Protocol #8: ‘The Look’

It’s officially November, which means that for most of us, spooky season has come to a screeching halt. But given that we’re not yet in the holiday season (although retail stores would disagree), there is always room for one more spooky story! 

Picture this… You’re walking back to your dorm room late at night. You’re coming back from several long hours of pretending to study in Edmunds. You check your phone. It’s 4:39am. As you enter your building, you’re prepared for the hallways to be empty. Surely, no one else will be awake at this hour. You realize that you’re pretty hungry, so you make a bowl of ramen noodles and sit in the hallway to eat so as not to disturb your sleeping roommate. 

Just before you take your first bite, you sense something strange. Maybe it’s the pit-pat-pit-pat of someone walking across the hall to use the bathroom, or maybe those weird motion-sensing lights flicker for just a second. Even though no one is watching you, you feel the eyes of the Other bear a hole into your being and consciousness. 

Suddenly, the room begins to shift. Rather than your perception being centered around the instruments and possibilities in your universe, the Other’s presence corresponds to a “fixed sliding of the whole universe, a decentralization of the world which undermines the centralization” that you were effecting (231). The Other’s look sends you into the Other’s universe, where all of your possibilities become instrumentalities for the Other. (240)

But what you notice most is not that the Other is there. In fact, you can’t even “remark on the color” of the Other’s eyes. This is because your entire consciousness is fastened upon your self. Specifically, the way your self appears to the Other (234). You can’t perceive the world around you because you are so aware of the image of your ego loudly slurping noodles in the hallway at 5am with sauce all over your face, and because of your awareness of the Other, you are aware that you, unfortunately, look like a rat. (It’s okay bestie, we’ve all been there.) 

But now, the question remains: is the image of that person who is eating noodles in the hall really me? Well, yes and no. The presence of the Other reveals to you that you are this being in itself. You are not that person for you; you are that person for the Other. Internally, you will always remain a consciousness. But for the Other, you are indeed the ego that you have presented yourself to be. In the face of the Other, you do not own your being. The image of your being is “written in and by the Other’s freedom” (238). Therefore, the being that you are “preserves a certain indetermination” and unpredictability: you cannot fully control how you are perceived by the Other, since the Look of the Other turns you into an object in the face of the Other. The only way to see yourself, then, is to apprehend yourself from the perspective of the Other (237). But since the Other is a totality, and it is “impossible for us to ‘adopt the point of view of the whole,’” that means that there is a paradox: you can’t view yourself from the point of view of the Other (a totality) but you also can’t view yourself from the point of view of yourself, because to yourself you are just a consciousness (228)! So, if you were to engage in some selective reading of Sartre, maybe you can conclude that you do not identify with the image of yourself eating noodles at 5am or putting up your Christmas tree on November 1st. However, Sartre later clarifies that the existence of the Other is not just dependent on its facticity; the “permanent possibility” of being seen is enough to make the Other a tangible presence — sorry to burst your bubble there. (230)