (woman) represents castration (because she no longer has a penis). I think Doane is wrong here. I think the sustained shot is disturbing, but not because I fear becoming the object myself but because the object that stares back can defy my phallic power of meaning creation.

I cannot control whether or not the object (with or without agency) looks back at me. I can, however, control how I interpollate the object and what responses (non-responses) my meaning is flexible enough to embrace.

This, as Elkin illustrates, is then complicated by the potential conflict between my meaning system and other meaning systems. The object that stares back is also other subjects that have made meaning around that object staring back (Thanks Percy).