Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1995, volume 13, pages 761-781

Distance, surface, elsewhere: a feminist critique of the

space of phallocentric self/knowledge
Gillian Rose
Department of Geography, University of Edinburgh, Drummoml Street, Edinburgh EH8 9XP,
Scotland
Received 15 March 1995

Abstract, In this paper I focus on a particular subjectivity and a particular spatiality. The
subjectivity is that of dominant Western masculinities. The spatiality is the specific organisation
of space through which that subjectivity is constituted and through which it sees the world, a
problematic described here as a space of self/knowledge. The importance of a particular organisation of space to this particular subjectivity is introduced through the work of Irigaray, and
elaborated with reference to Mulvcy's account of the Lacanian mirror stage. Both Mulvcy and
Irigaray emphasise the importance of a distancing, visualised space to dominant masculinities,
However, Mulvey and Irigaray have both been criticised for conceptualising this dominant subjectivity and his visual space in ways which leave little possibility for feminist disruption. These
criticisms have been made from a diverse range of theoretical-political positions. In this paper,
however, I engage specifically with the visual space of phalloccntric space/knowledge, and therefore only explore the critical possibilities offered by other, more recent feminist appropriations of
Lacan because these have centred precisely on questions of visuality, spatiality, and subjectivity,
In particular, interpretations of Lacan's distinction between a certain organisation of space and
what Lacan calls 'the gaze' are drawn upon here in order to theorise both the fragilities of
dominant masculinities and the existence of other visualised spaces of self/knowledge. It is thus
argued that certain psychoanalytic feminisms can offer a critical account of phallocentric self/
knowledge, which is also a critical account of the production of visual spatialities.
Reflecting on the spaces of self/knowledge

"Why can't you look after yourself and not down on me "
Evan Dando and Tom Morgan, "Big Gay Heart"
For some of those geographers currently working towards a critical geographical
practicethat is, a practice aware of the intersection of knowledge with powerit
appears that the world is not only a prison house of language but also a hall of
mirrors, since reflection is very often argued to be constitutive of critical knowledge.
Many radical geographers are arguing that the knowledge they produce should be
reflexive, by which they mean that the circumstances of its production must be
acknowledged in order to address the exclusions implicit in any knowledge which
claims universality. Self-reflection is advocated, because, as Madge (1993, page 296)
argues, it is only through "a consideration of these dilemmas, hesitancies, insecurities
and ambiguities of self identity and identity of 'others' in relation to our identity,
that the role of the 'all-knowing' researcher may be destabilised". Self-reflexivity is
indisputably a crucial strategy in the construction of a radical geography which can
confront its own complicity with the power relations it seeks to critique. As Keith
(1992) insists, to reject the need for self-reflection is simply to condone the smug
complacency of an academy unwilling to address its culpability. However, as many
advocates of self-reflection also acknowledge, there are also limits to its critical
possibilities. The mirrors in this hall of reflexivity certainly reflect: but how, exactly?
For example, mirrors also frame and thereby exclude, and both Madge (1993) and
Keith (1992) comment that reflexivity as a strategy pays little attention to the audience of the reflexive work in question. Moreover, psychoanalytic arguments suggest

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that a mirror's reflection is interpreted in particular ways, and thus that we envisage
a self-image, see a self, in particular ways. Lacan (1977a, page 82), for example,
argued that the very idea of being able to see oneself seeing oneselfthe distance on
the self that self-reflection demands (Pile, 1991a)assumes that full self-knowledge
is in principle possible; but for Lacan this clarity of self-vision can only ever be an
illusion, because it denies the dynamics of the unconscious. Indeed, he goes so far
as to claim that, "in this matter of the visible, everything is a trap" (Lacan, 1977a,
page 93): the visible both ensnares and deceives. The implication of this argument
is that it is precisely those unconscious dynamics whichaccording to psychoanalysis
most profoundly structure the self, that are the least visible to a conscious, reflexive
look (Pile, 1991b).
In this paper I address such arguments about the spaces through which selves are
seen. Particular understandings of the self assume particular kinds of space. Thus
discussions of self-reflection assume a self from which the self can be distant in order
to see its self, and this requires a distancing, separating, visualised space. Specific
articulations of subjectivity mobilise specific organisations of space, then, and such
modes of spatialising the self are also deeply bound into ways of understanding the
world. That is, the spatialities of subjectivities and the spatialities through which the
material world is represented mediate one another: "we cannot separate out the
geographies of what we know from the geographies of what we are" (Woodhead,
1995). Here, I term the interplay of spaces of a subjectivity with spaces of the world,
the space of self/knowledge. And I am particularly concerned with developing a critique of one organisation of the space of self/knowledge, that of the dominant masculine subject position in the West.
To introduce my concerns more fully, I want to begin with the work of Irigaray
(1985a; 1985b). Throughout her work, Irigaray explores the relationship between
what she describes as the phallocentric subject and his particular space of self/
knowledge (Rose, forthcoming). Irigaray argues that the structure of this self and his
space is a form of mirroring; she suggests that the mirror describes the very structure of phallocentrism. According to Irigaray, all dominant forms of Western
knowledge are phallocentric; that is, meaning is structured around the presence or
absence of only one organising principle, the phallus. And because of "a kind of collective make-believe in the commensurability of the penis and phallus" (Silverman,
1992, page 15), phallocentrism privileges men. Irigaray insists that the phallocentric
"desire for the same, for the self-identical, for the self (as) same, and again of the
similar, of the alter ego and, to put it in a nutshell, the desire for the auto ... the
homo ... the male, dominates the representational economy (1985a, page 25). Thus,
according to Irigaray, sexual difference does not yet exist; she is diagnosing sexual
sameness. For Irigaray, the flat mirror is fundamental to this sameness because it is
the mirror that is seen as reflecting the self back to himself as the same.
'For relations among subjects have always had recourse, explicitly or more often
implicitly, to the flat mirror, that is, to what privileges the relation of man to his
fellow man. A flat mirror has always subtended and traversed speculation ...
turning back onto the self-(as the) same" (1985b, page 154).
Far from being a means of elaborating particularity and context, then, for Irigaray
the mirror is a means only of affirming and reaffirming the subjectivity of he who
looks. In consequence, the specular phallocentric economy of meaning can only see
difference from itself as a negative of itself. "Now woman", she comments, "starting
with this flat mirror alone, can only come into being as the inverted other of the
masculine subject" (page 129). Most importantly for this paper, she argues that this
mirror is part of the constitution of a specific kind of space of self/knowledge.

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763

She argues feminists must analyse "the scenography that makes representation feasible,
representation as defined in philosophy, that is, the architectonics of its theatre, its
framing in space-time, its geometric organization, its props, its actors, their respective positions, their dialogues, indeed their tragic relations,without overlooking the
mirror, most often hidden, that allows the logos, the subject, to reduplicate itself, to
reflect itself by itself. All these are interventions on the scene; (hey ensure its
coherence so long as they remain uninterpreted" (page 75). Here, Irigaray is arguing
that this particular, phallocentric look at the self-(as the) same is structured by a
particular space-time geometry. She makes it clear that she considers all space to
be organised inside the logic of the phalloccntric subject: "if he arrived at the limits
of known spatiality he would lose his favourite game, the game of mastering her"
(1993, page 42). Hence the spatial organisation of the phallocentric self is integral
to the space through which that subject constructs the world.
I would like to suggest that figure 1 (sec over), an engraving from a 17th-century
Dutch treatise on the philosophy and techniques of painting, can be interpreted in
terms of Irigaray's analysis of the phalloccntric space of self/knowledge. (This is by
no means the only interpretation of this image, as I will go on to show.) Following
Irigaray, then, in the engraving we can sec the constitution of a certain kind of
modern knowledge, through a particular kind of surveillance, through a certain kind
of space, is represented by the four male figures. Each stares at his object of analysis,
calculating, measuring, and surveying it through a particular organisation of
ordered, perspectival space (Alpcrs, 1983; sec also Cosgrove, 1985). The female
figure in the foreground and the landscape in the background arc also represented
through perspectival space. Both the figure and the landscape are represented
through the same techniques of rational masculinity that the men in the image arc
demonstrating.
Moreover, the figure and landscape are offered to the spectator of this image
through those same techniques. The reader of the treatise is invited to observe
them through that same space and with that same look; in looking at them in that
way he too participates in the perspectival space of the masculine analyst. Indeed,
through such participation he becomes a masculine analyst like them. Thus when he
turns to the male figures, the reader of this book is looking at a representation of
his own self-image, seeing himself seeing himself in the illusion of conscious mastery
of the world. Both the content and the organisation of the image reflect his self.
However, this sameness is obscured by the spectator's interpretation of its perspectival space as something which provides a distance on both the world (the landscape)
and the self (the figures); the engraving is seen simply as a transparent window on a
preexisting, distanced, coherent, and knowable world. This is what Irigaray means
when she says the mirror of phallocentrism is hidden, I think. It hides by appearing
transparent, by establishing a distance which separates the object from the subject,
the self from the scene, by being a "non-place" (Irigaray, 1985a, page 205; see also
Silverman, 1992, page 127). Yet, the tain of the glass can be reinstated and the
distance of the scenario from the phallocentric subject can be revisioned. That distance can be seen, not as a mode of separating self from scene; but as an intimate
self-reflection of that subject. Irigaray interprets this scenography of knowledge,
then, not as a window oh a real world but as a mirror, the visual and spatial organisation of which constitutes only a dominant masculine subjectivity.
For Irigaray, the mirror can only reflect the self-same distance and mastery, and
this has implications for her tactics of critique. She argues that feminists who wish
to challenge phalloceritrism must also challenge its visual and spatial organisation:
"the transition to a new age in turn necessitates a new perception and a new

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G Rose

conception of space-time, the inhabiting of places, and of containers, or envelopes of

identity" (1993, page 7). On these grounds, she is hostile to sight, arguing that it is
the sense which most produces an objectifying distance between self and other
(quoted in Owens, 1992, page 179); and she has suggested that touch could provide
a better structure for a feminist knowledge because the tactile permits contiguous
relations between different subjects:
"Open your lips; don't open them simply. Weyou/Iare neither open nor
closed ... Between our lips, yours and mine, several voices, several ways of
speaking resound endlessly, back and forth. One is never separable from the
other. You/I: we are always several at once. And how could one dominate the
other? impose her voice, her tone, her meaning? One cannot be distinguished
from the other ..." (1985b, page 209).
Such passages from Irigaray have been interpreted as advocating a peculiarly
feminine merger and fusion between self and other, and have been much criticised
as a result. Writers as different as Butler (1990), Doane (1987; 1990; 1991), Moore
(1988), and Rose (1986) have all argued that this strategy seems dangerously close to
phallocentric arguments which claim that women are unable to occupy positions of
analytical distance. And indeed, figure 1 can be reinterpreted at this point in order
to support this feminist fear of the consequences of abandoning the visual to the
masculine, as the engraving can be seen as exemplifying the masculinist denial of
women's ability to participate in the space - time geometry of masculinist knowledge.
For central to the engraving is a figure, represented as feminine, who appears unable
to organise space perspectivally. I refer of course to the female seminude, decorated
for display to the masculine look and herself turned into a landscape by that same,
perspectivally organised look. But she does not look as the masculine spectators do.
She is absorbed in her own image, oblivious of the crowded landscape around her.
And her fascination with her reflection is so intense that it seems to disrupt the
spatial organisation of the scene. According to the rules of that perspectival organisation, she is too close to the mirror to be able to see the image shown in it; and,
according to those same rules, there is something odd as well in the relation
between the angle of the mirror, the reflection it shows, and what the viewer of this
engraving expects to see. What the engraving can be seen as suggesting is not only
that feminine self-reflection lacks the separating distance necessary for, and constitutive of, masculine self-knowledge, but also that femininity disrupts the spatial
geometry which structures that distance. As Doane (1987, page 137) remarks in
another context, in masculinist discourse "the ontological problemthat is, the
problem of feminine identityis transformed into a spatial problem". Although this
transformation can certainly be disturbing to the phallocentric subjectas Irigaray
herself makes clearnevertheless, a strategy of noncompliance with the phallocentric scenography of knowledge may simply reaffirm phallocentrism's claim that
women are incapable of producing the visually orderly space of self/knowledge.
Irigaray's arguments, and the critical reactions to them, raise a number of issues
central to my concern with critiquing the interrelation between phallocentric subjectivity and its visualised space. Her insistence on that interrelation is crucial for
feminist geography, I would argue, because it persistently interrogates the complicity
of the phallocentric subject with certain modes of organising the visual and the
spatial. This is a necessary interrogation because "the identity of the hegemonic
white male subject is an enigma in contemporary cultural politics" (Mercer, 1991,
page 206). In this paper, therefore, I attempt to develop a critique of the phallocentric space of self/knowledge. However, the terms of that critique must not
replicate phallocentrism's own claims to power; as Irigaray (1993, page 177) herself

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765

says* "no narrative, no commentary on a narrative, are enough to produce a change

in discourse ... unless they go beyond the utterance into the creation of new forms'*.
A critical account of phallocentrtsm must argue that the phalloccntric space of self/
knowledge is not as stable or stabilising as the phallocentric subject desires. Thus,
although in this paper I have started by taking as my object of study what might be
perceived as an overly general conceptual categorythe phallocentric subject
positionI must, and will, go on to argue that this position is not monolithic but is
composed of fractured, contradictory, mobile, and diverse masculinities. The particular spatiality and visualhy of phalloccntric subjectivity needs to be specified in this

Figure 1. Jan Saenredam after Hendrick Goltzius An Artist and His Model 1678 (source:
Alpers, 1983, page 60).

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G Rose

way if feminist theorisations of space and subjectivity are to avoid reflecting the
self-image of the same.
But if the instabilities and the specificities of the phallocentric space of
self/knowledge must be theorised, so too must the possibility of other spaces of self/
knowledge. This is because, as Irigaray's critics argue, feminist work must also
avoid occupying the aspatial and avisual position of other to the same.(1) Nonphallocentric modes of organising both space and sight must also be sought. These
organisations themselves will surely be diverse, and elsewhere I have suggested that
some feminist reconstructions of the corporeal attempt to produce a nonphallocentric space (Rose, 1995; see also Grosz, 1994). In this paper, however, I want to
focus on reworkings of visualised spatialities in relation to subjectivities. Irigaray's
annexation of tactility to a hoped-for femininity has been criticised not only by
feminists suspicious that it reaffirms masculinist definitions of femininity, but also by
feminists who, with Williams (1994, page 11), "want the chance to keep exercising
my greedy eyes, the chance to keep looking". Feminist geographers are among those
refusing to abandon the visual (for example, Ford, 1991), and recently several have
appropriated the mirror for emancipatory ends and have used it to look both at
themselves and at the world (for example, Katz, 1992). These subversions of
phallocentric visual spaces offer yet another interpretation of figure 1. In this third
interpretation, the female figure can be seen as involved in her own spatiality rather
than as a failure of phallocentric spatiality; she can be seen as representing herself
in ways indifferent to the rules of phallocentric perspective. (Indeed, my own
repeated viewings and different interpretations of this image are themselves
intended as a means of baffling the ordered scene of phallocentric knowledge by
insisting on the importance of specific, and other, viewing positions to understandings of what is seen. I will return to this strategy, of a repetitive looking which does
not reflect the same, later in the paper.) A feminist critique of the phallocentric
space of self/knowledge must also acknowledge such other possible spaces of self/
knowledge in order to demonstrate the particularity of the phallocentric mirroring
of the world, and to imagine an elsewhere where everything might be different.
My elaboration in this paper of the organisation of visuality and spatiality in
these two directions entails an engagement with psychoanalysis. There are a
number of authors who, like Irigaray, work with (and also against) psychoanalytic
arguments in order to address the politics of sexual sameness, sexual difference, and
visuality. Psychoanalysis also has something to say about space, as Pile (1993) has
noted. What I find especially critical about such psychoanalytically informed
critiques is that they replace phallocentric visions of space as transparent and
coherent with spaces riddled with fissures, lacks, voids, slippages, doublings,
absences, splittings, and paradoxes. [All of which must also be allowed for in the
work of the critic of phallocentrism (Doane, 1990; Irigaray, 1985b, pages 6 8 - 8 5 ;
Rose, forthcoming).] As I hope this paper will show, certain feminist interpretations
of psychoanalysis provide radical ways of thinking about space by destabilising the
space of self/knowledge of the phallocentric subject. The following three sections in
fact draw mainly on feminist psychoanalytic film theory, but I share these theorists'
(1)

I would argue that Irigaray's description, quoted above, of the two lips is precisely an effort
to avoid occupying the position of the other; it is an attempt to imagine and occupy a different
kind of spatiality, one not constructed through a phallocentric dualism of depth and surface (see
below). I therefore find Whitford's (1991) argument that Irigaray is not in fact advocating a
femininity of closeness and fusion persuasive; indeed, the quotation used earlier to demonstrate
Irigaray's advocacy of tactility concludes with the sentence, "One cannot be distinguished from
the other, which does not mean that they are indistinct" (1985b, page 209, emphasis added).

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767

assumption that arguments about filmic space may be helpful in considering the
spaces of self/knowledge more generally, because filmic spaces fundamentally depend
on other powerful discourses and fantasies which circulate persistently in modern
Western societies. In the next section 1 explore in more detail one, particularly
influential, feminist psychoanalytic argument about the specific organisation of the
visual, the spatial, and sexual sameness. In the third section I discuss some other work
which places more emphasis on the instability of the phallocentric subject's space of
self/knowledge. In the fourth section efforts to organise the spatial and the visual in
ways which attempt to evade sexual sameness are explored* As I have assumed that
many readers will not be familiar with psychoanalytic theory and have therefore
tried to explain its relevant terminology with some care, this paper focuses only on a
few of the possible intersections of gender; it focuses only on heteroscxualities.
The phallocentric subject and the phalloccntric space of self/knowledge
"I ease my self into a body bag"
P J Harvey, "Plants and Rags"
In this section I outline one, highly influential, feminist psychoanalytic argument
about the production of sexual sameness through a particular organisation of the
visual and the spatial. The key text here, originally written over twenty years
ago now, is Mulvcy's essay on "Visual" pleasure and narrative cinema" (1989,
pages 14-26). In this essay, Mulvcy famously summarised the visual structure of
dominant ways of cinematic seeing as "woman as image, man as bearer of the look"
(page 19); that is, the heterosexual masculine position is to look actively, possessively, and crotically at women, and the feminine position is to be looked at.
Although her essay was referring only to classic Hollywood cinema, Mulvey claimed
that "the fascination of film is reinforced by preexisting patterns of fascination
already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have
moulded him" (page 14). She thus assumed that the politics of representation are
bound into the dynamics of subjectivity which, for Mulvey as for psychoanalysis in
general, is at once individual and social (Pile, 1993). This encouraged the subsequent generalisation of her argument into a description of a hegemonic way of
seeing in which masculinity and femininity are positioned in a hierarchical relationship. Most readings of her work focus on the dynamics of this particular
organisation of visual pleasure, but her essay also explores the relations between
this scopic regime and the organisation of space, and this will be the focus of my
reading of her essay here.
Mulvey's argument develops by drawing on Lacan's (1977b) account of the
mirror stage. The mirror stage is a crucial moment in the formation of the subject,
of subjectivity itself. Lacanians argue that there is no pregiven subject position, only
the invitation to occupy one extended by, among other things, the mirror stage. The
infant is very young when the mirror stage occurs; it is though curious, looking,
gazing, scopophilic. And gradually it recognises an image in a mirror as its self. But
this is by no means a simple encounter. The image is apprehended in a particular
way, through "a culturally specific epistemic a priori" (Butler, 1990, page 129; see
also Doane, 1990; Silverman, 1992) which includes culturally specific ways of
understanding the visual and the spatial.
On the one hand, the image and the body it apparently reflects are understood
as complete and whole, and this fascinates the child as its own bodily coordination
is as yet fragmented. As Bowie (1991, page 23) notes, a certain kind of space is
central to this fascination: "the child's attention is seized (capte) by the firm spatial
relationships between its real body and its specular body and between body and

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setting in the specular image; he or she is captivated {captive)". The child is intrigued
by and caught in this space, and it is a space organised in a specific way, as something which can firm, cohere, and fix. This kind of space shows a stable relation
between body and setting, and "it is from this fixity, and the images that are thus
produced, that the subject is able to postulate objects of permanence and identity in
the world" (Rose, 1986, page 173). The look at the self-image is organised by the
same, coagulating space, too: a stable, coherent, perspectival space (Grosz, 1990,
page 38). When the child looks through this space, the image it sees is "incorporated into the child's organisation of its experience of its body" (page 37) so that the
child experiences a unified and totalised body image. Moreover, this cohering space
is both a mode of perceiving objects in the world and a mode of perceiving the self.
The self is also imagined as being organised through a coherent, extensive space.
This space provides "a measure of the 'me', which emerges from an acknowledgement of my inwardness, the depth of my character, the profundity of my person, to
mention only a few of those qualities through which we commonly articulate our
self-consciousness" (Bhabha, 1994, page 48). As Bhabha (page 49) says, this visibility
of depth apparently makes the self transparent, just as in figure 1 it made the world
transparent. This particular mode of visual spatiality thus produces a particular
kind of subject, who relates to its others in a particular way.
On the other hand, this apparent coherence and plenitudinous transparency are
always threatened: the transparent self is an illusion, after all. The child's recognition of its self in the mirror is always also a misrecognition, precisely because the
image is not its self. The mirror image thus also involves alienation: "identification
of an object world is ... grounded in the moment when the child's image was
alienated from itself as an imaginary object and sent back to it the message of its
own subjecthood" (Rose, 1986, page 173). The subject simultaneously identifies
with the image and is alienated from it. The space constituted in terms of stability
and coherence therefore has a further quality: it is also a space which permits a
sense of distance, which alienates and separates the self from the scene. The image
alienates the subject and might thus potentially confront the subject (page 174). So
the coherent space of the self is never quite totally coherent: "there is a hole in the
visible" (Doane, 1991, page 45), as well as a whole. To return to figure 1 once
more, its coherent perspectival space is fissured at its very centre. Which returns us
to the question of sexual sameness.
Mulvey (1989) argues that cinema enacts especially clearly the very different
positions designated as masculine and feminine within the dynamics of phallocentric
and heterocentric spatiality, visuality, and subjectivity. She argues that cinema
represents the subject which believes it actively sees the world as masculine. The
male movie star, the hero of the filmic narrative, "is free to command the stage, a
stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action"
(page 20). The movie spectator identifies with him partly because the cameras assume
his position when picturing the narrative. But the spectator also identifies with the
movie hero because he embodies the spectator/subject's mirror-stage self-image:
"A male movie star's glamorous characteristics are ... those of the more perfect,
more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of
recognition in front of the mirror. The character in the story can make things
happen and control events better than the subject/spectator, just as the image in
the mirror was more in control of motor co-ordination ... The active male figure
(the ego ideal of the identification process) demands a three-dimensional space
corresponding to that of the mirror recognition, in which the alienated subject
internalised his own representation of his imaginary existence" (page 20).

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769

The masculine figure is not therefore himself subject to looking, according to

Mulvey. Instead, the position of "to-he-looked-at-nvss" (page 19) is occupied by the
female movie star. She is represented as a passive spectacle repeatedly offered to
the masculine look, a look which Mulvey describes as voyeuristic in its reiterative,
distancing mastery,
In order to explain such sexual sameness and hcteroecntrism, Mulvey is forced
to add another psychoanalytic term to her analysis of subjectivity: castration. The
active masculine look which can see itself seeing is also the look which, as Grosz
(1990, page 39) points out, during the castration complex HQQH the female genitalia
not simply as different but as lacking, Irigaray (1985a) argues that it is precisely
this seeing of the feminine as lacking which prevents those constituted as feminine
from becoming subjects in a phalloeracy. Hence the dominant masculine look is not
only coherent and distancing in these arguments, but also phallocentric. Mulvey
(1989) argues that this visual phalloccntrism is central to the phalloccntric organisation of cinematic space. In particular, that separating distance between spectator
and image is produced not only by the inherent gap between the two, but also by
the masculine desire to distinguish its self from what it sees as feminine lack (see
also Doanc, 1991; Silverman, 1992; Williams, 1990). Masculinities put a distance
between their selves and femininity: voyeurism is a reaction to feminised lack. And
this lacking other is excluded from the spatiality of separating distance by another
of the mechanisms brought to bear on it: fetishism, According to the classic
psychoanalytic definition of fetishism, which Mulvey more or less follows (but see
Gamman and Makinen, 1994, pages 176-182), the fetish is an object which represents the mother's 'missing' penis. Mulvey argues that the perfect face and body of
the female film star, her surfaces lovingly lingered over by the camera, work as a
fetish because their beauty denies the horror of the mother's apparent castration.
The feminine is thus represented as surface, as nondepth, as to-be-looked-at-ness.
Femininity is represented as a facade, The phallocentric (and heterocentric) subject
thus organises space through the depth of his self and the surface of this other.
Mulvey's essay shares Irigaray's emphasis on the centrality of a specific organisation of a seen space to the phallocentric subject. She offers a clearer account than
Irigaray, however, of the particular organisation of that space: through the processes
of voyeurism and fetishism, an active look, organised through a cohering and
distancing space, both structures and is structured by the phallocentric subject. This
active, masculine look through space constitutes its other as a femininity which is
lacking. The feminised other is fetishised as a spectacle, to be looked at only as a
surface concealing a lack. The phallocentric relation between same and other is
thus articulated visually and spatially as a relation between depth and (deceptive)
surface. Dominant modes of representation, such as cinema, function according to
this particular, spatialised subjectivity, and their representations of the world mirror
his self. Mulvey thus goes some way towards specifying the contradictory dynamics
of the phallocentric space of self/knowledge.
There are two difficulties with this otherwise valuable account, however. The first
is that it theorises phallocentric masculinities as extremely powerful. There is little
sense of dominant masculinities as vulnerable in Mulvey's work. The second difficulty is that it theorises femininity as completely passive; notoriously, there are no
female spectators in Mulvey's cinema. Thus, although Mulvey usefully specifies
aspects of the phallocentric space of self/knowledge, she does not acknowledge either
its instabilities or the possibility of other spaces which might organise other modes
of intersubjectivity. In the next two sections I address each of these issues in turn.

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Cracks in the mirror: re-viewing the gaze

"Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything"
Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"
Mulvey's (1989) argument was a polemic against the phallocentric pleasures of
classic narrative cinema. As a polemic it has been inspirational for a great many
feminist cultural studies. But it has also been heavily criticised, and in this section I
focus on criticisms of Mulvey's analysis of the powerful phallocentric subject as one
who watches, without himself being seen, through a space organised into distance
and surface. Mulvey's emphasis on visual pleasure was an argument which pivoted
on that masculine subject; it was his anxieties about castration which she argued
that cinema temporarily suspended and which made cinema pleasurable. Many
commentators have argued that her account exaggerated the success of films in
soothing the fears and horrors of the masculine spectator, however (see for example
Clover, 1992; Cohan and Hark, 1993; Gamman and Makinen, 1994; Mayne, 1993;
Silverman, 1992). They have suggested that Mulvey's account should be revised in
order to acknowledge the instabilities of the phallocentric subject.
Now, Mulvey certainly did not ignore the possibility that masculine cinematic
viewing positions could be nonpleasurable and destabilising. The very first page of
her essay began by asserting that, in the last resort, the cultural order "speaks
castration and nothing else" (1989, page 14), and her formulation of fetishism as a
mode of representing femininity can be read as a comment on the way in which the
representation of femininity as a surface recognised, as well as refused, the possibility of castration. This is because fetishism is not a simple erasure of the fear of
castration: as an act of denial it simultaneously acknowledges what it wants to evade.
Fetishistic disavowal both denies and recognises lack. Thus the disruption of the
dominant phallocentric visual depth by the feminine surface implies a further disruption: that another space of femininity lurks behind the surface, an incoherent and
overwhelming space of castration, dissolution, and death (Clover, 1992; Creed, 1993;
Mulvey, 1991). The phallocentric gaze and space is thus always already fissured by
the dynamics through which it defines its feminine other; images of femininity can
disrupt phallocentric modes of representation. Mulvey's account of fetishism thus
suggested that fetishism was a symptom of a self-contradictory spatial and visual
disruption which the masculine subject produces in order to constitute himself.
However, Mulvey's account of voyeurism allowed for no such destabilising
contradictions. It described voyeurism as masterful, empowering, controlling,
sadisticas actively and successfully denying lack. Although driven by a fear of
castration, in Mulvey's essay voyeurism appears untainted by the anxieties and
vulnerabilities which that fear must induce in the masculine subject. For a feminist
critique concerned not to exaggerate phallocentric power, Mulvey's understanding
of voyeurism must be modified. And indeed it has been, by writers who argue that
voyeurism is just as problematic for masculinity as is fetishism, but in different
ways. They argue that voyeurism always fails to placate fears of castration, and
that, far from being a process of mastery, voyeurism always threatens the phallocentric subject. These feminist accounts of failed voyeurism cite Lacan, but not his
discussion of the mirror stage. Instead, they draw on his later arguments in The
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1917a). I now address, in this section,
feminist interpretations of this later Lacanian account of voyeurism, partly because
they theorise voyeurism as less invincible than does Mulvey, but also because they
then provide further ways of theorising the inherent fragility of the phallocentric
subject and his space of self/knowledge.

Distance, surface, elsewhere

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Both these tasks require a reconsideration of castration, As Copjee (1989)

remarks, in The Four Fundamental Concepts Lacan was no longer so concerned to
explore the dynamics of identification with the mirror image, Rather, he was
working through ideas about what he termed 'symbolic castration', and was using
the term castration in a particular way, to refer to traumatic experiences of loss and
absence and the consequent anxieties that such experiences provoke in the subject.
At this moment in his work, Lacan argued that this extended definition of castration
could be used to describe the alienation inherent in language and in cultural codes
more generally; because they are only ever substitutes for objects, they are striated
by a sense of loss and lack, and it is this lack that he termed 'symbolic castration'.
'Symbolic castration' is therefore central to the entry into culture.
"Symbolic castration, in its most neutral sense, is a way of referring to what is
also called the loss of origin, i.e. the entry into language and the symbolic, and
thus the definitive loss ('castration') of the original symbiotic relation with the
mother. Whatever one thinks of the terminology, the process appears to be the
only route to growing up and becoming a functioning social human being"
(Whitford, 1991, page 84).
For feminist purposes the terminology is inappropriate indeed; I am therefore
placing the term 'symbolic castration' in inverted commas in order to use it in its
most neutral sense, as "the central source for anxieties about the threat to the ego's
sense of wholeness" (Bronfen, 1992, page 41).(2)
In The Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan argues that the visualbeing a cultural
code as much as language isis riven by the failures and lacks that 'symbolic castration' threatens. He offers Holbein's portrait of The Ambassadorsan image, like
figure 1, of men both surrounded and represented by the technologies of their worldly
knowledgeas an example of the striation of the visual by 'symbolic castration'
anxieties. This painting contains an image of a skull which for Lacan represents
castration/death"the subject as annihilated" (1977a, page 88)and Lacan argues
that the visual field always carries such a threat. But in the painting the skull can
only be seen as a skull, as an image of death, when the viewer stands to one side of
the canvas and looks at it at an oblique angle; looked at from straight in front (the
spectating position invited by the perspectival space of the image), the 'skull' just
looks like a patterned, elongated oval. What this suggests to Lacan is that the threat
of the visual, its lack, cannot be seen through the perspectivally organised space of
the rest of Holbein's canvas. In offering this commentary on Holbein's painting,
Lacan wants to make a more general point about the current, dominant organisation
of the visual and the spatial: which is that the two exist in a complicated interrelation. Although (for sighted people) the visual and the spatial intersect in our
everyday experiences of self/knowledge, Lacan argues that there is a particular
contradiction between them. This contradiction is what several feminists have
drawn upon when theorising the fallibility of phallocentric voyeurism (Grosz, 1992;
Phelan, 1993; Rose, 1986; Silverman, 1992). Their appropriation of Lacan
proceeds as follows.
M Both castration understood in relation to feminised lack and this notion of 'symbolic
castration' are at work in the account of phallocentric space offered in the previous section.
Mulvey (1989) addressed the first explicitly in her discussion. But the alienating distance
between the self and image during the mirror stage can be described as an example of
'symbolic castration' too, and, as Silverman (1992, pages 4 5 - 4 7 ) argues, is projected by
masculine subjectivities onto the feminine through the phallocentric perception of female
castration. Silverman's use of the term 'projection' is useful here as, in its implication of both
depth or distance and a screen or surface, it reiterates the structure of phallocentric space.

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G Rose

Lacan elaborates a complicated relationship between the spatial and the visual.
In order to characterise what I am terming phallocentric space, he reiterates his
earlier interpretation of the mirror stage. He argues that the perspectival organisation of space is a culturally specific organisation of perception, apparently by the
subject. The subject imagines himself as an eye/I which structures a space. Yet,
although this particular space is seen by a look, Lacan says that it is a "construction
which allows that which concerns vision to escape totally" (1977a, page 86); and he
comments that a blind person can understand this particular organisation of the
spatial. Perspectival space is seen, then, but is not constituted through what Lacan
argues is the most important aspect of the visual. In explaining what he takes to be
the key aspect of vision, Lacan focuses on what he calls the gaze.(3) The gaze,
argues Lacan, is outside the subject; it is a look which sees the subject from someplace else, from the cultural field which preexists the subject and through which the
visual is made sense of (Bryson, 1988). At this point in Lacan's work, the possibility
of being seen by the gaze is more important to the subject than the possibility of
seeing perspectival space: "the subject is defined as that which is seeable, capable of
being shown" (Grosz, 1992, page 449). The gaze is irridescent, diffuse, evanescent,
punctual. It precedes the subject and constitutes him:
"in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a
picture ... What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the
gaze that is outside" (Lacan, 1977a, page 106).
For Lacan, then, the most important aspect of the dominant organisation of
visualitymost important in the sense of constituting the subjectis the gaze. The
gaze determines the subject because it speaks to his profound desire to be seen, to
be recognised, as a subject. Phelan (1993, page 20) describes this desire to be seen
as part of "the symmetrical drive of spectatorship: the desire to see always touches
the desire to be seen". Phelan's comment also indicates that the visualised space of
phallocentric self/knowledge can be understood as the intersection of perspectival
space and the gaze. Rose (1986, pages 190-191) summarises this complex intersection thus: "the subject of representation is not only the subject of that geometrical
perspective whereby it reproduces objects as images ... it is also represented in that
process, illuminated by the light emitted by the object of its own look, and thereby
registered simultaneously as object of representation". The phallocentric space of
self/knowledge thus articulates the phallocentric subject as subjectas the perceiver
of objectsbut also as himself objectthe object of the gaze.
Yet the gaze cannot satisfy the subject's desire for recognition. Full recognition
is impossible; desire for recognition is never satisfied. The gaze lacks, and the
instability of the intersection between phallocentric space and the gaze is produced
by this failure of the gaze. One element in this failure is that the gaze works as if
projecting an image of the subject onto a screen of cultural meaning (Bryson, 1988),
and this projection "breaks up [the subject], in an extraordinary way, between its
being and its semblance" by creating "something like a mask, a double, an envelope"
(Lacan, 1977a, page 107) which is the subject's self-image, and not its self. Hence
the gaze does not see the subject (which is what the subject wants: recognition), but
only something like a mask. Another element of the lack of the gaze is that the
subject seeks recognition of his self from his self(-same), but can only do so through
<3> Lacan's use of the term 'the gaze' is not the same as the use of the term 'the gaze' in certain
Lacanian-influenced feminist film theory, as both Silverman (1992, page 130) and Grosz
(1992) point out. In the latter, 'the gaze' often refers to just that powerful voyeuristic look
which Lacan's conceptualisation of 'the gaze' undermines.

Distance, surface, elsewhere

773

the mediation of the screen, of the gaze beyond his self, of the cultural. This
produces the contradiction that, when "I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that You never look at me from the place from which I see
you" (page 103). These are contradictions between the subject and his desire.
Lacan summarises the lacking gaze thus: "Generally speaking, the relation
between the gaze and what one wishes to see involves a lure. The subject is
presented as other than he is, and what one shows him is now what he wishes to
see. It is in this way that the eye may function ... at the level of lack" (page 104).
The gaze can thus never fulfill the subject's desire; it is structured by 'symbolic
castration', by lack, absence, and loss. The gaze preexists the subject and is never
satisfying because of "the fact that the subject cannot see what it wants to see"
(Rose, 1986, page 194; Fhelan, 1993). As feminists then argue, the voyeur never
sees where he most wants to. If fetishism fails the phallocentric subject by offering
him a veiled glimpse of what he does not want to see, then, voyeurism fails him
either by not allowing him to see from where he wants or by showing him from
places he docs not want to be seen.
Feminist discussions of Lacan's analysis of the relation between the gaze and
perspectival space are, I would argue, important for a feminist account of spatiality
for two reasons (compare, Doanc, 1990). First, their arguments about the gaze insist
upon the failure of voyeurism, as I have just argued; and this is necessary if feminist
arguments are not to reflect the self-same back to his self. Indeed, the gaze disrupts
all subjects' efforts to centre themselves visually. Second, these arguments differentiate between various visual modes: in particular, between the gaze and the look that
sees perspectival space. This suggests that it is critical to think more carefully about
the relationships between spatialities and visualities in order to problematisc the
organisation of both. Indeed, I now want to argue that the analytical separation of
the gaze from perspectivally (dis)organised space has radical implications for
destabilising the phallocentric subject's space of self/knowledge. I have already
suggested that the phallocentric subject's constitution of and by a particularly visualised space of self/knowledge through fetishistic responses to the fear of castration is
riddled with contradictions: it produces a space of depth and also of baffling surface.
I have now also argued that the voyeuristic dynamic of that particular space can be
disrupted by the gaze. I now want to end this section of the paper by discussing a
further destabilisation of the space of phallocentric self/knowledge, drawn from
some recent discussions of masculine posing. This work suggests that the contradiction between phallocentric visualised space and the gaze can place lack with the
masculine instead of projecting it onto the feminine.
Paradoxically, it is during his discussion of this gaze of desire as "a place of
permanent catastrophe" (Bowie, 1991, page 138) that Lacan offers one of the very
few moments in his project which allows for some sense of agency by the subject.
He suggests that the split between the subject and his image allows a certain
manipulation of the self-image.
"Only the subjectthe human subject, the subject of the desire that is the essence
of manis not, unlike the animal, entirely caught up in this imaginary capture.
He maps himself in it. How? Insofar as he isolates the function of the screen
and plays with it. Man, in effect, knows how to play with the mask as that
beyond which there is the gaze" (1977a, page 107).
This manipulation can be understood in terms of the relation between phallocentric
space and the gaze. The split between the subject and the mask is articulated as a gap,
a space. The phallocentric space of distance, depth, and interiority is understood as a
distance between the subject and his double. The illusion of consciousness and

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G Rose

agency produced by this distance enables the manipulation of the self-image, and
Owens (1992) describes this manipulation as posing. This distance produces a pose,
a mimicry of the self, a pose in which "the subject poses as an object in order to be a
subject" (page 215). Now, the politics of such masculine posing are complex and
diverse (Bell et al, 1994; Cohan and Hark, 1993; Moore, 1988; Mort, 1988;
Simpson, 1994; Williams, 1990). I want to suggest one possible feminist interpretation of (some) masculine posing, which emphasises the fragility of such masculine
performances, by establishing a contradiction between the phallocentric space of
self/knowledge which enables the pose and the gaze which is beyond the pose. This
move is possible because, as Owens (1992) argues, the pose is struck in order to
deflect threat of lack in relation to the gaze. The pose is a mask, a surface, which
offers itself as complete to the gaze. It is hiding (from) a lack. In this sense, the
pose might be described as a kind of fetish, but as a fetish which projects a surface
onto a masculine body. The posing phallocentric subject is himself fetishised,
produced as a surface to ward off the lack which the gaze induces in his self
(Gamman and Makinen, 1994, page 181; Silverman, 1992). This could be one way
of making sense of the current proliferation of naked male torsos in advertising,
cinema, and television: faultless phallic surfaces are presented to the gaze as well as
to the look of others (Simpson, 1994). The phallocentric subject does not always
project his lack onto the site of femininity, then; his desire to resist the gaze may,
ironically, produce that subject as himself a fetishised surface. This fetishised
masculine surface produces its own disruptions, however. Its very surficiality contradicts the masculine space of self/knowledge as depth, transparency, and interiority.
And, as a fetish, it also acknowledges lack even as it denies it; it both parades a
perfect masculinity and enacts "a grotesque masquerade of manhood" (Moore,
1988, page 53; see also Heath, 1986). As the work of Ward suggests (see figure 2),

Figure 2. Cathy Ward Enmesh 1992 (source: Salaman, 1994, page 106).

Distance, surface, elsewhere

775

the fetishised phallic surface both decorates masculinity and disperses it. What this
analysis of contemporary representations of dominant masculinities suggest, then, is
that efforts to spec(tac)ularly affirm dominant masculinity and its space fail even as
they succeed.
Certain recent feminist discussions of voyeurism, fetishism, and posing can be
interpreted in the context of this paper, then, as explorations of the contradictions
between the phallocentric look at a space organised visually through perspective,
and the gaze. Theorising this contradiction is useful for feminist critiques of the
phallocentric organisation of subjectivity, visunlily, and spatiality because it undermines the coherence of the phalloeentric subject and his visualised space of self/
knowledge, The Lacanian notion of the gaze renders voyeuristic looking fallible
because it ensures that the voyeur never sees what he most wants to sec. The
understanding of masculine posing as the fetishistic deployment of the phalloccntric
space of self/knowledge in order to deflect the gaze suggests that lack can be
located as masculine (even if it is disavowed). The projection of 'symbolic castration'
can be directed onto masculinities. These different failures may work at different
moments to disrupt different masculinities; and no doubt there are other failures
too. But these are some of the ways, at least, that the coherence of the phallocentric
subject and his visualised space can be problematised by a feminist critique which
refuses to reflect the same back to himself.
Shattering the mirror
"Come on girl let's get out of this party it's getting boring there's more to life than
this

"

Bjork, "There's More To Life Than This"

In this paper I have argued that the phallocentric space of self/knowledge can be
specified critically by theorising its complex and unstable mobilisations of fetishism
and voyeurism, and by theorising a dissonance between the phallocentric organisation of space and the gaze. This particular formulation tries to avoid inadvertantly
reasserting the power of the phallocentric subject position, by emphasising its
vulnerabilities and contradictions. In the previous section, I noted that some
feminist discussions of phallocentric posing even go so far as to suggest that certain
modes of masculine posing locate lack with the masculine. However, several of the
writers pursuing such an argument conceptualise the frailties of the phallocentric
subject only by placing him in relation to his other, femininity. According to these
arguments, the lacking masculine subject is feminised. Silverman (1992, page 3), for
example, describes certain masculinities which "not only acknowledge but embrace
castration, alterity and specularity" as "those which open in a variety of ways onto
the domain of femininity" (Silverman, 1992, page 3; see also Holmlund, 1993;
Neale, 1993). Conversely, for Mulvey the female spectator is masculinised if she
looks actively; indeed, Mulvey even described the female spectator as a kind of
transvestite (Mulvey, 1989, page 33), which not only affirms dominant, phallocentric
definitions of gender difference but naturalises them by assuming a real female body
underneath male clothes (deLauretis, 1991). Many feminists have argued in
contrast not only that women can look actively but that certain orchestrations of
looks and spaces invite a look which is at once active and feminine (Gamman and
Marshment, 1988; Pribram, 1988), and that there is no reason why this look should
be theorised as women spectating in a masculine manner. As deLauretis (1988)
argues, feminist cultural critics need to work with notions of subjectivity which do
not simply echo phallocentric discourses of difference. Women who look may not need
to be compared to transvestites; they may rather be performing a femininity that

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G Rose

phallocentric discourse cannot recognise. To describe unconventional femininities

as 'masculine', or unconventional masculinities as 'feminine', then, is to adopt an
impoverished critical-analytical vocabulary. Not only does it understand gender
difference in phallocentric terms (which, following Irigaray, is not to understand difference at all but only to reflect the same); it is also an example of what Wittig
(1980) described as "the straight mind", as difference is formulated only in terms of
a relation between masculine and feminine. This section examines discussions of
space which refuse to take this phallocentric and heterocentric structure of difference as fundamental to spatiality and visuality. The section explores in particular
the possibilities of feminine spectatorship which challenge the phallocentric subject
and the phallocentric space of self/knowledge.
The possibility of other spaces of self/knowledge is raised in Irigaray's discussion of the mimicry of femininity as a parodic and subversive tactic. She suggests
that "if women are such good mimics, it is because they are not simply resorbed in
this function. They also remain elsewhere" (1985b, page 76). Given her arguments
about the importance of a particular time-space geometry to the phallocentric
subject and its erasure of feminine subjectivity, Irigaray must be referring here to a
different organisation of space through which femininity might be imagined as a
subject position. This organisation would involve neither the separating distance
through which the phallocentric subject organises his self/knowledge, nor the
surficiality to which he condemns his other. It would not be structured by phallocentric voyeurism or fetishism. It would, rather, be a different space which would
also permit a different organisation of subjectivity. A space not structured through
the phallocentric mirror, a space which would allow other subject positions to place
themselves. A subjectivity, for example, indifferent to castration, an "indifference
[which] may be the mark of her (sexual) difference, the trade of her location
elsewhere" (Grosz, 1990, page 192; see also Rose, 1995).
I now want to consider a photograph by Ryan called Your You (figure 3) as a
trace of a location elsewhere. This image helps me to envision the possibility of a
differently feminine, visualised space which is not phallocentric, and which also
places heterosexuality in suspension. The photograph seems to refer to a feminine
desire to relate to a masculine other and to be recognised by him, as Ryan has
literally projected an image of her self onto a male body, and this image is her look.
She is constituted as an eye/I in relation to him. In doing this, though, she is also
representing her self as an active looker, a spectator relating to an other, wanting to
see and be seen, constructing a space between her self and her seen. But what kind
of space? She is not occupying the passive position of to-be-looked-at-ness which
constitutes phallocentric femininity. And her refusal of this position, her refusal of
phallocentric visual space, her insertion of her look into that space, seems to me to
disrupt the space of the photograph. The photograph is incoherent according to the
organisational rules of the phallocentric space of self/knowledge. The depth and
distances of the photograph are uncertain. How close to the backcloth is this
figure? Is he lying on it? leaning on it? And is the camera above him as he lies or
in front of him as he walks? or leans? For this spatial uncertainty also means that
the masculine figure is not represented as a clearly active subject in the field of
vision. It is difficult to see, for example, whether the photographed male torso is
standing or lying down, nor, if he is standing, whether he is walking forward (hinted
by the swing of his left arm) or whether he is static and posing (suggested by the
twist of his right hip). Both the figure and the space through which he is constituted
thus seem neither an active articulation of distance and depthand masculineor a
static surface of spectacle and passivityand feminine. The photograph's visualisation

Distance, surface, elsewhere

777

of space has disrupted the phallocentric organisation of space and the phalloccntric
subject and his other: none are conventionally gendered. The difference between
masculinity and femininity, and thus the possibility of heterosexuality, is no longer
clear, and nor is their phalloccntric constitution through a specific organisation of
visual space,
This uncertainty of gendered spatiality, visuality, and sexuality is supplemented
by an uncertainty of subjectivity. Ryan's photograph does not describe an other
space of other selves and other knowledges, It does not delineate a stable and
coherent alternative with which the phalloccntric space of self/knowledge can be
replaced. This is because it acknowledges the impossibility of stable and authentic
subject spaces through which phalloccntrism can be resisted. Ryan's photograph
reminds me of the impossible, wounding desire of the gaze, in the way her selfimage is taped with what look like bandages onto her other, a tear of glue running
down his body, and in the disruption of her returned look by the man's nipple
which looks almost like a third eye, an excessive disruption to hers.
These uncertainties mean that, as a spectator, I have returned again and again to
this photograph, I am intrigued by its unusual mirroring of self and other and its
concomitant spatial doubts, and by how it addresses me as a woman, Such repetition can subversively destabilise the conventionalised performance of femininity, as
Butler (1990) as well as Irigaray (1985b) argue, and Owens (1992, page 214) details
how my particular repetitive spectatorship of Ryan's photograph enacts a destabilisation of gender. He argues that such reiterative looking displaces the opposition
between (masculinised) activity and (femininised) passivity: my repeated return to
this image is an active act, but it is also one which aims for the passivity of the
to-be-addressed. For Owens, this displacing of the gendered distinction between

Figure 3. Jennifer Ryan Your You: Act 5 1992 (source: Salaman, 1994, page 149).

778

G Rose

active and passive is also a displacing of gender itself, a reflection of the displacement of gender in the image, a reflection which is itself no longer the phallocentric
reiteration of the self-same. Ryan's photograph catches me through its space which
is neither surface nor depth, and then constitutes me in ways which are not clearly
gendered. For me, then, Ryan's image implies a space of self/knowledge organised
in ways which are not those of the phallocentric subject.
This discussion has a number of implications for the question of self-reflection
with which this paper began. 'Reflection' is not a self-evident process. In this paper
I have argued that reflection cannot be understood as produced through a transparent space of self/knowledge, as the self can never be fully known. A single
glance, no matter how sustained or how penetrating, will see a coherent and orderly
space of self/knowledge only at the cost of denying and disavowing its disruptions.
For if the self is not whole, if it is incoherent, always punctured by the gaze, then a
perspectivally organised space of self/knowledge will always produce a self whose
vulnerabilities are obscured. I suggest then that a critical geography aware of the
intersection of knowledge with power should consider abandoning the illusion of
full self-knowledge. This means, as many geographers have argued, abandoning
claims to all-seeing analytical insight. But it also demands abandoning efforts to
position the self in an orderly, plenitudinous, transparent space. Again, many
geographers have made this point too; but only in the context of refusing to occupy
a space of self-knowledge which ignores its own particular perspective (Katz, 1992;
Keith, 1992; Madge, 1993). But the same critique of the kind of space in which we
locate our selves must also be made in relation to situated knowledges: even
acknowledging the specificity of a particular perspective still assumes the transparent coherence of perspective itself. In order not to reflect the transparency of
phallocentric spaces of self/knowledge, critical geographers require other spaces of
other selves and other knowledges. Spaces which do not reflect the same. Spaces
then that are fissured, punctured, opaque, doubtful: spaces vulnerable to the gaze
(of others): spaces that produce hesitant accounts of the self and the world. Diverse
reflections from different locations in a multiple space, perhaps, like the repetitiously different interpretations offered here of figure 1. Or repeated glances at an
image like Ryan's which, in its stubborn ambiguities, locate my spectating self in/as
an uncertain spatiality. Or a tangled space of interaction between diverse fragments
of an incoherent self in dialogue with an elusive other (Rose, forthcoming). Or ...
... the possibilities must be much more various. What the few I have offered
here do insist upon, though, is that modes of (inter)subjectivity which are not
phallocentric also require spaces which are not the illusory phallocentric space of
self/knowledge as transparent depth.
Picking a way through the shards
This paper has ended with some ways of seeing space that try to break (with) the
phallocentric mirror with which it began. There are possible ways of seeing space
that are beyond the spatial regime of surface and depth and its specular regime of
geometral reflection. In thus distorting what Irigaray (1985a) describes as the old
dream of symmetry between the same and his other, I have introduced a number of
terms which shatter the singular reflection of the same. Voyeurism and fetishism,
for example, have been discussed as processes which both produce a coherent and
distancing phallocentric space and disrupt it; they disavow what is perceived as
feminine lack in ways which both constitute and distort the coherent space of the
phallocentric subject by creating surfaces and voids. The very desire for a coherent
space of self/knowledge constructs an other which convolutes that space. Nor are

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779

these disruptions always projected onto the site of femininity. Certain modes of
masculine posing can acknowledge masculinity as the site of lack. Above all, this
phallocentric space is structured by 'symbolic castration- as well as by its fear of the
apparently castrated feminine. There is always a lack which striates every effort to
attain a coherent, plenitudinous subjectivity.
Shattering the mirror of phalloccntric subjectivity was the major task of this
paper. I hoped to theorise that subjectivity in a manner which understood both its
power and its fragility. However, it must be apparent that in order to undertake that
task I have continued to use shards from the smashed mirror of theory. In particular, psychoanalysisthe dreamer of symmetry par excellence, according to Irigarny
(1985a)has provided mc with some ways of speculating on that phallocentric
subject positioning. It has given me the distinction between the gaze and phalloccntric space, and some ways in which to understand the dynamics of that space. I
have tried to use elements of psychoanalytic arguments, and other appropriations of
other shards by other feminists, in order to reflect the phatloccntric subject in them
from a position other than that of their insight. These remain shards, therefore; my
account (and those of other feminists on whose work I have depended here) does
not simply reflect Lacan's in faithful mimicry. I try to remain indifferent, elsewhere.
So I have tried to structure this paper itself as a number of pieces, each elaborating
the others without displacing them. The paper moves on, but also repeats, its
repetitions subverting the usual textual desire for coherence, plenitude, bringing it all
together. Maybe itself, myself, then articulating a different space of self/knowledge.
Acknowledgements. Thanks to Virginia Blum, Heidi Nast, Jan Penrose, Steve Pile, Pam
Shurmer-Smith, and Matt Sparke for their comments on previous versions of this paper.
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