Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child
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Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child
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Overview
For more than two decades, film theory has been dominated by a model of identification tacitly based on the idea of feeling what the other feels or of imagining oneself to be the other. Building on the theories of affect and identification developed by André Green, Melanie Klein, Donald W. Winnicott, and Silvan Tomkins, Cartwright develops a model of spectatorship that takes into account and provides a way of critically analyzing the dynamics of a different kind of identification, one that is empathetic and highly intersubjective.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822389255 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/18/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 926 KB |
About the Author
Lisa Cartwright is Professor of Communication and Science Studies and a faculty member in Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture, a coauthor of Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, and a coeditor of The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender and Science.
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MORAL SPECTATORSHIP
TECHNOLOGIES OF VOICE AND AFFECT IN POSTWAR REPRESENTATIONS OF THE CHILDBy LISA CARTWRIGHT
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2007 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4194-9
Chapter One
MORAL SPECTATORSHIP: RETHINKING IDENTIFICATION IN FILM THEORY
Paths not taken: Object relations and affect in early feminist film theory
Which psychoanalysis was taken up in feminist film theory, and what can we learn from revisiting some psychoanalytic notions and practices that were not? In Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1973), Juliet Mitchell provided a rationale for the choices made by feminists taking up psychoanalysis at that moment. She recalls the opening claim of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in Envy and Gratitude (1957) in which the leading proponent of object relations theory explained her reasons for focusing on the infant's relation to the mother. Mitchell explains that what Klein intended as an analytic description was, in the climate of the time, taken for an ideological prescription for mothers to perform in a manner adequate to the production of a sound subject. The welfare state of postwar and cold war Britain fostered a milieu in which "the cult of the mother and child went its relentless way" as psychoanalysts grappled with rebellious youth culture, delinquency, child psychosis, and problems of the family at the expense of the study of a feminine psychology that ventured outside the figure of the mother (Mitchell 1975, 227-231). It is not surprising then that reception of Mitchell's book in Anglophone feminism emphasized her contribution to the interpretation of Lacan and Freud and not her reading of R. D. Laing and his contribution to the study of schizophrenia.
In her introduction to Psychoanalysis and Cinema (1990), E. Anne Kaplan also reminds us that the women's movements in the United States and Britain were strongly motivated to reject Freudian psychoanalysis as well as object relations theory. Lacanian psychoanalysis, however, "seemed immediately relevant to analysis of representation in film." Language was an apt model for interpreting filmic systems of meaning; concepts such as the mirror phase seemed apt analogs for the screen-spectator relationship (Kaplan 1990, 10). As Kaplan notes, the construction of the subject and the circulation of desire were regarded by academics studying literature, art, and film as important issues that could be usefully discerned through psychoanalytic theory, not only that based in clinical practice and the analysis of individuals but also that which was already applied to the analysis of literature and the visual and plastic arts. It was in this context, which emerged under the interdisciplinary rubric of representation, that the concept of the feminine, another concern of Lacan's, was further developed outside the paradigm of the mother-child relationship. Thus the turn to representation was accompanied by a return to the subject of feminine psychology, a topic that Mitchell had noted was all but abandoned by psychoanalysis after the 1930s.
But Lacan was not the only post-Freudian theorist available for appropriation in the construction of theories of femininity and representation in the late 1970s. To understand the turn to Lacan and away from other options in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I begin by looking back on some conversations about the status of the subject in film theory. In 1991, David Rodowick looked back to remind readers that, "contrary to film theory's emphasis, psychoanalysis is not a theory of the subject" (Rodowick 1991, 67-68). He cites Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose to support this point, recalling Mitchell's contrast of object relations theory, with its emphasis on "ego's deviations and returns to 'norms' of self-identity and coherence," to Lacan's antihumanist insistence that the subject is incommensurable with any notion of unity or coherence. Positions of masculinity and femininity are built on fantasies that engage figurations of identity unification (through others/objects) (Rodowick 1991, 67-68). Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis made the same contrast a year later in their New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: "While ego psychology seeks to bolster the unified subject by reinforcing the perception of a coherent self, Lacanian psychoanalysis implies a critique of this idealist unity" (1992, 135). Object relations, in this formulation, is not the right psychoanalysis because it emphasizes the ego's "return to coherence" rather than the unitary ego's status as artifact of liberal humanist philosophy.
These interpretations of object relations, void of examples and author references, are both far too general and off the mark. They conflate different varieties and periods of object relations theory and ego psychology. The popular psychology of Erik Erikson (1965) may be faulted for offering a relatively unitary model of a self. D. W. Winnicott (1965, 1971a, 1971e) and Melanie Klein (1952a, 1952b, 1955, 1975a), however, stress the divisions that are constitutive of the self. Klein, especially, based her work in the sustained function of splitting as an essential protective measure (enacted through projection and introjection) in defending against the disintegration that threatens the organization of the self. And the proposition of Heinz Kohut, theorist of self psychology, that it is not desire and lack but failures in empathy that split the ego (Kohut 1971 and 1984; Alford 1991, 31) has yet to be mined for its implications regarding the fundamental fragmentation of the ego relative to processes of identification.
Film theory's writing off of object relations theory and self psychology for their supposed investment in a subject that comes too close to the liberal notion of a unified self left us without the variety of useful concepts and tools that object relations theory offered. It may be true that some objects relations theory of the late twentieth century became the domain of a popular psychology of the liberal self and a means of shoring up the traditional role of the mother (e.g., Erikson 1965), but the empirical ego psychology of Freudian psychoanalyst René Spitz and object relations theory as proposed by Klein, Winnicott, and later psychoanalysts who drew from a range of approaches, most notably André Green, were for the most part not guilty of these mistakes. These psychoanalysts introduced concepts that support film theory's interest in a subject model that veers from the various normative, ideal, and unitary forms offered in liberal humanist political and psychological theories. I will be arguing throughout this book that this body of work provides concepts and models that can help us to get past some of the impasses created by the Lacanian model's adherence to language.
To begin with, Klein's object relations theory views the subject as being constituted in a manner that is deeply divided intrapsychically, as well as being fundamentally intersubjective in its formulation. Intersubjectivity, however, is not emphasized in the Freudian model of the psyche. Film theory, despite its emphasis on splitting as constitutive of the ego, has yet closely to consider splitting and fragmentation as processes that shift and change according to relationships with others in the world, rather than as ontological states achieved at some developmental moment then held and reenacted within the subject throughout adulthood. For Klein, the spectrum of experiences of fragmentation and splitting is not retrogressive, harking back to some primitive moment in childhood, but rather is a densely layered process that continues into adulthood, unfolding throughout a lifetime.
The matter of intersubjectivity must be emphasized here. Laplanche and Pontalis (1973, 278) recall Spitz's point that Freud throughout his writings viewed the libidinal object solely from the view of the individual subject (cathexes, object choice), with one exception: his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in which he addresses the mutual relationship between mother and child. Subject production in the object relations theory of Klein and Spitz (1959, 1965) is fundamentally interconstitutive beyond the binary of mother and infant, including radical fragmentation at the level of object fantasies. Object relations theory thus can help film theory to model the action of film as agent upon and through the subject in an interconstitutive process that takes form at the level of fantasy. This process involves a complex arena of part-objects, bodies, and subjects, through visceral projective processes that are radically multiple and fractured, carrying forward throughout adulthood without being regressive in nature.
The historical resistance to object relations theory in the 1970s and 1980s, I propose, had to do in part with a strategic aversion-perhaps even a political abhorrence to certain kinds of work: to work on psychosis, developmental delay, cognitive disorders, the infant/child-maternal relationship, and, most of all, to work on the body (figured as maternal) outside the linguistic-symbolic register through which we came to interpret representation. In an interview with Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose published in the British feminist theory journal m/f in 1983, Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie asked these leading feminist scholars: "What has happened to the Oedipus complex in Lacan's later texts?" Mitchell's response brings us directly to psychosis, infancy, and object relations theory:
I think the reason why the concept of the Oedipus Complex has disappeared in favor of the castration complex, so to speak, is that in Lacan's return to Freud, his re-reading of Freud, he is stressing that one can, as an analyst, only treat neurosis and not psychosis. And it is only in the positioning in the symbolic, in other words after the castration complex, that neurosis or "normality" start to have any meaning. So Lacan is attacking all the work subsequent to Freud and by that I don't mean simply all those who wrote after his death, but all the work of object relations theorists, Kleinians, etc. Lacan argues that these analysts are only dealing with the resolution of or the failure to resolve, the shattering of or the failure to shatter the Oedipus Complex. (Mitchell in Adams and Cowie 1983, 9)
Klein, in a theory proposed in 1946 and modified by 1952, identified the Oedipal situation as a process that begins much earlier than Freud posited. She described the infant's normal development as entailing a paranoid-schizoid phase, characterized by destructive impulses and projection of fantasized objects and parts objects during the second quarter of the infant's first year, giving way to a reparative depressive phase characterized by awareness of the mother as an object that can be lost, destroyed, and mourned. Mitchell states that Lacan is critical of object relations analysts' focus on the Oedipus complex. This point is perplexing because Klein and others explicitly shifted the boundaries and its terms, locating it much earlier in the life of the subject, and extending it, as well as rethinking its implications. As Michelle Boulous Walker notes, Lacan, in his "On a Question Preliminary to Any Treatment of Psychosis," takes to task psychoanalyst Ida Macalpine (without mentioning her coauthor Richard Hunter) precisely for not interpreting Freud's patient Daniel Schreber's psychotic fantasy properly within the terms of the symbolic structure of the Oedipal complex-the resolution of it, or the failure to resolve it (see Boulous Walker 1998, 58-64; Macalpine and Hunter 1956; and Lacan 1977b, 127-225). In the essay that Lacan critiques, Macalpine and Hunter do indeed argue that Freud, "in his determination to attribute Schreber's illness to unconscious homosexual wishes ... had discounted Schreber's central theme of soul murder," mistaking Schreber's idea of unmanning as emasculation and connecting the latter with castration and homosexuality. This error, they note, was perpetuated in translations of Freud's paper (Macalpine and Hunter 1956, 40). They emphasize the theme of ego coherence and its failure-in a word, the failure of cohesion that results in psychosis-as the more crucial content of the Schreber case.
If, as the passage from Rodowick suggests, objects relations theorists really cared most about subject coherence and ego emergence, it can easily be demonstrated that those of Klein's generation and those who followed her work closely spent their energy attending to situations where the normative formation of the ego had not or could not properly occur, and the places where ego formation comes closest to failing. For example, Spitz, a Freudian psychoanalyst working both prior to and alongside Klein, closely observed the failure of the institutionalized infant to move through normative developmental stages toward symbolization, speech, language, and the law. He saw much more at stake prior to and outside linguistic symbolization-notably, the requirement of transitive human contact-for ego formation and the emergence of a coherent subject.
But to return for the moment to the conversation that ensues from this statement by Mitchell: Rose at first challenges Mitchell's claim that Lacan failed to see psychosis as analyzable and refuted those post-Freudians who did address psychosis. But she quickly changes her mind and concurs with Mitchell, even augmenting her point. For Lacan, she concludes, psychosis is the foreclosure of the symbolic. Even in his famous paper in which he discusses Freud's Schreber case and presents his own account of psychosis, Lacan (1977b) understands psychosis as "the default of the symbolic, not any idea of failure within it" (Rose in Adams and Cowie 1983, 10). From psychosis, and the foreclosure of the symbolic and the transitive relation to the analyst that this condition refuses, we again swing back to the infant and young child, who are similarly foreclosed from analysis because they have not yet entered into symbolization. Rose reminds readers of Klein's case of Little Dick (Klein 1975b), discussed by Lacan in his first seminars (1988). The four-year-old Dick had the language ability of an eighteen-month-old toddler and showed limited affective ability to bond. Lacan, Rose explains, applauded Klein for giving her client Dick a means, belatedly, through which to organize language, a structure through which, in Rose's words (describing Lacan 1988), "the child starts speaking." But Rose is quick to agree with Mitchell's sense that Lacan's description of this case as a narrative that climaxes in the child's belated entry into language performance is off the mark. Lacan "changes what Klein meant," making the analyst's observations about Dick's imagery, action, movement, and behavior into an account about the analyst giving the child a means of entering language (figured in the moment when Klein helps Dick imagine himself as a train entering Mommy). Mitchell concludes that Lacan "equates language and symbolization." Rose agrees, adding that we must keep in mind the distinction between parole and language: "the fact that he (Little Dick) is using speech doesn't mean there is the structure of language" (Adams and Cowie 1983, 10-11).
This distinction is even more crucial as we now realize that this is not a matter of distinguishing between psychotic and normal language development: Dick was in fact likely to have been autistic and not, as Klein inferred, schizophrenic. The distinction is crucial: theories of autism would come to emphasize problems in praxis, the cognitive aspects of affect and empathetic identification with others, as a distinctive feature of the disorder.
In Lacan's perspective (1988), Klein gives Dick a system of symbolization, a "letterbox" through which to organize language. But if this interpretation is not quite accurate, then what may we analyze in the absence of organized transitive language? Or, what might the analyst give the analysand if not the gift of organized, transitive symbolization ability? On this point, Rose remarks that this absence "is why someone like André Green wrote his book Le discours vivant (Presses Universitaires de France 1973). He thought that affect was the concept through which you could re-insert, against Lacanian psychoanalysis, a non-symbolic domain" (Rose in Adams and Cowie 1983, 11).
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction: Spectatorship, Affect, and Representation 1
1. Moral Spectatorship: Rethinking Identification in Film Theory 11
2. The (Deaf) Woman's Film and the Quiet Revolution in Film Sound: On Projection, Incorporation, and Voice 51
3. "A Child Is Being Beaten": Disorders of Authorship, Agency, and Affect in Facilitated Communication 157
Conclusion: On Empathy and Moral Spectatorship 229
Notes 241
References 255
Index 281