' to set »f both n First rum of i neo-i "aes-lema," thetic, s "no-Clyde o. The ;enous What iss the z$ and il real-They estern rrative id the :learly natize mod- )• ent m Tasty of the dern-:erna-lied a we e n \,s ex-sively z for-urses, From Linguistics to Psychoanalysis a anthropophagic devouring of varied cultural stimuli in all their éterogeneity. Tropicalist filmmakers framed a resistant strategy remised on a low-cost "aesthetic of garbage." Where Rocha's arlier metaphor of an aesthetic of hunger had evoked famished vic-ms redeeming themselves through violence, the garbage metaphor onveyed an aggressive sense of marginality, of surviving within scarify, of being condemned to recycle the materials of dominant cul-ire. A garbage style was seen as appropriate to a Third World country icking through the leavings of an international system dominated y First World capitalism. In their attempts to forge a liberatory language, alternative film ■aditions draw on para-modern phenomena such as popular region and ritual magic. In some recent African films such as Team [9$7),Jitt( 1992), and ICasarmu Ce (This Land is Ours, 1991),. íagical spirits become an aesthetic resource, a means for breaking ,vay, often in comical ways, from the linear, cause-and-effect con-;ntions of Aristotelian narrative poetics, a way of defying the "grav-y," in both senses ofthat word, of chronological time and literal pace. The values of African religious culture inform not only Afri-in cinema but also a good deal of Afro-diasporic cinema, for exam-le Brazilian films like Barravento (1962) and A Forca de Xango The Force of Xango, 1977), and African American films like Julie lash's Daughters of the Dust, all of which inscribe African (usually oruba) religious symbolism and practice. Indeed, the preference >r Yoruba symbolism is itself significant, since the arts - music, mce, costume, poetry, narrative - are at the very kernel of the Yoruba ligions themselves, unlike other religions where the performing ts are grafted onto a theological/textual core. Aesthetics and cul-ire, in this sense, are inseparable. L.e >■■■■■"J. From Linguistics to Psychoanalysis Within First World film theory, meanwhile, lmgai^dly^TJeixted1 ^MoTofpwas d^n^Avav^o^jsecond^miQlQ^"," wfe 158 A*. From Linguistics to Psychoanalysis I 1 I as&atj:ej3tjion~ "su.bject-erTecfs^pf>- analj'Sis-became-the piefeuct ..frQmJ^nxiaiigoá^^ ,4jiced ray„the.cmematic-apparatus. iThe encounter between psychoa-"" nalysis and the cinema was in one sense the culmination of a long flirtation, since both were born around the same time (Freud first used the term "psychoanalysis" in 1896, just one year after the first screenings of the Lumiere films in the Grand Café)...There had also been character-oriented psychoanalytic studies of the cinema prior to the second semiology, such as Movies: A Psychological Study (1950), where Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites argued that the ein; ema crystallized the common dreams, myths, and fears of the general population, and Hollywood: The Dream Factory (also 1950), where Hortense Powdermaker described, in quasi-ethnographic terms, the Hollywood "tribe" that manufactured these same dreams and myths. There was also the pioneering work of sociologist, psychologist, and filmmaker Edgar Morin. In Cinema, ou Vhomme imaginaire (1958) Morin revisited the venerable trope of "cinema magic," but this time in order to highlight cinema's capacity to infantilize and overpower the spectator. According to Morin the spectator does ' not merely watch a film; he or she lives it with a neurotic intensity, äs a form of socially approved regression, a theme which would be taken up by the psycho-semiotícians. The cinema, for Morin, implicates spectators in their very depths. Both contemporary and archaic, the cinema as an "archive of souls" allows us to photograph our own movements, attitudes, and desires. Imbuing the cinema with their own sensibility and imagination, spectators experience powerful emotions and even a cultic devotion gSginrung"in"tÄniičl 1970s, ah^nota^lrwitrrtííějpěčwl Í97Š ^issue o£the Erench-journal CoMmuničdtionsj&otc cinematic apparatus itselfpnot only in the sense of the instrumental- * _ba^^camera,.proje^^)>and^čr^np3uí^lsoJin"íJie sense of the 160 m From Linguistics to Psychoanalysis t ;specUtqi as the cLesiung subject on Vv Inch thejcinematic institution j§ (jepencls as its obie^_aM_accomphcerJFhe_ psychoanalytlc^apprÔič^ I highlighted the nieta^pgychßlogicaj dimension_of the cinema,Tts %. feys of both activating and teguläting^pectatonaí désjre^The pŕäo % titioners of this approach were not interested at all in what other t «psychological" approaches had classically been interested in: the ' psychoanalysis of authors, plots, or characters. Rather, the interest • shifts, in this phase, frcnrr questions such as "What is the nature o& ' tfíe ciněh^íc~sigh~andT:he laws of their combination?" and~"What is \ a'textual system*" to other cjtteSüoTis, such as "What do we want, f fjfŕom the text?""and "What arej>ur_spectatonai investments in it?" ' Many of the psychoanalytic questions were interarticulated with h Marxist issues of ideology How is the spectator/addressee^'inter,-jtpellated"as_ subject* What is the nature of our ídenuficauonwitíľ" řthe cinematic apparatus and with the stories and characters offered | by the cinema? What kind of subject-spectator is fashioned by the ^'cinematic apparatus? Why does the cinema provoke passionate reac-prions? What explains its fascination? Why does so much seem to be | at stake? How do films resemble dreams or daydreams? What are the -^analogies between the-condensations and displacements typical of Ithe^dreamwork" and the textual "work" of film?"(Ean the cinema "^ pěřve as the "poor man's couch," as Felix Guattari suggested? How:/ Ido film narrativesrepla^^^ ^ I desire? i ■ */)•"> ^ , Although much has been made of the faddish nature of the shift : from linguistic semiotics to psychoanalysis, in fact this change forms part of a coherent trajectory toward the "semio-psychoanalysis" of : the cinema. linguistics and psychoanalysis were not chosen for arbitrary voguish reasons but because they were seen as two sciences *ffiaTdeaTfdirectly with signification as such? The shift was facilitated^ by the fact that JacquesXacan, the major influence in psychoanalytic ^ * film theory, had placed languages the very center of psychoanalysis. If classically the Unconscious was seen as a prelinguistic, instinc-tual reserve, for Lacan^heJJnconsi:^ effect of the subject's entry into the linguistic (symbolic) "orders Language-was the very_ condition of the Unconscious. Rather than read the Oedipus Com- 161 6631 s prac-other n: the íterest iircofi /Kati| wan£ in it>'r m i with [jnterj i with ŕfered >y the : reac-to be ŕethe cai^of nemá How raiícT ;nces -om- From Linguistics to Psychoanalysis ?iölomStieaIly, Lacan read it linguistically./The reference to lin. ciiistici, I «ican promised, "will introduce us to the method which l«'distinguishing synchronic and diachronic structurings in language, vil enable us to understand, better the different value that our anguagc assumes in the interpretation of the resistances and the jí inference" (Lacan, 1997, p. 76). Lacan's nostrum that the "Un-duiscious is structured like a language" provided a further bridge between i he two fields of language and the psyche. (Voloshinov and B ikhtin, from a different angle, had performed a linguistic reading of"Freud in their 1927 book Freudicmism: A Marxist Critique.) psychoanalytic theorists were especially interested in the psychic dimension of the film medium's overpowering "impression of real-*ifiE? They were concerned, that is, with explaining the extraordinary power of the cinema over human feelings. The persuasiveness of ■j*the<.cinenutic apparatus was analyzed as deriving from a number of ¥?3tors - the cinematic situation (immobility, darkness),.thee eripneiatory mechanisms of the image (camera, optical projections, r.nignocul«ir perspective) - all of which induce the subject to project him or herself into the representation. Picking up on the cues provided by the earlierwork of Edgar Morin, 1970s theorists like Jean-Louis Baudry, Chrištián^etž/and 'Jěan-Louis Comolli saw the "question of the impression of reality as inseparable from the ques--tuarof spectatorial positioning and identification. Baudry was the h'ist to draw on psychoanalytic theory to characterize the cinematic -apparatus as a technological, institutional, and ideological machine vvjjh strong "subject-effects." In "Ideological Effects of the Basic (..nematic Apparatus" (1971) Baudry argued that the apparatus flat-. řteced infantile narcissism by exalting the spectatorial subject as the ^center and origin of meaning. 3audry postulated an unconscious substratum in identification, in the sense that cinema, as a simulation apparatus, not only represents the real but also stimulates intense "subject-effects." In 'The Apparatus" (1975) Baudry explored the oft-cited similitude between.'ôie scene of Plato's cave and the apparatus, of cinematic projection, arguing that the cinema constituted the technical utilization of a perennial dream of a perfect, total simulacrum. The 162 From Linguistics to Psychoanalysis shadowy images on the screen, the darkness of the movie/theater^ the passive immobility of the spectator, the womb-like sealing off of ambient noises and quotidian pressures, all foster an artificial state of regression, generating "archaic moments of fusion" not unlike those engendered by dream. Thus a kind of double whammy operates in the cinema: extremely strong visual and auditory stimuli inundate us at a moment when we are predisposed toward passive" reception and narcissistic self-absorption. The film, like a dream, tells a story - a story rendered in images and therefore resonant with' the logic of a primary process which "figures itself forth in images." Specifically cinematic techniques such as superimposition and the' lap-dissolve "mime" the condensations and displacements through which the primary-process logic of dreams works over its phantasizeď £■ objects; The cinema, for Baudry, constitutes the approximate- material re-" alization of an unconscious goal perhaps inherent in the human psyche: the regressive desire to return to, an earlier state of psychic development, a state of relative narcissism in which.desire could be, satisfied through a simulated, enveloping reality where the separation ,- between one's body and the exterior worldrbetween ego and non-ego, is not clearly defined. In apparatus theory th& cinema becomes a very powerful machine which transforms the embodiedj socially situated individualmto a spectatorial subject.-In effect, Baudry put a negative spin on Bazin's positively connoted "myth of total cinema." The film as window-on-the-world became barredT like-a prison. For 1970s psychoanalytic theory^Lacan's notion'that desire is not a matter of desiring the other but of ."desiring thedesireof the other" t seemed a marvelously apt description of the processes of identifica^-tion in, the cinema. Psychoanalytic theory largely absorbed the Lacanian vision, of the deludeH^subjeqtof the cinema. Given an initial lack of being (manque d étre), the initial loss of an originary plenitude linked to a dual relation with the mother, human beings were seen as constitutively alienated, split from themselves, with psychic "identity" consisting of a flimsy bricolage of ephemeral identifications. These ephemera congealed into a kind of identity only during the phase Lacan called the mirror stage, the stage in the child's de- 163 From Linguistics to Psychoanalysis vclopmcnt where hyperactive perception coincides with a low level '-of motor activity. Lacan describes how the infant ego is constituted by the child's identification with and misrecognition of the lure of the mirror image, which offers an imaginary picture of his own autonomous self-presence. Both Metz and Baudry compared,thé>; ■ spectator's situation to the mirror stage, with Metz pointing out that the mirror analogy was only partially accurate; the cinema, unlike the mirror, does not reflect back the spectator's own image. From a feminist perspective, this theory was now seen as.giving expression to amascuíinist denial of sexual difference. 3ľhe. self-deluded, ideologically coherent subject constructed by dominant cinemactor thesefeminist theorists, was gender-specific.«Taking a term coined by Marcel Duchamp and elaborated by Michel Carrouges, feminist critic Constance Benley (1989)ilater compared the-Baudry ** model of the apparatus^ t.o^a "bachelor machine," i.e. as a closed, -y self-sufficient, frictiohless machine controlled by a knowing overseer subject to a fantasy of closure and mastery, ultimately as a compensatory pleasure and consolation for male lack and alienation. Joan iGÖpjee (1989).;argued that apparatus theory constructed a paranoid .anthropomorphic machine producing only male subjects, as a "delusional defense against the alienation that the elaboration of cinema as a language opened in theory." In "The Imaginary Signifier" Metz argued that the c^ubJ^omagi-_ nary nature of die:cinema^ whaťit repre- sents and imaginary by the nature of its signifier—-.heightens rather than diminishes thepossibilities of identification.The signifier itself, even before coming to form part of a Active imagined world, is marked by the duality of presence/absence typical of the Lacanian imaginary. The impression of reality is stronger in film than in theater because the weak phantom-like figures on the screen virtually invite us to invest them with our phantasies and projections. Iľhe cinema spectator identifies, first of all, with his or her own act of looking, with "himselfas ä pure act of perception (as wakefulness, alertness); as condition of possibility of the perceived and hence as a kind of transcendental subject" {Metz, 1982, p. 51). What Metz calls primary identification, ,then, is not with the events or characters de- 164 From Linguistics to Psychoanalysis picted on the screen but rather with the act of perception that makes , ju diese secondary identifications possible, ah act of perception both * channeled and constructed by the anterior look of the camera and > the projector that stands in for it, granting the spectator the illusory, ubiquity of the "all-perceiving subject." The spectator is caught in a play between regression and progression. The images received come from without, in a progressive movement directed toward external reality; yet due to inhibited mobility and the processes of identification with camera and character, the psychic energy normally devoted to activity is channeled into other routes of discharge.^ Metz had especially interesting observations about the question of pleasure and displeasure in the cinema. Some films, for. example pornographic films, might generate displeasure by touching too closely on the spectator's repressed desires, thus triggering a defensive reaction. Building on Melanie Klein's analysis of the role of objects in the infant's fantasy life - the child's tendency to project libidinal or destructive feelings onto certain privileged objects such as the breast - Metz spoke of the critical tendency to confuse the actual filmas a sequence of images and sound with the film experi- 2-i "*■*■* ence such as it has pleased or. displeased,, in function of the phanta- v; sies, pleasures, and fears triggered in specific spectators by the film. Thus spectators-critics misconstrue an aesthetic question - the quality of the film - with a psychoanalytic question: Why did this film please or displease me) (A classic example of this confusion occurred with Woody Allen's Stardust Memories^ which critics, many of them former admirers of Allen, took as an attack on themselves (rather than as a witty and self-mocking exercise in intertextuality) and which they therefore condemned in the most violent possible bad-object language as "vicious," "mean-spirited," and "poisonously bad.") Metz also put the theorist on the couch, since film theorists were not immune to such projections. Thus Metz analyzed the various forms,,. of "love" for the cinema, ranging from the fetishism of the collector to the critic-theorist who sees most films as "bad objects" yet main-, tains a "good object relation" with the cinema as a whole. Metz became the psychoanalyst of the film theorists, much as Lévi-Strauss had been the ethnologist of the anthropologists. 165 it make, :>n bott sera anc ght in í -d com< -xternal :ntificaa ally de uestior sample ng toe ĺ defen; role oi project :ts such use the experi-:>hanta-le film, quality i please :d with former ian as a :h they :ct lan-) Metz :re not ; forms, )Ilector t main-• Metz Strauss From Linguistics to Psychoanalysis On,a/nore positive note, (^ema^ li0id©aThe material existence of filmic images, for Metz, creates the feeling of a "little miracle," a srMifff^^fh^fft^smMQXWňlilÉě^ ^^tempOTary*~rupmfe^ "This is the spe- cific joy of receiving from the external world images that are usually 11 -ernal ... of seeing them inscribed in a physical location (the m -een), of discovering in this way something almost realizable in t W (Metz, 1977, pp. 135-6). ^^_ Metz's analysis explains what might otherwise be a conui^rurnT" the pleasures generated even by films which at first glance seem to N dystopian, threatening, even repulsive. Disaster films, for exam-p'c, play on our most elemental insecurities about nature, yet such tl ms often become monstrous hits. Such films, despite their super-ľk lai disagreeableness, ultimately reassure, in a Metzian perspective, 1\ cause t^ey^jggajaSrBlififiiiacfiy our^ears? thus reminding,us that# 0^GĚĚ&á&M&&ňň$ We are not crazy to feel such armetjes, such films * ^oirrto be telling-us? since our fears are so palpably present there on ,, ihirscreen, inscribedin ima~ges and sounds, recognized and felt by^ * oi her specfätôr^s^ellí Psychoanalytic criticism also prolonged earlier work on the region between film and dream. Hugo Mauerhofer had suggested in * I he Psychology of Cinematic Experience" (1949) that what he v. i led the "cinema situation" shares a good deal with the dream ttaation, notably passivity, comfort, and withdrawal from reality. M zanne Langer (1953) argued that film exists in a "dream mode," m that it creates a "virtual present conjoined with a feeling of im->' ^diacy, an impression of reality." It was only with the «gggjgjgggyifr tj uttthesfilm^ŕéam-an^ ^The^Fieticß^ fcilrcrtjfM^ (mn-yet of the analogies-and-disanalogiesbetween-film and-dream? n uch as he had earlier explored the analogies between film and lan- j'iage. For Metz, thě^tepie^sjejni^^ 4 ^af^ak^jAafeamy^ seííf-induígenc©^á-regression:into?primary Dcess^coňdiťionedbycircumstances, similar :tothose which under- % ** tf 166 From Linguistics to Psychoanalysis lié^íhe'íllušío^^ conventional fiction film in- vokes a lowering of wakefulness that triggers a state close to that of sleep and dreaming. This lowering of wakefulness implies a withdrawal of concern from the external world and a heightened receptivity to phantasized wish-fulfillment. In the cinema, unlike dream, we do not literally confuse our phantasies with perceptions, since here we are dealing with an actual perceptual object - the film itself. While dream is a purely internal psychic process, film involves real perception, potentially common to other viewers, of actual images recorded on film. The dream, as Metz points out, is doubly illusion: the dreamer believes more than the spectator, and what he or she "perceives" is less real. The continuing perceptual stimulation of the cinema prevents unconscious wishes from taking a completely regressive path, therefore, and what is illusion of reality in dream is merely an impression of reality in film. Yet the parallels between the / conditions of film viewing and those of dreams help explain the quasi-1 hallucinatory degree of this impression of reality that films can achieve.' The view of Hollywood as a dream factory suggested that the dominant industry promoted escapist fantasy. Screen theory, similarly, stressed the negative, exploitative dimension of film dream. But while theory was right to denounce the alienations provoked by dominant cinema, it is also important to recognize the desire that brings spectators to the movie theater. The perennial comparison of film and dream points not only to film's potential for alienation but also to its central Utopian thrust. Dreams are not merely regressive; they are vital to human well-being. They are, as the Surrealists emphasized, a sanctuary for desire, an intimation of the possible transcendence of dichotomies, the source of kinds of knowledge denied cerebral rationality. Psychoanalytic questions, while not on the surface political, could also be easily pushed in a political direction. What is the "libidinal economy" of the cinema? How does Hollywood, for example, exploit the spectator's voyeuristic and regressive tendencies in order to maintain itself as an institution? JfřiííSĚ^sŤ^^^m^^m^£s^éé^^m 167 From Linguistics to Psychoanalysis \ M^^^^ks^^^k^^^^^m^Aáttz in this context psychoanalyzed and institutionalized the underlying springs of cinematic pleasure; ic agi^ygin4gIsjs&satiaa^ thus tried to answer a very important question: Why do spectators go to the cinema if they are not forced? What pleasure are they seeking? And how do they become part of an institutional machine that both delights and deludes them? Answering such questions about the imbricated functions of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic in film reception might even have a feedback effect, yielding a new contribution to psychoanalysis itself. The psychoanalytic critics also deployed the notion of the Oedipus Complex in the analysis of the cinema. in^aHfeflsaska^e^pe^ss» feřkhásaig^itesfe cinema was. dearly fojjndecL on the pé^šBS@5s®fisl@©lši&g, conceived since its origins as a place from which one could "spy on" others, ^fe^fee^^fl^^^^^ fl|jj|j||py&e4mpuise Lo LunrllreHjtrreTinTcnľrre-^^ deed, the titles of some of the earliest films bear witness to this fascination: As Seen Through a Telescope (1900), Ce que Von voit de nion sixieme (What one sees from my sixth floor, 1901), Through the Keyhole (1900), and Peeping Tom in the Dressing Room (1905). The 168 The Feminist Intervention jay it virtually demands an immobile secret viewer who absorbs everything through the eyes. T^ «4©&k©ds&iš^e§s#í©^^ 1977). The The voyeur's invisibility produces the visibility of the objects of his or her gaze. It is the breaking down of these processes, the shattering of an illusory voyeuristic distance, that is allegorically staged in Hitchcock's Rear Windowy where the protagonist is caught in the act through a series of scopic inversions which turn him into the object of the gaze. Psychoanalysis, as we shall see later, formed part of many subsequent movements such as film feminism and post-colonialism, and certainly inflects the work of later figures such as Kaja Silverman, Joan Copjec, and Slavoj Zizek. The Feminist Intervention At its height, the left wing of semiotic film theory hoped for a creative amalgam of the projects of the "Holy Trinity" (or Sinister Triumvirate, depending on one's point of view) of Althusser, Saussure, and Lacan. In an amicable;.division.oO.ahoxJS^axxisnajÄíOiild^proyjde the theory of society and ideology; semiotics would provide _the jheorj?_ of signification; and psychoanalysis would provide the theoryj2£.the-. subject. But in fact it was not an easy task to synthesize Freudian psychoanalysis with Marxist sociology, or historical materialism with a largely ahistorical structuralism. Indeed, the post-1968 period witnessed an overall decline in the prestige of Marxism and the emergence of the new politics of social movements such as feminism, gay liberation, ecology, and minority empowerment.JThe_de^ din£jifMarxisjm had to do not only with the transparent crisis of socialist societies (a point sometimes exploited to obscure the fact that global capitalism was also in crisis), but also with increasing skepticism about all totalizing theories. Gradually, the focus of radi- 169