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.Furthermore, to defi ne Mary s knowledge as simultane-ously symbolic and imaginary is to point to the possibility of troubling, perhaps A °öB±öIGGER S PLACE 19subverting, the white symbolic order by rendering it blind, by denaturalizingits structures.Whereas her knowledge pertains to the white symbolic order, itcan be rendered imaginary when Bigger learns to transgress his place.What I call the white symbolic order, then, can be sustained only by therigid organization of subject positions in which racial difference to a largeextent determines the form of jouissance available to one.24 Of course, if thesymbolic is the realm of ethical mobility for Lacan, the rigidity of the whitesymbolic betrays its unethical hence un-symbolic character.Bigger s sub-sequent, momentarily successful manipulation of its structures indeed revealsits imaginary character.My point here is analogous to that of feminist criticswho have argued that what in a patriarchy passes off as the symbolic ordermay be nothing but a masculine imaginary (Tyler 41).While the danger of pictur[ing] the symbolic order as some sort of extension of the imaginary isthat we profoundly misunderstand their discontinuities and differences (Dean,Beyond 86), insisting on the proximity of the imaginary and symbolic forma-tions allows us to show how Jan s and Mary s assumption that structures can beseized and redistributed can only be the result of their own privileged positionswithin the networks of power and visibility.When they insist that they are on[his] side (55), Bigger feels uneasy: Why was Mary standing there so eagerly,with shining eyes?.[T]hey made him feel his black skin by just stand-ing there looking at him, one holding his hand and the other smiling (58).Bigger knows that subject positions are not as easily negotiable as the youngwhite couple assume.As I will go on to argue in the following chapters, theycan be attacked, but this requires something more than white liberals will-ingness to be on the same side as Bigger.Instead, despite their good inten-tions, Jan and Mary repeat the gestures of white inattention and condescensionexhibited by her (equally well-intending) parents.Like Mr.and Mrs.Dalton(40), they patronizingly discuss Bigger in his presence without addressing himdirectly ( They ve got so much emotion! What a people!. They ve got to beorganized.They ve got spirit. [ellipsis in original] And their songs thespirituals! Aren t they marvelous? [66]).Unsurprisingly, their liberal antira-cism in fact perpetuates the structures whose symptoms it purports to alleviate,exacerbating their violence, a fact to which Bigger s uneasy reactions attest.AsBigger later tells his lawyer Boris Max, who tries to insist that Mary acted outof kindness: Mr.Max, we re all split up.What you say is kind ain t kind atall.I didn t know nothing about that woman.We live apart.And then shecomes and acts like that to me (297).As the object of Jan and Mary s racializing gaze, Bigger fe[els] naked,transparent; he fe[els] that this white man, having helped to put him down,having helped to deform him, held him up now to look at him and be amused (58).In other words, because they are in a position where they can hold on totheir illusion of mastery, Jan and Mary are unable to see that their interven-tions only reiterate the very conditions of Bigger s subordination.25 Yet, as theirinability to see suggests, the two young radicals, because of their positions of 20 THE AMERICAN OPTICprivilege, are also rendered blind: they cannot see Bigger s position any morethan they can discern the effects of their actions on him.As I will argue in thenext chapter, Bigger learns to utilize this structural blindness, which he discov-ers to entail white people s privilege.To anticipate the argument, we can notethat his helpless feeling of being held up as a deformed object to the looks ofthe young white couple is depicted as something which turns him into a specta-cle yet simultaneously makes him all but disappear.Feeling both naked and transparent, he seems to be in a position that is paradoxically marked bothby a specular overexposure or vulnerability and by of invisibility.This double-ness of transparency a term which refers to an object that is both obviousor readily knowable and simultaneously looked through and missed suggestswhat Lewis Gordon calls the existential dynamics of black invisibility ( Exis-tential 71).That is, while Bigger is identifiable as an embodiment of RalphEllison s nameless invisible man whose high visibility renders him invis-ible ( Introduction xxv), this transparency of the black subject paradoxicallyenables a certain defensive concealment.When Bigger mobilizes racial visibil-ity to his advantage, the white people find themselves, like Holbein s ambas-sadors, immobilized and blinded in postures of self-knowledge.In the lectures that comprise The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Lacan exemplifies this dynamic by implicating himself in such imagi-nary arrogance.Problematizing the critique of psychoanalysis as stubbornlyinsensitive to societies material groundings, he illustrates the way class privi-lege renders one an unethical subject in his well-known anecdote of Petit-Jean. In this true story, he recalls how, as a student in his early twenties, desperately [wanting] to.see something different, he briefly visited a smallfishing village.The young intellectual enjoyed taking part in the villagers fish-ing trips to the sea on the frail craft[s] that the fishermen had to use at [their]own risk. Taking the often unfavorable conditions as a chance for an adven-ture, our hero, who loved to share this risk, this danger with the fishermen,recalls almost lamenting that it wasn t all danger and excitement there werealso fine days days which, supposedly, the fi shermen would welcome muchmore than the adventure of having to go out in heavy storms and risk deathat sea (SXI 95).Among the villagers, there was a young man whom we Lacan and thefishermen called Petit-Jean, who, Lacan says almost parenthetically, like allhis family,.died very young from tuberculosis, which at that time was a con-stant threat to the whole of that social class. As a member of a better-off sec-tion of society, Lacan recalls how, during one fishing trip, Petit-Jean points outa sardine can floating on the waves, a witness to the canning industry, whichwe, in fact, were supposed to supply (emphasis added). You see that can? Jean asks the young guest. Do you see it? Well, it doesn t see you! While Petit-Jean finds this incident [Ce petit épisode] highly amusing, the guest refuses tosmile.And why? To begin with, if what Petit-Jean said to me, namely, thatthe can did not see me [ne me voit pas], had any meaning, it was because in a A °öB±öIGGER S PLACE 21sense, it was looking at me [elle me regarde], all the same.It was looking at meat the level of the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at meis situated (SXI 95/89). The point of this little story and note how the story itself remainsdiminutive for Lacan, as much as little Jean does.derives from the fact that, if I am told a story like that one, it is becauseI, at that moment as I appeared to those fellows who were earning theirlivings with great difficulty, in the struggle with what for them was pitilessnature looked like nothing on earth.In short, I was rather out of place inthe picture
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