Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film 9789048533985, 9048533988

Citation preview

FILM CULTURE IN TRANSITION

TOWARDS A POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF CINEMA

THE OUTSIDE OF FILM

sulgi lie

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:18:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:18:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:18:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema The Outside of Film

Sulgi Lie Translated by Daniel Fairfax

Amsterdam University Press

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:18:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Originally published as: Die Auβenseite des Films. Zur politischen Filmästhetik, Sulgi Lie. Diaphanes, Zürich-Berlin, 2012 © 2012 Diaphanes, Zürich-Berlin. All rights reserved.

Cover illustration: Jack Nicholson in The Shining (1980). Directed by Stanley Kubrick. © Warner Bros / Collection Christophel / ArenaPAL Cover design: Kok Korpershoek Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 363 2 e-isbn 978 90 4853 398 5 doi 10.5117/9789462983632 nur 670 © S. Lie / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:18:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms



Table of Contents

New Preface to the English Edition

7

Preface

9

Part I The Absent Cause of Film: On the Theory of Enunciation and Suture Introduction

13

1. On Enunciation in Apparatus Theory 1.1 Imaginary Enunciation, or the Place of the Spectator: ­Christian Metz (1) 1.2 Voyeuristic Enunciation, or the Place of the Author: Raymond Bellour 1.3 The Double Énoncé, or the Division of the Filmic Image: World Projection as Rear-Projection in Marnie

25

2. On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture 2.1 Negative Enunciation, or the Place of the Absent One: JeanPierre Oudart 2.2 Masked Enunciation, or the Site of the Apparatus: Daniel Dayan 2.3 The Schizoid Suture, or the Division of Body and Voice: Acousmatics as Schismatics in Psycho 3. On the Pragmatics of Enunciation 3.1 Deictic Enunciation, or Film as Speech Act: Francesco Casetti 3.2 Impersonal Enunciation, or Film as Writing: Christian Metz (2) 3.3 Looking at the Camera, or The Theatricalization of Film: Jean-Luc Godard 4. On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture 4.1 External Enunciation, or the Triumph of the Gaze over the Eye: Jacques Lacan/Kaja Silverman

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:19:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

26 38 44 55 56 67 76 89 91 97 103 117 118

4.2. Extimate Enunciation, or the Gaze as Bodiless Organ: Joan Copjec/Slavoj Žižek 4.3 From the Hors-champ to the Hors-lieu, or the Trans-Subjective Point of View: The Unrepresentable in ­Rossellini and Antonioni 5. The Political Uncanny, or the Return of the Repressed: Caché

127 138 149

Part II Allegories of Totality: Fredric Jameson’s Political Film Aesthetics Introduction

171

6. The Dialectics of Mass Culture 6.1 Reification and Utopia: Jaws and The Godfather 6.2 Class and Allegory: Dog Day Afternoon 6.3 The Political Unconscious

177 178 188 197

7. Cartographies of the Postmodern 7.1 Nostalgia and Historicism 7.2 The Totalization of Totality: Cognitive Mapping 7.3 The Implosion of the Referent: Blow-Up

205 206 214 220

8. Geopolitical Aesthetics 8.1. Totality as Conspiracy 8.2. Conspiratorial Enunciation, or the Acousmatics of the Paranoia Film 8.3. Digital Cinema in the Age of Globalization: Miami Vice

233 234 240 253

9. The Political Uncanny, or the Return of Domination: The Shining 265 Filmography

315

Bibliography

317

Index of Names

331

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:19:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms



New Preface to the English Edition

If the present book may appear to the reader as an exercise in hardcore film theory, especially of psychoanalytical provenance, then it is worth recalling that its initial impulse arose from a cinephilic attachment to certain irritating details of specific films, rather than from a will towards theoretical abstraction in the first place. While watching films by Antonioni, Haneke, Kubrick or Schrader, to name just a few directors whose works will be closely analyzed in the following pages, I was fascinated by a phenomenon that in strict technical terms would be regarded as an error in the construction of a character’s point-of-view. In an apparently purely transitional scene in Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo for example, Richard Gere is driving in his convertible as the first shot shows his head turning right towards the surrounding landscape of the highway. The next reverse shot occupies his subjective look and pans from right to left to embody the turning of his head. Nothing could be more conventional in terms of cinematic syntax than this sequence of objective shot and subjective reverse-shot. But all of a sudden the same movement of the camera discloses the view of Richard Gere from behind. What began as a perfectly causal linking of shots ends up as an illogical and impossible detachment of the point of view from the carrier of the same point of view. In trying to grasp this paradoxical short circuit of stitching and de-stitching in between one cut, I gradually came to the conviction that the old psychoanalytical paradigm of “suture” provides the most adequate and most elaborate theoretical tool to come to terms with this fundamental negativity of what Jean-Pierre Oudart, in his formative article on suture, called the “absent one”. While the theoretical ramifications of this structuring absence are extremely complex – and the whole first part of this book is devoted to tracing its complicated path throughout the history of psychoanalytical film theory – its basic premise is radically simple: the absent one in film is none other than the camera itself. In other words: the camera is logically excluded from the very cinematic image it has captured itself. Or, to put it even more simply: the camera cannot film itself. Thus the core of the present book is an attempt to defend this ineluctable negativity of what I name the “outside of film” against its positivist domestications. Yet it is important to delimit this insistence on aesthetic negativity from the pre-theoretical valorisation of some vague hors-champ that still populates much film criticism. Not only is the outside as it is conceived here not the outside of the image, but the outside of the gaze, it is also not to be confused with a predilection for the decorative flavour of withdrawal and lack. On

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

8

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

the contrary, I understand film’s structural openness to externality as its very political potential to surpass its own aesthetic immanence towards the inscription of social totality. In decoding the wounds of cinematic suture as articulations of a political unconscious, the work of Fredric Jameson enters the frame in the second part of the book. Here, I try to explicate the allegorical nature of suture, or to re-work a famous phrase by Jameson: suture is the wound in which history is what hurts. Berlin, September 2019 Sulgi Lie

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Preface “Absence does not derive from presence, but the other way around.” – Slavoj Žižek

In this book, political film aesthetics will be articulated as a negative project. This premise presupposes the following negations: the politics of aesthetics is to be found neither in the manifest political content of films, nor in the political intentionality of individual authors, nor even in the canonized practices of political modernism. I do insist on the primacy of a politics of form, but I seek to divorce this from the modernist dogma of reflexivity. A political valency will also be ascribed to films that do not, on the surface, appear to be political. This book is not dedicated to directors and films that have cultivated a high-level avant-garde politics of form, but aims for the release of a symptomatic, non-arbitrary political potential in supposedly “apolitical” films. Thus, the contours of a political film aesthetics can only be found, here, in the process of interpretation, which precisely mistrusts the common sense of a political cinema in the style of Jean-Luc Godard. In the wake of the discursive hegemony of the Godardian tradition of political modernism that has dominated film theory since the 1970s, another cinematic connection between politics and aesthetics must be developed. With this in mind, my work rests on two theoretical pillars: with the twin concepts of enunciation and suture as my point of departure, I will initially attempt a political revision of psychoanalytic film theory. This revision rests on the hypothesis that, in its preference for political modernism, apparatus theory, despite its seminal role for the field, is based on theoretical shortcuts which underpin the filmic dispositif with a structurally anti-political ideological disposition. The ontological absence of the production process in the filmic product is thus, according to this outlook, the cardinal political problem of the cinema. In the first part of this book, in contrast, I conceive of this absence as the unique aesthetic and political capability of film. Negativity here means, literally, the Outside of the Film: the paradoxically invisible element that lies at the core of what appears to be the most visible of the arts. The negative force of absence will firstly be formulated as a revised theory of the gaze, which has been considered as a relic of psychoanalysis since the phenomenological, corporeal turn in film theory since the 1990s. The present book also relates negatively to this trend; it adheres both to the orthodox concept of the gaze, and to the conceptualization of film as a text.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:20:41 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

10 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

The negativity of a political film aesthetics confirms neither the positivity of the visible nor the positivity of the body. The Marxist aesthetics of Fredric Jameson forms the other fundamental theoretical pillar of this study. In Germany, Jameson’s works have never received the attention they deserve. A political aesthetics can be extracted from his writings on film theory, one that rejects the fetishism of production of an outmoded critique of ideology in favor of a negative, Marxist, allegorical approach. According to Jameson, political film aesthetics must produce an encounter between the negative totality of late capitalism and the allegorical traversal of this Outside. In this sense, the following considerations plead for a re-animation of the alliance between psychoanalysis and Marxism in film theory, in the wake of their de-animation. Tarry yet with the negative, for the lonely hour of the final instance never comes.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:20:41 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Part I The Absent Cause of Film: On the Theory of Enunciation and Suture

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Introduction Abstract The idea of an outside of the f ilm is based on the assumption that an absent cause is structurally immanent to f ilm. In a f ilm, the absent cause coincides with the camera’s gaze, which remains external to the image precisely as the generator of the cinematic image. This is the paradox of the cinema: the camera can never reveal itself as the cause of the image, the generative outside cannot be transferred to the inside of the image. With apparatus theory, however, this necessary split between gaze and image, cause and effect, production process and product, becomes the cardinal ideological problem of a political f ilm aesthetics. How can cinema produce political effects when its the structure of its dispositif works towards concealing its productive outside? Keywords: Absence, Apparatus, Camera, Ideology, Off-Screen

“To understand this necessary and paradoxical identity of non-vision and vision within vision itself is very exactly to pose our problems (the problem of the necessary connection which unites the visible and the invisible).” – Louis Althusser “…which would mean that the effects are successful only in the absence of cause.” – Jacques Lacan

If, in almost all advanced discourses of film theory, it is a commonly held position that the media self-reflexivity of an aesthetic object is virtually synonymous with an explicit political reflexivity, then it should be recalled, in line with Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, that even the most refined reflexive turn is always, in the end, condemned to failure when it comes up

Lie, S., Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462983632_intro_part01

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

14 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

against the hard kernel of an “absent cause.”1 An apparently simple structural phenomenon, which can be described as a fundamental impossibility of every self-reflexivity, forms the point of departure for the following discussion on the complex theoretical history of the twin, inextricably intertwined concepts of enunciation and suture: the film camera cannot film itself in the process of filming. The original site of capturing the image in every cinematic shot appears as a blind spot. The entity that gives rise to the visible world remains necessarily external to it. The plenitude of the visible is thus based on the existence of an invisible site, the Inside on an Outside, the on-screen world on the off-screen world, the effect on an absent cause. The theoretical stances on the system of enunciation and suture have frequently connected, in their own self-conceptualization, the hope for political filmmaking with the promised development of self-reflexivity in the cinema. In contrast with this dominant “politics of self-reflexivity”2 in film theory another concept of political film aesthetics must be delineated by means of a symptomatic reading of both enunciation theory and suture theory. This political film aesthetics would distance itself from the modernist dogma of an equivalence between self-reflexivity and political progressiveness and instead seek to conceive the political potential of film in that paradoxical intersection between seeing and not-seeing which underpinned Louis Althusser’s Marxist epistemology. It is astonishing that Althusser’s famous definition of ideology as the “‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”3 via Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage in psychoanalytic film theory has had such an immense effect, while certain other passages from Reading Capital have remained fully unconsidered. It is here that Althusser even seems to formulate an implicit film theory: Althusser’s reconstruction of Marx’s critique of political economy as a structural theory of reading strikingly anticipates the problematic of enunciation and suture. According to Althusser, the separation-connection of vision and nonvision extends across a “necessary invisible connection between the field 1 See Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2009), and Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981). 2 See, for instance, Dana Polan, “A Brechtian Cinema? Towards a Politics of Self-Reflexive Film,” in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 661-672. 3 See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 109.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Introduction

15

of the visible and the field of the invisible, a connection which defines the necessity of the obscure field of the invisible, as a necessary effect of the structure of the visible field.”4 Althusser’s formulation of the obscure field within the field of the visible rather precisely describes the inaccessible cause of the gaze as a blind spot of the visual, which in a film coincides with the camera’s viewpoint. With Althusser, the film camera may be understood less in its empirical existence as a material, technical apparatus, and more as a phantom essence, which both generates the visible field of the filmic image and hollows it out with a structural absence: “non-vision is therefore inside vision, it is a form of vision and hence has a necessary relationship with vision.”5 Decisive, in this regard, is the fact that non-vision does indeed initially enable vision, even though this relationship can never be reciprocal. The cause of the gaze is immanent to the visible, but, at the same time, it is located in a radically “extimate” site.6 In this regard, the following astonishing passage can be read as a theory of the cinematic off-screen avant la lettre: The invisible is defined by the visible as its invisible, its forbidden vision: the invisible is not therefore simply what is outside the visible (to return to the spatial metaphor), the outer darkness of exclusion – but the inner darkness of exclusion, inside the visible itself because defined by its structure.7

Transposed into the terminology of film theory, this passage has the following meaning: here, Althusser establishes the visible field as the effect of an absolute hors-champ (off-screen space), which should not be understood as a spatial outside that necessarily comes into being when the filmic frame has extracted a visual slice from the infinite field of the visible, but as a constitutive darkness in the heart of the visible itself – as the unfolding of an Outside in the Inside. This internal outside is – according to this hypothesis – none other than the (non-)place of the camera viewpoint. Early film theory regularly affirmed that the aesthetic power of film resided in its unprecedented disclosure of the visible world, and that this was due less to its capacity for verisimilitude and more to the film image’s potential for revelation – the revelation of the previously hidden, or 4 Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2009), p. 20. 5 Ibid., p. 22 6 On Lacan’s notion of extimacy, see below, Ch. 4.2. 7 Althusser/Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 27.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

16 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

becoming-visible of the previously invisible. At a remove from this romantic strand of thinking, Noël Burch, at roughly the same time as Althusser, systematized with formalist rigor, in his book Theory of Film Practice, a theory of the cinematic hors-champ, which augments the visible field of the filmic image by incorporating its absent side. In Burch’s fundamental distinction between screen space (the totality of the visible space of the image) and off-screen space (the invisible space outside the image), the difference between presence and absence initially refers to the constitutive delimitation of the visible field – the frame. As an extraction of a spatially finite image from the infinite continuity of the visible world, the image field is always a sectional, delimited, framed phenomenon that is surrounded on all sides by off-screen space. Burch then differentiates six segments of this off-screen shell: The immediate confines of the first four of these areas are determined by the four borders of the frame, and correspond to the four faces of an imaginary truncated pyramid projected into the surrounding space, a description that obviously is something of a simplification. A fifth segment cannot be defined with the same seeming geometric precision, yet no one will deny that there is an off-screen space ‘behind the camera’ that is quite distinct from the four segments of space bordering the frame lines, although the characters in the film generally reach this space by passing just to the right or left of the camera. There is a sixth segment, finally, encompassing the space existing behind the set or some object in it: A character reaches it by going out a door, going around a street corner, disappearing behind a pillar or behind another person, or performing some similar act. The outer limit of this sixth segment of space is just beyond the horizon.8

Making use of an analysis of Jean Renoir’s silent film Nana, Burch demonstrates how off-screen space can be mobilized through various filmic strategies. Entries and exits of figures in and out of the image field are considered to be the simplest form of off-screen construction: they open diegetic space out towards the six segments of the hors-champ. In addition to such movements, the visual axes of the on-screen figures indicate objects of the gaze existing off-screen, and thereby exceed the boundaries of the visual field. An off-screen space inextricably bound with the visible can also be brought into play through body parts and fragments that protrude into the on-screen space. 8

Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 17.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Introduction

17

The off-screen necessarily evokes an imaginary space that is essentially filled by the active imagination of the spectator. Decisive, for Burch, is the fact that in film the invisibility of the imaginary off-screen can be potentially made visible through a subsequent revelation in the visual field. Through the possibilities of expansive camera movements, but above all through the space-transcending potential of montage, the imaginary off-screen can be retroactively transformed into a concrete on-screen. Burch thus does not understand the filmic off-screen as an absolute category, but as a relational phenomenon: “It is important to realize that off-screen space has only an intermittent or, rather, fluctuating existence during any film.”9 Of course, through certain camera movements, and through every cut that does not repeat the same camera position, an on-screen is shifted into the off-screen, but the power of film seems to be tied to the expansion of a mobile visual field and the occupation of the off-screen through the forces of the visible. Here, Burch seems to lean on André Bazin’s well-known distinction between the cadre (frame) of painting, as a kind of internal closure, and the cache (mask) of film, as a centrifugal opening outwards: The outer edges of the screen are not, as the technical jargon would seem to imply, the frame of the film image. They are the edges of a piece of masking that shows only a portion of reality. The picture frame polarizes space inwards. On the contrary, what the screen shows us seems to be part of something prolonged indefinitely into the universe. A frame is centripetal, the screen centrifugal.10

Following on from Bazin, the fact that, in this structural alternation between off-screen and on-screen, between Fort and Da, the mobile frame of the film is fundamentally distinct from both the internal closure of the painting and the fixed frame of photography was clarified by Christian Metz in an important passage: In film there is a plurality of successive frames, of camera movements, and character movements, so that a person or an object which is off-frame in a given moment may appear inside the frame the moment after, then disappear again, and so on, according to the principle (I purposely exaggerate) of the turnstile. The off-frame is taken into the evolutions and scansions 9 Ibid., p. 21. 10 André Bazin, “Painting and Cinema,” in What is Cinema? vol. I, trans Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 165.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

18 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

of the temporal flow: it is off-frame, but not off-film. Furthermore, the very existence of a sound track allows a character who has deserted the visual scene to continue to mark her or his presence in the auditory scene (if I can risk this quasi-oxymoron: “auditory” and “scene”). If the filmic off-frame is substantial, it is because we generally know, or are able to guess more or less precisely, what is going on in it. The character who is off- frame in a photograph, however, will never come into the frame, will never be heard- again a death, another form of death. The spectator has no empirical knowledge of the contents of the off-frame, but at the same time cannot help imagining some off-frame, hallucinating it, dreaming the shape of this emptiness.11

Here, Metz contrasts the absolute off-field of photography as the site of an ever unavailable outside with the variable off-field of film. While off-screen space in the cinema – as Burch has shown – always stands in causally motivated spatial relationships with the visible field through the mobile axes of the camera (and the human gaze), for Metz the withdrawal of the visible in the photographic off-field is not provisional, but conclusive. It is precisely on this point that both Burch and Metz should be contradicted. In the cinema, after all, there does indeed exist an absolute hors-champ which is radically external to the fictional occupation of off-screen space. The “undocumented, immaterial and projected off-frame” that Metz only ascribes to photography, persists in film as the empty space of the camera viewpoint. In the cinema, the absolute hors-champ coincides with the cause of the visible. To this thesis, we could object that, in photography, the place of the camera as absent cause can of course only be conceived through the spectator’s capacity for imagination. Moreover, in human perception the eyes of the person seeing cannot be seen. However, both in the case of photography and in the case of natural perception, the view remains tied to a single, fixed perspective. The spatiotemporal immobilization of a singular viewpoint at the moment of illumination is unavoidably inscribed in the freeze-frame of the photograph, while the human eye cannot, as a rule, be separated from the body that carries it. In contrast to these spatial limitations to the viewpoint, film allows for an undoing of the boundaries of visual perspective, and it thereby loosens the gaze from both the arrested punctum of photography and the limitations of the human eye. By means of mobile framings and montage, the camera can differentiate and reproduce any 11 Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” October 34 (Autumn 1985), pp. 86-87.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Introduction

19

number of successive visual perspectives, thereby potentially constructing a vision of an unlimited spatial totality. Since the historical codification of narrative cinema, the shot/reverse-shot technique forms the smallest syntagmatic unity of this multiperspectival spatial enclosing in the cinema. In photography there is only a shot and no reverse-shot. In the cinema, by contrast, the camera in a reserve-shot occupies the approximate position of the object of the gaze in the initial shot, since it rotates the visual field by 180 degrees and encloses the space in the perimeter of the two sides. This totalization of filmic space guarantees the conversion of the imaginary off-field into a concrete on-field. Of decisive importance, however, is the fact that the imaginary off-field of the first shot is occupied simply by the placement of the camera, whereas in the direct reverse-shot the off-screen camera does not gain on-screen presence, but disappears from its original location, and is usually substituted with a fictional figure. In other words: the shot/reverse-shot technique suggests the subsequent visibility of the camera in the frontal change of perspective of the perimeter of the screen, but ends with its complete invisibility. The point where the gaze is produced is masked, and the f ictional space is hermetically sealed. And yet, the disappearance of the camera in the reverse-shot is not a result of the ideological masking of the apparatus, but of a structural impossibility – precisely that of a camera filming itself. As the “obscure field” (Althusser) of the visible, the hors-champ is not buried away in the relative darkness of Burch’s six segments, but in the absolute darkness of an internal outside – a present absence. At the very most, this structural off-field comes close to Burch’s fifth off-screen segment, “next to the camera,” which symptomatically does not fit into his geometric formalization of off-screen spaces. The off-field “behind the camera” (Burch) is the camera itself as the point of absence. From an entirely different theoretical perspective, Stanley Cavell, in his concept of “automatic world projection,” emphasized the constitutive separation of the visible world of the film from its absent cause. The automatism of the film camera is intrinsically tied to its disappearance from the field of the visible, which it created in the first place: “One can feel that there is always a camera left out of the picture: the one working now.”12 Not without a relationship to Althusser’s thoughts on the “dark field” of visibility, Cavell also evokes the appearance of the cinematic “world image” of an invisible 12 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 126.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

20 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

outside, which is based on the primary withdrawal of the camera from the field of its effects. Cavell’s formulation of “the camera’s outsideness to its world,”13 which is only immanent to the projected world at the cost of its absence, thereby observes a similar entanglement between phenomenal appearance and structural withdrawal, which (as already suggested) conceives of the camera less as a material apparatus and more as as a creature of the hors-champ.14 Proceeding from this impossibility of a simultaneous visibility of projection and the source of projection, we may also speak, with Stanley Cavell and Gertrud Koch, of a fundamental latency of the camera: “The camera functions as an image-generating medium, whose phenomenal world is produced as a projection. And as in every projection, the cause of the projection remains concealed. It is for this reason that Cavell can rightly speak of an automatic world projection. It is technically-apparatively generated, without merging into this generation.”15 The latent existence of the camera cannot, therefore, be positively duplicated in the cinematic image, but can only be visualized at the cost of a posterior absence. For Cavell, too, the camera as absent cause marks the boundary of all filmic self-reflexivity, since the latter, even in the extreme case of a camera filming itself in the mirror, cannot make manifest the hidden kernel of the projection. Cavell also comes from a position of philosophical skepticism toward the thesis of a necessarily divided subjectivity, which is astonishingly close to psychoanalytic enunciation theory (see Chapter 1.1). Even through a symmetrical self-reflection, the outside of the camera can never be inscribed in the inside of the filmic image. One almost imagines that one could catch the connection in act, by turning the camera on it – perhaps by including a camera and crew in the picture (presumably at work upon this picture), but that just changes the subject. The camera can of course take a picture of itself, say in a mirror; but that gets it no further into itself than I get into my subjectivity by saying “I’m speaking these words now.” […] The camera is outside its subject as I am outside my language.16 13 Ibid., p. 133 14 For Cavell’s views on off-screen space, see the chapter “Photograph and Screen,” in Ibid., pp. 23-25. 15 Gertrud Koch, “Latenz und Bewegung im Feld der Kultur: Rahmungen einer performativen Theorie des Films,” in Sybille Krämer (ed.), Performativität und Medialität (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2004), p. 165. 16 Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 127. In their detailed commentary on Cavell’s book, William Rothman and Marian Keane assert that the exteriority of the camera to the projected world

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Introduction

21

In the renowned opening sequence of Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963), Jean-Luc Godard explored the very paradox highlighted by Cavell, which consists of the impossible attempt to film the camera itself during the act of filming. In the background of the first shot, we can see, from a low camera angle, a small filmmaking team during the filming of a long tracking shot, while a voiceover reads out the names of the cast and crew. This sequence unmistakably makes the point of simultaneously referring both to the visible filmmaking team in front of the camera and the invisible filmmaking team behind the camera. The visible camera slowly moves towards the invisible camera, until the cameraman of Le Mépris, Raoul Coutard, viewed from slightly below, can be seen sitting on a dolly in the foreground of the image. Coutard pans the camera from its initially parallel position to a frontal axis in the center of the absent viewpoint. It is with this paradoxical confrontation of two camera views that the opening sequence of Le Mépris concludes: Coutard behind the camera films Coutard in front of the camera behind the camera. Godard’s strategy of inscribing the absent site in the image dramatizes, in its very duplication, the aporias of a constitutive gap between the camera angle and the filmic image: the primary viewpoint can be marked only through secondary image incarnations of the technical camera apparatus in the register of the visual. These are always visual substitutes, which metonymically refer to the cause of the effect, without the site of the primary genesis of the image ever being capable of being fully obtained. Le Mépris seeks to obtain the blind spot in the field of the visible as the self-duplication of the camera, and thereby only invests in this empty position of an elusive causality. The hidden core of the camera viewpoint does not become transparent, if, like Jacques Aumont (“the look at another look that is looking at us”)17 or Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, we fill this empty position with the place of the spectators: “While Coutard is of course not filming the spectator’s body, his camera has captured our point of view; it is looking has as a consequence the hermetic closure of this world: “That the camera is outside its subject means it is outside, separate from, the person or things in its frame at any given moment. It also means the camera is outside the world on film; the world that reveals itself on film, that reveals itself to be the camera’s, is complete onto itself, complete without the camera in it.” William Rothman and Marian Keane, Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), p. 208. 17 Jacques Aumont, “The Fall of the Gods: Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris,” in Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds.), French Film: Texts and Contexts (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 223. Aumont understands this visual confrontation as an expression of Godard’s authorial self-reflexivity: “In short, Le Mépris is a movie in which the filmmaker’s ‘authorial’ self-awareness is never far below the surface and a deliberate reflexivity constantly asserts itself.”

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

22 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

at the site/sight of our looking, which it has reduced to the unidentifiable circle of light we see in Coutard’s lenses.”18 In the asymptotic tear of the absent and the present camera, the beginning of Le Mépris practically produces the failure of any attempt at a self-reflexivity of the cinematic apparatus. While, from a low-angle viewpoint, we look directly into the CinemaScope lens of Coutard’s camera, the film’s voiceover cites an apocryphal quote from André Bazin: “Cinema substitutes for our gaze a world that conforms to our desires. Le Mépris is the story of this world.” As if taking the form of a visual reply to Bazin, a reverse-shot then shows us the naked body of Bardot from a high-angle shot – as an imaginary approximation of two fully, diegetically incommensurable spaces. Instead of intensifying the self-duplication in the reverse-shot (through a kind of second shot of Coutard behind the camera), the cut seems to fulfil the same desire about which Bazin speaks. The lack within the empty space of the camera angle is enriched through the plenitude of the image in the reverse-shot: They are shot from a high-angle position, exactly like that assumed by Coutard’s camera in the previous shot. Camille and Paul thus seem to come as the reverse shot to the shot which ends with a close-up of Coutard’s lens, and with the words promising us a world conforming to our desires. It is as if the first shot of Contempt signifies “camera,” and the second “image.” And of course what figures here as “image” is primarily Camille, in all of her naked beauty. Her reclining body even seems made to order for the scope format.19

The separation-connection of camera and image in the film’s initial shot/ reverse-shot also articulates an aesthetic tension between modernism and classicism which courses throughout the whole film. For Jacques Aumont, Le Mépris is, with its plenitude of allusions to film history, a compendium of (Hollywood) classicism, so beloved by the cinephiles of Cahiers du cinéma, and simultaneously a melancholic confession of the irrevocable end of this era.20 The first shot of the film is thus a sign of the modernist gesture of 18 Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (London: BFI, 2004), p. 34. Suture-theory provides us with convincing arguments against such a precipitous amalgamation of the viewpoint of the camera and that of the spectator. See Chapter 2 below for more. 19 Harun Farocki and Kaja Silverman, Speaking about Godard (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 33. 20 See Jacques Aumont, “The Fall of the Gods,” pp. 218-219. On the “ruinous classicism” of the film, see Catherine Russell, “Jean-Luc Godard: Allegory of the Body,” in Narrative Mortality:

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Introduction

23

a discursive transformation of its own production of meaning, while the second shot contains the full beauty of classical cinema in the color-filtered transfiguration of Brigitte Bardot’s naked body. In the reverse-shot, Godard seems to yield to the Bazinian desire to imagine a phantasmatic plenitude in the totality of the filmic (body-)image, in which every kind of lack is expelled. Only linked through a reverse-shot that is simultaneously connective and disconnective, the first two shots of the film oscillate between the apparatus and the sublime, discourse and the iconic. And yet, what this highly complex cut disguises, in all its semantic refinement, is the absent camera-cause as hors-champ, which denies itself any capacity for becoming an image. To express this idea in Lacanian terms: in the beginning of Le Mépris, the Symbolic and Imaginary realms mutually intersect each other, but a full confrontation with the Real is avoided. In the following sections on enunciation and suture, I intend to articulate positions in film theory and aesthetics in which the Cavellian idea “that the camera must now, in candor, acknowledge not its being present in the world but its being outside the world”21 is decidedly turned in a political direction, beyond the historical options of classicism and modernism. With respect to the present book, this means above all that we should not turn our backs on the (abyssal) ground of the absent cause.

Bibliography Althusser, Louis, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2009). Aumont, Jacques, “The Fall of the Gods: Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris,” in Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds.), French Film: Texts and Contexts (London: Routledge, 1990, pp. 217-230. Bazin, André, What is Cinema? vol. I, trans Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit, Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (London: BFI, 2004). Burch, Noël, Theory of Film Practice (New York: Praeger, 1973). Death, Closure and New Wave Cinemas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 142-158. 21 Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 130.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

24 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Cavell, Stanley, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Farocki, Harun, and Kaja Silverman, Speaking about Godard (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Koch, Gertrud, “Latenz und Bewegung im Feld der Kultur: Rahmungen einer performativen Theorie des Films,” in Sybille Krämer (ed.), Performativität und Medialität (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2004). Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981). Metz, Christian, “Photography and Fetish,” October 34 (Autumn 1985), pp. 81-90. Polan, Dana, “A Brechtian Cinema? Towards a Politics of Self-Reflexive Film,” in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 661-672. Rothman, William, and Marian Keane, Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000). Russell, Catherine, “Jean-Luc Godard: Allegory of the Body,” in Narrative Mortality: Death, Closure and New Wave Cinemas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

1.

On Enunciation in Apparatus Theory Abstract The concept of enunciation has flowed into Lacanian psychoanalysis through Benveniste’s linguistic theory and refers to the constitutive division of the subject into the “subject of speech” and the “speaking subject.” While the former refers to a transparent model of the self, the latter refers to the opaque aspect of the uttering subject. In summary, it can be said that most authors avoid the negativity of the absent cause to the extent that all try to conceive a concrete instance of enunciation. If in Metz’s text “History/ Discourse” the viewer takes this position, in Raymond Bellour’s analysis of Hitchcock’s Marnie the enunciator coincides with the author. In a counterreading of Marnie, I try to show that it is precisely in the anamorphic rear projection sequences of the film that a division of the enunciator is set in motion, which negates the visual power of the authorial subject. Keywords: Enunciation, Discourse, Author Theory, Hitchcock, Rear Projection

“Who is speaking?” In the context of a theoretical reconstruction of the concept of enunciation, this fundamental question about subjectivity in language can hardly avoid encountering Michel Foucault’s shrug, when, having infamously riposted with his own counter-question: “Who cares, who is speaking?”,1 he strove to carry the author off into its post-structuralist grave. Whatever concepts with which we may seek to outline the entity that produces every expressive act – and enunciation theory in no way provides a unified answer to this question – this question insists on identifying the cause, which I, as can already be intimated from the preceding passages, suggest can be conceived of as an absent cause. However we may wish to determine the site of speech in a film – whether it is to be found in the author, narrator, 1 See Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?,” trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 124-127.

Lie, S., Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462983632_ch01

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

26 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

camera, spectator, etc. – the following discussion argues against Foucault’s cheerful positivity, with a language that practically speaks itself, and it seeks to conceptually develop the structural negativity of the cause of speech. In essence, I hope to uncover the paradoxical intertwining of productivity and negativity in the theory of cinematic enunciation. Initially, however, I will discuss two theoretical positions, those of Christian Metz and Raymond Bellour, which seem to shy away from a full confrontation with the negative potential of enunciation, although both authors contributed to establishing the concept in film theory. It will be shown that both Metz and Bellour sought to conceive of enunciation within the problematic of apparatus theory. But both figures lack the explosive theoretical force of this conceptual formation.

1.1 Imaginary Enunciation, or the Place of the Spectator: Christian Metz (1) The history of the concept of enunciation in film theory begins with a short but highly influential essay by Christian Metz. “Story/Discourse (Notes on Two Types of Voyeurism:)” was first published in 1975, and then as the second part of The Imaginary Signifier. Both Metz’s distinction between Story and Discourse and his concept of enunciation refer back to the linguistic theory of Emile Benveniste. Benveniste defines enunciation as an act of linguistic uttering, which is to be distinguished from what is uttered, the énoncé. Enunciation produces the énoncé, and thus always indicates the presence of a subjective marker in linguistic expression. Enunciation and the énoncé are therefore inextricably linked with one another, and yet they do not become assimilated with each other. In the personal pronoun I, this division in linguistic subjectivity is particularly manifest: for Benveniste a gap arises between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the énoncé, a gap which breaks out in every articulation of a grammatical I-point: “There is thus a combined double instance in this process: the instance of I as referent and the instance of discourse containing I as the referee.”2 In spite of his theoretical distance from the concept of enunciation, Noël Carroll has given a precise description of these two un-unifiable I’s in the I: In order to approach the contrast Benveniste has in mind, suppose that I say “I went to the store yesterday.” The subject, “I”, inside the quotation 2 Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 218.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation in Appar atus Theory

27

marks is the subject of speech (le sujet de l’énoncé). The subject outside the quotes, the I speaking the sentence in the present tense – the I say… – could be seen, heuristically, as the equivalent of the speaking subject (le sujet de l’énonciation). Or, to be more precisely in terms of what Benveniste is getting at, the simple utterance “I went to the store yesterday” really has two subjects, the “I” (the subject of speech; le sujet de l’énoncé) who went to the store, and the “I” that speaks the sentence (the speaking subject; le sujet de l’énonciation). The realm of enunciation is the process of making the utterance which includes the speaking subject as well as the listener and the context of the utterance. The utterance itself comprises the énoncé. Clearly, every utterance will be enunciated, will herald from a speaking subject and some context of speech, but not every utterance will call attention to its process and context of enunciation and/or to its speaking subject.3

Every énoncé is thus processed by a subject of enunciation, but the traces of enunciation in the énoncé can be marked to varying degrees. It is at this point that the difference between Story (histoire) and Discourse (discours) arises: according to Benveniste, the Discourse mode always implies the strong presence of the enunciation within the concrete communicative situation of speakers and listeners defined by their pronouns. In the Story mode, by contrast, the subject of enunciation is repressed in the énoncé, and things appear to be able to speak by themselves, as in the “Once upon a time…” of fairy tales: Discourse and history [sic] are both forms of enunciation, the difference between them lying in the fact that in the discoursive form the source of the enunciation is present, whereas in the historical it is suppressed. History is always “there” and “then”, and its protagonists are “he”, “she” and “it”. Discourse, however, always also contains, as its point of reference, a “here” and a “now” and an “I” and a “you”. 4

The masking of enunciation in the Story thus coalesces with the temporal mode of a past closure, whereas in Discourse the deictic presence of shifters indicates the present openness and thus mutability of the speaking situation. 3 Noël Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads & Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 151. 4 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “A Note on Story/Discourse,” in Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods vol. II, p. 551

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

28 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Coupled with a critique of ideology, the linguistic concept of enunciation thus forms the theoretical background to Christian Metz’s attempt to apply Benveniste’s categories to cinema. The target of this critique is initially the classical narrative cinema (Hollywood) in its hegemonic totality: In Émile Benveniste’s terms, the traditional film is presented as story, and not as discourse. And yet it is discourse, if we refer it back to the film-maker’s intentions, the influence he wields over the general public, etc.; but the basic characteristic of this kind of discourse, and the very principle of its effectiveness as discourse, is precisely that it obliterates all traces of the enunciation, and masquerades as story. The tense of story is of course always the “past definite”; similarly, the narrative plenitude and transparency of this kind of film is based on a refusal to admit that anything is lacking, or that anything has to be sought for; it shows us only the other side of the lack and the search, an image of satiety and fulfilment, which is always to some extent regressive: it is a formula for granting a wish which was never formulated in the first place.5

In a triangulation of linguistics, psychoanalysis and Marxism, typical of 1970s film theory, Metz synthesizes the enunciation model of Benveniste with a Marxist theory of ideology and a Lacanian theory of the subject. The disappearance of the subject of enunciation from the regime of the Story is conflated both with the Marxist critique of the commodity-form, which understands the disappearance of the production process from the finished product as a mode of ideological naturalization, and with the Lacanian theorem of a fundamentally divided subjectivity. The gap between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the énoncé in Benveniste is none other than the gap which, for Lacan, linguistically splits the ego. For Metz, the narrative film as Story masks itself, in order to seal off the Outside of enunciation in the Inside of the énoncé. In this hermetic closure, the invisible discursive entity that enunciates the film is substituted with the pseudo-discursive presence of speaking and interacting figures in the diegesis. The question “who speaks?” is led from the outside to the inside; the register of enunciation ends up disappearing into the register of the filmic fiction. In other words: with the “denial of the search,” the cause disappears in the field of its effects. Against this disappearance of the cause, 5 Christian Metz, “Story/Discourse”, in The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzzetti (London: Macmillan Press, 1984), pp. 91-92.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation in Appar atus Theory

29

enunciation theory, alongside Metz, insists on the theoretical difference of the enunciative Outside and the fictional Inside. As Kaja Silverman writes: The level of enunciation is in effect that of production – of camera movement, editing, composition, sound recording, sound-mix, script, etc. The level of fiction designates the narrative within which the spectator of the finished film is encouraged to “find” him or herself, and the characters with whom he or she is encouraged to identify. The speaking subject of the cinematic text is that agency responsible for the text’s enunciation. The subject of speech, on the other hand, can best be understood as that character or group of characters most central to the fiction – that figure or cluster of figures who occupy a position within the narrative equivalent to that occupied by the first pronoun in a sentence.6

The opening sequence of Le Mépris can consequently be understood retrospectively as a filmic strategy of re-discursivizing the Story, which in the interval of a single cut seeks to conceive of both the unity of and rupture between enunciation and enoncé. As Kaja Silverman would put it, the agency of enunciation itself, as the production of the film Le Mépris becomes visible in the first shot: the presence of the cameraman, sound technicians, etc. is duplicated by the deictic voiceover. The film thus seeks to open the Outside of enunciation, which as a rule remains invisible in the Story mode, into the Inside of narration, at the cost of an anti-fictional rupture. In the second shot, however, this enunciative marking disappears in favor of a fictional plenitude, which in Metz’s terms finds the “satisfied, fulfilled side of lack” in the body of the star Brigitte Bardot. The lack spoken of by Metz not only relates to the empty position of enunciation, but also, and above all, to the physical disposition of the spectator. The lack that requires a fictive denial is the lack that lies deep within the spectator-as-subject. For Metz, therefore, the veiling of enunciation in the Story is a component of a comprehensive ideological dispositif, which is directly interconnected with the psychic apparatus of the subject. The regime of the Story seals itself off as a “beautiful closed object,”7 in order to shut out the lack in the subject. Metz seeks to more precisely grasp this dual closure in the object and the subject by utilizing the twin psychoanalytic concepts of exhibitionism and voyeurism. Both terms relate to specific perversions of the scopic drive explained by Freud in his theory of sexuality. Metz 6 Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 46-47. 7 Christian Metz, “Story/Discourse,” p. 94

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

30 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

initially describes the relationship of film and spectator as an exhibitionist ordering of the gaze: “By watching the film I help it to be born, I help it to live, since only in me will it live, and since it is made for that purpose: to be watched, in other words to be brought into being by nothing other than the look. The film is exhibitionist, as was the classical nineteenth century with its plot and characters.”8 But he only does so in order to immediately bring the exhibitionism of film into question: “The film is exhibitionistic, and at the same time it is not.”9 Genuine exhibitionism, according to Metz, is predicated on the interplay of mutual identifications and a clear communicative confrontation between an I and a You, that is, between exhibitionist and voyeur: “The exhibited partner knows that he is being looked at, wants this to happen, and identifies with the voyeur whose object he is (but who also constitutes him as subject).”10 Exhibitionism is constituted through a reciprocal exchange of gaze and knowledge, and thereby transforms itself into a discursive constellation of “active complicity”11 between subject and object, the gazer and that which is gazed upon, which Metz explicitly aligns with a theatrical dispositif. In the cinema, this discursive exchange of gazes is temporally ripped apart: The film is not exhibitionist. I watch it, but it doesn’t watch me watching it. Nevertheless, it knows that I am watching it. But it doesn’t want to know. […] The film knows that it is being watched, and yet does not know. […] During the screening of the film, the audience is present, and aware of the actor, but the actor is absent, and unaware of the audience; and during the shooting, when the actor was present, it was the audience which was absent. In this way the cinema manages to be both exhibitionist and secretive. The exchange of seeing and being-seen will be fractured in its center, and its two disjointed halves allocated to different moments in time: another split. I never see my partner, but only his photograph.12

The voyeuristic regime of gazes in the cinema is thus predicated on the temporal closure of the filmic object in the past, which encounters the 8 Ibid., p. 93. 9 Ibid. Metz’s partly contradictory line of argumentation, and his subjectivist lapses into the first person, can be understood as an attempt to prevent his own theoretical discourse from congealing into story, thereby making the traces of enunciation transparent. 10 Ibid., p. 94. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., pp. 94-95.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation in Appar atus Theory

31

present gaze of the spectator, but can no longer reciprocate it. At this point, Metz makes it unmistakably clear that the closed off temporality of the Story is indebted not only to the ideological naturalization strategy of classical narrative cinema, but also to an ontological condition that Stanley Cavell has most forcefully emphasized: namely, the fact that the film as an automatic projection of the world necessarily brings to life a past world that “we can never be, or can never have been, present at apart from the movie itself.”13 Seen thus, the Story regime in the cinema does not disguise an original discursivity. Rather, the opposite is true: due to its past ontological temporality, film cannot avoid ending up in the closed off nature of the narrative. In their insistence on the uncloseable gap between an absence, which is only present as the projection of moving images (the film), and a presence that is irrevocably absent from the filmic “world past” (the spectator), Metz and Cavell are astonishingly close to each other. Both theorists seem to see the novel as having a closer relation to film than the theater’s aesthetics of presence: “In viewing a movie my helplessness is mechanically assured: I am present not at something happening, which I must confirm, but at something that has happened, which I absorb (like a memory). In this, movies resemble novels, a fact mirrored in the sound of narration itself, whose tense is the past.”14 Metz and Cavell uphold the same thesis of a past temporality of film, but only in order to proceed to radically different conclusions: whereas Cavell seeks, with the liberation of an essentially passive subjectivity, to found a film ethics based precisely on the suspension of the spectator “from the world, as its being complete without me,”15 Metz understands the temporal absence of film as the construction of a world, which at its core is made for me. Metz leaves us in no doubt that this for me installs a hierarchical distance between the voyeuristic subject and the f ilm as the object of the gaze: “For this mode of voyeurism […] the mechanism of satisfaction relies on my awareness that the object I am watching is unaware of being watched. ‘Seeing’ is no longer a matter of sending something back, but of catching something unawares.”16 The voyeuristic dispositif of the film thereby generates a “vacant spectator”17 who 13 Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 183. 14 Ibid., p. 26. 15 Ibid., p. 211. On Cavell’s film ethics, see also D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press), pp. 63ff. 16 Metz, “Story/Discourse,” p. 95. As for the temporal gap between film and spectator, discursive modes of address such as characters looking at the camera or directly talking to the audience, are unable to structurally change anything about it. For more on this, see chapter 3. 17 Ibid., p. 96.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

32 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

identifies with the omnipotent visual regime of the camera as an unseen seer. In the decisive passage of his text, which warrants being quoted at length, Metz reformulates his central thesis of a primary identification of the spectator as a theory of enunciation: We are not referring here to the spectator’s identification with the characters of the film (which is secondary), but to his preliminary identification with the (invisible) seeing agency of the film itself as discourse, as the agency which puts forward the story and shows it to us. Insofar as it abolishes all traces of the subject of the enunciation, the traditional film succeeds in giving the spectator the impression that he is himself that subject, but in a state of emptiness and absence of pure visual capacity. […] The regime of ‘story’ allows all this to be reconciled, since story, in Émile Benveniste’s sense of the term, is always (by definition) a story from nowhere, that nobody tells, but which, nevertheless, somebody receives (otherwise it would not exist): so, in a sense, it is the ‘receiver’ (or rather, the receptacle) who tells it and, at the same time, it is not told at all, since the receptacle is required only to be a place of absence, in which the purity of the disembodied utterance will resonate more clearly. As far as all these traits are concerned it is quite true that the primary identification of the spectator revolves around the camera itself, as Jean-Louis Baudry has shown.18

In connection with the apparatus theory of Jean-Louis Baudry, Metz also understands film as a machine for spectatorial phantasmatization, a subject of domination that centers itself as a disembodied eye in the vanishing point of the camera’s monocular perspective.19 Apparatus theory has always understood this constitution of a “spectator God”20 as an ideological address, inherent to which is a dual matrix of recognition and misrecognition (méconnaissance). In this appropriation for film theory of Lacan’s notion of the Imaginary, in which the infant in the jubilatory perception of its own mirror image always ends up identifying with what it is not – namely, with 18 Ibid., pp. 96-97. 19 See Baudry on primary identif ication: “Thus the spectator identif ies less with what is represented, the spectacle itself, than with what stages the spectacle, makes it seen, obliging him to see what it sees; this is exactly the function taken over by the camera as a sort of relay.” Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative Apparatus Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 295. 20 Metz, “Story/Discourse,” p. 97.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation in Appar atus Theory

33

the externality of an image21 – and Althusser’s theory of ideology, in which subjectivity as subjection is conceived of as ideological “interpellation,”22 the spectator is the victim of an imaginary (self-)deception, precisely in their supposed omnipotence: “The spectator is constituted by the meanings of the text but believes him or herself to be their author. This is precisely an account of the process of interpellation, where the subject appears to be the source of the meanings of which he or she is an effect.”23 In a point of fundamental difference from Lacan’s mirror stage, the reflection of one’s own body image is, of course, lacking in a film – and it is for this reason that Metz conceptualizes film as a kind of permeable mirror24 in which primary identification is not initiated through the image, but through the gaze: Primary cinematic identification, as Metz describes it […], is identification with the “look” of the camera and the projector. Like the child positioned in front of the mirror, the cinema spectator, positioned in front of the cinema screen, constructs an imaginary notion of wholeness, of a unified body. Yet unlike a mirror, the cinema screen does not offer an image of oneself. Metz’s account subsumes all other registers of identification under the primary – an all-perceiving subject, absent from the screen, who is transformed into a transcendental not empirical subject.25

As it is for Baudry, for Metz too the camera is the pivot of the filmic dispositif. The spectator, therefore, can only identify as a transcendental subject because the camera itself, as the absent cause of the gaze, in a certain sense both constitutes and transcends the filmic image. In Metz’s model, the hollow space of the camera viewpoint is immediately substituted by the gaze of the spectator: the “hidden spectator” (Metz) takes over the position of the “hidden cause” (Cavell/Koch). To return to the problem of enunciation: Metz’s central thesis has it that in film the spectator recognizes/misrecognizes themselves as the 21 See Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in idem., Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 75-81. 22 See Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” pp. 115-116. 23 Robert Lapsley and Michel Westlake, Film Theory: An Introduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 80. 24 “The screen is like a mirror, and yet one in which you don’t see yourself,” Nowell-Smith, “Notes on Story/Discourse,” p. 555. 25 Ann Friedberg, “A Denial of Difference: Theories of Cinematic Identification,” in Ann Kaplan (ed.), Psychoanalysis and Cinema (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 40.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

34 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

enunciator. Hence, Metz understands the camera as the primary entity of an identification of the spectator with themselves as the invisible bearer of the gaze. The camera-eye and the spectator’s eye fuse into an omnipotent subject of enunciation, the sender and the receiver are united as one. Because in the cinema the camera, as a discursive entity, must remain external to the world captured on film, “the film facilitates an imaginary exchange whereby the spectator supplies his or her own links to the utterance, seeming to authorize and control the unfolding spectacle of the film as if it were the product of his or her own powers of enunciation. The film seems to be narrated by the spectator himself, who becomes, in imagination, its discursive source.”26 We should not let Metz’s distinction between Story and Discourse tempt us to reach the conclusion that these two modes refer to different aesthetic options, which either confirm the spectator as an imaginary enunciator, or attempt to sabotage this position. Following the logic of Metz’s argumentation, every film, insofar as its images have been recorded by a camera, must take the path of Story, since both the voyeuristic division of temporality and the camera’s absent capacity for the gaze are ontologically determined. These apparative conditions consolidate filmic enunciation as a site of ideological subjectivation. Let us pose our initial question once more: “Who speaks?” Metz’s answer would be: it is not the author, but the spectator, as the primary identification with the absent camera, who speaks the film. The camera occupies the position of a “disappearing mediator” (Fredric Jameson), who transfers the enunciative power of the author to the spectator: “The subject-producer must disappear so that the subject-spectator can take his place in the production of the filmic discourse.”27 This enunciative transfer of the “who speaks?” from the sphere of production to a narcissistic spectator-super-subject is, according to Metz, decisively guaranteed by the empty position of the camera’s gaze, which comes from the “nowhere” of the Story,28 and thus yields to the gaze of the spectator without any resistance: “Subjectivity in the cinema (the inscription of the ‘I’) is hence displaced from the producer of the discourse to its receiver. In film, there is a curious operation by means of which the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ of discourse are collapsed in the figure of the spectator.”29 It is precisely this occupation of the absent cause of the gaze, 26 Robert Burgoyne, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis and Robert Stam, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 106. 27 Bertrand Augst, “The Order of [Cinematographic] Discourse,” in Discourse 1 (1979), p. 51. 28 Metz, “Story/Discourse,” p. 97. 29 Mary Anne Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 10.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation in Appar atus Theory

35

as asserted by Metz and the apparatus theorists, that I want to oppose. In Chapter 2, I will develop a theoretical position that radically annuls the imaginary contract of camera and spectator.30 After all, the central hypothesis of an ideological amalgamation of the camera’s viewpoint and the gaze of the spectator to a transcendental enunciator unavoidably has a direct consequence for a political aesthetics of film: for Metz and the apparatus theorists, the cinema can only bring about political effects when it radically turns against its own dispositif. It is only a self-de(con)struction of film as Histoire, which discursively marks the invisible site of the camera/spectator’s gaze, that the capacity is attributed to politically thwart the technologically naturalized ideology of the apparatus.31 “The notion that a text that hides its own means of production, its énonciation, its status as discours must be contested and replaced by an alternative cinematic practice lies behind much recent writing that champions Brechtian cinema, the avant-garde, or film theory itself as an interrogation or intervention that reveals what histoire tries to conceal.”32 We should have our eyes open to the aporia of this thesis: for Metz, there can only be political cinema at the cost of a self-destruction of the dispositif. As a dis-positive, the cinema materializes the positivity of (bourgeois) ideology, which can only be liberated from the domination of the imaginary through a negation of its structural conditions. With compelling logic, the demand for a politics of self-destruction follows a fatalistic hypostasis of the cinema as a totalizing ideological machinery, which in the last instance is built upon the enunciative contract between camera and spectator. In contrast to the reductionism of the thesis of primary identification, I present the following counter-thesis: the aesthetic negativism of apparatus theory paradoxically derives from its inability to think of the camera 30 Even Laura Mulvey’s foundational text of feminist film theory shares the identification thesis of apparatus theory. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16:3 (1975), pp. 6-18. 31 Thus, Metz asserts, in a symptomatic passage from The Imaginary Signifier, the explicitly political privilege of the discourse of theater over the story of cinema: “There is no need to be surprised that certain films accept their voyeurism more plainly than do certain plays. It is at this point that the problems of political cinema and political theater would come in, and also those of a politics of the cinema and the theater. The militant use of the two signifiers is by no means identical. In this respect the theater is clearly at a great advantage, thanks to its ‘lesser degree of imaginariness,’ thanks to the direct contact it allows with the audience. The f ilm which aims to be a film of intervention must take this into account in its self-definition.” Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, p. 65. 32 Bill Nichols, “Introduction to Christian Metz, Story/Discourse: Notes on Two Kinds of Voyeurism,” in Bill Nichols, Movies and Methods vol. II, p. 543.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

36 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

viewpoint as a negative Outside. Metz correctly conceives of the key enunciative position of the camera as a (non-)place of a productive negativity, only to immediately occupy this empty position with a positive entity: the spectator. This substitution of the absent cause by a spectator-enunciator is the cardinal problem of Metz’s theory. Hence, the first theoretical exposition of filmic enunciation33 appears to be determined by a phobic defense-construction, which aims to repress the uncanny emptiness of enunciation: the displacing Nowhere of the “Who speaks?” is nonetheless, in the end, re-placed in a Somewhere – the spectator. The critique of Metz by film theorists in the 1980s did little put the paradigm of primary identification under fundamental inspection.34 Instead of departing from it, even the revisionist positions plead for a differentiation of the identification paradigm within psychoanalytic film theory. Hence, Constance Penley criticizes, from a feminist perspective, Metz’s hypothesis of a subject of domination as a masculine construction of the cinema as an asexual “bachelor machine,”35 and Jacqueline Rose reproaches Metz for a reductive reading of Lacan, which neglects the fact that the specular topos of the Imaginary can also be turned against the narcissism of the spectator.36 Against the rigidity of Metz’s subject-positioning thesis, and following on from Rose, Elisabeth Cowie has also accentuated the reversibility of identification process: It is also, however, the mirror phase which inaugurates lack in the subject, its fundamental self-alienation, and to identify with one’s image also implies an identification with the place of looking – “I am the image I 33 For more on the re-formulation of the concept of enunciation by Francesco Casetti and the later Metz, see Chapter 3 below. 34 In his dispute with Metz’s approach in Narration in the Fiction Film, David Bordwell narrows the problem of enunciation to a totally narratological questioning, and overlooks the fact that does not concern a cognitive, but an unconscious process. In addition, his objection that Metz anthropomorphizes the camera as a surrogate of the gaze of the spectator is simply not valid, since Metz explicitly speaks of a metaphysical transformation of the spectator by the camera, which precisely does not reaffirm the anthropomorphic limitation of the eye, but transcends it. See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 24. 35 See Constance Penley, “Feminism, Film Theory and the Bachelor Machines,” in The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 57-80. 36 “The relationship of the scopic drive to the object of desire is not simply one of distance but of externalization, which means that the observing subject can become object of the look, and hence elided as subject of its own representation.” Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), p. 196.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation in Appar atus Theory

37

am looking at” and which contains the supplementary position of “I am looked at by an other.” The structure of specularity thus undermines the imaginary as the field of a unified subjectivity. Voyeurism is not a relation of unmitigated mastery. In identifying with the other (the mirror image) we are separated from it as other. It is this which allows us to both be and not be the camera.37

In this sense, psychoanalytic film theory has indeed attenuated the concept of primary identification since the 1980s, but it has nonetheless retained its theoretical kernel. As my thesis posits, it has overlooked the fact that Metz’s theorem of identification is based on a questionable conception of the horschamp, which misunderstands off-screen space as a centering entity of the gaze, and thus lacks the structural displacement of the camera viewpoint as negative causality. In a significant passage on the hors-champ, Metz gives a strange description of off-screen space, conceiving of it not as an opening of the image towards its perimeters, but as a way of redirecting the off-screen vectors towards the vanishing point of the transcendental spectator-subject: “In a fiction film, the characters look at one another. It can happen (and this is already another ‘notch’ in the chain of identifications) that a character looks at another who is momentarily out-of-frame, or else is looked at by him. If we have gone one notch further, this is because everything out-of-frame brings us closer to the spectator, since it is the peculiarity of the latter to be out-of-frame.”38 As opposed to Bazin, Metz seems to ascribe the hors-champ with a centripetal, rather than a centrifugal force. A perfect enunciative chain of substitutions is hereby established (camera = hors-champ = diegetic looks = spectator), in which the productive negativity of the camera as an absolute hors-champ is successively incarnated in the phantasmatic body-eye of the spectator.39 Metz’s theory of filmic enunciation defends Cavell’s assertion that “The camera is outside its subject as I am outside my language,”40 only to annul it all the more radically: “Who speaks? I, the spectator, speak the film.” Before the concept of suture will be profiled in Chapter 2 as a theoretical position which contrasts the camera-I of the Metzian enunciator with 37 Elisabeth Cowie, “Identifying in the Cinema,” in Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 101. 38 Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, p. 55. 39 “My body itself becomes an imaginary entity, a body conceived in terms of an eye (and an ear) that can travel vicariously through the imaginary world of a film where it becomes an anonymous and all-seeing inhabitant.” Richard Rushton, “Cinema’s Double: Some Reflections on Metz,” in Screen 42:2 (2002), p. 112. 40 Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 124.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

38 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

the camera-not-I of the Absent One, a second important position in the enunciation debate within film theory must be discussed: that of Raymond Bellour, who, in contrast to Metz, does not primarily answer the question “Who speaks” with a theory of the spectator, but a theory of the author.

1.2 Voyeuristic Enunciation, or the Place of the Author: Raymond Bellour If Christian Metz embeds the problem of enunciation within a larger theory of the cinematographic apparatus, the opposite can be said of Raymond Bellour’s appropriation of the concept of enunciation: Bellour develops the concept in the context of microscopically precise film analyses from a corpus of classical Hollywood films, centered on the œuvre of Alfred Hitchcock. In contrast to the monolithic critique of ideology in Metz, which insists on starting with the aesthetic form of classical cinema in order to actually speak about the determinism of the apparatus, Bellour presents an analytical methodology, which aims for the deciphering of authorship: “Each filmmaker appropriates and then designates the look in a specific way – that is what characterizes a particular director’s system of enunciation, the way the look is organized to create the filmic discourse.”41 For Bellour, “Who speaks?” is a question which cannot be answered with the subject-disposition of the dispositif alone – hence, reformulated in the structuralist garb of enunciation theory, the old Cahiers du cinéma-watchword of a politique des auteurs gains new relevance. If, as Metz asserts, the classical cinema qua Story fixes the spectator in place as an Author/Enunciator, then we may ask whether the strong presence of an authorial signature does not necessarily produce a discursive effect, which breaks with the register of the Imaginary. As I will show, Bellour gives a dual answer: on the one hand, “Hitchcock, the enunciator”42 inscribes himself in his films as the discursive source through a specific stylistic signature, on the other hand, Hitchcock’s discursive presence as the author does not interrupt the enunciative chain of camera, diegetic figure and (male) spectator, but libidinously accumulates it. For Bellour, too, the concept of enunciation stands for a mode of identification which does, in the end, lead to an ideological closure – a closure that for Bellour, in contrast to Metz, 41 Sandy Flitterman, “Woman, Desire and the Look: Feminism and the Enunciative Apparatus in Cinema,” in John Caughie (ed.), Theories of Authorship (London: BFI, 1981), p. 243. 42 This was the original title of Bellour’s analysis of Hitchcock’s Marnie.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation in Appar atus Theory

39

is nonetheless intrinsically bound to the problem of sexual difference. For Bellour, the enunciator of classical Hollywood cinema is also a subject of domination, but a specifically male one. “In cinema as elsewhere, one must know who is the subject of discourse.”43 Alongside this central question of enunciation, Bellour offers his meticulous analysis of the beginning of Hitchcock’s film Marnie, which opens with the famous fetish-image of a yellow handbag: a black-haired woman viewed from behind, walking along the platform of a depopulated railway station. In contrast with the traditional grammar of an introductory establishing-shot, Marnie begins with a close-up of an enigmatic object, which the camera initially follows at the same pace as the walking figure, until the camera movement gradually slows down and the shot changes from a close-up to a long-shot. This alternation of proximity and distance, in which the camera changes between coming close to and moving away from an unknown female body, is understood by Bellour as a scopophilic movement, which becomes the motor of enunciation: More than anything else it is the variation in distance between camera and object that serves to inscribe cinema in the realm of the scopic drive through an exaggerated manifestation of its effects. […] Hitchcock (i.e., the director, the man with the movie camera, the kino-eye: the authorenunciator) under- scores in a single shot that this variation in distance, this tension that erupts as an infinity of shots within the shot, constitutes his position of enunciation by moderating the trajectory of his scopic relation to the object. 44

Marnie begins with an image that is totally absorbed by the gaze: here, as if in a mannerist exaggeration of central perspectival construction, all lines and movement converge in the vanishing point of the image. The anti-realistic lack of any atmospheric background noise also acoustically underscores the elimination of an off-screen field in favor of a hermetic closure of the image for the gaze, or, as Joe McElhaney writes: “the opening shot of Marnie suggests a closed world, which alludes to nothing substantive or alive on any sides of the frame.”45 In the transition from the movement of the camera 43 Raymond Bellour, “Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis: Interview with Janet Bergstrom,” Camera Obscura 3/4 (1979), p. 98. 44 Raymond Bellour, “To Enunciate (on Marnie),” in The Analysis of Film , trans. Constance Penley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 219. 45 Joe McElhaney, The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli (New York: SUNY Press, 2006), p. 97.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

40 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

and the figures which bring it to life at the beginning of the sequence, to the mortified stiffness at the end, the gaze keeps the image transfixed. For Bellour, the opening shot of the film already leaves no doubt that the subject behind the camera is none other than Hitchcock, the Enunciator. Hitchcock directs the scopophilic modulation of the gaze as a subject of desire, “a subject endowed with a kind of infinite power, constituted as the place from which the set of representations are ordered and organized, and toward which they are channeled back.”46 Analyzing the following sequence, Bellour demonstrates the manner in which the powers of enunciation are canalized into the author-subject Hitchcock: a harsh cut from the unreal railway scenery to an enraged businessman, who has just reported a theft to the police. The conversation revolves around the external appearance of the thief, who is noticeably sexualized, and whose face remains hidden to the viewer. In the middle of this dialogue, the publisher Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) steps out of the background of the scene, whereby the camera captures him through a slow tracking-shot leading to a close-up of his face. The sequence concludes with a shot of Rutland, a smug look on his face, until a cut to the same close-up of the yellow handbag as in the first shot introduces the next sequence, in a hotel corridor. An imaginary viewing axis, not dissimilar to the montage of Le Mépris, melds the two shots, over two heterogeneous spaces, into an imaginary point-of-view shot of Mark Rutland. The point-of-view functions both in an anticipatory and a retrospective manner, in the sense of a retroactive diegetic re-coding of the first shot of the film. The fetishistic gaze on the woman, according to Bellour, shifts from an invisible enunciator to a fictional figure: Mark thus sees what he cannot see but what he is in the position of being able to imagine by means of the camera that sees in his place. This repetition-effect, which makes Mark see/imagine what Hitchcock-the camera sees in shot 1, situates Mark on the trajectory of enunciation permitted by the camera-look. Mark’s singular desire for Marnie is aroused by this relationship between himself and the image. He becomes the relay for that which Hitchcock can only possess through the camera, which forbids it to him precisely so that he may represent it. 47

By means of a refined system of gazes, the fictional figure of Rutland is established for the spectator as a relay-station of a dual identification, which, 46 Bellour, “Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis,” p. 98. 47 Bellour, “To Enunciate (on Marnie),” p. 222.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation in Appar atus Theory

41

to use Metz’s terminology, mediates between the primary identification with the camera and the secondary identification with the character. Mark Rutland thereby becomes a diegetic representative of the great Enunciator Hitchcock, “as if he were the third term of an imaginary viewpoint in the structure seeing/seen/seeing, whose first term is conflated with the camera in order to be subsequently displaced onto Mark’s look.”48 With the diegetification of the enunciatory entity, the film as Story masks itself, only for Hitchcock as a flesh and blood Enunciator to discursively make his entry in the next sequence. Hitchcock himself enters the image through a doorway, observes Marnie as she walks through the hotel corridor, turns around, for a brief moment, and looks directly into the camera. Among Hitchcock’s numerous brief appearances in his own film, his cameo in Marnie nonetheless has a special significance, because here, with the duplication of Hitchcock behind and Hitchcock in front of the camera (which again recalls Le Mépris), a triple complicity of the gaze is set into motion: a complicity with himself as the camera-eye, with the previous gaze of Mark Rutland, and finally with the gaze of the spectator. For Bellour, an enunciatory circulation of gazes is established, which Hitchcock himself sees as its productive origin: He formulates, in the full meaning of the term, his position of enunciation by inscribing himself in the chain of the look at the exact point that permits him to determine, however fleetingly, the structuring principle of the film. In thus observing Marnie, who is both object of desire and enigma (becoming the one because she is the other), Hitchcock becomes a kind of double of Mark and of Strutt, who have just contributed to the creation of his image but who, at the same time, are caught in it. This is possible because they too are nothing but doubles, irregularly distributed along a trajectory at whose origin is Hitchcock, the first among all his doubles, a matrix that generates them as well as his own representation as duplicate image of himself, embodying the pure power of the image, the desire of the camera, whose chosen object is here the woman. 49

In this sense, Bellour also understands the camera as the causal empty position of the gaze. Unlike Metz, however, he sees this empty position of the gaze as being filled up by the desire of the author subject. The camera is the mediator through which Hitchcock, as the arranger of primary and 48 Ibid., p. 223. 49 Ibid., pp. 223-224.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

42 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

secondary identif ication, makes himself both invisible (as the camera) and visible (through his signature appearance): “he assumes a specif ic position in the cinematographic apparatus, whereby he asserts himself as enunciator by representing himself in the scene on such an axis that he comes to embody both the look and the camera.”50 Thus, unlike Metz, Bellour finds the originary embodiment of the absent camera-cause, not in the spectator, but in the omnipotent author. Although the phantasmatic sender-receiver unity of the Metzian enunciator is thereby interrupted, for Bellour the exchange of identificatory occupations between the spectator and the author in Hitchcock is no less frictionless. The author-enunciator is not the Other of the spectator, but their Alter Ego. Bellour thus understands the process of enunciation as a reciprocal flow of desire, “for not only do the screen images emanate from a desiring source, they are returned (in order to be taken over) to an equally desiring source – the spectator.”51 For Bellour, unlike for Metz, the desire of the camera does not aim for an ideological domination over representation, but for the masculine domination of sexual difference. The structural voyeurism of the camera is for Bellour a genuinely masculine perversion. Thus, the beginning of Marnie initially withholds the visible face of the protagonist, in order to culminate in an epiphanic moment: with a jubilatory gesture, Marnie (Tippi Hedren), standing before a mirror, tosses her hair back and for the first time reveals her face in a close-up. The camera finds itself in an impossible position behind the looking-glass, and transforms itself, as Metz puts it, into a permeable mirror, in which character and spectator mutually reflect each other. Brigitte Peucker describe the imaginary fusion in Hitchcock’s mirror stages as follows: In Hitchcock’s films, we repeatedly encounter moments when a mirror becomes a window and when a character’s look into a mirror is not contained by its surface but instead becomes a direct look out of the frame. At such moments, character and spectator become mirror images and, although the spectator is not literally present in the film, she might be said to reflect in it. At one and the same time, the spaces of character and spectator are suggested to be permeable to one another.52 50 Ibid., p. 228. 51 Burgoyne et al., New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics, p. 160. 52 Brigitte Peucker, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 90.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation in Appar atus Theory

43

And yet, the specular exchange of gazes is lacking a decisive nuance: Marnie’s gaze barely moves past the camera. While in the previous sequence Hitchcock, the Enunciator, addresses the spectator as a knowing accomplice with a direct look into the camera, this reciprocal knowledge is withheld from Marnie: “Thus, we see her seeing herself, without her seeing us seeing her. In this way, the divergence dramatically increases the voyeurism as such, what might be called the passion for the image aroused by its missing part. This fixed, contemplative gaze suggests that Marnie imagines herself in terms of her own image in the mirror.”53 The spectator is thus caught in a double bind, in which both the gaze and the image are identificatorily occupied: “The enunciator-characterspectator oscillates between being and having the woman image.”54 This voyeuristic control over proximity and distance is withdrawn from the female protagonist. For her, there only remains the passive acceptance of an image, which she is unable to possess.55 “Marnie is constituted and possessed as image, reduced to image by the very principle of enunciation.”56 As with Metz, for Bellour the enunciative markings in Hitchcock’s system thereby converge in the vanishing point of an absent presence: “The same way in Hitchcock’s films it’s striking how one can constantly move back, through the insistence on point-of-view and subjective shots, on vision and on the places assigned to each of the characters in the organization of the narrative, to a central point from which all these different visions emanate: the place, at once productive and empty, of the subject-director.”57 Bellour’s understanding of enunciation as a simultaneously empty and productive site designates nothing other than the negative causality of a camera viewpoint. Like Metz, Bellour conceives of the empty off-screen position of an absent cause in order to retroactively personify it: the figure of the enunciator merely shifts from the spectator to the author. In both Metz and Bellour, the identification paradigm of enunciation theory is underpinned by a logic of similarity that asserts a positive transference of camera, author and spectator. Bellour analyzes the textual process in Marnie as a proliferation of similarities where “the figuration of woman serves as the collective image of a desire whose subject is produced as a narcissistic 53 Bellour, “To Enunciate (on Marnie),” p. 232. 54 Janet Bergstrom, “Enunciation and Sexual Difference,” Camera Obscura 3/4 (1979), p. 52. 55 Here, Bellour’s argumentation overlaps with the dichotomy described by Laura Mulvey between active/gaze/male and passive/image/female in classical Hollywood cinema. See Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 56 Bellour, “To Enunciate (on Marnie),” p. 76. 57 Bellour, “Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis,” p. 98.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

44 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

replication of male doubles whose origin is the camera itself.”58 It is in this way that the enunciative circle from textual analysis to apparatus theory closes itself.

1.3 The Double Énoncé, or the Division of the Filmic Image: World Projection as Rear-Projection in Marnie The notion that the only films that can produce political effects are those which seek to sabotage the ideological contract of camera and subject, is selfevident for theorists of enunciation. Both Metz and Bellour are in agreement with Baudry that the substitution of the camera by the spectator-subject or author-subject is “only possible on the condition that the instrumentation itself be hidden, repressed.”59 The Marxist demand to lay bare the traces of the production process in the finished product is tied to the Freudian formulation concerning the return of the repressed. It is for this reason that, for Baudry, Dziga Vertov’s Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera) is paradigmatic for a political film aesthetics that, by so flagrantly making the camera visible in the diegesis, makes the ideological invisiblity of the apparatus enter back into the filmic image, and thus, in the represented camera, bestows a concrete body (image) to the work of enunciation. It is precisely the ontological impossibility, highlighted by Cavell and Koch, of transposing the latent invisibility of the camera into visual evidence which enunciation theory is unable and unwilling to come to terms with: The camera that has recorded the film will never be in the image that I see on the screen. If a director wants to show that their film has been recorded by a camera, they must always do it from another camera, itself remaining invisible. Of course, a complex system of mirrors, etc., can alleviate the problem, but then the camera would just be the image of another medium: the present mirror, as a material object, but not as a producer of images. The experimental resolution of the problem is a self-reflexive commentary on film aesthetics resting on a camera that is not visible.60 58 D.N. Rodowick, The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference & Film Theory (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 124. 59 Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” p. 295. 60 Gertrud Koch, “Filmische Welten – Zur Welthaltigkeit filmischer Projektionen,” in Joachim Küpper and Christoph Menke (eds.), Dimensionen ästhetischer Erfahrung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), pp. 169-170.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation in Appar atus Theory

45

This invisibility of the image-producer, which for Cavell and Koch underpins the aesthetic disposition of the film as an automatic world projection, is for enunciation theorists, quite simply, the ideological problem of the cinematic apparatus. In harmony with the Freudo-Marxism of the Tel Quel theorists, the demand arises for a film theory and practice critical of ideology that opposes the disappearance of the camera as the “hypostasized result of an extinguished genesis.”61 As this thesis has it, only a cinema that radically distrusts the conditions of its own dispositif would be able to sever the identity of camera and subject. This schema for a politics of self-reflexivity necessarily finds itself ensnared in the unresolvable aporia involved in making the outside of enunciation visible in the inside of the énoncé. The fact that enunciation in the cinema can only function through the énoncé, the gaze through the image, and the cause through the effect is also denied: the latency of the camera viewpoint can only be closed off through the evidence of the projected image. Implicitly, then, the political aesthetics of enunciation theory leads to both a theoretical and a practical dead-end – namely, the impossibility of transposing the negative causality of the camera into a visible positivity.62 The cinema is a structurally fetishistic apparatus only insofar as it constantly negates its own apparative productivity. As Koch stresses, production and projection are inextricably intertwined with each other and kept apart from one another: “projections are representations whose catalysts are no longer contained within them.”63 We could assert that political modernist cinema, with Godard as its central figure, has repeatedly attempted selfreflexively reappropriate the negated enunciation. Before Godard’s strategy of a discursive cinema is more closely examined in Chapter 3.3, I will, against Bellour’s analysis of Marnie, with its critique of ideology, develop an approach that is unequivocally specific to film aesthetics, thanks to a re-reading of the film, one which inscribes the antagonism of enunciation and énoncé in the projection itself, and counterposes to the dead-end of self-reflexivity a surplus of the effect over the cause. I am speaking, here, of Hitchcock’s excessive deployment of rear-projection in Marnie. At the time Marnie was released, the technique of rear-projection had long been outdated. The invention of rear-projection coincided with the advent 61 Jean-Joseph Goux, Freud, Marx: Ökonomie und Symbolik (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1975), p. 116. 62 Of course, this negative causality is not only valid for the invisibility of the camera. Baudry points to a second, no less fundamental absent cause of the cinema – the still image that disappears in the projection of moving images. See Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” 63 Koch, “Filmische Welten,” p. 169.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

46 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

of sound cinema. The microphones used at the time were unable to record sound when shooting on-location. As a result, the appropriate background image was projected on a transparent screen hanging behind the actors as they are filmed live in the foreground. In the classical Hollywood era, countless car trips were filmed with the aid of this technological effect, until color films replaced it with the blue-screen technique. Since then, rear projection has often been considered a technologically devalued procedure, which is only reeled out for low-budget films whose budgets prevent the use of costlier on-location shooting. As a special effect, rear-projection is specifically lacking in that reality effect that guarantees the coherency of illusion: instead of making itself invisible as a “disappearing mediator” in the service of the impression of reality, the artificiality of rear-projection, along with its rough-hewn nature and the spatial incoherence of the three-dimensional foreground and flat background cannot be overlooked by the spectator. But even in his late work Hitchcock continued to use this archaic technique. In the only text that, amid the glut of Hitchcock studies, concerns itself with the phenomenon of rear-projection, Dominique Païni writes that Hitchcock’s films – far from concealing the patent deficiencies of the technique – consciously display the artificiality of the illusion of reality: “Paradoxically, although the term implies invisibility, the technique is most often easily detected by audiences. Theoretically, it should deceive the eye, through a sort of trompe l’oeil effect, but Hitchcock and his technicians did not appear too concerned with concealing it.”64 Païni primarily reconstructs Hitchcock’s singular usage of this strange, anti-illusory illusion technique in an art-historical context. By contrast, I would like to see rear-projection less as an appropriation of pre-filmic illusion techniques, and more as a singular metafilmic procedure which, within the filmic image itself, reinstates the ontological difference between filmic space and spectatorial space. Rear projections are a special case of a non-diegetic film within the film, in which the relationship of the figures to the projection comes close to duplicating the relationship of the spectator to the film. Like cinema spectators, the figures in the film find themselves in front of a projection of moving images, which is spatially separated from them. Albert Michotte van den Berck was the first film theorist to place an emphasis on this “segregation of spaces” in the film situation: “One of these spaces is where the actors ‘live’ and move, and the other is where the audience 64 Dominique Païni, “The Wandering Gaze: Hitchcock’s Use of Transparencies,” in Dominique Païni and Guy Cogeval (eds.), Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2000), p. 53.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation in Appar atus Theory

47

belongs. This division is similar to that between stage and auditorium in the theatre, though probably generally deeper in the cinema. This juxtaposition of the two different worlds is a result of the system of visual stimuli.”65 In the rear-projection, this fundamental division between the filmic and the extra-filmic world is displaced onto the filmic itself. The situation of the actors corresponds to the situation of the spectators: both are physically “fixed” while the moving images roll past them (although rear-projection aims, of course, for the illusion that the actors are really moving); a real three-dimensional space confronts a two-dimensional image surface, which nonetheless produces the illusion of spatial depth. It is of no little interest that both actors and spectators oscillate between belief and knowledge: both groups are perfectly aware of the unreality of the projection, but they believe in the “character of reality” it possesses (Michotte). Hence, rear-projection exposes the phantasmagorical nature of the filmic moving image as a “realized unreality” (Metz) in the internal duplication of ontological difference. Referring to Michotte, Christian Metz also stressed, in his early work, the constitutive segregation of the filmic from the world of the spectator: The cinematograpic spectacle, on the other hand, is completely unreal; it takes place in another world – which is what Albert Michotte van den Berck calls the “segregation of spaces”: The space of the diegesis and that of the movie theater (surrounding the spectator) are incommensurable. Neither includes or influences the other, and everything occurs as if an invisible but airtight partition were keeping them totally isolated from each other.66

What Metz, here, still describes with phenomenological neutrality, is, however, none other than the impossibility of a discursive exchange between film and spectator, which, as already shown, forcibly leads to the ideological regime of the Story. For it is obvious that spatial separation in the cinema always implies a temporal separation: the spatio-temporal co-presence of the theater and its spectators is, in the cinema, irrevocably torn asunder. This also applies to the special case of rear-projection: “We see, then, that there are two time frames being portrayed and brought together in one 65 Albert Michotte van den Berck, “The Nature of ‘Reality’ in Cinematic Projections,” in Vinzenz Hediger, Kate Ince and Guido Kirsten (eds.), Inventing Film Studies: Selected Writings from the Révue internationale de f ilmologie, 1946-1961 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming). 66 Christian Metz, “On the Impression of Reality in the Cinema,” in Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 10.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

48 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

setting, a setting where the figures in the foreground and the scenery behind them are conjoined. Transparencies are all about time. Indeed, the very essence of transparencies is this temporal gap that our willing suspension of disbelief reduces to manageable proportions.”67 Rear projection should thus be described as an aesthetic technique whose specific mediality does not aim for enunciation, but quite the opposite: it further divides the énoncé, duplicating this division within the image itself. The meta-character of rear-projection is thus not one that revolves around the revelation of the enunciative cause, but one that expresses the effect of automatic world projection as a cleavage in the filmic image. It may have now become clear that rear projection is much more than an old-fashioned production technology: as a forum for the confrontation of illusion and reality, it inscribes a fundamental rupture in the énoncé, which in spite of the utmost technical refinement cannot be and, at least in Hitchcock’s case, should not be smoothed over. As a procedure that pronounces absence and division, rear projection is a genuinely anti-theatrical technique.68 Instead of simulating a discursive co-presence of film and spectator, as enunciation theory demanded, rear-projection duplicates the shielding effect of the filmic screen. Cavell has insisted that every projection is invariably also a form of division: “A screen is a barrier. What does the silver screen screen? It screens me from the world it holds – that is, makes me invisible. And it screens that world from me – that is, screens its existence from me.”69 Rear projection as world projection inscribes the demarcation line between film and spectator into the image, without unmasking this division as a condition of a voyeuristic enunciation position. Against Bellour’s interpretation of the film, the excessive deployment of rear projection in Marnie can be read as a symptomatic eruption of psychopolitical contradictions in the “body” of the film, which cannot only be explained by Hitchcock’s enunciatory control over the image. The division of the filmic image through the use of rear projection is interesting neither as a relic of film technology, nor as Hitchcock’s auteurist signature, but as an enunciative condensation of social antagonisms, which according to Michele Piso marks Marnie more than any other Hitchcock film: Organized around the sexual combat between Mark and Marnie and the familial strife between Marnie and her mother, the film’s most general 67 Païni, “The Wandering Gaze,” p. 58. 68 On anti-theatricality, see Chapter 3.3 below. 69 Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 24.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation in Appar atus Theory

49

and unresolved social contradiction turns, not surprisingly, around love and money, giving and acquisition. It is precisely this antagonism between the sensual world and the business world that runs through Marnie: the world of capital dominates and chills the erotic and creative aspects of life. The real abjection in Marnie lies in the blank streets and fast-food restaurants, the alienation from nature, and the replacement of communal spontaneity with the rational corporate hierarchy depicted by Strutt, Ward, and, more suavely, Mark. […] Marnie’s characters exist unnaturally as separate entities, antagonistic monads.70

In this sense, we can understand the film as an aetiology of reification, in which the neurosis of the monadic subject can be deciphered as a symptom of late-capitalist fragmentation. The beauty of Tippi Hedren’s mask-like face freezes out any liveliness – her affects become visible only when she is afflicted by fears whose cause remains hidden from her. Marnie thus appears as a figure who seems cut off from her own interiority. So palpably separated from the expressive legibility of the face, the divided affects instead strike off on a different path: in a certain manner, a conversion from the image of the body to the body of the image takes place. Instead of persistently remaining in the psychology of the character, these affects contaminate and disfigure the realistic plasticity of the filmic image. Such affective divisions are consolidated in what may well be the most artificial rear projection sequences that Hitchcock has ever filmed: far from wishing to homogenize the reality effect, the rear projections in Marnie shatter the space of the image. This is already clear in the first rear projection sequence, at the beginning of the film, when Marnie rides her beloved horse Forio through a forest. We have here one of the few scenes showing Marnie in a moment of pleasurable sensation; at the same time, however, the rush of movement is denaturalized by the rear projection. Here, it is less the masculine possession of the image of the female body by the Great Enunciator that is at work, which Raymond Bellour ascribes to this scene,71 and more an excess of the énoncé in its duplication through the use of 70 Michele Piso, “Mark’s Marnie,” in Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (eds.), A Hitchcock Reader (Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1986), p. 290. 71 See Bellour, “To Enunciate (on Marnie),” p. 236. “On one level, the representation of her pleasure is almost embarrassingly excessive: the horse in its animality and as an obvious phallic substitute. On the second level, it is a pleasure that has its meaning only insofar as it can be represented as an image. That this pleasure is exactly the unreal real characteristic of film is understood by the obviously fake movement of Marnie on the horse that is almost entirely off-screen, as the equally hokey rear projection of a forest flows by.”

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

50 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

rear-projection. Rear projection inscribes itself as an alien body in the image, and thereby hinders perspectival centrality and the penetration of the (male) gaze. Instead of bringing about the domination of the image by the gaze, as Bellour believes, rear projection displays the heterogeneous, edited nature of the filmic image. It folds an incommensurable exteriority into the interiority of the image, which defocuses the gaze and lets it wander. The same aesthetic of exteriorization can be found in the sudden flashes of red that flood over the entire surface of the image during Marnie’s panic attacks. Here, too, an anamorphic element symptomatically intrudes into the body of the image, and stains it with an excessive affective intensity: “It is as though the stain is not simply within the diegesis, but has begun to spill over onto the very surface of the image itself.”72 The neurotic symptoms are also torn away from the diegetic subjectivity of the figure and are released as purely abstract color values. We may speak of the existence, in Marnie, of a “transsubjective affect,”73 which excessively pertains to the narrative causality of Marnie’s neurosis. Furthermore, the artificiality of the rear projections and color flashes serves as a filmic symptom of a hysterical over-identification with the female protagonist, in which Marnie’s interiority is externalized and consequently universalized to the point of being transformed into an entity, an affectionimage. “The affect is impersonal and is distinct from every individuated state of things,”74 as Deleuze writes, and it can only be thus in the sense that it cleaves away from the subject. In the affection-images of Marnie’s neurosis, the film closely adheres to the symptoms of its protagonist and assumers her pathogenic perception for itself: “In other words, this is the point at which the trauma-signifier of the protagonist and her director bores through the matrix of film language.”75 This is also why Bellour’s assertion of a total enunciatory alliance between Hitchcock and the spectator qua camera viewpoint is one-sided, if not squarely wrong. Finally, the last rear projection sequence in the film comes to interrogate Mark’s therapeutic normalization of Marnie: In working through the origins of her maternal repression, Marnie leaves her childhood home, apparently “cured.” At that moment, our eye is caught 72 McElhaney, The Death of Classical Cinema, p. 98. 73 See Chapter 2.3, below, on Hitchcock’s Psycho. 74 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 98. 75 Elisabeth Bronfen, “Du Freud, ich Jane: Hitchcock’s Marnie – Wiedersehen mit einer Fallgeschichte,” in Das verknotete Subjekt: Hysterie in der Moderne (Berlin: Volk und Welt, 1998), p. 635.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation in Appar atus Theory

51

by a strange motility at the end of an alleyway and some astonishing, almost imperceptible, surface movement. What we are actually seeing is a picture of a harbour (the source of Marnie’s prostitute mother’s customers), painted on an immense studio backdrop. [It] recalls the disturbing strangeness produced by this “theatrical faux pas,” which calls Marnie’s recovery and the happy ending into question and confirms the “unresolved nature” of her repression.76

The division of the filmic image by means of rear-projection can be understood as a condensation of contradictions and ruptures, which in the case of Marnie even resists narrative closure through the enunciator. In rearprojection, the reality effect of the filmic image qua duplication of the énoncé is antagonistically denaturalized without succumbing to the modernist aporia of apparative self-reflexivity, which strives to make enunciation visible. We should critique the thesis that stubbornly ascribes a fixed subjectivity to the (non-)place of enunciation – whether this is the place of the spectator (Metz) or that of the author (Bellour). What would happen if the enunciatory circulation chain of spectator, author and character itself is torn apart and if, behind the strange camera movements at the beginning of Marnie, a concrete authority figure is no longer embodied? What if, as at the end of the film, the wounds are no longer sealed shut? With the paradox of an affection-image that cuts off the affect from its belonging to an individual,77 we are already moving into the terrain of suture-theory. To the externalization of affect in Deleuze corresponds the externalization of the gaze in suture theory, which formulates a refusal of any ego-logic in the cinema. Unlike apparatus theory, suture theory never considers the eye to be identical to the I.

Bibliography Althusser, Louis, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). Augst, Bertrand, “The Order of [Cinematographic] Discourse,” in Discourse 1 (1979), pp. 38-57. Baudry, Jean-Louis, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative Apparatus Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp 286-298. 76 Païni, “The Wandering Gaze,” p. 73. 77 See Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 215.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

52 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Bellour, Raymond, “Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis: Interview with Janet Bergstrom,” Camera Obscura 3/4 (1979), pp. 70-103.
 –––, The Analysis of Film, trans. Constance Penley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). Benveniste, Émile, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1971). Cowie, Elisabeth, “Identifying in the Cinema,” in Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Bordwell, David, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Bronfen, Elisabeth, Das verknotete Subjekt: Hysterie in der Moderne (Berlin: Volk und Welt, 1998). Burgoyne, Robert, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis and Robert Stam, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond (London: Routledge, 1992). Carroll, Noël, Mystifying Movies: Fads & Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Cavell, Stanley, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Doane, Mary Anne, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Foucault, Michel, “What is an Author?,” trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 124-127. Flitterman, Sandy, “Woman, Desire and the Look: Feminism and the Enunciative Apparatus in Cinema,” in John Caughie (ed.), Theories of Authorship (London: BFI, 1981), pp. 242-250. Friedberg, Ann, “A Denial of Difference: Theories of Cinematic Identification,” in Ann Kaplan (ed.), Psychoanalysis and Cinema (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 36-45. Goux, Jean-Joseph, Freud, Marx: Ökonomie und Symbolik (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1975) Koch, Gertrud, “Filmische Welten – Zur Welthaltigkeit filmischer Projektionen,” in Joachim Küpper and Christoph Menke (eds.), Dimensionen ästhetischer Erfahrung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), pp. 162-175. Lacan, Jacques, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). Lapsley, Robert, and Michel Westlake, Film Theory: An Introduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation in Appar atus Theory

53

McElhaney, Joe, The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli (New York: SUNY Press, 2006). Metz, Christian, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). –––, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzzetti (London: Macmillan Press, 1984). Michotte van den Berck, Albert, “The Nature of ‘Reality’ in Cinematic Projections,” in Vinzenz Hediger, Kate Ince and Guido Kirsten (eds.), Inventing Film Studies: Selected Writings from the Révue internationale de filmologie, 1946-1961 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming). Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16:3 (1975), pp. 6-18. Nichols, Bill, “Introduction to Christian Metz, Story/Discourse: Notes on Two Kinds of Voyeurism,” in Bill Nichols, Movies and Methods vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 543-544. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, “A Note on Story/Discourse,” in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 549-556. Païni, Dominique, “The Wandering Gaze: Hitchcock’s Use of Transparencies,” in Dominique Païni and Guy Cogeval (eds.), Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2000), pp. 51-78. Penley, Constance, “Feminism, Film Theory and the Bachelor Machines,” in The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Peucker, Brigitte, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). Piso, Michele, “Mark’s Marnie,” in Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (eds.), A Hitchcock Reader (Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1986), pp. 288-303. Rodowick, D.N., The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference & Film Theory (London: Routledge, 1991). Rodowick, D.N., The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press) Rose, Jacqueline, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986). Rushton, Richard, “Cinema’s Double: Some Reflections on Metz,” in Screen 42:2 (2002), pp. 107-118. Silverman, Kaja, The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

2.

On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture Abstract Suture theory overrides the central identification concept of apparatus theory. Instead of the spectator’s primary identification with the camera, there is a primary disidentification between camera and spectator that can only be reconciled secondarily. With Oudart, suture theory can thus be reconstructed as a negative apparatus theory: the camera is an apparatus, but a phantomatic one. But in Daniel Dayan’s influential appropriation of Suture theory, the emptiness of the subject of enunciation is short-circuited with the repressed apparatus of production. Since Dayan’s reading, a false compromise has prevailed in f ilm theory between suture theory and apparatus theory, which I try to once again separate from each other. Hitchcock remains an important aesthetic point of reference, because he stages (above all in Psycho) a free-floating subjectivity by means of acousmatic voices and unsutured glances, which spectralizes the site of enunciation as a diegetically unclosable (non-)place. Keywords: Suture, Identification, Negativity, Spectrality, Acousmatics

Marnie concludes with an ambivalent final image, which in spite of the apparently successful working through of her initial childhood trauma rejects a direct causality of neurosis. The alien body of rear-projection displays an unease that eludes the manifest closure of the narrative. Marnie sketches out such an aetiology, which in place of a definable causa for the protagonist’s illness posits an elusive cause – the proof of which is the fact that “the trauma from which the heroin suffers is in any case over-determined and cannot be unambiguously determined or resolved.”1 In this sense, I would like to conceive of suture theory, the re-reading of which is central to this chapter, as 1

Bronfen, “Du Freud, ich Jane,” p. 595.

Lie, S., Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462983632_ch02

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

56 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

an aetiological project, which in contrast to the positions of Metz and Bellour does not one-dimensionally ascribe the problematic of filmic enunciation to the causality of a concrete entity (spectator/author), but, on the contrary, seeks to think through the paradox of an enunciation without enunciator. It will be shown that suture theory radically breaks with apparatus theory, by understanding the camera itself as a (non-)place of negative causality. It proposes a theory of the camera and the gaze, which conceives of the “darkness of exclusion inside the visible itself” (Althusser) as the structural cause of visibility – that is, as that very hors-champ that was dismissed as being a placeholder for the enunciator. In what follows, film is precisely not considered as a medium for the “ideology of the visible” (Jean-Louis Comolli), but more as a spectralogy of the invisible which is entrenched in the heart of the visible. In taking my distance from apparatus theory, I in no way wish to enact a return to classical film theory, which offered itself as a corrective to psychoanalytic film theory after the latter’s loss of hegemony. Benjamin’s epistemic comparison between film and surgery has very little to do with the clinical origins of the notion of suture (which originally referred to the sewing up of wounds). That the film camera, much like a surgical knife, cuts through the tissue of the world in order to give rise to another reality, which is torn to pieces and put back together again according to operational standards, serves Benjamin, in his “Work of Art” essay, as a metaphor for his aesthetics of revelation.2 With respect to suture theory, however, it would be better to speak of an aesthetics of concealment, one which dulls the sheen of the visible through the invisibility, absence and negativity of an unavailable Outside.

2.1 Negative Enunciation, or the Place of the Absent One: Jean-Pierre Oudart The surgical needle sews up an open wound. Without the existence of a past injury, a tear in the tissue, the notion of suture is meaningless. But what is the nature of the open wound of the film? This question stands at the center of the foundational text of this theoretical strand, “Cinema and Suture” by Jean-Pierre Oudart, who was the first to make the term borrowed from Lacan fertile for film theory.3 The wound of the film is opened when the 2 See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 217-252. 3 The original psychoanalytic elaboration of the suture concept derives from Jacques-Alain Miller, “Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier),” Screen 18:4 (1977-78), pp. 24-34.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture

57

imaginary density of the image crumbles. Like Metz, Oudart also posits the specular phantasma of the Imaginary as the origin of spectatorial pleasure in the cinema, but for him – and this is where the decisive difference with Metz and enunciation theory lies – the primal scene of the cinema does not begin with the pleasure-inducing amalgamation of image, gaze and spectator, but with the “destiny of the image”: In a hypothetical and purely mythical period, when the cinema alone reigned, enjoyed by the spectator in a dyadic relationship, space was still a pure expanse of jouissance, and the spectator was offered objects literally without anything coming between them as a screen and thus prohibiting the capture of the objects. Suddenly however, prohibition is there in the guise of the screen; its presence first puts an end to the spectator’s fascination, to his capture by the unreal. Its perception represents the threshold at which the image is abolished and denounced as unreal, before then being reborn, metamorphosised by the perception of its boundaries. […] Instead, a vacillating image re-appears, its elements (framing, space, and object) mutually eclipsing one another in a chaos out of which rise the forth side and the phantom which the spectator’s imagination casts in its place: the Absent One. The revelation of this absence is the key moment in the fate of the image, since it introduces the image into the order of the signifier, and the cinema into the order of discourse. In this metamorphosis, the filmic field, an expanse of jouissance, becomes the space separating the camera from the filmed objects – a space echoed by the imaginary space of the forth side – and, similarly, the objects of the image become the representation of the Absent One, the signifier of its absence. 4

According to Oudart, the cinema is not constituted in the accumulation of imaginary relations, as asserted by Metz, but on the contrary through a separation, even an alienation, between the spectator and the image. This separation arises with the awareness of the frame of the image as a necessary limitation of the visible. The sensory plenitude of the perceptual is surrounded by the darkness of the off-screen space beyond the frame, which forestalls the expansion of the visual. But in Oudart’s view, the actual hors-champ is hidden behind the “fourth side,” which, in the cinema, in contrast to that ominous fourth wall of the theater, is impenetrable, because it coincides with the site where the image was first produced. It is thus the camera itself that forms the non-transparent 4

Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” trans. Kari Hanet, Screen 18:4 (1977-78), pp. 41-42.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

58 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

fourth wall of the film, behind which an unrepresentable zone opens up – a zone which Oudart gives the name “the Absent One” (l’Absent). The Absent One occupies the inaccessible viewpoint which the image always gestures towards without ever being able to make it visible. In other words: enunciation eludes the very field of the énoncé that it has produced. Let us recall Cavell’s formulation: “One can feel that there is always a camera left out of the picture: the one working now.”5 The Absent One thus exists only as a figment of the spectator’s imagination, and with no concern for the materiality of the real camera technology that has recorded the film. The camera immateralizes itself, in Oudart’s view, to the point of becoming a phantom presence, which sees without being seen. Here, we should not neglect the fact that Oudart does not speak of a generalized Absence, which hides itself in the off-field of the camera, but of a specific Absent One, by which term he grammatically subjectivizes the inaccessible site of enunciation: the Absent One is a subject, but a ghostly one. Bordwell therefore errs when he insists that the “Absent One” concerns a merely spatial off-screen presence: “The first shot implies an offscreen area which is occupied by a presence which Oudart calls the Absent One. Note that the shot does not suggest a perspectival point of vision, only an off- screen field or zone. The shot is not the record of a glance but the sign of an absence. The Absent One is not a character, only an offscreen presence constructed by the viewer.”6 The view of the Absent One invariably arises from a perspectival viewpoint, but this point is concealed in the hors-champ of the fourth wall. Likewise, Carroll’s supposition that the Absent One is a synonym for the viewpoint of an ideal spectator is just as false: “That is, the initial sense of plenitude of the shot gives way to a sense of absence, an awareness of not only what was left out by framing but also of the reverse field of the shot, the field in which the viewer of that shot, figuratively speaking, would have been stationed. The viewer in this absent reverse field is called ‘the absent one.’”7 The Absent One is thus neither a subjectless off-zone, nor is it a placeholder for spectatorial subjectivity. The radicality of Oudart’s Absent One is in fact grounded in the assertion that in the cinema the subject of enunciation originates in an unattainable Outside, which can never be occupied by the spectator. For Oudart, the gaze of the absent camera is incommensurable with the gaze of the spectator. It is at this point that the theoretical line of demarcation between suture theory and apparatus theory becomes 5 Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 126. 6 Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, p. 113. 7 Carroll, Mystifying Movies, p. 184.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture

59

absolutely clear: the camera, here, is not the egological position of the spectator, but the phantom of an Otherness. This theoretical distinction is a comprehensive one: in place of the primary identification of the spectator with the camera (Metz), Oudart posits a primary disidentification between the camera viewpoint and the spectator’s eye: “The theorists of suture also thematize the camera as an ‘Absent One,’ thereby further emphasizing the distance that separates it from the spectatorial eye. It represents that which is irreducibly Other, that which the subject can never be. Not only does the Absent One occupy a site exterior to the spectator, but it also exercises a coercive force over the spectator’s vision.”8 Suture theory enables a conception of the camera that is totally different, indeed as remote as it possibly could be, from that of apparatus theory. The camera is not the technical switchpoint of an ideological dispositif, but a negative apparatus in a double sense: the camera negates its own nature as an apparatus in order to bring into being a visible world that appears free of any technical mediation whatsoever. Here, Benjamin’s romantic expression – the “blue flower in the land of technology” – is utterly relevant, but at the same time, the negativity of the apparatus as absent ground hollows out the positivity of the visible. Thus, every filmic image becomes a symptom of an irretrievable lack: “As Oudart sees it, there is always something missing (amiss?) in the immediate image.”9 Oudart’s Absent One articulates a tragic awareness of the cinema after the spectator’s loss of innocence: this is a loss of the jubilatory jouissance of primary identification (Metz), but also a loss of the kairotic constellation of the natural and the artificial (Benjamin).10 The Outside of enunciation refuses to be embedded in the interiority of the énoncé: The visible is duplicated by a structural invisibility: “Every filmic field traced by the camera and all objects revealed through depth of field – even in a static shot – are echoed by another field, the fourth side, and an absence emanating from it. […] Every filmic field is echoed by an absent field, the place of a character who is put there by the viewer’s imaginary, and which we shall call the Absent One.”11 Here it once more becomes clear that Oudart’s Absent One is indeed conceived of as a subject, one that nonetheless immediately withdraws 8 Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 126. 9 Edward Branigan, Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film Theory (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 138. 10 On Benjamin, see Gertrud Koch, “Kosmos im Film: Zum Raumkonzept von Benjamins ‘Kunstwerk’-Essay,” in Sigrid Weigel (ed.), Leib- und Bildraum: Lektüren nach Benjamin (Cologne: Böhlau, 1992), pp. 35-48. 11 Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” pp. 35-36.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

60 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

from any diegetization, precisely because it is the subject of enunciation. In this way, Oudart reinforces Benveniste’s original antagonism between enunciation and the énoncé, which was smoothed over in Metz and Bellour’s theory through the emergence of the spectator/author as enunciator. Oudart is thus the first film theorist to draw the full consequences from the psychoanalytic/linguistic schism of the subject: “In the realization of speech, an irreversible division of the subject takes place in which the subject of enunciation is irrevocably separated from the subject of the énoncé. Objectivized in the énoncé, and once more determined in every enunciation, the subject definitively differentiates itself from the subject of enunciation, which – in formulating it – remains outside of speech.”12 This “outside of speech” can be occupied by neither the spectator nor the author: “The spectator is doubly decentered in the cinema. First what is enunciated, initially, is not the viewer’s own discourse, nor anyone else’s: it is thus that he comes to posit the signifying object as the signifier of the absence of anyone.”13 Far from acting as the midwife of a dominating egoideal, the negativity of the Absent One leads to a primordial disempowering of the spectator, who is robbed of their discursive power over the image through the power of a gaze which is not their own. As Kaja Silverman puts it, the spectator is always-already symbolically castrated.14 And yet, of course, according to Freud the threat of castration follows the denial of a lack. For Oudart, suture is none other than the name film theory gives to this defense mechanism. Suture sews together the wounds in the filmic image that have been torn open by the Absent One, through a re-internalization of the Outside. The antagonism of enunciation and énoncé is retrospectively absorbed into an internal difference through the economy of the shot/reverse-shot. When the camera in the reverse-shot takes the original site of the initial shot into its field, the Absent One of the first shot becomes present in the second shot. The space of the shot, “castrated” by the off-screen space, is completed in the reverse-shot. The state of unrest analyzed by Oudart does not, therefore, begin with the question as to who has organized and selected the view, but already has its basis in the particularity of such views themselves. Here, the 12 Roger Hoffmann, “Spannungen – Psychoanalyse, Literature, Literaturwissenschaft,” in Hans-Dieter Gondek, Roger Hoffman and Hans-Martin Lohmann (eds.), Jacques Lacan – Wege zu seinem Werk (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001), p. 193. 13 Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” p. 38. 14 See Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), especially pp. 1-41.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture

61

convention of the “reverse-shot” makes its entry; shifted by an angle of between 90 and 180 degrees, the camera now shows the “rest” of the space, transcends the particularity of the first shot and completes the images, which only as a result of this “rounding off” really promises pleasure and security. The shot/reverse-shot technique, therefore, does not merely have the function of presenting the dialogue partner of the protagonist shown on-screen until that point, but also of showing the complementary space of the space shown until that point.15

With this, suture sets the logic of a positive causality in motion. The absent cause of enunciation is replaced by the present cause of the énoncé.16 Through the substitution of presence for absence, on-screen for off-screen, and diegetic space for non-diegetic space, suture reinstates an economy of the visible: Prior to any semantic ‘exchange’ between two images […] and within the framework of a cinematic enoncé constructed on a shot/reverse-shot principle, the appearance of a lack perceived as a Some One (the Absent One) is followed by its abolition by someone (or something) placed within the same field – everything happening within the same shot or rather within the filmic space defined by the same take. This is the fundamental fact from which effects derive. As a result the field of Absence becomes the field of the Imaginary of the filmic space, formed by two fields, the absent one and the present one, the signifier is echoed in that field and retroactively anchors in the filmic field.17

Within this equilibrium, the Absent One forfeits its uncanny nature. The absolute hors-champ is converted into a relative hors-champ, which in the cut to the next shot can always be potentially transferred to the on-screen field. In doing so, suture suggests a theoretical totality of the visible beyond the subtractions made of it by the hors-champ. Yet the balance remains a fragile one: every reverse-shot, which closes the Absent One of the initial shot, opens up a new absence. The suture itself is simultaneously its own wound. In contrast to the monolithic machinery of apparatus theory, suture is characterized by a theoretical open-endedness which is fulfilled in the 15 Hartmut Winkler, Der filmische Raum und sein Zuschauer: “Apparatus” – Semantik – Ideologie (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1992), p. 58. 16 Here, whether the reverse-shot retroactively recodes the shot as a character’s field of vision is of no importance; it is the visualization of the invisible field that plays a fundamental role. On the point of view shot, see Chapter 2.2. 17 Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” p. 37.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

62 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

temporal tension of anticipation and retroaction 18: “Although the Absent One is revealed in the next shot, a new absence, or Absent One, arises from the spatial field that is excluded from the new shot. That is, even after an absence or gap has been sutured by the following shot, absence reappears because the new image, while closing one gap, opens a new one. Thus, for Oudart, a pervasive sense of incompleteness clings to the image.”19 The alternation of Fort and Da in suture can never be stopped once and for all, because it takes place in the temporality of montage. Suture thus bears the stigma of negativity that it had sought to overturn. Without the operative capacity of montage, the concept of suture has no meaning. Montage cuts the visible up into pieces, in order to put it back together again. In montage, fragmentation and construction are intrinsically interwoven. Montage rests on the principle of separation and division, if even this only has the purpose of sewing the fragmentary pieces back together again through suture. Compared with the rigid ideological interpellation thesis of apparatus theory, Oudart insists on the processual nature of suture, which, as Stephen Heath has highlighted, must constantly be re-articulated from one film to the next: A reverse shot folds over the shot it joins and is joined in turn by the reverse it positions; a shot of a person looking is succeeded by a shot of the object looked at which is succeeded in turn by a shot of the person looking to confirm the object as seen; and so on, in a number of multiple imbrications. Fields are made, moving fields, and the process includes not just the completions but the definitions of absence for completion. The suturing operation is in the process, the give and take of absence and presence, the play of negativity and negation, flow and bind.20

Even if suture works against the imaginary foreclosure of the Outside, it does not describe a mechanism which is itself determined by the technical dispositif. Such a media-technological deviation does not function because, 18 “Therefore the suture (the abolition of the Absent One and its resurrection in someone) has a dual effect. On the one hand it is essentially retroactive on the level of the signif ied, since it presides over a semantic exchange between a present f ield and an imaginary f ield, representing the field now occupied by the former – within the more or less rigid framework of the shot/reverse-shot. On the other hand, it is anticipatory on the level of the signifier; for, just as the present filmic segment was constituted as a signifying unit by the Absent One, that something or someone, replacing it, anticipates on the necessarily ‘discrete’ nature of the unit whose appearance it announces.” Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” p. 37. 19 Branigan, Projecting a Camera, p. 137. 20 Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space,” in Questions of Cinema (London: BFI, 1981), p. 54.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture

63

as I have already shown, suture conceives of the camera as a structurally negative apparatus. Hence, suture does not name an effect of the dispositif, but a syntax specific to the cinema, in which the sewing up and opening of wounds must necessarily co-exist: Thus cinematic coherence and plenitude emerge through multiple cuts and negations. Each image is defined through its differences from those that surround it syntagmatically and those it paradigmatically implies (‘this but not that’), as well as through its denial of any discourse but its own. Each positive cinematic assertion represents an imaginary conversion of a whole series of negative ones.21

Oudart proceeds to distinguish three distinct syntactic modes of the shot/ reverse-shot procedure, which deny or mobilize the Absent One in different ways. With the term “subjective cinema,” Oudart typifies the shot/ reverse-shot system of classical Hollywood as one in which suture constantly transforms the Absent One back into a diegetic figure, thereby eradicating it. This permanent corporealization of the Absent One creates the basis for the so-called invisible editing of classical Hollywood as a cinema of continuity and causality. To this type of cinema, Oudart counterposes the films of Robert Bresson, in which suture marks both the connections between shots and, at the same time, their dis-connections. A film like Procés de Jeanne d’Arc (The Trial of Joan of Arc, 1961) articulates suture both as a threading-together and as an unthreading, as Richard Allen in his meticulous overview of Oudart’s essay remarks: Bresson composes shots in shot/reverse shot sequences at oblique angles in relationship to the profilmic space that vary from shot to shot. In this way the space of the first shot does not correspond to the eyeline of a character in the second shot despite the presence of a character in the second shot. While the position of the Absent One is absorbed into the reverse field through the presence of the character, the space of the Absent One (and hence of the cut) is also highlighted by the obliqueness of the angle.22

A third variant consists in the thorough relinquishing of the shot/reverseshot process, as in the case of Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966). Here, 21 Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, p. 205. 22 Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 35.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

64 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

the rejection of suture appears to forestall an identification of the Absent One with the narrator, and yet Oudart has a rather skeptical evaluation of the film, since he speaks of the necessary failure of those films which do without the dialectics of presence and absence.23 This also clarifies the fact that suture, for Oudart (in contrast with the later usage of the term) is in no way synonymous with an ideological code. That suture always articulates itself in the double bind of connection and disconnection will be shown with a closer consideration of the films discussed by Oudart. In Procès de Jeanne d’Arc, the suture economy of the film is tied to to a rigorous fragmentation of the filmic space, whose diegetic unity only constitutes itself in the cleavage separating the shots from one another. As the title already suggests, the film is based, with an almost documentarylike gesture, on the historical transcripts of the legal trial. The internal monologues of Bresson’s earlier films have disappeared, and only a rigorous alternation of question and answer remains. The hierarchy of a trial situation in which Jeanne d’Arc comes up against the juridical power of the clergy is translated by Bresson into a parallel montage which allows for no possible exchange between accuser and accused, question and answer, shot and reverse-shot. The enmeshing effect of the classical editing style is problematized by being radicalized: between the shot and the reverse-shot there is no spatial overlapping, as had been cultivated in the Hollywood system of continuity editing: Jeanne d’Arc and the judges are located in the same diegetic space, but the line demarcating the oppressor from the oppressed is total. The syntax of Bresson’s montage refuses the invisible flux of continuity cinema, without deconstructing the causality between successive shots. It is precisely in this between-space that the film’s suture is articulated as a separation-connection. The self-negating rhythmic uniformity of the trial scenes corresponds to what David Bordwell, in his analysis of Bresson’s previous film, Pickpocket (1959), has called a “parametric form”: “striking is also the ‘preformed’ nature of the découpage, whereby characters move into position for the shot/reverse-shot combination, as if figure behavior and camera position secretly collaborate to fulfill an abstract stylistic formula.”24 In strict repetitions, Jeanne d’Arc enters and exits a static frame. The serial nature of this parametric form invariably reduces all events to the same coordinates: in Procès de Jeanne d’Arc, the parametric system is equivalent to the dead form of domination. The control of the space by a male legal power marks 23 Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” p. 44. 24 Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, p. 296.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture

65

the negative hermeticism of a film which, in the short scenes showing Jeanne’s prison cell, begins by voyeuristically duplicating the sadistic gaze of the law on a vulnerable female body, only in order to simultaneously thwart it: “Bresson’s camera as it gazes through the spyhole at the sobbing Jeanne inevitably tends to draw the spectator into an identification with its perspective, an identification troubled and inverted when we see the eye in close-up from the other side of the cell door, as if it were watching our own gaze.”25 This disruption of the voyeuristic gaze is the effect of an ambivalent suture, which occupies neither the perspective of state power nor that of its victim. In Procès de Jeanne d’Arc, suture operates in the between-space of the parametric form: With inf inite subtlety, Bresson has outlined and almost reinvented cinematic fields. Dispelling the illusions and ambiguities of a “subjective: cinema, he has willfully accentuated the divergence between the camera’s position and that of the character placed on the same side, thereby introducing infinite modulations of shooting angles: the character may either be almost face-on (the judge) or in three-quarter view (Joan). The variation of this angle of attack, which results in the executioner seeming strangely more vulnerable than his victim, would, if necessary, prove the importance of the field outlined by the camera whose obliqueness indicated the spectator’s own position. That the only possible position for the camera should be that oblique angle, shows that the spectator does not identify with any other character in the invisible field of the film, but occupies a position out of alignment both with the character and with the position of the Absent One which is only present in the imaginary when the character, who takes its place, is not there itself.26

Only in a single sequence at the end of the film does Bresson return to the classical enmeshing of sightlines, and yet the suture of this sequence is motivated here, of all things, by the gaze of an animal: as Jeanne d’Arc walks to the stake, the film leaves the closed interiors of the court and the jail for the first time. The camera captures Jeanne’s whole body in a medium-long shot, as she climbs up the stairs to the stake and is chained to the wooden pole by two men. She closes her eyes, and can be seen frontally, in a slightly low-angled shot. There then follows a cut whose offhand nature thwarts the fictional closure of the film: a dog walks across the last path that Jeanne’s 25 Keith Reader, Robert Bresson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 65. 26 Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” p. 45.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

66 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

feet ever treads on, pauses for a moment, takes a few more steps, pauses again and raises its head, before the scene cuts to a close-up of Jeanne’s feet, and the camera slowly pans from her feet to her face. In contrast with the disconnective montage of the court sequences, the shot/reverse-shot process here integrates the images to form a point-of-view shot of the dog, which gazes upon Jeanne’s body from head to toe with an almost haptic attentiveness. The film appears to halt for a moment, and, as if to intensify the significance of this apparently so insignificant moment, Bresson blocks out the impassive noise of the crowd thronging around Jeanne, until only silence and the panting of the dog can be heard. Jeanne does not see the dog, but the dog sees her. And yet, by dint of the alterity of the animal eye, the suture effect remains ambivalent: does the gaze of the dog originate in an animalistic proximity to Jeanne’s dying body, or sheer contingency? The shot/reverse-shot between animal and human declines to give an unambiguous answer to this question. This ambivalence of suture, between opaque alterity and pre-linguistic communicativity, can also be seen in the zoo scene from Au hasard Balthazar. A zookeeper leads the donkey Balthazar past a row of cages, in each of which a tiger, a polar bear, a monkey and an elephant are kept locked up. Initially the roar of a tiger can be heard from off-screen. Frightened by this noise, Balthazar stops and focuses his gaze on the tiger. In the reverse-shot, the tiger seems to return the donkey’s look. In a film which, according to Oudart, almost entirely does without shot/reverse-shot procedures, Bresson stages an intersubjective proximity, or at the very least a communication, in the eyeline-match between two different species. As if he wanted to imprint the suffering of the captured animals in his mind forever, Balthazar observes them with silent attention – a gaze that registers and records, even though no intentional consciousness can be ascribed to him. The animal gazes in Procès de Jeanne d’Arc and Au hasard Balthazar are, therefore, examples of a suture which in the moment of being sutured together displays the fragility of the suture. Since an animal eye occupies the empty site of the Absent One in the reverse-shot, the hors-champ is indeed, on the one hand, diegeticized, but on the other hand the alterity of the animal impedes any appropriation of the gaze. The Absent One is anchored in the visible world, and yet the epistemic evidence is obscured by the non-transparency of the animal eye, which the spectator cannot accept as their own. Hence, even in the corporealization of the absent side, the logic of Bresson’s suture holds open a gap between the camera viewpoint and the gaze of the spectator: “by positioning the Absent One as the subject of vision which is not his own, and the image as the signifier

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture

67

of absence,”27 Bresson insists on the wound created by division and lack which is consistently discussed by Oudart and the suture theorists, and which, according to Alenka Zupančič, is programmatic for psychoanalysis as a whole: “Psychoanalysis is solely concerned with dissolving, disputing, dividing, it is obsessed with negativity and lack and never puts forward an affirmative, positive project (whether political or simply ‘human’).”28

2.2 Masked Enunciation, or the Site of the Apparatus: Daniel Dayan This reconstruction of Oudart’s seminal text shows that suture theory should not be subsumed into apparatus theory. Against Metz’s influential thesis of a primary identification between camera and viewer, a stronger counterposition could hardly be formulated than Oudart’s schema of a primary cleavage between the viewpoint of the camera and the eye of the spectator. There are undoubtedly several reasons why this antagonism has invariably been smoothed over by film theorists. For a start, both theories owe much to the categories of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and at first site they appear to be dealing with the same problematic. Secondly, the aspect of suture theory that involved a critique of ideology has consistently been more forcefully emphasized in the continuation of debates surrounding it, which has had the consequence that its original ambiguity has become one-sided. For Oudart, suture is in no way a purely ideological mechanism, because in it the trace of the Absent One has not been eradicated once and for all. It is not the elimination of suture in Bresson’s films that interests Oudart, but its specific aesthetic modulation. The turn towards a theory of ideology in the concept of suture was introduced with Daniel Dayan’s influential essay “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” which in overviews of film theory has often been given precedence over Oudart’s more inaccessible text. Dayan extends Oudart’s interrogation of the syntactic construction of subjectivity to a theory of the point-of-view in the cinema. In the context of this book, this articulation of suture and point-of-view theory is of eminent importance, as will become clear in the following chapter. And yet, Dayan’s text is the result of a compromise formation between suture and apparatus theory, which threatens to bury the radical potential of the Absent One. It thus merits a detailed consideration. 27 Ibid. 28 Alenka Zupančič, Warum Psychoanalyse? (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2009), p. 52.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

68 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

If an external antagonism can be transformed into an internal difference by means of suture, then the invisible no longer seems to stand in the way of the filmic totalization of the visible. The blind spot of the Absent One gives rise to the evidence of the visible world. The desire of film to make visible that which is structurally invisible is nonetheless, according to Dayan, already prefigured in classical painting. From Foucault’s famous analysis of Velasquez’s painting Las Meninas, Dayan extracts the function of a pre-cinematic suture that aims for a total transparency of representation. A painter who paints himself painting: Velasquez himself is depicted in the margins of Las Meninas, standing with a paintbrush before a canvas, of which we can only see the back, and directing the gaze to an object crossing the surface of the image. Both the looks of the figures in the foreground and that of the man at the doorway in the background meet in an invisible point outside of the painting, which according to Foucault coincides with the place of the viewer: “The spectacle he is observing is thus doubly invisible: first, because it is not represented within the space.”29 The key to the painting, however, is not the evocation of blind spots in and of itself, but the fact that the blind spot has been made visible in the actual painting. The portrait in the background, which at first sight appears as an image inside the image, reveals itself as a mirror. This mirror reflects what can be found in the hors-champ of the visual field, which is also what the painter in the image is focused on as his subject: the king and the queen. Through a paradoxical reflection of the invisible, the absent field is absorbed into the visible field. A kind of internal montage avant la lettre takes place: “In cinematographic terms the mirror represents the reverse shot of the painting.”30 The mirror sutures the Outside of the image into the image: In fact, it shows us nothing of what is represented in the picture itself. Its motionless gaze extends out in front of the picture, into that necessarily invisible region which forms its exterior face, to apprehend the figures arranged in that space. Instead of surrounding visible objects, this mirror cuts straight through the whole field of the representation, ignoring all it might apprehend within that field, and restores visibility to that which resides outside all view. What it is reflecting is that which all the figures within the painting are looking at so fixedly, or at least those who are 29 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 4. 30 Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods vol. I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 445.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture

69

looking straight ahead; it is therefore what the spectator would be able to see if the painting extended further forward, if its bottom edge were brought lower until it included the figures the painter is using as models.31

The royal couple is the object of representation, but at the same it is its subject, because its place outside of the image converges with the viewpoint of the painter and with that of the viewer. In the absent field of the image, an enunciatory circulation of gazes takes place, establishing a structural equivalence between painter, viewer and monarch.32 An empowering of the Outside is set in motion, one which constitutes the spectator as the subject of domination over the representation. Anticipating the central ideas of apparatus theory, Foucault also understands the viewer as a kind of Grand Enunciator, who assumes the empty position of sovereignty. In Las Meninas, the system of self-reflection appears to be perfectly balanced: the painter watches himself painting, the viewer watches themselves viewing, and the royal couple watch themselves representing: “For the function of that reflection is to draw into the interior of the picture what is intimately foreign to it: the gaze which has organized it and the gaze for which it is displayed.”33 And yet this internalization cannot be hermetically sealed, because no entity can simultaneously occupy both the Inside and the Outside. Velasquez’s “representation of classical representation” must externalize the sovereign in an imaginary off-field, in order to represent the act of representation: “In the depth that traverses the picture, hollowing it into a fictitious recess and projecting it for- ward in front of itself, it is not possible for the pure felicity of the image ever to present in a full light both the master who is representing and the sovereign who is being represented.”34 In other words: in this painterly “metathesis of visibility,”35 the identity of the subject and object of representation is just as impossible as the identity of enunciation and énoncé. The intimate foreignness of the gaze spoken of 31 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 8-9. 32 “In it there occurs an exact superimposition of the model’s gaze as it is being painted, of the spectator’s as he contemplates the painting, and of the painter’s as he is composing his picture (not the one represented, but the one in front of us which we are discussing). These three ‘observing’ functions come together in a point exterior to the picture: that is, an ideal point in relation to what is represented, but a perfectly real one too, since it is also the starting-point that makes the representation possible. Within that reality itself, it cannot not be invisible. And yet, that reality is projected within the picture – projected and diffracted in three forms which correspond to the three functions of that ideal and real point.” Ibid., p. 16. 33 Ibid., p. 17. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., p. 9.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

70 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

by Foucault cannot be entirely assimilated into the picture. The sought after totalization of the visible reaches its limit in the “necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation.”36 The internalization of the gaze by the mirror also invariably gestures towards the Outside from which it actually wants to keep hermetically sealed. Even the circularity of sovereign representation is founded on an inexhaustible remainder. In Dayan’s reading of Las Meninas, this necessary disappearance of the founder in no way threatens the representational order of things, because the central absence of the gaze from the subjectivity of the viewer has been filled. The absent field is merely a hollow mold for the Eye (=I) of the spectator: The paradox of Las Meninas proves that the presence of the subject must be signified but empty, defined but left free. Reading the signifiers of the presence of the subject, the spectator occupies this place. His own subjectivity fills the empty spot predefined by the painting. […] When I occupy the place of the subject, the codes which led me to occupy this place become invisible to me. The signifiers of the presence of the subject disappear from my consciousness because they are the signifiers of my presence. What I perceive is their signified: myself.37

The dominant subjectivity is practically imprinted on the image as a determinate position of the gaze. Since the viewer perceives – must perceive – this position to be that of the creator of the representation, they identify, as in the Lacanian mirror stage, with that which they are not: the mirror returns back to them the foreign image of the sovereign as a reflection of their own transcendental ego-position. For Dayan, the imaginary reverse-shot of the mirror image sutures the viewer, as an absent Present One, together with the power of the sovereign gaze, which they recognize/misrecognize as their own enunciatory power. Already, this indicates that Dayan conceptualizes suture as a genuinely ideological operation, which restores the dispossessed gaze of the spectator. As opposed to the way it functions in painting, the question of enunciation in the cinema is always posed beyond an anthropomorphic problematic. While the genesis of painting cannot, in the final instance, be separated from the brush of the painter, the film camera makes the manual mediation of the artist obsolete, as Bazin had already established: “For the first time an 36 Ibid., p. 18. 37 Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” p. 445.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture

71

image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man.”38 Furthermore, in film the pictorial fixation of the sovereign spectator-subject threatens to break apart due to the multiplication of a plurality of perspectives: every change of camera-angle brought about by editing brings on another viewpoint. The integration of the spectator into the cinematic image is, in contrast to the static perspective of painting, subjected to a constant fluidity by dint of its multiperspectivalism. It is to this that the filmic economy of suture must find an answer: “For its succession of shots is, by that very system, a succession of views. The viewer’s identification with the subjective function proposed by the painting or photograph is broken again and again during the viewing of a film. Thus cinema regularly and systematically raises the question which is exceptional in painting (Las Meninas): ‘Who is watching this?’”39 With this question posed by Dayan, we return to the initial question of the enunciation debate: Who is the subject of discourse? Who produces this discourse? And for whom is this discourse produced? Drawing on Oudart, Dayan also posits the Absent One as the invisible subject of enunciation, which withdraws power from the spectator through the image: “This ghost, who rules over the frame and robs the spectator of his pleasure, Oudart proposes to call ‘the absent one’(l’absent).”40 That Dayan equates the Absent One with a ghost only increases its uncanniness. Alienated from the image in this fashion, only suture can once again reconcile the spectator with the image. Unlike Oudart, for whom suture is already present when the complementary reverse-shot fills out the filmic space, Dayan identifies suture with the specific subjectivization of the reverse-shot through eyelinematching and point-of-view editing. The reverse-shot not only converts the off-screen to an on-screen, it retrospectively positions itself as the diegetically immanent cause of the first shot’s gaze: Shot two reveals a character who is presented as the owner of the glance corresponding to shot one. That is, the character in shot two occupies the place of the absent-one corresponding to shot one. The character retrospectively transforms the absence emanating from shot one’s other 38 André Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema? vol. I, p. 13. 39 Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” p. 446. See also Jacques Aumont, “Point of View,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11:2 (1989), p. 7. “Because the construction of filmic space implies the element of time and because it also implies topological relationships […] the cinematographic point of view must in the first instance be referred not to the immobile view but to the sequence of views.” 40 Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” p. 446.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

72 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

stage into a presence. […] When shot two replaces shot one, the absent one is transferred from the level of enunciation to the level of fiction. 41

With this fictional absorption of the Absent One, the suture in the reverseshot authorizes the previous camera-angle as the visual property of a character. The spectral gaze of the Absent One is thus materialized in the concrete, gazing body of a character. Since the origin of the gaze is anchored in the fiction, suture enables the spectator to repress the absent enunciation. An imaginary recoding of subjectivity takes place, in order to re-attach the the disempowered gaze of the spectator back to an egological origin point. Hence, Edward Branigan writes, in his study of point-of-view: “Subjectivity, by definition, depends on equating origin with character. A point in space must be established and related to the space occupied by a character; that is, character or the perspective position of character will be designated as the origin of a production of space for the viewer.”42 Dayan, for his part, understands suture as a substitution mechanism, in which the spectral subjectivity of the Absent One has been replaced by the diegetic subjectivity of a fictional character: a transfer of enunciation into the fiction, which enables the secondary identification of the spectator with a diegetic I. At this point, I must once again point to the decisive difference between the notions of enunciation respectively offered by suture theory and apparatus theory. Unlike in Metz’s model, secondary identification does not logically follow from primary identification; rather, Dayan, drawing on Oudart, understands secondary identification as a kind of phobic defense reaction against the uncanny potency of the Absent One. If suture sets an ideological mechanism in motion – and Dayan does not hesitate to claim this – then it is not because it perpetuates the technologically preformed ideology of the apparatus. Suture is thus ideological, because it blocks off the traumatic moment of a primary disidentification and relocalizes this identification in the fictional world of the film: “The reverse shot has ‘sutured’ the hole opened in the spectator’s imaginary relationship with the filmic field by his perception of the absent-one. This effect, and the system which produces it, liberates the imaginary of the spectator, in order to manipulate it for its own ends.”43 Suture transforms the primordial camera-not-I into the fictional representative of an ego-ideal. 41 Ibid. 42 Edward Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1984), p. 76. 43 Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” p. 449.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture

73

It is unsurprising, then, that the spectral scenario of suture theory has been fiercely attacked in various quarters. From an empirical standpoint, the hypostasizing of the shot/reverse-shot system was reproached for only corresponding to around 40% of all cuts, even in classical Hollywood cinema. 44 William Rothman, meanwhile, noted in a rebuttal to Dayan’s article that the point-of-view sequence, as a rule, does not consist of two shots (as Dayan suggests), but of a chain of at least three shots. If, for Dayan, the second shot always delivers the answer to the absent cause of the gaze, then according to Rothman a typical point-of-view sequence usually begins with the shot of a character, whose gaze is directed towards an off-screen point. It is only then that the object of this gaze is cut to, in order then to revert back to the gazing figure: “Thus the point-of-view shot is ordinarily introduced by a shot which calls attention to its own frame by indicating (by a cue) that there is something about to be shown that lies outside the boundaries of that frame. This cue is a condition for the viewer’s discovery of the frame of the point-of-view shot itself.”45 Because the hors-champ is subject to a constant diegetization through the diversion of the visual axes out of the field of the image, for Rothman the drama of the Absent One is only an apparent problem: “No ghostly sovereign is invoked by the point-of-view sequence.”46 As indisputable as the empirical evidence behind Rothman’s thesis may be, it changes nothing in the structural causality schematized by suture theory: whatever editing conventions or diegetic strategies of the gaze may be dominant in the cinema, all shots are, strictly speaking, contaminated by the invisible presence of an absent field. It is self-evident that not every single shot necessarily conjures up the ghost of the Absent One, and yet Rothman proceeds with a natural difference of objective and subjective shots, which it is indeed worth interrogating with the use of suture theory. It should be recalled that the notion of the Absent One does not only aim for the duplication of the visible filmic field by an invisible zone, but it also aims for the emanation of a similarly asubjective subjectivitity. The operative utilization of suture should then be designated as successful, insofar as this external subjectivity of the Absent One is totally absorbed by the internal subjectivity of the character, and the bodiless gaze anchored in a diegetic body. Here, it is a rather secondary consideration whether the 44 See Barry Salt, “Film Style and Technology in the Forties,” Film Quarterly 29:9 (1975), pp. 45-50. 45 William Rothman, “Against ‘The System of the Suture,’” in Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods vol. I, p. 455. 46 Ibid.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

74 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

connections between the shots are aligned with each other in a spatially exact fashion, since suture seems to rest on the desire of the spectator to postulate a causality even when the shots are only loosely connected with one another. Edward Branigan has brought attention to the fact that point-of-view is constructed on a logical impossibility, which consists of the fact that the actual spectator and camera can never occupy the same spatial point: “In a real space the camera and character could not occupy the same point at the same time; nevertheless, in the POV shot they do exactly this and without interfering with one another. The contradiction, here, is resolved through an ideology (that is, a reading convention) which takes the camera (and, more broadly, narration) to be invisible and the character to be real.”47 That this substitution of the gaze is accepted by the spectator has, however, nothing to do with the invisibility of the camera, which according to Branigan is the basis of the invisible-observer principle of classical narrative cinema. In Dayan’s view, the spectral presence of an absent subject is indeed hiding behind the immutable invisibility of the camera. The ideological aspect of the point-of-view technique is formed, as this account has it, not in the disappearance of the camera from the visible field, but, the other way round, in its disappearance from the invisible field. Suture always guarantees the anchoring of an absence in the evidence of visibility. But who is hidden behind the secretive Absent One? Whereas Oudart is skeptical of any unambiguous answer and refrains from ascribing any clearly identifiable enunciator to enunciation, Dayan seems to reveal this secret at the end of his essay. The Absent One is not, for Dayan, a stand-in for the author or the spectator, but for the totality of the production process. The Absent One metonymically points to the conditions of a productive work, which suture has, as its central ideological impetus, the goal of masking. Here, Dayan’s key passage should be quoted in full: The absent-one is masked, replaced by a character, hence the origin of the image – the conditions of its production represented by the absent-one – is replaced with a false origin and this false origin is situated inside the fiction. The cinematographic level fools the spectator by connecting him to the fictional level rather than to the filmic level. But the difference between the two origins of the image is not only that one (filmic) is true and the other (fictional) false. The true origin represents the cause of the image. The false origin suppresses that cause and does not offer anything 47 Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema, p. 74.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture

75

in exchange. The character whose glance takes possession of the image did not produce it. He is only somebody who sees, a spectator. The image therefore exits independently. It has no cause. It is. In other terms, it is its own cause. By means of suture, the film-discourse presents itself as a product without a producer, a discourse without an origin. It speaks. Who speaks? Things speak for themselves and of course, they tell the truth. Cinema establishes itself as the ventriloquist of ideology. 48

Although Dayan does not provide a clear definition of what he actually means by relations of production, the theoretical resonance with apparatus theory cannot be overlooked. The intangible entity that is the Absent One is in the end reduced to the hard materiality of a dispositif, which is conceptualized as the origin of enunciation. Certainly, it is not the spectator or the author, but the totality of the productive labor process, considered in the Marxist sense, which functions as the subject of enunciation. And yet Dayan seems certain that he has located the true origin of the filmic image. By attaching this true ground to a pseudo-subject in the fiction, the suture-system produces a false causality. As in Metz, Discourse masks itself as a self-generating Story. With this diversion of the Absent One out of the apparatus, the theoretical boundary between suture and apparatus theory is, in fact, difficult to discern: whereas Oudart largely foregoes an understanding of suture grounded in a critique of ideology, for Dayan suture acts in the service of the Lacanian matrix of recognition and misrecognition, which assimilates the spectator into the imaginary order of the film, without becoming aware of the genesis of enunciation in the apparatus. In the conclusion to his text, Dayan thus seems to suggest both a false and a correct substitution of the Absent One. To the false substitution (suture), political film aesthetics must oppose the correct substitution of the Absent One through the enunciatory apparatus. Unsurprisingly, given that his text belongs to the political discourse of post-1968 film theory, Dayan proposes Godard’s Vent d’est (Wind from the East, 1969) as an exemplar of a radical cinema capable of breaking with the illusion mechanism of suture and self-reflexively highlighting its own apparative Outside in every image. 49 48 Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” pp. 450-451. 49 On the fact that this film shows not only the absent camera but includes other practices such as scratching the f ilm stock, see the influential article by Peter Wollen, “Godard and Counter-Cinema: Vent d’est,” in Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: BFI, 1982), pp. 79-91. For a critique of Godard’s political aesthetic from the perspective of suture theory, see Chapter 3.3 below.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

76 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Show the apparatus! This catch-cry of the politics of self-reflexivity is, for Dayan too, a curative against the cinema of suture. I would suggest, however, that with this closing thesis of an equivalence between Absence and the apparatus, Dayan robs suture theory of its theoretical dynamism. The Absent One is reduced to a mere representative of the dispositif, and is thus deprived of its uncanny ghostliness, which Dayan had himself initially ascribed to it. Since the spectral logic of absence is once more subordinated to the technical logic of the apparatus, the Absent One almost unavoidably falls under the suspicion of ideology. Finally, Dayan also appears to have a phobic reaction against the menace of absence, which can only be warded off by an anti-fictional presence (of the apparatus), rather than a fictional presence (of suture). This phobia can once again be traced back to the dogma of apparatus theory, which demands that the irrepressible cleavage between enunciation and the énoncé be denounced as the core of ideological illusion. Of course, this is buttressed by the hypothesis, (mis)understood to be a Marxist position, that the absence of the camera in the field of the visible ineluctably results in a masking of the production process. As already could be seen in Metz, in Dayan a critique of ideology is pronounced which pointedly reproaches the cinema for the structural specificity on which it was established. Acceding to the Althusserian demand to formulate suture theory as a theory of structural causality, Dayan’s false solidarity with apparatus theory annihilates the potency of absence discovered by Oudart. We should dispose of this false compromise and counterpose to it a concept of absence which does not defame it as an ideological problem, but, by contrast, understands it as the foundational figure of a political film aesthetics which positively affirms the negativity of the Absent One.

2.3 The Schizoid Suture, or the Division of Body and Voice: Acousmatics as Schismatics in Psycho The later contributions to this debate afford a further differentiation of the concept of suture, and yet, on a theoretical level, they add nothing new to Oudart’s and Dayan’s paradigmatic texts. In this vein, Stephen Heath pleads for a far broader concept of suture, as a generalized mode of assimilating the spectator into the narrative, which extends well beyond the micro-unit of the shot/reverse-shot.50 Kaja Silverman, by contrast, seeks to link her discussion of suture both to apparatus theory’s critique of ideology and 50 See Heath, “Notes on Suture,” in Questions of Cinema, pp. 77-112.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture

77

to the feminist theory of the gaze offered by Mulvey.51 What unites both authors, however, is their shared assumption of an identity between absence and the apparatus – precisely that thesis, that is to say, with which Dayan sought to de-spectralize suture theory. In analogous fashion to the previous re-reading of Marnie, I will now analyze Hitchcock’s Psycho, with and against Silverman’s reading of the film, in order to undertake a re-spectralization of suture theory. The subversive undermining of suture in Psycho, as my initial hypothesis has it, occurs precisely in the evasion of an apparative causality, and not in its performative display, as Silverman asserts: “Hitchcock’s Psycho […] deliberately exposes the negations upon which filmic plenitude is predicated. It unabashedly foregrounds the voyeuristic dimensions of the cinematic experience, making constant references to the speaking subject, and forcing the viewer into oblique and uncomfortable positions both vis-à-vis the cinematic apparatuses and the spectacle which they produce.”52 However, what we see in the famous opening sequence of Psycho is, on the contrary, tied to the uncanny invisibility of the apparatus: the camera slowly glides over the Phoenix skyline, until it swoops down, with an unsettling mixture of contingency and necessity, towards the exterior window of an anonymous building, and finally enters the interior of the hotel room through the half-opened shutters, finding the protagonist of the film (Marion Crane), with her lover, in a state of post-coital tristesse. “Who is watching this?” This core question is irrepressibly evoked with a camera movement, which, in its deliberate curiosity, is too subjective to function as a classical establishing shot, but also too objective to assume the point of view of a fictional character. The viewpoint cannot be described to any human perspective, because the camera movement does not correspond to any credible pattern of human mobility within the diegesis, which would have realistically motivated a gliding movement from above the rooftops to the interior of the hotel room. The camera movement derives from an ahuman viewpoint, but nonetheless suggests a deceptive subjectivity, whose undertows hint at the presence of a diegetic bearer of the gaze, which could potentially appear in a reverse-shot: “Psycho’s opening few shots take in the exterior of a group of city buildings, without a single reverse shot to anchor that spectacle to a fictional gaze.”53 The desire for a suturing, revelatory reverse-shot only becomes vehement, therefore, if there is an unmistakable subjective marking of the filmic images as the gaze of a somebody. The 51 See Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, pp. 194-236. 52 Ibid., p. 206. 53 Ibid.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

78 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

opening sequence of Psycho awakens this desire, but also subverts it: it releases the gaze from an asubjective subjectivity, which in its ambivalence negates the distinction between objective and subjective, neutral and pointof-view shots. It is on the basis of this difference that the suture system is necessarily structured. Stephen Heath has described it as an alternation between the first and third person: “Point-of-View, that is, depends on an overlaying of first and third person modes. There is no radical dichotomy between subjective point-of-view shots and objective non-point-of-view shots; the latter mode is the continual basis over which the former can run in its particular organization of space, its disposition of the images.”54 With the collapse of this difference, the diegetic anchoring of the gaze brought about by the reverse-shot also breaks down. The grammatical undifferentiability of objectivity and subjectivity in Psycho blocks the functionality of the suture by rejecting the potential reverse-shot, and thus evokes a paradoxical voyeurism without a voyeur, which in this case only be assigned with great difficulty to Hitchcock the Enunciator, as Bellour, following on from his analysis of Marnie, sought to do for Psycho: “Thus, from the start, emphasis is placed on the voyeuristic position, which deliberately constitutes the position of enunciation.”55 Nor, however, can the source of enunciation be directly ascribed to the apparatus, as Silverman does. Far from exposing its materiality, the camera appears to be dematerialized, such that it is totally transformed into a disembodied eye. A disembodied eye, which, however (as opposed to how the description of it given by apparatus theory would have it), does not function as the equivalent of the spectator’s eye, but as the emanation of a phantom gaze from out of the darkness of a hors-champ, which fluctuates in a liminal zone between diegesis and non-diegesis. For Angelo Restivo, such ambiguities of enunciation are symptomatic of a film which opens up its “extimate” side: “This contamination of the boundary between the outer and the inner, or between the diegetic and the nondiegetic, stands in for a larger social breakdown, between the private realm and the public space. Not only do we see this diegetically – […] but also, once again in the enunciation.”56 This diffusion between the public and the private sphere can also be seen in a later sequence, in which the subjectless subjectivity of the gaze 54 Heath, “Narrative Space,” in Questions of Cinema, p. 48. 55 Raymond Bellour, “Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion (on Psycho),” in The Analysis of Film, p. 248. 56 Angelo Restivo, “Into the Breach: Between the Movement-Image and the Time-Image,” in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 182.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture

79

contaminates the shot/reverse-shot system from within. After Marion Crane is entrusted by her boss with $40,000 of a customer’s money, we can see her in her bedroom, her back to the camera. As she turns around, an unexpected camera movement reveals the envelope with the money in it lying on the side of her bed. A zoom focuses on the money in a close-up, before the camera pans to an open trunk full of clothes. Marion turns around and directs her gaze to the bed. There then follows a shot/reverse-shot pattern, in which Hitchcock repeatedly cuts between Marion and a close-up of the money. Although the syntax of classical suture apparently remains intact in this sequence, the duality of gaze-subject and gaze-object is also subtly irritated. At the beginning of the autonomous camera movement, the money is bestowed with an auratic power that eludes Marion’s own gaze. The pastness of the (fetish) object establishes an inversion in the hierarchy of gazes, such that the object seems to peer at the subject. In spite of the familiar shot/reverse-shot alternation, Marion becomes the spellbound gaze-object of an object-gaze. Her theft of the money thus appears as a pre-determined act: Finally, it associates the money with a transcendental gaze, a gaze which exceeds Marion’s and that can see her without ever being seen – one which knows her better than she knows herself. […] By privileging the point of view of an inanimate object, Hitchcock makes us acutely aware of what Oudart would call the ‘Absent One’ – i.e. of the speaking subject. Our relationship with the camera remains unmediated, ‘unsoftened’ by the intervention of a human gaze.57

And, of course, it is not a coincidence that this transcendental object-gaze takes the form of money, which is precisely one of those “sensuous things which are are at the same time supra-sensible,”58 and which in capitalism assume the simultaneous position of a transcendental subject/object.59 It is precisely this dual status of money that emerges from within the inversion of suture as the object-gaze of an automatic subject, one which kindles Marion’s desire. In the strictly obscene gaze of an inanimate object on the half-naked body of a woman, money stains the private sphere as the irruption of an abstract economic externality. Over the course of the film, 57 Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, p. 208. 58 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 165. 59 On the transcendental status of money, see also Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 6ff.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

80 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

this externalized object-gaze experiences another uncanny modulation. In her escape to California, the sleeping Marion is surprised in her car by a traffic cop. Under the suspicious interrogation of the police officer, Marion feels increasingly pursued. Although the two figures are only separated by the open side-window of her car, we are shown a shot/reverse-shot series, whereby (although in this sequence, too, the symmetry of the points of view is maintained intact) the stable intersubjectivity of a conventional change of viewpoint is toppled by an anamorphic stain in the picture: the eyes of the cop, behind his big, dark sunglasses, see without being seen. Marion’s looks rebound against the impenetrable darkness of the sunglasses, which appear as intrusive particles from the hors-champ in the field of the visible. They are, so to speak, an Off in the On, which transforms the police office into an omen of Marion’s coming death. The punishing gaze does not originate in a human eye, but arises from out of a black hole. An omnipotent all-seeing eye is constitutive of the object-gaze in Psycho. As with the money lying on the bed, the gaze of the police officer hidden behind the sunglasses sees more than the protagonist does. Hence, at the end of the sequence, the shot/reverse-shot alternation gives way to a conclusive disempowerment of Marion’s point of view through the off-screen eye of an all-seeing police officer. Branigan describes this phenomenon as an “embedded point of view.”60 In the transcendental gaze of money and the law, Marion falls under the spell of a pronouncement of guilt from which her paranoia grows. Although the entire first half of the film is focalized through Marion’s perspective, she is not the subject of the gaze. The articulation of suture reveals itself – in contrast to Dayan’s description – to be an extremely fragile process, in which the balance between shot and reverse-shot can turn against the diegetic gaze-subject. Through the release of an uncanny object-gaze, a paranoid reversibility of gaze-structures is set in motion in Psycho, one which according to Jacqueline Rose is inherent to the classical syntax of the shot/reverse-shot schema: What is seen is the subject himself and what he sees. The opposition is however a lure in its very structure. Firstly, the camera has to identify not 60 “An embedded POV results when a POV structure of one character is nested or contained within a larger POV structure of another character. For example, in Psycho we see Marion inside her car glance (shot A) at a policeman outside the car who then glances (shot B) at he car licence plate (shot C). Marion is still watching the policeman (repetition of shot A) as he looks up (repetition of shot B). One characteristic of this structure is that while we have seen something from Marion’s viewpoint, we have also seen something that she cannot see: the licence plate.” Edward Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema, p. 117.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture

81

only with the subject […] in order to show what he sees, but also with the object of vision in order to show the subject. The series can therefore only be structured by a partial activation of the potentially aggressive reversal of its system. Secondly, the fact that the camera must identify with both terms of the opposition, and in the place of one of them cannot be assimilated to a subjectivity, reveals its presence prior to the point at which it disengages from that opposition, cancels the observer’s centrality and subjects the observer and the observed to a gaze whose signified is attack. The opposition shot/countershot therefore contains its own principle of instability prior to the moment of its activation.61

In Psycho, the paranoid reversibility of the gaze has its acoustic pendant in the separation of body and voice. More than any other f ilm, Psycho dramatizes the fundamental disjunction of cinematic audio-vision in the untying of the vocal from the visual: during her night-time car trip, which ends up leading her to Norman Bates’ hotel, Marion is harried by the imaginary voices of her boss, her colleague and the millionaire she stole from, who all speak of the increasing suspicion surrounding her. Although, thanks to their technical distanciation, these voices recognizably spring from Marion’s imagination, the conversions could also have really taken place in the diegetic world of the film. In this sequence, therefore, the differentiability between imaginary and real sound disappears in the emanations of a paranoid superego voice. This superego voice becomes the hinge of an amalgamation of interiority and exteriority, as the products of Marion’s own paranoid delusions turn against her. The voice belongs neither to Marion nor to the Other, but, much like the asubjective gaze at the beginning of the film, occupies a liminal zone of an internal exterior. In other words: the voice is concealed in an off-screen space that cannot be completely embodied in the on-screen space. In Psycho, this separation of body and voice happens for the first time at precisely that moment in which an instance of rear-projection splits the filmic image. In this sense, an enunciative antagonism is condensed in the duplicated separation, which haunts the film on all levels of its audio-vision. Hence, even the “audiovisual contract”62 between image and sound is nothing more than a suture effect, which makes two incommensurable entities commensurable with one another. The practice of synchronization 61 Jacqueline Rose, “Paranoia and the Film System,” Screen 17:4 (1976/77), p. 92. 62 See Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 66-94.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

82 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

can also be understood as an attempt at a diegetic suturing together of the acoustic realm in the transparency of the fiction – that is, as a naturalizing mediation of an original schism between image and sound, body and voice. Synchronization as suture thus guarantees the substitution of acoustic enunciation through the “moving lips” of the figures: “They transfer the origin of the words, as perceived by the spectator/auditor, from sound ‘track’ and loudspeaker to character within the film’s diegesis. To put it another way, pointing the camera at the speaker disguises the source of the words, dissembling the work of production and technology.”63 Sound in the cinema, according to Altman, always asks: “Where from?” The image, as a rule, answers with a “Here!” In Psycho, the fundamental enquiry of the voice’s “where from?” is no longer answered through an embodied image source, but is acousmatically spectralized. Michel Chion characterizes film voices whose visual source is not visible in the image field as “acousmatic.” The voice is separated from the body and wanders over the surface of the image as an uncanny off-screen power (the acousmêtre), without a place or an origin. As Mary Ann Doane has described it: “As soon as the sound is detached from its source, no longer anchored by a represented body, its potential work as a signifier is revealed. There is always something uncanny about a voice which emanates from a source outside the frame.”64 In contrast to the clearly extra-diegetic position of the traditional voiceover narrators, the acousmatic voice oscillates between potentially being anchored in the diegesis and remaining as a non-diegetic externality. Through this enunciative ambiguity, the acousmatic voice can be transported into the suture system: the acousmatic voice, as the placeholder of an hors-champ, is essentially the acoustic doppelgänger of the Absent One. Complementary to the operation of suture, “de-acousmaticization” designates the diegetic transference of the Absent One into the field of visibility. With the double renunciation of this embodiedness, Psycho releases the uncanny coupling of a spectral gaze/voice, which floats through the film like undead “organs without bodies”65: “In some traditions, ghosts are those who are unburied or improperly buried. Precisely the same applies to the acousmêtre, when we speak of a yet-unseen voice, one that can neither enter the image or attach to a visible body, nor occupy the removed position of the 63 Rick Altman, “Moving Lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism,” Yale French Studies 60 (1980), p. 69. 64 Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” in Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods vol. II, p. 571. 65 See Slavoj Žižek, “‘I Hear You with My Eyes,’ or, the Invisible Master,” in Slavoj Žižek and Renata Salecl (eds.), Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 110. See also chapter 4.2 below.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture

83

image presenter. The voice is condemned to wander the surface. This is what Psycho is all about […]. The mother in Psycho is first and foremost a voice.”66 Norman Bates is obsessed with the ghost of this “acousmother”67: in an act of psychotic introjection, Bates has incorporated his mother’s undead voice as his own. This monstrously two-faced character kills Marion Crane in the shower and thus bifurcates the narrative of the film. Half Norman, half Mother; half living, half dead; half man, half woman; half voice, half body – it is in this zone of undifferentiability between on-screen and off-screen that the schizoid subject of Psycho constitutes itself. There can, therefore, be no unambiguous visual embodiment of this subject. In the two central murder sequences, the shape of the murderer is concealed either by shadows (the murder in the shower) or in the renunciation of a reverse-shot (the murder of Arbogast). In spite of its diegetic presence, the gaze of the murderer remains in an unrepresentable darkness. In the shower scene, the paranoiac reversal of suture in the unity of the knife and the (hidden) gaze finally finds its deadly apotheosis: The paranoid structure of Psycho culminates in the shower scene itself through the rapid montage, which relies heavily on shot/reverse-shot structure, and by explicit sound effects which evoke the sound of slashing. Here the camera becomes both knife and murderer, revealing that the nature of cinematic suture as such entails the paranoid mechanism because it calls upon the psychic mechanism that tries to fill in the loss.68

Hardly any other scene in the history of the cinema has so radically exposed montage as an act of violence. The cut into the flesh of the victim stands in isomorphic relation with the shattering of the filmic image into extremely short shock-fragments. The hyperbolic acceleration of the cutting frequency is accompanied by the violation of the 30-degree rule: montage dismantles the continuity-rule of classical Hollywood style. This rip in the syntactic chain of shots has, once again, its acoustic counterpart in the soundtrack: Bernard Herrmann’s screeching violins function here as the acousmatic externalization of Marion Crane’s death cry. Straddling the boundaries between music, scream and synthetic noise, the soundtrack strips the character of her own death cry. As Slavoj Žižek puts 66 Michel Chion, The Voice in the Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 140. 67 Ibid., p. 141. 68 Ayako Saito, “Hitchcock’s Trilogy: A Logic of Mise en scène,” in Janet Bergstrom (ed.), Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 226.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

84 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

it: the nondiegetic Outside of the film’s score intervenes into the diegesis and, like the use of rear projection and flashes of color in Marnie, makes horror “transsubjective – that is, it can no longer be qualified as the affect of a diegetic personality. From our perspective, however, this ‘transsubjective’ dimension is precisely the dimension of subject beyond ‘subjectivity.’”69 It is precisely this “subject beyond subjectivity” that is the empty place in which all the spectral gazes and acousmatic voices in Psycho converge. This place cannot be made fully transparent, whether through suture or through de-acousmaticization. An “impossible corporeality”70 closes off the absent subject of Psycho: Hitchcock contrives to keep the subject of Psycho physically absent and morally indefinable. It is pushed out of everyone’s reach. No one, including Norman, is in possession of what is withheld. To the extent that it can be identified at all, Psycho’s ‘issue’ becomes the silhouette behind the curtain – an image poised to shatter at the eye’s moment of contact with it, like the double reflection that startles Marion’s sister Lila during her search of Mrs. Bates’s bedroom. (As Lila turns accost the woman behind her, what she discovers is her own distraught face in the looking glass.) Psycho’s missing subject is perhaps best described as a figure glimpsed but never quite seen: a dim outline in a lighted upstairs window; the spectral imprint of a rigidly coiled form on a mattress. On a first viewing, we chiefly feel it as a threat of recurrence that is under no one’s control.71

This spectral subjectivity culminates in the famous closing shot of the film, which carries out an impossible integration of voice and body. Now fully “zombified” by the voice of the mother, Norman Bates gazes, with unflinching eyes, directly into the camera. The difference between deacousmaticization and acousmaticization collapses in the schizoid suture of Norman and the M(Other). In this “disjunctive synthesis” (Deleuze),72 69 Slavoj Žižek, “Hitchcock’s Universe,” in Slavoj Žižek (ed.), Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan But Were Too Afraid to Ask Hitchcock (London: Verso, 1992), p. 245. 70 See Chion, The Voice in the Cinema, pp. 140ff. 71 George Toles, “If Thine Eye Offend Thee…: Psycho and the Art of Infection,” in Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzales (eds.), Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (London: BFI, 1999), pp. 170-171. 72 “A disjunctive synthesis is a connection of elements which are brought together and attached with one another so as to bring forth a new mode of thinking and a new form of existence, precisely due to the fact that these elements are not homogenous and cannot be reduced to the identity of a common measure.” Monique David-Ménard, Deleuze und die Psychoanalyse (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2009), p. 98.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture

85

the identity of body and voice brought about by the suture coincides with their absolute alterity, as Žižek affirms in a central passage: This figure of “absolute Otherness” is none other than the VorstellungsRepräsentanz: it stands in, within the diegetic reality, for a representation which is constitutively excluded from its space. Therein consists the allegorical dimension of Hitchcock’s universe: the Vorstellungs-Repräsentanz is the umbilical link by means of which the diegetic content functions as an allegory of its process of enunciation. The place of this figure is acousmatic: it never simply partakes in diegetic reality, but dwells in an intermediate space inherent to reality yet “out of place” in it.73

In the puncturing of its diegesis through the gaze and the voice, Psycho opens up an unrepresentable hors-champ, which can only evoke Freud’s Vorstellungs-Repräsentanz (ideational representative). It is precisely in this sense that, in Psycho’s allegory of its own enunciation, we see the crystallization of neither the reflexive figuration of the spectator (Metz), nor that of the author (Bellour) or the apparatus (Dayan, Silverman), but rather, an absent cause: Psycho is the allegory of an enunciation without an enunciator.

Bibliography Allen, Richard Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Altman, Rick, “Moving Lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism,” Yale French Studies 60 (1980), pp. 51-66. Aumont, Jacques, “Point of View,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11:2 (1989), pp. 1-22. Bazin, André, What is Cinema? vol. I, trans Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film, trans. Constance Penley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 217-252. Bordwell, David, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 73 Žižek, “Hitchcock’s Universe,” p. 244.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

86 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Branigan, Edward, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1984). –––, Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film Theory (London: Routledge, 2006). Carroll, Noël, Mystifying Movies: Fads & Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Cavell, Stanley, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Chion, Michel, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). –––, The Voice in the Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). David-Ménard, Monique, Deleuze und die Psychoanalyse (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2009). Dayan, Daniel, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods vol. I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). Doane, Mary Ann, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 565-576. Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1989). Heath, Stephen, Questions of Cinema (London: BFI, 1981). Hoffmann, Roger, “Spannungen – Psychoanalyse, Literature, Literaturwissenschaft,” in Hans-Dieter Gondek, Roger Hoffman and Hans-Martin Lohmann (eds.), Jacques Lacan – Wege zu seinem Werk (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001). Karatani, Kojin, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). Koch, Gertrud, “Kosmos im Film: Zum Raumkonzept von Benjamins ‘Kunstwerk’Essay,” in Sigrid Weigel (ed.), Leib- und Bildraum: Lektüren nach Benjamin (Cologne: Böhlau, 1992), pp. 35-48. Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976). Miller, Jacques-Alain, “Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier),” Screen 18:4 (1977-78), pp. 24-34. Oudart, Jean-Pierre, “Cinema and Suture,” trans. Kari Hanet, Screen 18:4 (1977-78), pp. 35-47. Reader, Keith, Robert Bresson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Restivo, Angelo, “Into the Breach: Between the Movement-Image and the TimeImage,” in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Rose, Jacqueline, “Paranoia and the Film System,” Screen 17:4 (1976/77), pp. 85-104. Rothman, William, “Against ‘The System of the Suture,’” in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods vol. I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 451-459.


This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture

87

Saito, Ayako, “Hitchcock’s Trilogy: A Logic of Mise en Scène,” in Janet Bergstrom (ed.), Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 200-248. Salt, Barry, “Film Style and Technology in the Forties,” Film Quarterly 29:9 (1975), pp. 45-50. Silverman, Kaja, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). –––, The Threshold of the Visible World (London: Routledge, 1996). Toles, George, “If Thine Eye Offend Thee…: Psycho and the Art of Infection,” in Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzales (eds.), Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (London: BFI, 1999), pp. 159-174. Winkler, Hartmut, Der filmische Raum und sein Zuschauer: “Apparatus” – Semantik – Ideologie (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1992). Wollen, Peter, Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: BFI, 1982). Žižek, Slavoj, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan But Were Too Afraid to Ask Hitchcock (London: Verso, 1992). –––, “‘I Hear You with My Eyes,’ or, the Invisible Master,” in Slavoj Žižek and Renata Salecl (eds.), Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). Zupančič, Alenka, Warum Psychoanalyse? (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2009).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

3.

On the Pragmatics of Enunciation Abstract In Francesco Casetti’s pragmatist theory, enunciation becomes entirely a matter of deictic point-of-view configurations between pronominally defined positions of “I” “you” and “he.” Casetti turns the negativity of the speaking subject into a performative speech act. In contrast to Casetti, the late Metz comes closest to the original impulse of Oudart: against the presentism of Casetti’s deictic model, Metz pleads for the impersonality of the instance of enunciation similar to that of writing. However, Metz tends to allow enunciation and text to fall into one another despite their alleged splitting. The next step is a critique of Godard’s political modernism from the perspective of suture theory. I refer to his use of the paradigmatic selfreflexive figure of the “look at the camera” to explain that Godard remains caught in the deictic addressing of spectator, author and apparatus. Keywords: Deixis, Speech Act, Writing, Textuality, Look at the camera

At the end of Psycho, Norman Bates’ psychotic grin seems to turn directly towards the viewer. Yet the final deterioration of his mental health leaves us in doubt as to whether the gaze actually is intended for the viewer as a secret accomplice, or whether it is simply an empty gaze, which, in the isolation of madness, has been denuded of any communicative affinity. The You which the gaze of the character addresses is in Psycho as little embodied as the place of the enunciator. Both the source of the sender and that of the receiver remain precarious: the enunciator cannot be unconditionally equated with Hitchcock (as Bellour does), but nor is the concrete spectator the unambiguous addressee of Norman Bates’ last gaze. Every form of enunciation is necessarily also an utterance addressed to an enunciatee, but this basic pragmatic embedding of enunciation was initially brushed aside by Metz’s conflation of sender and receiver. In the 1980s, the debate surrounding filmic enunciation underwent a pragmatic turn, which saw an increasing preoccupation with the linguistic roots of

Lie, S., Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462983632_ch03

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

90 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

the concept. The Italian film theorist Francesco Casetti can be considered the main representative of this turn towards the historicization of theory. In his seminal book Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and its Spectator, the implications these debates had for psychoanalysis and the critique of ideology disappear in favor of a performative theory of enunciation, in whose center stands the concept of “deixis.” As a direct reply to the work of Casetti, Christian Metz then embarked on a revision of his earlier concept of enunciation: in his last book, Impersonal Enunciation, or The Site of the Film, he turns away from both his earlier apparatus theory and Casetti’s deictic theory, and frames the concept of enunciation within a theory of filmic reflexivity. Even though, in connection with the totalizing schemas of psychoanalytic theory, a de-ideologization of discourse can thus be observed, the political valence of the concept of enunciation has in no way been relinquished: the presence of deictic or reflexive markings is still seen as the yardstick for a politically articulated film aesthetics. To this extent, the old Metzian dichotomy of Story and Discourse is also present in a pragmatically reformulated context, as Casetti himself maintains: Finally, enunciation can make itself perceptible or disappear: in the first, it engenders a text that, in representing something, also represents the fact of representing it; in the second case, it originates a text that represents the world directly, without representing its own act of representation. Thus, it underscores the film’s ability to inscribe the gesture that gave birth to it in itself, in a way that can be either secret or obvious. There are thus three main elements that the idea of enunciation touches upon: constitution, situation, and possible self-referentiality of the filmic text.1

In this chapter, the positions of Casetti and Metz will be critically reconstructed. Their pragmatics of enunciation reaches its limit, in my view, when it encounters the non-pragmatic absence of an enunciatory subject. In other words: even the second phase of enunciation theory shies away from a wholehearted confrontation with suture theory. The pragmatic approach fails in the doubly liminal zone of the hors-champ, which in Hitchcock’s films is recurrently touched on: it fails, that is, when enunciation without the enunciator is mirrored by an address without an addressee. It will not only be shown that the place of the camera is akin to a non-place, but also that the place of the spectator is not identical with itself. 1 Francesco Casetti, Theories of Cinema 1945-1995 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), p. 240.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Pr agmatics of Enunciation

91

3.1 Deictic Enunciation, or Film as Speech Act: Francesco Casetti Let us briefly recall Raymond Bellour’s idea: “In cinema as elsewhere, one must know who is the subject of discourse.” Like Bellour, Casetti considers the problem of enunciation to be inseparably linked to this question. In like fashion to Edward Branigan’s narratological category of a “zero-focalization,”2 Casetti speaks of enunciation as a “degree zero” of filmic discourse. The fact that this degree zero can never be made fully transparent – and here Casetti follows Benveniste’s central hypothesis without reservation – is a result of the separation-connection of enunciation and énoncé: Consider for one, that the enunciation, and the subject that it implies, never appear as such. Whether conceived as an instance of mediation assuring passage from virtuality to realization, or as the linguistic act which ensures the production of a discourse, the enunciation can be seen only in the enunciated, or énoncé, which it presupposes […]. The subject of the enunciation – whether reduced either to a simple operation (under the assumption that the process initiates itself) or to some empirical entity (an individual who initiates the process) is recognizable only through fragments, a series of indices internal to the film. In short, the act which initiates the game occurs openly, but always outside the field of play. In return, there is always something in the énoncé which reveals and attests to the presence of the act. There is, in effect, always an aspect to the énoncé which refers to the enunciation and its subject, an aspect which the film never wholly excludes: it is the gaze which broaches and organizes what is shown, the perspective which delineates and puts in order the visual field, the place from which one follows what comes into sight. In a word, there is the point of view from which things are observed, a point which provides the pivot around which to organize the images (and sounds), and which determines their coordinates and form.3

Casetti is fully aware that the subject of enunciation is only legible through the énoncé, and that its origin remains permanently concealed: “A necessary result of speaking of film in the context of enunciation is the introduction 2 See Edward Branigan, “Focus,” in Narrative Comprehension and Film (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 100-107. 3 Francesco Casetti, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and its Spectator (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 19.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

92 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

of a notion of absence – an absence defined in terms not of an absolute lack but of an obliteration of origin.”4 Although enunciation and absence are the preconditions of each other, Casetti succumbs to the temptation to provide a substitute for the emptiness of this place through theory. His response is also different to that of his predecessors: the hollow space of the enunciatory subject is taken up neither by the Imaginary of the spectator (Metz), nor by the voyeuristic author (Bellour), nor even by the apparatus (Dayan), but by an abstract, grammatical I – an I which in spite of its obvious intangibility Casetti nonetheless appears to designate as a stable source. He thus defines the enunciator as “the film’s implicit ‘I’; the primary discourse activity lying outside the diegesis and flowing from the medium itself; an abstract instance of ‘narrating’ implied by the film; the one in charge of directing the enunciation toward its destination.”5 The goal of this enunciatory address is the enunciatee, which Casetti conceives of as being analogous to the I as the You of an equally abstract spectator-subject. The enunciatee is “the implied receiver of the message as opposed to its sender; the film’s implicit ‘you’; a target fixed by the énoncé as the ideal addressee; an ideal spectatorial point of view, hence an abstract instance implied by the film, but nonetheless available to connect with the body of a genuine spectator.”6 With respect to the rigid definitions of earlier enunciation theories, Casetti’s model possesses the advantage of a greater power of abstraction: decisive, here, is the fact that the enunciator and the enunciatee are not merely seen as empirical categories, but as virtual positions which leave a greater room for maneuver to the respective forms of actualization through concrete entities. In other words: for Casetti the enunciator is to be equated neither with the author-subject nor with the invisible apparatus. The same goes for the enunciatee, which is in no way identical with the flesh and blood spectator. This abstract grammatical subjectivity of I and You forms the core of Casetti’s deictic enunciation theory. The concept of deixis, in this context, refers to the use of personal pronouns such as I, you, he, she and it. If we disregard the absence of psychoanalytic terminology, Casetti attempts – as Metz had already done before him – to relate Benveniste’s discursive concept of the speech act to the filmic text. Deixis and discourse gain force only in a specific communication situation, which is always variable and mutable: “Because deictic terms only gain their meaning when manifest, they obviously serve to bond or link utterances to the speakers and hearers 4 Ibid., p. 161. 5 Ibid., p. 138. 6 Ibid., p. 136.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Pr agmatics of Enunciation

93

who produce and receive them. Indeed, language is not self-enclosed, but is oriented toward, or centered around its users and their spatio-temporal context. Deictic words grammaticalize the reference points of production and reception within the utterance itself.”7 At this point, a problem with Casetti’s deictic theory already presents itself: the pronominal distribution of the modes of enunciation is too abstract on the one hand, and too concrete on the other hand. If, on the one hand, they designate empty grammatical shifters, then, on the other hand, they always indicate a concrete embodiment of discourse.8 As was already the case in Metz, Bellour and Dayan, in Casetti a defensive attitude against the central insight of suture can be discerned: the absent cause of enunciation is retrospectively embodied in a substantive entity. The desire for a presentistic compensation for this fundamental absence is also the basis for Casetti’s typology of four different configurations of the filmic gaze, in which deictic markers are more or less overt. Both the monolithic regime of gazes in apparatus theory and Dayan’s binary definition of point-of-view are here differentiated in favor of a more complex articulation of gaze-subjectivity and gaze-objectivity. The cinematic gaze, according to Casetti, can manifest itself as either 1) an objective shot, 2) an impossible objective shot, 3) an interpellative shot or 4) a subjective shot. Regarding 1): the objective shot corresponds to the grammatical personal pronoun he. The third person singular is the preferred mode of classical narrative cinema, and its ability to mask enunciation through the construction of an invisible observer. The objective shot corresponds rather precisely to Christian Metz’s Story regime. Casetti, however, describes the neutralization of enunciation in the enunciatee less as an ideological dilemma, and more as an example of a weakened deixis: “Opposite a he that shows itself for what it is, there is an I and a you that are present but which do not make their presence explicit. In particular, the addressee must assume the position of a witness: he is the one who is led to look, and therefore who is permitted to look, but without this mandate being made explicit and without this task (of looking) 7 Warren Buckland, The Cognitive Semiotics of Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 57. 8 Christian Metz also pointed out this contradiction in his preface to Casetti’s book: “This second spectator – the enunciatee – does not exist. Casetti (of course) knows this and says it; nevertheless, by the power of his words, he still maintains at an arm’s length the solid expectation, the enigmatic perspective – which he makes almost palpable – of a possible comparison of these two spectators, or an interface which would put them in contact, as though there were some superior entity of which these are the two faces.” Christian Metz, “Introduction,” in Casetti, Inside the Gaze, p. xv.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

94 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

intervening in the events.”9 The he ignores the presence of I and you – the film seems simply to emerge from itself, without bearing any reference to a sender or a receiver. The figures of the diegesis deny their discursive source as well as the presence of an addressee. In the objective shot, the gazes of the figure may only circulate within the diegetic world, and cannot cross the boundary to the non-diegetic I or you. According to Branigan, this results in a prohibition of the direct look into the camera: “A glance implies an interaction with an object. In fact, glances are so important to narrating a story world that the only glance that is generally avoided is a glance into the lens of the camera.”10 The objective shot thus seals the énoncé off from its discursive framing. Regarding 2): Impossible objective shots are marked by extravagant camera perspectives, which could only correspond with great difficulty to an implicit anthropomorphic observer standpoint. Bird’s-eye views or crane movements detach themselves from the restrictions of the human eye and liberate the gaze from its shackles through the autonomy of a non-human apparatus. For Casetti, in such moments the omnipotence of the enunciator manifests itself as an I that can assume every conceivable viewpoint. In contrast with the objective shot, the enunciator does not disappear behind the énoncé, but, in the technical performativity of the camera, reveals itself to be the originator of the visual spectacle. On the other hand, the enunciatee bows down to the power of the enunciator, and identifies with its unlimited capacity for producing the gaze. Here, the deictic formula reads as follows: “As if You were I.” The impossible objective shot, in Casetti’s view: clearly indicate the presence of the point of view from which they have been fabricated and in relation to which the event has been organized. Such a transformation of the image exceeds simple narrative utility to the point of exhibitionism and links the scene both to what has produced it and to the one who will receive it. As a result the enunciator and enunciatee find their figurativization in, respectively, the (explicit) manner in which the énoncé displays its technical components, and the (brazen) way in which it demands to be deciphered.11

The equivalence between Casetti’s definition of the impossible objective shot and apparatus theory’s notion of enunciation is unmistakable: in Casetti, too, 9 Francesco Casetti, “Face to Face,” in Warren Buckland (ed.), The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995), p. 128. 10 Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film, p. 53. 11 Casetti, Inside the Gaze, p. 56.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Pr agmatics of Enunciation

95

the apparatus as Camera-I produces the transformation of the spectator into a surrogate for the Grand Enunciator. We once again have a kind of primary identification, which is intact despite (or because of) the fact that the camera abandons the simulation of an anthropomorphic gaze or viewpoint. According to Casetti, the shot does not necessarily have to imply the standpoint of a human observer, in order to bring about a subjectivation effect in the spectator: “Forced to submit to incongruous camera angles, this spectator is led to identify with a machine in operation rather than with a detached and exterior eye.”12 Regarding 3): In complementary fashion to the I of the impossible objective shot, “interpellation” calls forth the strong presence of a deictic You. The interpellatory shot breaks with the sealed-off nature of the diegesis produced by the objective shot, by seeking to puncture the separation between filmic space and spectatorial space. The frontal look of a character into the camera infringes the prohibition of a communicative exchange of gazes between film and spectator through the direct interpellation of a You, as an enunciatee that is admittedly virtual but no less in need of actualization: “For instance, the you in place by a look into the camera refers not to a particular person among all those who watch the film, but rather to the fact of the film’s act of self-offering. It does not address this or that actual individual, but rather the very possibility of a spectator, a possibility actualized during each encounter between a role and a concrete body.”13 In the context of this debate, Casetti’s argument appears all too familiar: as was already the case with his theoretical predecessors, disembodiment becomes the condition of a subsequent embodiment, while structural absence is withdrawn in favor of presence. For Casetti, the field of the Absent One is occupied by an empty You-position, which can still only be filled by the spectator.14 Casetti conceives of interpellation as a strictly reciprocal system of deictic communication, even though the enunciator here seems to be concealed behind the enunciated figure: “What Casetti means in effect is that the enunciator (‘I’) enters the film through the intermediary of a character’s look (‘he’), which 12 Ibid., p. 57. 13 Ibid., p. 46. 14 All the same, Casetti admits to the fragility of this intersubjective interpellation, in view of the constitutive blind spot of the Absent One: “It is clear that here a you appears only insofar as it responds to the appeal of an I. At the same time, this I is quite paradoxical, merging into a he that gazes out with no guarantee of actually seeing anything, addressing an off-screen space which can never act ally be made visible. Here is someone who is seen but whose own view is blocked and whose gaze ultimately reaches nowhere. The enunciator, the very moment it attempts to become figurativized within the énoncé, discovers a void, a blank space, a zone of suspension.” Ibid., p. 52. What Casetti overlooks is the fact that it is not only the You of the addressee, but also the I of the enunciator that arises from that off-screen zone of suspension.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

96 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

is directly addressed to the spectator (‘you’).”15 The addresser encounters the addressee, the sender encounters the receiver, the I encounters the You. Interpellation lays bare precisely that discursive praxis of enunciation which Metz had counterposed to the ideological regime of the Story. Casetti thus appears to have retained the categories of Metz’s early work, such as Story, Discourse and Camera-I. Nonetheless, he understands these terms not only as effects determined by the apparatus, but pluralizes them as pronominal variants of specifically cinematic configurations of the gaze. Regarding 4): The subjective shot forms the pendant to interpellation. Casetti’s description of the point-of-view shot only overlaps with suture theory insofar as he also emphasizes the shot/reverse-shot syntactic structure, which in contrast to the three other configurations rests on the articulation of two different shots: If we examine the structure in question, it is clear that it prefigures two components corresponding on the syntactic plane to two frames or to two different sides of the same frame. One represents a character who gazed, the other represents what is seen through the character’s eyes. The first moment of such a structure (in which we see a character who gazes) can be interpreted as, ‘I gaze and make you gaze at the one who gazes’ and the second moment (where we see through the character’s eyes) as ‘I am making him see what I make you see.’”16

Because montage constructs a syntactic absorption of the You-spectator into the gaze of the He/She figures, the diegetic address is strongest in the subjective shot. Whereas the objective shot implicates the spectator as a neutral eyewitness, the impossible objective shot intensifies the spectator’s identification with the omnipotent camera, and the interpellative shot partially distances the spectator from the diegesis, the subjective shot forces the spectator into an intradiegetic identification with a fictional character. But since the subjective shots are necessarily modulated through montage, they are prone to false connections and acausal chains – that is, they disrupt suture. In spite of its sharpened analytic delineations, Casetti’s fourfold schema nonetheless suggests an overly stable mode of functioning of the visual codes operative in the cinema. The example of Hitchcock’s Psycho has shown how, even through subtle deviations, the logical decodability of gazes can be lessened and the deictic positions attached to it weakened. 15 Buckland, The Cognitive Semiotics of Film, p. 62. 16 Casetti, Inside the Gaze, p. 49.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Pr agmatics of Enunciation

97

3.2 Impersonal Enunciation, or Film as Writing: Christian Metz (2) If we take a retrospective look at the voluminous œuvre of Christian Metz, which spanned nearly three decades, we can see that his output can be divided into three theoretical phases: after the early, purely semiotic Metz, who sought, in the wake of the linguistic turn, to establish the similarities between cinema and language, there followed the middle, psycho-semiotic phase of Metz’s career, represented by The Imaginary Signifier and its central chapter “Story/Discourse.” In a certain sense, with his book Impersonal Enunciation, or The Place of the Film, the late Metz returns to his initial question: is there a structural analogy between language and film? The formation of such an analogy, which from today’s perspective is usually precipitously declared to have been a failure, can hardly be denied in Metz’s last book. Of course, he here arrives at an answer that diverges from both his early works and his later model of enunciation influenced by psychoanalysis and the critique of ideology. And yet, Metz’ theoretical revision can be ascribed not only to the immanent developmental logic of his work. It first assumes the form of a nuanced grappling with the enunciation theory of his disciple Francesco Casetti, which, as I have already shown, detached the concept from its Lacanian appropriation and placed it on a linguistic-pragmatic foundation. Although Metz seems to follow Casetti in turning away from psychoanalysis, there is an unnavigable theoretical divide between the two positions, which recalls the schism between apparatus theory and suture theory. Casetti and Metz proffer markedly different views on the question of how the absent cause of enunciation can be understood. In contrast to Casetti, who re-causalizes enunciation as a form of deictic marking, Metz strictly rejects any reference to pronominal entities. Even with the high level of Casetti’s abstraction, for Metz the concept of deixis cannot be divorced from anthropomorphic, personifying tendencies. Even his concept of “impersonal enunciation” should be understood in this sense, as it gives prominence to the primary latency of the enunciatory subject, against Casetti’s construction of entities speaking in the present. Metz even makes a case for avoiding the personifying conceptual duality of the enunciator/enunciatee, and instead speaks of the source or the target of a non-anthropomorphic, anonymous enunciation. For Metz, enunciation is: not necessarily, nor always, “I-HERE-NOW.” Broadly speaking, it is the capacity that many utterances have of enfolding themselves, of appearing here or there as if in relief, and of shedding a fine layer of themselves on

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

98 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

which the trace of another nature (or another level) is engraved; a trace that is concerned with the act of production and not the product, or better yet, if you like, is engaged with production from the far side. Enunciation is the semiological act by means of which certain parts of a text speak to us of that text as an act.17

Enunciation is thus an inscription in the filmic text, which in the meantime only becomes legible, but not visible, through the insertion of the inscription in the material. The production manifests itself only in the product itself, the act only through the text, which it itself has brought forth. That this act, in contrast to other live forms of art and media based on presence, has been ontologically carried out in the past, is for Metz the decisive argument against Casetti’s deixis-thesis. Due to the temporal interval between the recording and the projection, the address necessarily misses the addressee. Through his insistence on the fundamental “too late” in the encounter between film and spectator, Metz basically repeats his earlier thesis that the cinema, due to its retroactive nature, has no other choice than to articulate itself in Benveniste’s regime of the Story. And yet, in contrast to his earlier position, Metz now seems no longer to lament, from the standpoint of a critique of ideology, this ontological deferral, but to affirm it as the aesthetic specificity of a non-discursive, non-communicative and thus decidedly non-deictic enunciation. Pronominally marked modes of enunciation are, for Metz, only effective in dialogic relations of communication, which are based on a reciprocal co-presence of I and You. As Metz has it, Casetti’s model therefore relies, in the end, on the ideal of a face-to-face communication that in the cinema is always-already torn apart: The enunciator and the [enunciatee] do not swap labels along the way, and the reactions of the [enunciatee] do not modify either the intentions or the words of the enunciator. This remains the case even when (as happens) canonical markers of enunciation appear, such as extradiegetic comments directed toward “you,” the public. This “you” can never answer back.18

Through the separation of recording and projection, enunciation always temporalizes itself as an absent catalyst. Warren Buckland has correctly 17 Christian Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or The Place of the Film, trans. Cormac Deane (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), p. 10. 18 Ibid., p. 11.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Pr agmatics of Enunciation

99

noted that Casetti’s theory of deixis rests on the paradigm of oral communication, whereas for Metz filmic enunciation is in essence closer to writing: Whereas Casetti models film on the immediacy and symmetry between filmic enunciator and addressee, as in dialogue, Metz argues for the mediated and non-symmetrical nature of the relation between filmic enunciator and addressee – as in writing. This relationship is non-symmetrical because one of the functions of writing is to dispense with the presence of the enunciator (or allow a spatio-temporal displacement between the enunciator and her utterance). Similarly, Metz dispenses with the filmic enunciator because of the way he conceives the realities of the filmic medium – it resembles the recording activity and permanence of writing rather than the immediacy of speech.19

The retroactive temporality of f ilm is, according to Metz, indebted to its intrinsically written nature. As opposed to the immediate nature of the speech act, in which I and You deictically exchange with each other, enunciation in the written medium can only ever be deduced a posteriori: the act that produces the text is both immanently inscribed in its product and separated from it. As with writing, film seals itself off as an object that is closed off (in both senses) from its enunciator, as well as from its addressee. Metz resolves the old semiotic question of film’s similarity to language in favor of its putative similarity to writing: is film like a language? Yes and no, Metz would now say: it is only as a system of inscription, and not as a performative speech act, that film is similar to language. Although Metz now adopts psychoanalytic terminology only with extreme caution, his concept of impersonal enunciation ends up confirming the Lacanian theory of the divided subject: enunciation is “extimate” to the énoncé, and thus structurally eludes visibility. Metz expressly situates enunciation in the hors-champ when he writes that, “where the enunciator is concerned, there is no body.”20 But the enunciatee is also contaminated by absence, even when they are a flesh-and-blood, living spectator sitting in a movietheater. The only Present One in the cinema is the énoncé itself: “Far from a person who is absent squeezed between two who are present, the film is more reminiscent of somebody present squeezed between two who are absent – that is, the author, who disappears after the film is made, and the 19 Buckland, The Cognitive Semiotics of Film, p. 67. 20 Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, p. 15.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

100 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

spectator, who is present but whose presence is not manifested in anything, as he knows all there is to know about having no role.”21 Despite this insight into the fundamental Outside of film, Metz is unable to resist the temptation to seek a place for the embodiment of this disembodied enunciation. It is not the spectator (as in the early Metz), not the author (Bellour), not the apparatus (Dayan), not the deictic I (Casetti) that takes on the role of the subject of enunciation in Metz, but the film itself. Metz conflates, as it were, enunciation with the énoncé, when he writes that “the ‘enunciator’ incarnates itself in the only body that is available, the body of the text, that is to say, a thing, which will never be an I and is not empowered to switch roles with some YOU, and which is and remains the source of images and sounds. The enunciator is the film, the film as source [ foyer], acting as such, oriented as such, the film as activity.”22 If, like Casetti, we conceive of enunciation as a speech act, then this must include the involvement of concrete speakers. Metz’s proposal for an impersonal enunciation dispenses with these speaker-positions, because the extirpation and anonymization of the author is grounded in film’s similarity to writing. A speech act does not function without the “on” of the speaker, whereas writing functions very well in spite of the “off” of the author. The death of the author is, for Metz, due to the autonomy of writing. Indeed, it is not a stretch to perceive in Metz’s textually radicalized enunciation theory an echo of Derrida’s notion of grammatology. For Metz, too, there is no outside of the text, although enunciation is not immanent to the text: “For Metz, filmic enunciation is, above all, ‘metadiscursive’, in the sense that what it indicates in the first place is the film itself as an object – so much so that ‘the enunciator’ becomes for Metz the film itself, and not some instance situated below or above (or, at any rate, outside) the film.”23 After dedicating the middle section of his book to a detailed analysis of enunciative figures in the cinema, Metz returns, in a detailed concluding chapter, to the hypothesis of an énoncé without enunciation. Although the énoncé cannot, of course, self-generate, Metz seems, in contrast to the earlier claims about a dichotomy of Story and Discourse, to stress the ineluctably processual nature of enunciation, which is not realized as deictic intersubjectivity and interactivity, but as a pragmatic act. Metz wishes to liberate the theory of enunciation from Casetti’s personal pronouns, by absorbing subjectivity into the text itself. In other words: the 21 Ibid., pp. 15-16. 22 Ibid. 23 André Gaudreault and François Jost, “Enunciation and Narration,” in Toby Miller and Robert Stam (eds.), A Companion to Film Theory (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), p. 59.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Pr agmatics of Enunciation

101

rigid counterposing of the objectivity of the énoncé (Story) and the subjectivity of enunciation (Discourse) is overcome in impersonal enunciation. Story and Discourse tendentially merge together – a non-differentiality which also has consequences for the political aesthetics of film. Whereas the early Metz, in harmony with apparatus theory, only sought to ascribe a discursive power to modernist or avant-garde texts, this dogma is no longer valid for the later Metz. All narratives, even those that seem to be formally anti-reflexive, such as Hollywood films, bear the traces of enunciation in them. Alongside Casetti, Metz distinguishes an invisible “diegeticized enunciation” from a self-reflexive “enunciated enunciation,” and yet on the whole the ideological chasm between the classical and the modern text no longer applies. The Outside of enunciation is also its own Inside: “Modern pragmatics […] dissociates enunciation from subjectivity and conceives it as coextensive with the totality of the statement, because it is the sign itself that is ‘reflexive’ and not at all ‘transparent.’ […] The sign can only designate its referent while designating itself as a sign. […] The text does not entirely efface itself in the face of its referent.”24 Whereas in Casetti’s pragmatics, based as it is on the speech-act, the subject of enunciation is still situated outside of the text, Metz’s writing-based pragmatics makes the case for a tendential liquidation of the separation between enunciation and énoncé, cause and effect, absence and presence. Filmic enunciation is none other than the act of its textual performativity: “Enunciation is the fact of uttering.”25 Although Metz pragmatically assimilates the absent subject into the text itself, thereby seeking to dissolve it, the Outside of enunciation apparently does not seek to totally disappear. After the question of subjectivity is initially rejected as a deictic misunderstanding, it comes back again as an unsolved problem, when Metz writes: “The final I is always outside the text.”26 So is the I of enunciation located inside or outside the énoncé? With this question, Metz seems to vacillate between the pragmatic thesis of an énoncé without enunciation and suture theory’s thesis of an enunciation without an enunciator. As if the theoretical amalgamation of the act of uttering and the utterance was not entirely plausible after all, Metz must also assert the primary absence of a subjectivity which permanently eludes its own reflexive encircling. A spectral subjectivity constantly hollows out the self-enclosure of the text: “The final I can never be grasped; rather, it 24 Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, p. 145. 25 Ibid., p. 153. 26 Ibid., p. 155.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

102 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

slips from your hands and withdraws into its nook. Trying to capture it is like chasing your own shadow.”27 Metz’s talk of shadows once again leads us back to the point of departure of this book: the impossibility of a camera filming itself filming. Michael Snow’s famous experimental film La Région centrale, in which a camera rotating 360-degrees can capture every viewing angle, but can only visualize itself as its own shadow, radicalizes the Metzian aporia of reflexivity. In film, the boundary of the visible coincides with the (non-)place of the camera. From this, Metz sketches out the following summary of the history of film theory: This feeling of a place of absence, a paradoxical originary figure, yet more “absent” in fixed, noninteractive discourses, is one of the rare things that generate agreement among film theorists who are interested in narration or enunciation. […] Disagreements start when it becomes a matter of describing it and giving it a status in theory. Many writers feel the need to personify this point of origin, this hollowed out thing.28

We can see here a fitting description of the repression of the structural disembodiment of enunciation through an attempted embodiment, which from Metz himself up to Casetti has yielded various modes of personification. And yet, while Metz’s concept of impersonal enunciation avoids the anthropomorphism of his theoretical predecessors, it does not elude the desire for embodiment. External subjectivity is, in Metz, only engaged with the autonomy of the text itself, which is written and writes itself concurrently. For Metz, the only I is the I of the textual object: “The film self-designates, because there is only itself.”29 But the contradictions in Metz’s argumentation also attest to the fragility of this pragmatic amalgamation of enunciation and énoncé. The insistence on the absent cause seems to haunt not only the aesthetic praxis of cinema (as Hitchcock’s films have already shown), but also film theory itself. To this extent, even with Metz’s contribution, the debate around enunciation and suture is far from being closed. The present book, indeed, in no way understands itself as an attempt at a more or less plausible theoretical description of this Outside, but makes the case for the irretrievable negativity of enunciation. Of course, even this negative place is semantically rendered in different ways from f ilm to f ilm and 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., pp. 155, 158. 29 Ibid., p. 164.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Pr agmatics of Enunciation

103

from theory to theory, but, in order to forestall any reductionism, it is necessary to uncover this empty space layer by layer, in the literal sense of an endless deferral. After all, Althusser’s account of the absent cause, as a theory of negative causality, also implies a genuinely anti-teleological outlook, which is articulated in the following famous formula: “From the f irst moment to the last, the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes.”30 To paraphrase Althusser, it is also the lonely hour of enunciation that never comes.

3.3 Looking at the Camera, or The Theatricalization of Film: Jean-Luc Godard Godard’s Political Address Philosophically, the hour of the final instance may always be delayed, but whenever film theory since the 1970s has evoked political film aesthetics, there does indeed seem to be a final instance: Jean-Luc Godard. In the periodization of his work, a division into three phases has dominated, which leads from Godard’s early nouvelle vague phase, to the radical Groupe Dziga Vertov era (the late 1960s-early 1970s), and then the sacral Godard of the 1980s, beginning with Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Slow Motion, 1979). The second phase, in particular, has gone down as the ne plus ultra of a political cinema that dismantles all the ideological registers of classical cinema. Among the countless texts that celebrate Godard as the master of a political avant-garde, Peter Wollen’s essay on Vent d’est is probably the most pertinent: Godard’s “counter-cinema,” according to Wollen, counterposes the seven sins of classical cinema with the seven virtues of a materialist aesthetics, which are as follows: Narrative transitivity vs. Narrative intransitivity Identification vs. Estrangement
 Transparency vs. Foregrounding
 Single diegesis vs. Multiple diegesis Closure vs. Aperture Pleasure vs. Un-pleasure Fiction vs. Reality31 30 Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1969), p. 113. 31 Wollen, “Godard and Counter Cinema,” p. 79.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

104 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

From this dichotomy, Wollen derives a program of the political avant-garde,32 which is strongly influenced by the epic theater of Bertolt Brecht and strives to produce a rupture in the imaginary misrecognition effect of classical cinema through the direct interpellation of the spectator. A counter-cinema that wishes to produce a political recognition effect in the spectator must also, according to Wollen, reflect the conditions of its enunciation: “Any form of cinema which aims to establish a dynamic relationship between film maker and spectator naturally has to consider the problem of what is technically the register of discourse, the content of enunciation, as well as its designation, the content of the enunciatee.”33 Among Godard’s various filmic strategies for the encircling of enunciation, only one will be discussed here. Not only because it represents a taboo in the standard functioning of classical cinema, but also because it crystallizes Wollen’s seven virtues of the political avant-garde. I am referring here, to the look of a character into the camera – that is, the gaze-configuration which Casetti designated in his fourfold schema as interpellation. Godard has mobilized this anti-illusionistic trope in different variations; not necessarily with a materialist intention (in early films like Une femme est une femme [A Woman is a Woman, 1961], for instance, the look into the camera is more closely related to the performative address of the musical), yet with a certain insistence, which can be observed throughout his œuvre, including the rather differently tempered films of his late work. Although the look into the camera, from today’s standpoint, has lost much of its transgressive power, this method still raises the question of the place of enunciation and suture in an immediate fashion: “A look into the camera breaks the diegesis because it makes the conventional reverse shot or eyeline match impossible. (Such a match would reveal the camera itself; its absence would be just as revealing.)”34 The look in the camera – only, of course, with the proviso that a reverseshot does not retroactively suture it into the diegesis – combines all seven of Wollen’s registers, which, psychoanalytically speaking, turn the “good object” of classical film into the “bad object” of the avant-garde counter-cinema. The look into the camera is narratively intransitive, because it interrupts the continuity of the narrative universe; it disrupts the identification of the spectator with the character through an exhibitionist confrontation 32 On Wollen’s distinction between a political and a painterly avant-garde in cinema, see also his influential text, “The Two Avant-Gardes,” in Readings and Writings, pp. 92-104. 33 Wollen, “Godard and Counter Cinema,” p. 82. 34 Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film, p. 53.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Pr agmatics of Enunciation

105

of looks; the diegesis is multiplied and literally bursts into the foreground of enunciation; the Story regime is discursively opened up; and, finally, the pleasure-principle of fiction is replaced by the reality-principle and its attendant relations of production and reception. In this sense, the look into the camera appears to be the key strategy of a de-suturing cinema par excellence. Yet, the discussion around suture theory has shown that an address without an addressee appears to be accompanied by a paradoxical enunciation without an enunciator. What does the character see when they look frontally into the camera? The camera itself, the spectator, the reverse-side of the studio set, the director? From the standpoint of suture theory, this question is in no way conclusively answered. Perhaps indeed, it cannot be answered. Godard’s films, however, consistently search for a concrete addressee of this look, or, as Casetti would put it, for a deictic You, which is reciprocal with the I of the interpellating gaze. His films always translate disembodiment into embodiment, absence into presence, spectrality into theatricality. In the following pages, I will sketch out a critique of Godard’s political aesthetics from the perspective of suture, which issues the same reproach which has already been articulated with respect to Metz, Bellour, Dayan and Casetti: they all shy away from a full confrontation with the radical consequences of suture theory, and studiously avoid the negativity of the absent cause, both in film theory and also in film practice. To state this in more polemical terms: even a director as theoretically informed as Godard, who cites Althusser and Lacan in his films, has been oblivious to the lessons of suture theory. The Interpellated Spectator: Pierrot le fou In order that the look into the camera not be misunderstood, certain conditions must be fulfilled, which mark it as distinct from the intra-diegetic circulation of gazes. Firstly, a frontal close-up of the face must be used to clearly show the character’s eyes gazing straight at the camera; secondly, the shot must last a certain amount of time to arrest the gaze, so that the spectator perceives the insistence of the shot. In Godard, the visual address is often accompanied by its verbal counterpart, which, as it were, names the place of interpellation. This dual interpellation can be found in a short sequence from Godard’s Pierrot le fou, which, although it comes from his pre-militant, romantic phase, nonetheless displays his increasing level of political reflexivity.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

106 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

In a red sports car, “Pierrot” (Jean-Paul Belmondo in the role of Ferdinand Griffon) and Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina) flee to the south of France, while the camera perspective alternates between frontal shots through the windscreen and rear views of the characters. Whereas the rear view generally underscores the sense that the figures in the image believe themselves to be unobserved, here a dialogue unfolds between the two characters, in the course of which Belmondo briefly turns to the camera and ironically comments on Karina’s behavior. When she asks him who he is speaking to, Belmondo curtly replies: to the audience, at which point Karina also briefly turns around and looks into the camera. With this sequence, Godard, gives a clear answer to the question posed by suture theory as to who is hiding behind the Absent One: it is the spectator to whom the visual and verbal address is directed, even though they, of course, can never respond to it. In Pierrot le fou, the look into the camera thus stands for a figuration, which interpellates the spectator as the Casettian You of an apparently simultaneous face-to-face communication. Although the ontological division between seeing and being seen, and between filmic space and spectatorial space, can never be overcome, Godard nonetheless suggests the possibility of or desire for a direct co-presence of filmic figure and spectator, in which the schism of absence is overturned through that active complicity which according to Metz distinguishes theatrical exhibitionism from cinematic voyeurism. Or, as Casetti puts it: the look into the camera articulates itself in the mode of an apparently successful deixis of the I, which, when mediated through the He of the character, shows the You that, while necessarily invisible, nonetheless designates an identifiable subject – the spectator. The look into the camera in Pierrot le fou thus aims for a deictic interpellation of the spectator, which seeks to explode the self-enclosed fiction of the film through reciprocity, communicativity and co-presence. We could perhaps speak of a non-diegetic suture between characters and spectators, in which the intra-diegetic suturing together of gazes yields an exchange between the diegetic look of the character and the non-diegetic look of the spectator. If in the classical cinema the presence of the spectator must be suppressed at all costs, then Godard performatively places them as the receiver of the fiction in the scene. Casetti’s enunciatee is turned into the collaborator of an open discourse, in which the border between screen and movie-theater appears to become permeable. If we follow Peter Wollen’s program, the political valency of the look into the camera can be understood as a strategy for a counter-cinema which mistrusts its own ontological preconditions and seeks to make

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Pr agmatics of Enunciation

107

the spatio-temporal separation of the spectator from the f ilmic world reversible. Here, we once again return to Metz’s distinction between Story and Discourse: if the Story, with an almost ontological necessity, makes the spectator as an omnipotent voyeur invisible, then film qua Discourse must turn against its own nature by brushing its media-aesthetic disposition against the grain, via a critique of ideology. The name of the theoretical foil for this self-suspicion is, not coincidentally, Brecht; already in Metz and the apparatus theorists’ understanding of enunciation the critique of the cinema is followed by praise for the theater and theatricality. In order to produce the political effects of a militant counter-cinema, the discursive elements of the theater must be introjected into the cinema’s Story regime. As Metz, Baudry and Wollen have it, a good political cinema, with Godard at its head, can only be a theatrical cinema, one which has the conditions of its enunciation appear as such. As a political strategy against the nontransparency of cinematic enunciation, a theatricalization is demanded, in which the poison of enunciative absence is to be counteracted with the antidote of presence: deixis, performativity and discourse are all theatrical attributes which exist in the cinema in a highly attenuated form at best. Are the virtues of the political avant-garde in the cinema, as described by Wollen, not the virtues of the theatrical? In any case, the look into the camera in Godard can, with good reason, be described as a theatricalization of cinema. But what if theatricalization in film is, in the end, fated to failure, precisely because the aesthetic disposition of the cinema is so deeply rooted in absence? A radical counter-position to Godard’s politics of theatricalization can be formulated by drawing on the work of the art theorist Michael Fried. Since his influential critique of minimal art and his study Absorption and Theatricality, Fried has launched a permanent attack against theatricality in art, which is decidedly opposed to any address to the spectator through the aesthetic object. “To detheatricalize beholding,”35 as Fried labels his programmatic formula, which does not, of course, follow any definitive political maxim, but which can nonetheless be brought into play as a general objection to the Brechtian coupling of political and theatrical address, as it has been hypostasized in the work of Godard and in modernist film theory since the 1970s. Fried, after all, understands his critique of theatricality as in no way being a return to a classical paradigm, but a proposed schema for a modernist aesthetics. 35 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 104.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

108 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Fried establishes a decisive shift in the mode of representation in late 18th century French painting: following Diderot’s imperative “Act as if the curtain never opens,” the images of that era show figures which are entirely absorbed in their own world and in their respective activities, and which appear to ignore the presence of the viewer. This self-absorption of the represented world as a hermetic space, which renounces every indication of the existence of the space of the viewer, does not lead, according to Fried, to a total negation of the viewer. Paradoxically, the radicalization of the fourth wall leads to an intensified attention on the part of the viewer, who is absorbed as if in analogy to the represented figures of the aesthetic object. It is only through the separation of viewer and image that a new bond arises between the two. Joan Copjec has correctly pointed to the fact that this separation-connection describes none other than the aesthetic form of classical cinema: By sealing the space of the representation off from that of the audience, at which the scenes were in fact directed, these paintings did not completely sever their relation to their beholder but, on the contrary, emphasized that relation, gave it new weight and significance. […] Anyone who has studied film will recognize in Fried’s description of the techniques of absorption the strategies of classical cinema, which is also assiduous in its disregard of the spectator and maintains a rigorous taboo against any character’s looking directly at the camera, that is to say, at the spectator, who comes to occupy the place of the camera during the film’s projection. In cinema as in the late eighteenth-century paintings Fried analyzes, the apparently autonomous world of the representation depends on the outlawing of any exchange of looks between its characters and its spectators.36

Following Fried, the classical Hollywood cinema should be understood less as an ideological project, and more as the logical realization of an anti-theatrical ontology immanent to the cinema.37 The look into the camera attempts a 36 Joan Copjec, “The Invention of Crying and the Antitheatrics of the Act,” in Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2003), p. 110. 37 As Fried writes: “It is the overcoming of theater that modernist sensibility f inds most exalting and that it experiences as the hallmark of high art in our time. There is, however, one art that, by its very nature, escapes theater entirely – the movies. […] Because cinema escapes theater – automatically, as it were – it provides a welcome and absorbing refuge to sensibilities at war with theater and theatricality. At the same time, the automatic, guaranteed character of the refuge – more accurately, the fact that what is provided is a refuge from theater and not a triumph over it, absorption not conviction – means that the cinema, even at its most experimental,

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Pr agmatics of Enunciation

109

re-theatricalization of the film, by seeking to make the separation effects of the fourth wall reversible. Let us return, after this brief excursus, to Godard. In his films, the fact that cinema, as a consequence of its automatic world projection, makes the mutual absence of image and spectator irreversible is not simply tolerated.38 Godard’s political modernism relies on theatrical strategies in order to bring about the de(con-)struction of the anti-theatrical dispositif of the cinema in its ontology and ideology. The Interpellated Author: 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle If Pierrot le fou seeks to rupture the non-transparency of the fourth wall to the spectator, then the opening sequence of 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, 1967) directly targets the source of enunciation. The look into the camera here is not primarily directed at the receiver, the enunciatee, but the sender, the enunciator. That the sender receives their own message back again may sound like a strange form of circular reasoning, but the addressee of interpellation does not perforce have to be the spectator, even if the gaze of the character always retrospectively meets the spectator during the projection. Foucault’s reading of Las Meninas already showed that that the place in the unrepresentable foreground of the image is, to a certain extent, overdetermined and simultaneously occupied by the represented object/subject (the royal couple), the painter and the spectator. Even in the hollow space of the filmic hors-champ, the potential subject- and object-positions are superimposed on each other, as the look into the camera momentarily suspends the spectator’s absorption into the diegesis. 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle, filmed at the beginning of Godard’s “Maoist” phase, begins with documentary-like shots of urban Paris, which are accompanied by a voiceover commentary. What could initially be thought to be a reportage on Parisian urban planning and architecture quickly acquires an uncanny tenor, by dint of the narrator uttering the commentary is not a modernist art.” Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), p. 164. The disdainful argument that film is only anti-theatrical through its technical automatism, and thus cannot be a modern art, has been revised by Michael Fried in his new book on photography. See Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 13ff. 38 This theoretical proximity between Fried and Cavell is argued, albeit from a pro-theatrical perspective, by Juliane Rebentisch, Ästhetik der Installation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), especially pp. 25-78.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

110 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

in a whispering voice. Through this whispering alone, which seems to have been inspired by the disembodied voices of countless horror films, the familiar contract between the objectivity of images and the strictly extra-diegetic objectivity of the narrator becomes fragile. In this way, there is an acousmatization of the narrative voice, which in the narrative cinema must not strictly speaking be acousmatic, since it can also appear as an external epistemological entity in the diegesis. Through the whispering, an unfamiliar subjectivity occupies the threshold between enunciation and énoncé. And yet the nature of the acousmatic voice is partially revealed in the following shots: a young woman is standing on a balcony, with a giant apartment complex visible in the background. As her face is initially covered in shadow, the direction of her gaze remains unclear, until it is gradually illuminated, thereby making clear that she is looking and speaking directly into the camera. Meanwhile, the same whispering voiceover narration comments on the physical and biographical characteristics of the woman, who is introduced as Marina Vlady, i.e. the real name of the actress in the film. When she turns her head rightwards, towards the off-screen, the voice verbally remarks on her head movement. Through this co-presence of representation and represented, or enunciation and énoncé, the place of the voice is also revealed: it is located directly behind the camera – indeed, it coincides with the gaze of the image-producing entity. Even if the spectator may not have recognized Godard’s own voice (which also introduces Le Mépris, made four years earlier), the audiovisual circulation between what is in front of and what is behind the camera determines the place of the voice as a place of the enunciator, which in this case is identical with the place of the author of the film. It is decisive that, in spite of the invisibility of the acousmatic voice, impersonal enunciation does not stubbornly remain disembodied, but experiences an enunciatory embodiment in the shape of the author-subject. The Brechtianism of the film is not only evident in the exchange between author and diegesis, but also in the multiplication of the diegesis itself: after Marina Vlady recites a line from Brecht, Godard cuts, in an impossible eyeline-match, to the same woman, standing before an identical background, who is now presented as Juliette Jeanson, i.e. the character embodied by Vlady in the fiction of the film. The shot is an exact echo of the previous one, right up to the the movement of her head towards the left, which is again duplicated by Godard’s commentary. Here, the Brechtian difference between actress and role, between real individual and fictive figure, is laid bare. It is not hard to recognize Wollen’s virtues of counter-cinema in this

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Pr agmatics of Enunciation

111

sequence, only with the difference that the look into the camera here is not primarily addressed to the spectator, but the enunciator itself assumes the place of the enunciatee. In other words: the You is at the same time also the I that speaks the film. The political modernism of Godard rests on this trope, which is both deictic and theatrical in nature. The Interpellated Apparatus: La Chinoise A further variant of the theatrical abolition of the fourth wall through the look into the camera can be found in La Chinoise, made the same year as 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle. In this film, the reference to Brecht is even more explicit: “A film in the making,” as an intertitle at the beginning of the film announces, making self-reflexive enunciation the formal program of the film. In one of the film’s first sequences, Jean-Pierre Léaud (as “Guillaume Meister”), filmed in close-up, gives a long speech about the possibilities of socialist theatre, in which he cites an essay by Althusser on Brecht. Here, it initially remains unclear whether his speech is a monologue or part of a dialogue. At the beginning of the sequence, a few brief shots of Anne Wiazemsky (as Véronique) in front of a similar background are cut into the scene. Léaud/Guillaume then directs his speech towards the right of the screen, as if there were an imaginary dialogue partner or interviewer located off-screen, albeit one who is neither seen nor heard. During the whole sequence, Léaud speaks in front of a background wall on which posters are hung, which is filmed from an extreme frontal perspective. This results in a distinct flattening of the image, which is typical for Godard’s films in the 1960s. The elimination of spatial depth and centralized perspective appears as a filmic translation of apparatus theory’s critique of film technique. Here, too, Godard displays an affinity with the Marxist theorems of the time, but as Jacques Rancière fittingly writes, this affinity does not concern the question of the represented subject, but above all the mode of representation: “Godard puts ‘cinema’ between two Marxisms – Marxism as the matter of representation, and Marxism as the principle of representation.”39 What Marxism – as a principle of representation or as a mode of enunciation – means for Godard is in La Chinoise again condensed in the look into the camera. Léaud suddenly begins to speak about the film technicians surrounding him, and turns his gaze from the right of the screen to a frontal look into the camera. Here, too, the character’s speech 39 Jacques Rancière, “The Red of La Chinoise: Godard’s Politics,” in Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 143.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

112 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

addresses the source of enunciation, but in contrast with Pierrot le fou and 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle, there follows, in this sequence, a reverse-shot showing the extra-diegetic camera filming La Chinoise itself. Raoul Coutard, who was also the cameraman on this film, briefly takes his eyes away from the viewfinder and gives Léaud a nod. As opposed to Le Mépris, where the self-duplication of the camera is still embedded in the extra-diegetic threshold function of the credits,40 La Chinoise radicalizes the autopoiesis of the apparatus through precisely that kind of “correct” suture that Daniel Dayan demanded for a political cinema. Shot and reverse-shot are not intra-diegetically linked, but appear to bridge over the gap between enunciation and énoncé. The look into the camera, here, interpellates neither the spectator (Pierrot le fou) nor the author (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle), but, literally, the filming camera that is being looked into. Hence, the impossibility of a camera filming itself seems to have been overcome, along with the antitheatrical screen of the fourth wall. In order to realize the Marxist demand to lay bare the production process behind the finished product, Godard must turn film against its own ontological conditions, as they were defined by Cavell and Fried. In Godard’s work, the externality of the camera with respect to the world represented yields an impossible symmetry of enunciation and énoncé: the look into the camera encounters the look of the camera. Of course, this is a camera that can only be embodied when being filmed by a second, invisible camera. Godard attempts to elude Cavell’s aporia through the maximum possible transparency of enunciation: “The only completely honest film, Godard once said, would show a camera filming itself in a mirror.”41 Jacques Aumont also grounds the political significance of La Chinoise in its self-reflexive materialization of suture and enunciation: In other words, the most important thing that this film offers is not a transformation of the nature of what is represented (though it is that as well), nor is it a new and different attitude toward what is off-screen. Rather, and much more radically, it proposes a non-classical relation to the other’s space – i.e., the spectator’s. […] All these things interpellate the spectator by designating his position from inside the frame in a manner which is quite different from that of classical suture. […] All these features 40 On the significance of film credits for the diegesis, see Roger Odin, “L’entrée du spectateur dans la f iction: à propos de Partie de campagne,” in Jacques Aumont and Jean-Louis Leutrat (eds.), La Théorie du film (Paris: Albatros, 1980), pp. 69-83. 41 Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 59.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Pr agmatics of Enunciation

113

point to Godard’s tactic of engaging the spectator in two ways, both as a semi-classical énoncé in a film scene and, at the same time, as (mimetic) representation of enunciation itself. 42

This mimetic attempt at representing enunciation through the look into the camera results in three different subject-positions in the three films, which isomorphically map onto the theoretical positions of enunciation theory and suture theory: in Pierrot le fou it is the spectator (Metz), in 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle the author (Bellour) and in La Chinoise, the camera apparatus (Dayan). In all three cases, the look into the camera is also embedded in the deictic interaction of the I and the You, which is spelled out in Casetti’s model of enunciation. From the radicalized perspective of suture theory, it is precisely this representation of enunciation that should be problematized as a denial of constitutive absence. Here, it is of decisive importance that even the look into the camera that tears apart the fiction in Godard’s film is, in the end, unable to escape the causality of suture – with the difference, of course, that with Godard it does not involve an intra-diegetic threading together of gazes, but a suturing of the diegetic universe and the extra-diegetic enunciator/enunciatee of the apparatus of production and reception. By crossing what we could call, with Cavell and Fried, the “anti-theatrical screen” of the cinema, the look into the camera in Godard’s films aims for the maximum closure of the gap between enunciation and énoncé, cause and effect. Despite being repeatedly propagated as a negation of classical narrative cinema, this strategy operates on a structural level in parallel with the enforced visualization and causality inherent to the cinema of continuity – with the key difference that, in Godard, the reverse-shot tears apart the non-transparency of the screen and, as Dayan demands, replaces a “false” suture with a “correct” suture. Godard thus misrecognizes the absent cause of enunciation, in the sense that he smooths over the “difference between the original causality and the representing effect.”43 Likewise, Metz has pointed, in his later work, to the pitfalls of a political modernism that desperately works towards the uncovering of enunciation: It was long believed, in a militant spirit of deconstructive avant-gardism and stout semi-ideological courage, that “markers” or open configurations 42 Jacques Aumont, “This is not a textual analysis: Godard’s La Chinoise,” Camera Obscura 8/9/10 (1982), p. 145. 43 Goux, Freud, Marx, p. 260.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

114 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

of enunciation had the unavoidable effect, not to say the deserving definition, of breaching the ramparts of belief, of the imaginary and of the apparatus [dispositif ]. It is still true that some do this. But others are no more than an aspect or moment (and this is no small thing) that is less buried than their neighbours within discourse, within the process of enunciation that conveys the fiction itself. So, enunciation that lets itself be “seen” is like a double agent: it denounces the cinematic illusion but is part of it. 44

The illusory image cannot be entirely reduced to its emergence, since it is produced by a deceptive gaze that hides itself. From the perspective of suture theory, the confrontation of the look into the camera with the absent gaze of the camera can never take on the symmetrical form of an intersubjective communication. But we should not refuse any potential for the gaze into the camera to maximize the absence-effects of enunciation, instead of materializing them as theatrical presence as Godard does. Against the absolutism of a Brechtian politics of addressing the spectator, Marc Vernet has pointed to more ambivalent variants of the technique of looking into the camera, in which it is not decisive who is hiding behind, or rather in front of, the shield of the camera – the spectator, the author, the cameraman or even the camera itself. Without a reverse-shot or a verbal marking, the anti-theatrical screen becomes even more opaque. As in Norman Bates’ last look in Psycho, this address without an addressee spectralizes enunciation without an enunciator in the register of the uncanny. The uncanny begins where causality founders: “The ‘look at the camera’ is an ambiguous look because it is the fruit of a compromise between a good and a bad encounter. […] What is seen in the look at the camera is the Invisible, the Elsewhere, Death. This Elsewhere, this Death, can be figured either in the image […] or ‘in the place of’ the camera, which is thereby perceived as an empty side.”45 Once again, the circle closes in on the central question of suture theory: the negative original causality of the camera is displaced into the “this side” of an absolute hors-champ, which remains unrepresentable, even if (or precisely because) it is not on the “other side.” In the look into the camera, the eye of the character encounters a metaphysical gaze, which refuses any conclusive physical embodiment. It is, I would argue, in this bodiless gaze of Oudart’s Absent One that the pragmatic theory of enunciation comes up against its epistemological frontier. 44 Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, p. 30. 45 Marc Vernet, “The Look at the Camera,” in Cinema Journal 28:2 (1989), pp. 56, 60.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Pr agmatics of Enunciation

115

How, then, can film theory conceive of a gaze without a body? Drawing on Lacan’s revised theory of the gaze in his seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Seminar XI), a specific strand of contemporary psychoanalytic film theory has developed which has radicalized the impulse of suture theory instead of domesticating it through spectator theory, auteur theory, apparatus theory, pragmatism, communication theory, performative theory or deictics.

Bibliography Althusser, Louis, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1969) Aumont, Jacques, “This is not a textual analysis: Godard’s La Chinoise,” Camera Obscura 8/9/10 (1982), pp. 131-160. Branigan, Edward, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London: Routledge, 1992). Buckland, Warren, The Cognitive Semiotics of Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Casetti, Francesco, “Face to Face,” in Warren Buckland (ed.), The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995). –––, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and its Spectator (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). –––, Theories of Cinema 1945-1995 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999). Copjec, Joan, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2003). Fried, Michael, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Fried, Michael, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998). Gaudreault, André, and François Jost, “Enunciation and Narration,” in Toby Miller and Robert Stam (eds.), A Companion to Film Theory (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999). Goux, Jean-Joseph, Freud, Marx: Ökonomie und Symbolik (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1975). Metz, Christian, Impersonal Enunciation, or The Place of the Film, trans. Cormac Deane (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Odin, Roger, “L’entrée du spectateur dans la fiction: à propos de Partie de campagne,” in Jacques Aumont and Jean-Louis Leutrat (eds.), La Théorie du film (Paris: Albatros, 1980), pp. 69-83. Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

116 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Juliane Rebentisch, Ästhetik der Installation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003). Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Marc Vernet, “The Look at the Camera,” in Cinema Journal 28:2 (1989), pp. 48-60. Peter Wollen, Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: BFI, 1982).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:22:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

4. On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture Abstract With Kaja Silverman’s works, a reversal within Lacanian theory becomes abundantly clear that turns away from the old identification paradigm of imaginary misjudgement in the mirror stage. Following Lacan’s reformulation of the gaze as an “objet petit a,” the gaze is thought of as divided from the subject and placed on the side of the object. In the synthesis of Copjec’s/Žižek’s work with Michel Chion’s theories of voice and sound, my aim is to conceive of a fundamental acousmatics of film: not only the voice, but also the gaze in film is structurally acousmatic. In Lacan’s understanding, gaze and voice are strictly equivalent objects. As such, it is my intention to conceive of a political aesthetics from a psychoanalytic acousmatics of film. In the point-of-view paradoxes and transsubjective gazes in Rossellini’s and Antonioni’s post-neorealist films, I analyze the political and social dimension of this acousmatics. Keywords: Gaze, Voice, Point-of-View, Transsubjectivity, Post-Neorealism

With the dwindling importance of psychoanalytic film theory since the 1980s, suture theory also seemed to be without a future. Newer paradigms like the debate around masochistic scopophilia initiated by Gaylyn Studlar, and a generalized shift towards the phenomenological body led psychoanalysis’s “anorexic” (Vivian Sobchack) theory of the gaze to appear increasingly obsolete. In fact, apparatus theory, with its dogmatic fixation on Lacan’s specular model of the imaginary, did seem to have maneuvered itself into a dead-end, which was also, unjustly, ascribed to suture theory. For a long time, there was little recognition that, in his later texts, Lacan had developed a theory of the gaze and the image, which in many areas was diametrically opposed to his earlier work on the mirror-stage. The following chapters will strive to bring together suture theory with Lacan’s revised theory of the gaze,

Lie, S., Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462983632_ch04

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

118 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

a task that has already been initiated by writers such as Kaja Silverman, Joan Copjec and Slavoj Žižek, but is far from having been systematized. To draw the full consequences of this theoretical articulation does not entail, however, bringing them in any way closer to contemporary phenomenological and somatic approaches. Although Sartre and MerleauPonty are important reference points for Lacan, he formulated a decidedly anti-phenomenological theory. The problem of apparatus theory, I would contend, is not that it is too disembodied, but quite the opposite, that it is not disembodied enough. Through the gratifying identification of the mirror stage, the body schema of the subject is stabilized in the unity of eye, gaze and image. As I will show, in Lacan’s late work this unity is dissociated to such an extent that the imaginary synthesis of the Body-I disintegrates. Lacan’s decisive argument is now that the gaze is directed towards neither a visual nor a corporeal substrate. The avisual, asomatic thrust of his theory of the gaze decisively distances itself not only from apparatus theory, but also from the phenomenology of an embodied vision. It appears all the more compatible with theories of the hors-champ, which – like suture theory, or Michel Chion’s theory of the acousmatic – form the foundation of a cinematic spectralogy.

4.1 External Enunciation, or the Triumph of the Gaze over the Eye: Jacques Lacan/Kaja Silverman Lacan’s central chapter on “The Gaze as objet petit a” in his The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis begins with the division of a couple which appears inseparable: the eye and the gaze. Surely, the eye is the exclusive and irreplaceable organ of the gaze? And why does the gaze assume the status of an object, if it belongs to the side of the seeing subject? And what is the “little other” of this object? Lacan initially relativizes the seeing subject: “I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides.”1 With this sentence, Lacan voids the ocularcentrism of centralized perspectival construction, which constitutes the subject seeing through the eyepoint as a subject of dominance. The unifying perspective of the monocular regime is encircled by a totalizing gaze that always surrounds the geometrical standpoint of the subject. At this point, Lacan’s critique of centralized perspective rests on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, and more pointedly his posthumously 1

Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 72.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture

119

published book The Visible and the Invisible. For Merleau-Ponty, the notion that “we are beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world”2 has to do with the corporeal nature of perception, in which the eyes are a part of the body that also sees parts of the selfsame body. Through this “chiasm,” I am a viewer who is always part of the field of vision of both my own eyes and the eyes of other. Or, as Lacan formulates it: as a viewer I am always already an image. And yet, in contrast to the human eye, which can indeed see parts of its own body, the camera cannot see its own “body.” Although Lacan primarily draws on examples from painting, there is, in a significant passage from Seminar XI, an equivalence made between the gaze and the camera: In the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture. This is the function that is found at the heart of the institution of the subject in the visible. What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied, and through which […] I am photo-graphed.3

Lacan counterposes the camera, as a synonym for the external gaze, to the Cartesian self-reflexivity of the eye that can see itself seeing, just as thought can reflect on itself thinking: “We might say that the gaze interrupts the functional circularity of the eye, insofar as we understand the eye as a natural metaphor for consciousness, for the principle of visibility.”4 Neither the gaze nor the camera can, however, reflect themselves while seeing, precisely because the site of their enunciation has been dematerialized and externalized. Here Lacan draws on Sartre, who has memorably described this dislocation of the gaze: “Every look directed toward me is manifested in connection with the appearance of a sensible form in our perceptive field, but contrary to what might be expected, it is not connected with any determined form. Of course what most often manifests a look is the convergence of two ocular globes in my direction. But the look will be given just as well on occasion when there is a rustling of branches, or the sound of a footstep followed by silence, or the slight opening of a shutter, or a light movement of a curtain.”5 2 Ibid., p. 75. 3 Ibid., p. 106. 4 Andreas Cremonini, “Die Nacht der Welt: Ein Versuch über den Blick bei Hegel, Sartre und Lacan,” in Gondek (ed.), Jacques Lacan, p. 170. 5 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 257.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

120 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

The striking aspect of Sartre’s example is that the gaze is, in the end, separated from its visual appearance. The gaze can have manifold manifestations, but its true core remains hidden to us. The shapeshifting of the gaze hides its fundamental shapelessness. Sartre even hints at the possibility of an “acoustic gaze” when a sudden noise evokes the presence of an unknown observer. For Sartre, the alterity of the gaze is not an exclusively visual phenomenon. A direct path leads from Sartre’s avisual gaze to film acousmatics: if Chion defines the acousmatic voice as all-seeing, then the epistemological separation of voice and gaze is abolished. The acousmatic voice in the cinema is also a voice that sees. Voice and gaze are thus also Lacanian objects, since they can both be detached from the body that produced them. At this point, Lacan goes beyond both Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. He detaches the gaze entirely from its anchoring in an organic body (Merleau-Ponty) as well as from the alterity of an alien subjectivity (Sartre). For Lacan, everything rests on his theory of the gaze as an objet petit a. The objet petit a is Lacan’s extension of the psychoanalytic concept of the part-object. In Freud’s work, the part-object refers to the different body parts or bodily excretions, such as the breast, the penis, or faeces, which are fated to be an object of the drive (Triebobjekt). The drive does not target an integral object (a whole person), but an erogenously occupied bodily fragment, which, while it always indicates a surrounding totality, is nonetheless bestowed with an absolute partiality. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and her followers have also placed a special value on this autonomization of the part-object: “In Klein’s use of ‘part-object’, ‘object’ is meant in its fullest psychoanalytic sense: though partial, the object (breast or other part of the body) is endowed in phantasy with traits comparable to a person’s.”6 The part-object itself is thus libidinously totalized, without necessarily being constrained to metonymically refer to a structural totality. In this way, the part-object can also be comprehended as a dismemberment of the organic body. Lacan’s innovation consisted in adding two more part-objects to the list: the voice and the gaze. Both originate in the (internal) body, but in contrast to the breast or the penis they are also ejected from the body without leaving behind a physical materiality (as is the case with faeces or urine). The gaze and the voice are, to adopt Mladen Dolar’s incisive formulation “excrescences of the body.”7 Perceived as an indissoluble part of the body, they can nonetheless potentially be separated from it and take on their own 6 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bernard Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1974), p. 302. 7 Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 61.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture

121

life as an object. Lacan focuses on this paradox of an alien “ownness,” when he affixes a “small a” (petit a) to the part-object: the a, here, stands for the part-object’s strange intermediate status between identity and alterity. As distinct from Sartrean alterity, which manifests itself in the gaze, the objet petit a is a lost object, which was once organically attached to the bodily whole, but has now gained autonomy: The objet a is something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. this serves as a symbol of the lack, that is to say, of the phallus, not as such, but in so far as it is lacking. It must, therefore, be an object that is, firstly, separable and, secondly, that has some relation to the lack.8

The desire of the subject thus yearns to re-integrate or re-incorporate the lost object that was once part of its own body. And yet, as always in Lacan, desire can never be completely quashed. The lack is irreducible: “Object a is the subject’s complement, a phantasmatic partner that ever arouses the subject’s desire.”9 Lacan speaks of the objet petit a as an hors-corps (an outside-the-body), which in like fashion to the part-object of the maternal bosom can never become part of the corps, because it is lost forever. The objet petit a is a relic, a left-over, the immaterial remains of phantasmatic pleasure10: “The objet petit a is […] a transition point, an external expulsion of something that arises from within the body of the subject. It is thus not an object that is external per se, that is found by the subject in the outside world and ‘appropriated.’”11 With this definition of the objet petit a as an internal externality, the gaze (and the voice) is now no longer located within the topography of the Imaginary, but in the register of the Real. In the Lacanian triad of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, it is the Real that is the most difficult to define, since it straddles the threshold of what can be conceived and represented. The Real eludes both the specular I-synthesis of the Imaginary and the linguistic signification of the Symbolic. In Seminar XI, Lacan relates 8 Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 103. 9 Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Pleasure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 61. 10 See also Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan und die Philosophie der Psychoanalyse (Weinheim: Quadriga, 1989), pp. 110-11. 11 Hans-Dieter Gondek, “Die Angst als ‘das, was nicht täuscht,’” in Bernhard H.F. Taureck (ed.), Psychoanalyse und Philosophie: Lacan in der Diskussion (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992), p. 112.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

122 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

the Real to a traumatic excess which overpowers the subject and submits it to a mortal spell. The Real of the objet petit a is manifested in the medusa-like nature of the “evil eye”: The evil eye is the fascinum, it is that which has the effect of arresting movement and, literally, of killing life. At the moment the subject stops, suspending his gesture, he is mortified. The anti-life, anti-movement function of this terminal point is the fascinum, and it is precisely one of the dimensions in which the power of the gaze is exercised directly.12

The ambivalence of the gaze as an objet petit a is crystallized in this fascinum, which is endlessly desired by the subject as a lost object, but which is capable of petrifying the vitality of the subject through its excessive intensity. With its blinding brightness, the fascinum can no longer be integrated in the imaginary wholeness of the mirror image. As part-objects, the gaze and the voice, in their disembodied corporeality, elude specular representation and fixation: “The human body can be mirrored, whole or in part, but certain of its zones always escape the mirror’s grasp.”13 The Real of the objet petit a is thus defined by Lacan as an excessive element which distorts and stains the transparency of the mirror image. With his reading of Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, Lacan explains the effect that this stain has: the two ambassadors in the painting are adorned with all the insignia of earthly power and dominant representation, but the representational function of the image is disrupted by a strangely indefinable shape in the lower edge of the painting, something like a fish or a bone transversally jutting into the symmetrical space. It is only when the viewer turns their head and sees the stain from an oblique perspective that its true form is revealed: an obliquely painted skull, which can only be recognized when the interpellation of centralized perspective is negated and the strange part-object itself takes on a partializing standpoint. When this shapeshifting is completed, we no longer see the human eyes of the ambassadors, but the empty eye sockets of the skull. Lacan names this stain in the image, which releases an unsettled gaze, anamorphosis. Anamorphosis cannot be mediated with the order of centralized perspective, nor with the wholeness of the mirror stage – it distorts both the geometrical vanishing point of perspectiva artificialis and the smooth reflective surface of the mirror: “Anamorphosis shows us that it is not a question in painting of a 12 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 118. 13 Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 166.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture

123

realistic reproduction of the things of space.”14 In this sense, we can justifiably assert that Lacan’s theory of the gaze in Seminar XI is diametrically opposed to the fundamental precepts of apparatus theory: film = centralized perspective + mirror stage. As an anamorphotic stain, the gaze is, strictly speaking, neither monocular nor specular: Simply put, in Lacan’s late work, the specular nature of the imaginary order is ultimately dependent upon a real element which cannot be specularized. […] At this point, the subject is deemed to be especially ‘interesting’ for what is in the image (of his body) more than the (specular) image itself: this is what Lacan names ‘object a’, a nonspecularizable remainder, a void (‘hollow’) that resides at the frontier between the Imaginary and the Real.15

In the gaze as objet petit a, there is a surplus of the effect over the cause and, conversely, the cause of its effect is elusive. To return to the cinema: can film, even more radically than painting, set the gaze free as a pure, disembodied intensity? Alongside its anamorphic, gaze-like quality, Lacan ascribes to painting the contrary quality of a “taming of the gaze” (dompte-regard).16 Painting can pacify and symbolize the evil eye. Holbein’s painting allows the viewer to stare at the mortifying gaze in the symbolic “phallic ghost” of the skull.17 Whereas in painting this phantomatic quality of the gaze is, in the end, lent a stain-like but nonetheless visible incarnation, in film the final remains of embodiment vanish. The camera is the non-reflective hole within the visible. “In the picture, something of the gaze is always manifested,”18 and yet while painting always tames the gaze, film unleashes an excess of part-objects. It is not only the voice that is acousmatically cut off from the body, the gaze, too, separates itself, and no less acousmatically, from its corporeal anchoring. The Absent One of suture-theory designates, as I understand it, none other than this organic and anorganic hors-corps of the gaze as objet petit a. “Showing in the image is tied to the concealment of the gaze, or more precisely: the visible image now appears as the function of a division or exclusion, with which a concealed seeing from without is insistent.”19 14 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 92. 15 Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 106. 16 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 109ff. 17 Ibid., p. 88. 18 Ibid., p. 101. 19 Joseph Vogl, “Lovebirds,” in Claudia Blümle and Anne von der Heiden (eds.), Blickzähmung und Augentäuschung: Zu Jacques Lacans Bildtheorie (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2005), p. 55.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

124 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Against McLuhan’s notion of media as prosthetic organ, but also against the thesis of classical film theory, which sees a genuinely ahuman cameraeye at work, the camera should be conceived of as a part-object in the strict psychoanalytic sense – that is, as a separable organ, which can no longer be incorporated by the subject, but which also does not function in a manner completely detached from all subjectivity, as is frequently suggested by media theorists. It is precisely as an object that the gaze is, according to Lacan, infiltrated by a spectral subjectivity that can never be represented in the Imaginary, but can only be thought of as the non-representable Imagination, as a “gaze imagined by me in the field of the other.”20 It appears to be no coincidence that Kaja Silverman, one of the few writers to have contributed to the suture debate, is also one of the first scholars of cinema to have systematized this “triumph of the gaze” for film theory. In her books Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992) and The Threshold of the Visible World (1996), she works with a strict distinction between the look and the gaze, a terminological distinction that is specific to the English language. With the look, Silverman denotes the diegetic look of the characters (the eye), whereas the gaze refers to the impersonal gaze of the camera (the gaze as objet petit a). Hence, Silverman takes Lacan’s metaphorization of the gaze as camera literally and understands the camera not as an empowering but as a disempowering of the human eye. In her earlier book, using an analysis of eyeline matches in Fassbinder’s films, Silverman understands the “camera which initially insists upon its autonomy from human vision”21 as an entity of the gaze as domination to which the diegetic looks are always-already subjugated. Unlike in apparatus theory, for Silverman this gaze as domination functions not as an interface of identification for the eye of the spectator, but as the negative effect, as it were, of an impersonal enunciation. Unlike in Metz, however, the externality of the enunciatory entity is for Silverman far more than a textual problem. In the gaze, power relations and social force fields are crystallized, thus imbuing the subject with hegemonic gender and racial norms. Whereas apparatus theory locates the gaze entirely in the topography of the Imaginary, and whereas the Lacan of Seminar XI couples the gaze with the Real, Silverman appears to take a third path. For her, the gaze is thoroughly constituted in the Symbolic realm: “The gaze occupies two domains simultaneously; in its capacity as light, and as that which is foreclosed from the subject, it partakes of the real, but in its status 20 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 84. 21 Kaja Silverman, “Fassbinder and Lacan: A Reconsideration of Gaze, Look, and Image,” in idem., Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London/New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 143.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture

125

as the ‘presence of others as such,’ it clearly belongs to the symbolic.”22 Although she does not make the relation explicit, Silverman’s sketch outline of a symbolic gaze can be traced back to passages in Lacan’s Seminar XI, in which he coins the interesting term “financial body.” Interpretations of Lacan that exclusively assign the gaze to the domain of the Real mostly overlook this symbolic “lease” of the gaze: If one tries to represent the position of the painter concretely in history, one realizes that he is the source of something that may pass into the real and on which, at all times, one might say, takes a lease. The painter, it is said, no longer depends on aristocratic patrons. But the situation is not fundamentally changed with the advent of the picture dealer. He, too, is a patron, and a patron of the same stamp. Before the aristocratic patron, it was the religious institution, with the holy image, that gave artists a living. The artist always has some financial body behind him, and it is always a question of the objet a, or rather a question of reducing it […] to an a with which – this is true in the last resort – it is the painter as creator who sets up a dialogue.23

This passage can be read as a corrective to the ahistorical ontologization of a “real” gaze. The gaze is never outside of social relations, and is thus fundamentally symbolic in nature: “On the symbolic level, an image is always an aggregation of accumulated power relations, it always serves some kind of ideological purpose, benefactors and intentions hide behind every image.”24 The diverse semantics of the “Other” in the objet petit a thus includes the symbolic other of the financial body, the lessor which hegemonically stratifies the gaze. For Silverman, the gaze of the camera is the crystallization point of an external enunciation, which to a certain degree inserts the subjects into their place in the image, and hence in society: “What must be demonstrated over and over again is that all subjects, male or female, rely for their identity upon the repertoire of culturally available images, and upon a gaze which, radically exceeding the libidinally vulnerable look, is not theirs to deploy.”25 In her following book, The Threshold of the Visible World, Kaja Silverman further distinguished the enunciatory externality of the gaze. At a 22 Ibid., p. 152. 23 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 112. 24 Markus Klammer, unpublished lecture on Lacan, Freie Universität Berlin, June 2008. 25 Silverman, “Fassbinder and Lacan,” in Male Subjectivity at the Margins, p. 153.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

126 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

distance from apparatus theory’s hypothesis of a primary identification between the two, here camera and eye are disarticulated, thereby dethroning the gaze of the subject. For the first time, Silverman makes explicit the proximity between suture theory and Lacan’s later theory of the gaze: “The theoreticians of suture articulate a more disjunctive and even antipathetic relation between camera and eye. Spectatorial pleasure, they maintain, depends on the occlusion of the enunciatory point of view, and the seeming boundlessness of the image.”26 Once again, everything revolves around the central question of how the empty position of externalized enunciation can be theoretically apprehended. Kaja Silverman’s response to this question adds another entry to our lengthy list of enunciatory causes. It is not the spectator (Metz 1), not the author (Bellour), not the apparatus (Dayan), not the Absent One (Oudart), not deixis (Casetti), not textual pragmatics (Metz 2) and not even the traumatic Real of the gaze that entrenches itself in the hollow space of absent causality, but a symbolic regime of the gaze as a socializing force: the gaze/camera is, for Silverman, the gateway “of the symbolic into the f ield of vision. The gaze is the ‘unapprehensible’ agency through which we are socially ratified or negated as spectacle.”27 The camera, as an intangible agent, may well structurally elude the eye of the subject, but the social “debt” of the ideological gaze is nonetheless legible as a critique of power and ideology. Utilizing an analysis of Harun Farocki’s film-essay Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Images of the World and the Inscription of War, 1988), Silverman deciphers the camera as a complex interface of military and police technologies of control, which interpellates the photographed and filmed individual for the purposes of recognition – and thereby subjectivates them, in both senses of the word. In understanding the camera as a historical-cultural apparatus, Silverman attempts to mediate between Lacanian and Foucauldian theories of the gaze. In other words: with Lacan, the camera is, like the gaze, to be thought of as an entity of fundamental externality, while with Foucault it is a dispositif of power, which in spite of all abstraction has need of a certain (technical) materiality. Even if, in the Foucauldian panopticon, the prison watchtower, as an enunciator of the gaze of surveillance, does not refer to a human source of vision, the regime of the gaze must nonetheless be architectonically materialized and thus embodied.28 Silverman seeks to historicize Lacan qua 26 Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 126. 27 Ibid., p. 133. 28 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1975).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture

127

Foucault, in order to conceive of the gaze as a site of symbolic socialization: “Foucault’s account of the gaze does not generally intersect with Lacan’s, but it enriches Four Fundamental Concepts immeasurably when it suggests that the field of vision may have been variously articulated at different historical moments.”29 With Silverman, we can draw the following conclusion in the narrower context of suture and enunciation theory: eternal enunciation is at one and the same time structurally disembodied and historically embodied.

4.2. Extimate Enunciation, or the Gaze as Bodiless Organ: Joan Copjec/Slavoj Žižek While Silverman, therefore, makes the case for film theory to bring Lacan and Foucault into an alliance, Joan Copjec insists, in her work, on the irreconcilable nature of the two thinkers. Her motto, which reproached psychoanalytic film theory for its erroneous Foucauldianization of Lacan, was: Lacan contra the historicists. Copjec polemicizes against apparatus theory’s misreading of Lacan, which uses a redundant analogization of the film screen and the mirror-stage to dodge the central premises of Lacan’s theory of the gaze. In more explicit fashion than Silverman, Copjec insists on a rift between the early Lacan of the mirror-stage and the later Lacan of the objet petit a – and it is this later Lacan who is completely ignored by apparatus theory (which in Copjec simply goes by the name of “film theory”). Copjec concisely summarizes the basic premises of apparatus theory: The imaginary relation produces the subject as master of the image. This insight led to film theory’s reconception of film’s characteristic “impression of reality.” No longer conceived as dependent on a relation of verisimilitude between the image and the real referent, this impression was henceforth attributed to a relation of adequation between the image and the spectator. In other words, the impression of reality results from the fact that the subject takes the image as a full and sufficient representation of itself and its world; the subject is satisfied that it has been adequately reflected on the screen. The “reality effect” and the “subject effect” both name the same constructed impression: that the image makes the subject fully visible to itself.30 29 Kaja Silverman, “Fassbinder and Lacan,” p. 152. 30 Joan Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject,” in Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 21-22.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

128 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

In this sense, apparatus theory conceptualizes enunciation in film as an equivalent of the dispositif of the panopticon. The spectator qua primary identification with the camera assumes the empty position of the panoptical tower, whose visual impermeability installs the hierarchy of seeing and being-seen just as rigorously as does the cinematic dispositif. This dispositif of power determines the spectator as a panoptical enunciator: “the gaze is always the point from which identification is conceived by film theory to take place.”31 And yet, as with the later Lacan, the gaze for Copjec is precisely not the agent of identification, but a fundamental force for disidentification. Although Copjec herself does not make reference to suture theory, this imaginable but non-representable gaze is none other than the gaze as objet petit a; the gaze as an absent causality: “That is, the representation attracts the gaze, induces us to imagine a gaze outside the field of representation. It is this second sense of trap ping, whereby representation appears to generate its own beyond.”32 Lacanian terminology provides a neologism for this beyond of the gaze: extimacy (extimité), which is “Lacan’s excellent word for the uncanny.”33 The extimate is the externality of the intimate, that which is both internal and external to the subject. Once again, the extimacy of the gaze is tied to the paradoxical logic of the part-object: “The so-called objet petit a of partial drives is here, for Lacan, the real ‘equivalent’ of the subject in the Other. But this fragment of the (impossible to attain) real Thing also exists as the contingency and non-identity in the core of the subject – that is, as the internal externality (‘extimacy’) of the subject itself, which it divides.”34 The gaze as hors-corps hereby designates not only the externalization of enunciation, but also its “extimization” as an immanent outside. Copjec is the first film theorist to understand the gaze as totally detached from the

31 Ibid., p. 22. Copjec continues: “And because the gaze is always conceptualized as an analogue of that geometral point of Renaissance perspective at which the picture becomes fully, undistortedly visible, the gaze always retains within film theory the sense of being that point at which sense and being coincide. The subject comes into being by identifying with the image’s signified. Sense founds the subject – that is the ultimate point of the film-theoretical and Foucauldian concepts of the gaze.” As I have already shown, for Kaja Silverman the panoptical gaze is not the site of gratifying empowerment, but of a symbolic Other, at least insofar as her recourse to Foucault is utterly opposed to apparatus theory. 32 Ibid., p. 22. 33 Dolar, His Master’s Voice, p. 96. 34 Thanos Lipowatz, “Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). Das Begehren des Subjekts und des Anderen in der Psychoanalyse,” in Martin Ludwig Hofmann and Sibylle Niekisch, Culture Club: Klassiker der Kulturtheorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), p. 148.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture

129

imaginary dimension, as a phantom of the Real. As with suture theory, the place of the spectator’s gaze can be neither perceived nor assumed: This point at which something appears to be invisible, this point at which something appears to be missing from representation, some meaning left unrevealed, is the point of the Lacanian gaze. It marks the absence of a signified; it is an unoccupiable point, not, as film theory claims, because it figures an unrealizable ideal but because it indicates an impossible real.35

At the same time, the subject does not cease desiring the impossible, namely for the “external phantom” (Sartre) of the gaze to be capable of being possessed, and for extimacy to be transformed back into intimacy. Hence, Lacan speaks of the objet petit a not only as an object of desire, but also as the “object-cause” of desire: a causal impulse, which is what initially incites desire.36 From this perspective, the shot/counter-shot procedure can be precisely understood as a metonymic operation that attempts to suture the extimacy of the gaze back into the intimacy of the look, to fill up the hole of the Real through the Imaginary, and to locate the object of desire. Both suture theory and Copjec teach us, however, that this locking into place can never be definitive, and that it invariably gives rise to a blind spot: “The gaze, the object-cause of desire, is the object cause of the subject of desire in the field of the visible. In other words, it is what the subject does not see and not simply what it sees that founds it.”37 Suture creates the momentary illusion of an identity between the gaze and the look, in order to tear open a new wound in the visible: “The gaze is the object-cause of the spectator’s desire, but the spectator never encounters the gaze.”38 Copjec 35 Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject,” pp. 34-35. 36 Andreas Cremonini points out that “The petit a is not only the object, but more precisely it is the object-cause of desire. That initially means: the objet petit a is that which desire sets in motion. As a causa of desire – a formulation, in which we should hear the juridical ‘cause’ (causal determination), but also the Freudian ‘Ding’ (chose) – the petit a possesses an affinity to the the ‘lost’ objects of the drive, detached from the body of the infans. It is thus correct, in a certain sense, that the petit a takes on the place and status which is accorded to part-objects in the pre-Œdipal dialectic. What differentiates Lacan’s objet petit a from the conventional psychoanalytic conception of the part-object is that, far from any notion of a natural connection between the source and the object of the drive, it insists on the radically phantasmatic status of these objects.” Andreas Cremonini, Die Durchquerung des Cogito: Lacan contra Sartre (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003), pp. 148-149. 37 Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject,” pp. 35-36. 38 Todd McGowan, “Looking for the Gaze: Lacanian Film Theory and its Vicissitudes,” in Cinema Journal 42:3 (2003), p. 36.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

130 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

hereby endorses the Althusserian concept of a structural causality in which the visible is constituted on the basis of a core of invisibility, which is both empty and superfluous in its relation with the field of its effects. The gaze, as an extimate objet petit a thus anamorphizes not only the subject-effect, but also the reality effect. The epistemic transparency of the image is marred by the dislocation of the dispositif (the camera): It should be clear by now how different this description is from that offered by film theory. In film theory, the gaze is located “in front of” the image, as its signified, the point of maximal meaning or sum of all that appears in the image and the point that “gives” meaning. The subject is, then, thought to identify with and thus, in a sense, to coincide with the gaze. In Lacan, on the other hand, the gaze is located “behind” the image, as that which fails to appear in it and thus as that which makes all its meanings suspect. And the subject, instead of coinciding with or identifying with the gaze, is rather cut off from it.39

In another text, Copjec pursues the unnavigable schism between subject and gaze. Here, too, the lack of any reference to suture-theory is surprising, although, with her problematization of the difference between objective and subjective shots, Copjec seems to forge a direct link to Oudart’s seminal text. If Oudart’s talk of the Absent One implicitly assumes that, strictly speaking, there can be no neutral gaze in film, since a spectral subjectivity is always concealed behind (and in front of) the image, for Copjec this paradox is made acute in those indeterminate shots which cannot be ascribed to any diegetic point of view, but which at the same time do not designate an objective entity of enunciation or narration. Is it not the central hypothesis of suture theory that enunciation per se has something subjective about it? Copjec aligns herself with this position when she writes: “Included among the various shots that can be attributed to some point of view, there is a scattering of shots that, unassociated spatially with any particular character, cannot be attributed to any point of view. They seem thus to come from nowhere – not 39 Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject,” p. 36. In a commentary on Copjec’s reading of Lacan, Mary Ann Doane writes: “The term ‘gaze’ always signals in Lacan’s text the excess of desire over geometral vision. […] And the subject’s desire is the desire of the Other – it is characterized by alterity. In f ilm theory, the gaze has become substantialized, directed – we speak of the gaze of the camera, the gaze of the spectator. By associating with lack, with the small object a, with, in effect nothing, Lacan deessentializes it.” Mary Ann Doane, “Remembering Women: Psychical and Historical Constructions in Film Theory,” in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 83.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture

131

even, and this is an important qualification, from an omniscient observer, since there are no objective shots in cinema.”40 Strictly speaking, there can be no objective shots in cinema because the non-diegetic subjectivity of the Absent One contaminates every viewpoint. The gaze from “nowhere” is thus not the omnipotent empty-position of the camera, as the guarantor of an objective eye. Rather, it designates a strange form of subjectivity, which Metz has aptly characterized as a “subjectivity without a subject.”41 The place of determination remains, for the spectator, an indeterminate place: From this point of view, the visible always raises the spectre of the hidden, the secret – a secrecy that, on this Lacanian reading, becomes inseparable from (structural to) the experience of looking as such. This is not a, however, a secret that can be revealed by more scrutiny, more surveillance. On the contrary, the effect on the subject-spectator is that of something invisible, something missing, from the field of vision. 42

For Copjec, another division is necessarily linked to the Lacanian division between the gaze and the look: namely, that between seeing and knowing. The encounter with the gaze of the Other (here Copjec makes reference to Lacan’s reading of Sartre), can never be cognitively mastered; the form of the Other remains an unfathomable enigma: “It is not possible, however, to proceed analytically from the contingency of this meeting to any cognitive knowledge of the Other. The Other is not the object of a possible cognition.”43 Beginning with the indeterminacy between the subjectivity and objectivity of the gaze, Copjec proceeds to draw an interesting parallel between the Lacanian theory of objet petit a and the concept of free indirect discourse, which was introduced into film theory by, in particular, Pasolini and Deleuze. In free indirect discourse, the subjectivity of a figure is rendered neither directly (such as in a quotation), nor indirectly (through an objective narration), but constantly vacillates between the two modalities of speech. A linguistic example would be a sentence such as “She looked out the train window, such loneliness was unbearable,” in which a subjective perspective subsequently passes over into an objective perspective. For Copjec, the 40 Joan Copjec, “What Zapruder Saw,” in Imagine There’s No Woman, p. 201. 41 Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, p. 102. 42 Vicky Lebeau, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Play of Shadows (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 57. 43 Copjec, “What Zapruder Saw,” p. 211.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

132 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

diffusion between subjectivity and objectivity, and between direct and indirect discourse is a signum of literary and cinematographic modernity, in which the multi-perspectivalism produced by changes in camera angles and montage generates a gaze without a bearer – or, in Deleuze’s words, an “automatic subjectivity.”44 Such disembodied object-causes should, however, be strictly distinguished from any notion of a (proto-)theological transcendental subject, since the extimate gaze is not to be confused with the invisible, divine gaze: In all these instances, we encounter the gaze rather than the Other, not as part of the Other. There is no bearer of the gaze, there is only the gaze, and this, to speak like Deleuze, is the cogito of modern art. Objective reality is rendered novelistically and cinematically through the point of view of a character, which is reflected in ‘another consciousness.’ Yet there is no transcendental subject to be found, no omniscient God who sees everything; this is even the ineluctable fact on which point-of-view structure – and thus novelistic and cinematic narrative form – is founded. Point-of-view structure depends on there being no total view, no transcendental position from which an all would, if only in principle, come into view. What, then […] is the gaze? It is that excess object, encountered as some disturbance within point of view, which makes visible the emptiness of the transcendental position, the absence of the transcendental subject.45

Along with Joan Copjec, Slavoj Žižek, of course, is among those Lacanians for whom, in contrast to earlier psychoanalytic film theory, the Real becomes the decisive category. Whereas, for Copjec, the reference to suture is still implicit, in Žižek’s reformulation of Lacanian film theory it becomes explicit – “Back to the Suture” is the name he gives to his intervention – and indeed Žižek can be seen as the writer who has done the most to develop a synthesis between suture theory and Lacan’s later theory of the gaze. Pointing beyond the debates in film theory, Žižek draws from the theory of hegemony developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to insist on the political mode of articulation of suture as an operation that transforms an external antagonism into an internal point of difference. 46 44 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 55. 45 Copjec, “What Zapruder Saw,” p. 216. 46 See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture

133

In this line of thinking, suture dissolves the antagonism between enunciation and the énoncé in the énoncé itself. As Žižek, following Althusser, writes: “the threatening intrusion of the decentering Other, the absent cause, is ‘sutured.’.”47 Žižek’s position is distinguished from that of the earlier suture-theorists, however, by the fact that he understands the place of the absent cause not as a representative of a masked site of production, but as that which genuinely establishes absence as such. For Žižek, the transfer of the absent cause into the present cause can never proceed as a disruption-free process of ideological causality (suture, in Dayan’s view, conceals the production process as a true cause), since there can never be a full transition from radical absence to presence. In suture itself, the failure to do so is in-built, or, as Žižek formulates it: “the only thing that actually de-sutures is suture itself.”48 For Žižek, such a self-dissolution of suture in film can be seen in precisely those symptomatic moments which contain what Joan Copjec has called non-attributable shots; shots in which the unambiguous decodability of objective and subjective shots suddenly becomes precarious: Each subjective (point-of-view) shot has to be firmly allocated to some subject within diegetic reality, who is presented in an objective shot, so that the standard procedure is rather that of first seeing the protagonist (in an objective shot) and then, in a complementary shot, seeing what this protagonist sees in a point-of-view shot. In short, the ultimate threat is not that of an objective shot which will not be “subjectivised”, allocated to some protagonist within the space of diegetic fiction, but that of a point-of-view shot which will not be clearly allocated as the point of view of some protagonist, and which will thus evoke the spectre of a free-floating Gaze without a determinate subject to whom it belongs. So what one should do here is to apply to suture Chion’s logic of la voix acousmatique: of the Gaze of an impossible subjectivity which cannot be located within the diegetic space. 49

What Žižek here describes as a tear in the suture is thus precisely not the revelation of enunciation à la Godard, but, on the contrary, its mysterious concealment. The absent cause is evoked without its absence being 47 Slavoj Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears (London: BFI, 2001), p. 33. 48 Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2008), p. 20. 49 Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears, pp. 33-34.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

134 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

divulged. To concretize Žižek’s example, we could take the technique described by him and label it a shot without a reverse-shot. After a subjective shot, which is clearly attributed as an optic point-of-view angle (usually by means of a camera movement in the space), the reverse-shot of the bearer of the gaze is withheld. Of course, we encounter this technique in numerous horror films, where the uncanniness of the subjective gaze of the monster/killer is pronounced through the withdrawal of the reverseshot. But as a general rule, in most films a final embodiment of the diegetic bearer of the gaze does indeed eventuate. It is precisely this need for embodiment that is subverted in f ilms such as Lost Highway (a key f ilm for Žižek). Although, in line with narrative logic, the secret videotapes of the inside of the house must have been recorded by somebody or other, the f ilm persistently rejects the diegetic subject of the video’s gaze. The negation of the reverse-shot thus produces the gaze of a paradoxical “subjectivity without a subject” (Metz) on the threshold between inside and outside, the diegetic and the non-diegetic. With his concept of “impossible subjectivity,” Žižek seems to align with Metz’s suggestion of “rethinking ‘point of view’ (or certain points of view) starting from the theory of the out of frame [hors-champ],”50 as well as adding a f ifth category to Casetti’s four-part schema of the gaze, which I would dub the “impossible subjective shot” (in some ways a counterpart to Casetti’s impossible objective shot). In a second step, Žižek brings this impossible subjectivity of the gaze together with Chion’s theory of the acousmatic. Can there also be an acousmatic gaze in the cinema, alongside the acousmatic voice? There can indeed, because the gaze, in the Lacanian sense, is, just like the voice, divided from the body as an objet petit a. While the separation of voice and body now appears, from the standpoint of media history, to have become conventionalized with the advent of radio and sound recordings, the separation of the gaze and the body has a more estranging effect, even though in the schism of the part-object, the gaze and the voice, as equally “unreal organs”51 are strictly speaking correlatives of each other. In the logic of the acousmatic, it is nonetheless of decisive importance that the disembodied voice or disembodied gaze is potentially embodied in the diegesis and can thus be de-acousmaticized, since its free-floating presence is the all-pervasive presence of a nonsubjectivized object, i.e., of a voice-object without support in a subject serving as its source. It is in this way that désacousmatisation equals 50 Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, p. 102. 51 Cremonini, Die Durchquerung des Cogito, p. 159.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture

135

subjectivization.”52 The de-acousmaticization/subjectivation/diegeticization of the gaze/voice seeks to reintegrate the lost organ into a body. The acousmatic voice, evidently, is not interchangeable with the extradiegetic voice of the traditional off-screen narrator, who is strictly external to the diegetic world, just as the acousmatic gaze is not interchangeable with the omniscient gaze of the enunciator/narrator. The uncanny aspect of the acousmatic lies in its threshold function, which opens an interval between diegesis and non-diegesis, but cannot be ascribed to either one of them. If, in the present book, I speak of the outside of film, this does not refer to a blanket opposition between internality and externality, but the existence of the external in the internal and vice versa. Žižek repeatedly points out that suture can only guarantee the internalization of the outside at the cost of an internal externalization: “Suture” means that external difference is always an internal one, that the external limitation of a field of phenomena always reflects itself within this field, as its inherent impossibility to fully become itself. […] In short: in order to produce the effect of self-enclosure, one must add to the series an excessive element which “sutures” it precisely insofar as it does not belong to the series, but sticks out as an exception.53

In this enmeshing of inside and outside, the power of extimacy, which can never be entirely domesticated by suture, again becomes effective: “This is what Lacan’s neologism extimité aims at, the designation of a stranger in the midst of my intimacy.”54 The acousmatic gaze thus derives not from a pure externality of enunciation (which Silverman stresses in her reading of Lacan), but, in a more complex fashion, an extimate enunciation, in which it is impossible to determine whether the gaze belongs to “me” (that is, a diegetic representative) or the Absent One. Along with the subjective shot without a reverse shot, Žižek also mentions another variant of this “extimization” of the gaze: One of the standard horror movie procedures is the “resignification” of hte objective into the subjective shot (what the spectator first perceives as an objective shot – say, of a house with a family at dinner – is all of 52 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 127. 53 Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears, pp. 57, 65. 54 Žižek, Looking Awry, p. 169.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

136 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

a sudden, by means of codified markers like the slight trembling of the camera, the “subjectivised” soundtrack, etc., revealed as the subjective shot of a murderer stalking his potential victim). However, this procedure is to be supplemented with another reversal, when, in the middle of a shot unambiguously marked as subjective, the spectator is all of a sudden compelled to acknowledge that there is no possible subject within the space of the of diegetic reality who can occupy the point of view of this shot. […] Another subjectivity intervenes here, which is no longer the standard diegetic subjectivity of a protagonist of the f iction, but the impossible/traumatic subjectivity of the Thing itself.55

In this paradoxical modulation of the gaze, shot and reverse-shot initially alternate regularly with each other: the shot shows the direction in which a character is looking, and then the reverse-shot cuts to the character’s point of view. But all of a sudden, the character moves from the edge of the image into their own field of vision, and what we thought was a mobile point of view suddenly ends with the inclusion of the bearer of the gaze. Perhaps there is no better example for the expropriation of the look through the gaze than this point-of-view paradox, which is in no sense a false match-cut in the technical sense. The eyes seem to leave the body, in order, as an impossible object-gaze, to encounter the subject as a spectral alien body. Later, I will discuss numerous film scenes which aesthetically draw on this expropriation of the gaze. What consequences does this have for the “suturing” of the spectator into the fiction? For Elsaesser and Hagener: Žižek’s re-reading of suture, which can be understood as a technique of drawing the subject into the filmic fiction, leads to a deconstruction of classical style, because the actual subjective perspective and the shot that can be seen in the film always diverge. The apparently subjective shot can, on closer analysis not be ascribed to any character, such that the system of suture does not draw the spectator into the film, but is always already fragile and brittle.56

In spite of the dislocation of the spectator from the diegetic internalization of the gaze, the impossible gaze, in both its variants, must be demarcated from the Brechtian strategy of anti-fictional disidentification, which has been 55 Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears, pp. 36-38. 56 Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Filmtheorie zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2007), p. 132.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture

137

dominant in Godard’s work. With the re-entry of the bearer of the gaze into their own point of view, identification and disidentification interpenetrate each other almost seamlessly within a single shot. The spectator, after all, cannot avoid perceiving the point of view as an offer to take on the intradiegetic gaze of the character. Here, too, the acousmatic gaze operates within the interval between suturing and de-suturing, on-screen and off-screen, identification and disidentification. The subversive aspect of the procedure consists of this zone of indeterminacy, and not the Brechtian distancing of the spectator. Like Copjec, Žižek attaches the acousmatic gaze to the release of a traumatic Real, which can be neither mirrored in the Imaginary nor signified in the Symbolic. Inverting Deleuze’s notion of the “body without organs,” Žižek dubs the gaze without a bearer the “organ without bodies” and adds a further conceptual nuance to Freud’s part-object and Lacan’s objet petit a. The organ without bodies is a part-object, which is opposed to being reintegrated into the organic body, and, much like the “grin without a cat”57 in Alice in Wonderland, takes the form of a non-corporeal intensity: When we see ourselves “from outside,” from this impossible point, the traumatic feature is not that I am objectivized, reduced to an external object for the gaze, but, rather, that it is my gaze itself that is objectivized, which observes me from the outside, which, precisely, means that my gaze is no longer mine, that it is stolen from me.58

Žižek’s return to suture was politically directed against the “post-theory” polemics of the cognitivist film theorists, who put the very existence of the gaze into question. For Žižek, the crux of the gaze in the cinema lies in its impossible, phantasmatic status: precisely because it does not exist on an empirical, realist level, the gaze advances to the absent cause of the visible. This dialectic necessarily evades the positivism of cognitivist film theory, since it presupposes a spectator with a healthy human rationality, who has fundamentally rationalized their extimacy away. It is symptomatic that even as valuable a book as Branigan’s work on the point of view lists the most varied combinations of the shot/reverse-shot system without even once mentioning the impossible subjective gaze. The acousmatic gaze thus seems to mark the epistemological border of cognitivist theory, in much the same way that it also shows the limitations of apparatus theory. 57 See Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 58 Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 138.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

138 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

The historical reconstruction of suture and enunciation theory reaches its provisional endpoint with Žižek. Even if we should avoid ascribing a teleology to the history of theory, the Lacanianism of Cophec and Žižek draws the most radical consequences from the potential of suture theory. We can only speak of an acousmatics of enunciation, therefore, because the film camera, beyond its status as a technical apparatus, is none other than a part-object, an objet petit a, an organ without bodies. To speak with Deleuze: in art, we are always concerned with the creation of impossible percepts and affects. This is also the case with cinema, which, more so, perhaps, than in any other art, charges the gaze with an absent intensity that transcends the subject.

4.3 From the Hors-champ to the Hors-lieu, or the Trans-Subjective Point of View: The Unrepresentable in Rossellini and Antonioni The extimization of the gaze through the paradoxical modulations of point-of-view symptomatically breaks out in those post-war Italian films by Rossellini and Antonioni, in which the neorealist belief in a bond between the image and reality is torn apart. Rossellini and Antonioni both count among the founders of neorealism, but their later films no longer adhere to the Bazinian phenomenology of a becoming-image of the world and a becoming-world of the image. The release of an unrepresentable gaze tears this referential bond asunder and consequently refers to an Outside that hollows out the evidential power of the visible. This Outside, which also slides from the relative hors-champ of the image into the absolute hors-corps of the gaze, characterizes the post-neorealist films of Rossellini and Antonioni. In an important essay on Rossellini, Jacques Rancière adds a third externality to the hors-champ and the hors-corps: the hors-lieu (off-place). Although an elucidation of the concept within the framework of film theory is missing in Rancière’s own writings, the idea of an unrepresentable place may be conceived of in tandem with the displacement of the diegesis through the acousmatic gaze. In his political theory, Rancière understands displacement as an act of disidentification, which counterposes the “dissensual” excess of the political to the “consensual” distribution of bodies and identity (which Rancière call “the Police”): “Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination. It makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture

139

what was once only heard as noise.”59 Every political act thus begins with a fundamental displacement, a detachment from a place allocated by the Police, an overstepping of social boundaries. Political dissensus thus produces a bifurcation of an identity marked by the police as the sensible exposure of antagonisms, precisely as a dissensus, in the double meaning of “conflict” and “sensible heterogeneity”: “The essence of politics is then dissensus. But dissensus is not the opposition of interests and opinions. It is the production, within a determined, sensible world, of a given that is heterogeneous to it.”60 In dissensus, a distribution of the sensible determined by the Police collides with its heterogeneous Outside. In other words: a specific ordering of the visible is confronted with what necessarily makes it invisible, and inclusion is confronted with what it excludes. This dissensual collision is the focal point of Roberto Rossellini’s Europa 51 (1952). In this f ilm, the displacing movement consists of the crossing of class boundaries, from top to bottom. In her second film with Rossellini (after Stromboli, 1950), Ingrid Bergman plays the character of Irene, a woman from the fashionable elite of Rome, whose life unravels after her young sons dies from a suicide attempt. Tortured by feelings of guilt, she turns her back on her luxurious lifestyle and begins to fraternize with the proletarian residents of the outer suburbs of Rome. In this she is supported by her communist cousin Andrea. She pays for a young man’s medical costs, helps a woman with six children f ind work in a factory and cares for a sick prostitute. Europa 51 follows a deterritorializing movement, which, as with Rossellini’s Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero, 1948), is initiated through the traumatic event of a suicide: Irene leaves the place of her socially stratified identity, and devotes herself to another world, a world of “any spaces whatever” (Deleuze), which transcends the coordinates of her perception. In this collision of two worlds, Rancière sees the confrontation with a hors-lieu, a radical displacement, which in contrast to the hors-champ of the filmic image refuses any potential for being made visible. While the filmic off-screen continually alternates between absence and presence, the hors-lieu eschews this fluctuating exchange. The hors-lieu begins where representability ends: “The call of a hors-lieu, of what was not part of the tour, tip[s] over into the 59 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julian Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999), p. 30. 60 Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster and Andrew Parker (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 226.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

140 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

unrepresentable.”61 Since Irene follows this call of the outside, she does not enter a new place so much as a between-zone, an interval: She leaves the frame, although not in the technical, cinematographic sense. The problem is not one of shots and countershots. It is not a problem of camera work, which would still be part of the art of relation. What is at stake here is not the camera but cinema itself. What is at stake is the artist, what the artist as such can show us: not a play between what is in and out of the shot, between voice-on and voice-off, but a hors-lieu, which, in subjective terms, is called a conversion. A conversion is not in the first place the illumination of a soul, but the twisting of a body called by the unknown. The artist Rossellini shows us the sensible action of this conversion, the action of a gaze that turns around and pulls its body along with it toward the place where its truth is in question.62

If, as Žižek has observed, every film of Rossellini “represents the last failed attempt to cope with the Real of some kind of traumatic encounter,”63 then this heterological encounter with the hors-lieu finds its highpoint in the famous factory scene: standing in for the sick mother, Irene spends a day in the factory. From the beginning, the deafening noise of the factory imposes an acoustic caesura with the previous scene. The noise drowns out the human voices, as if the intelligibility of language is absorbed into the asignifying din of industrial machinery. The attack on the auditory sensorium is duplicated with the aggressive switching of the gaze. In two abrupt, consecutive viewpoints, Irene’s lost body is captured within the factory building. The cut shifts the camera-angle to an even more extreme long-shot, with the result that the body of the protagonist is entirely overpowered by the totality of the factory. With this, an ahuman perspective breaks into the continuity of the filmic space, which is no longer motivated by the diegetic chaining together of camera-angles and match-cuts. In the next sequence, the filmic gaze is completely divorced from its diegetic subject, through a paradoxical modulation of point of view: when Irene is led to her work station by a colleague, a close-up shows the movements of her gaze, which searches for orientation within the audiovisual 61 Jacques Rancière, Short Voyages to the Land of the People, trans. James Swenson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 116. 62 Ibid., p. 116. 63 Slavoj Žižek, Grimassen des Realen: Jacques Lacan oder die Monstrosität des Aktes (Cologne: Kiepenheur und Witsch, 1993), p. 61.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture

141

chaos of the factory. The following cut allows the camera movement over a conveyor belt to clearly appear as Irene’s point of view. Yet the supposedly subjective image reveals itself to be deceptive when the camera, having reached the end of the conveyor belt, comes to a stop before Irene herself. Since the bearer of the gaze enters into her own field of vision, the fictional subjectivity of the character is replaced by the uncanny release of an objectgaze without any diegetic cause.64 Here we have a case of impossible re-entry, as described by Žižek, in its pure form: the gaze as objet petit a does not emerge from a locatable source, but from an unlocatable hors-lieu. Here, too, the gaze replaces the eye: “What the foreigner perceives, in the noise and dirt of the factory, as the intolerable itself, is the assault upon the gaze. The factory is in the first place an uninterrupted movement that hurts the eyes, that gives you a headache. It is a constant and unceasing procession of sensory shocks, in which along with the ability to look, the possibility of thoughtfulness and respect is lost.”65 Through the suspension of the difference between subjective and objective shots, a false continuity breaks into the coherence of the diegetic world. Of course, this is not the first time that such a false continuity has appeared in Rossellini’s films: in the tuna fishing sequence in Stromboli, for instance, the point of view system between Karin and the fishermen is so loosely articulated that it cannot be determined whether the fishermen are seen from Karin’s point of view, or whether we are watching neutral, documentary-like images. In the factory scene, the subjective gaze of the character is transsubjectively transcended. Deleuze defines this transsubjectivity as the detachment of “pure optical and acoustic situations”66 from their embeddedness within causal narratives. In the context of the themes represented in Europa 51, the dissensual collision of two worlds is inscribed in the film’s form itself. To speak with Rancière, in this scene, the consensual causality of continuity cinema is pierced by dissensus. The rupture in the sensory-motor enchainment of perception and action, which for Deleuze makes Europa 51 a modern film par excellence, is here articulated as a fine tear of the suture. The breaking apart of the suture sheds light on those film techniques that the invisible editing system of classical cinema seeks to make invisible: montage, or “the meeting of antagonistic elements, the pure collision of 64 On this point, see also Laura Mulvey’s chapter on Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (Voyage to Italy, 1954). Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006), pp. 116ff. 65 Rancière, Short Voyages to the Land of the People, p. 125. 66 See Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp. 3ff.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

142 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

extremes.”67 In the shock-like, accelerated alternation between Irene’s shaken expression and the printing press, Rossellini thus condenses the composite nature of filmic montage to a dissensual act which appears in the interval between connection and disconnection, amalgamation and bifurcation. In contrast to the Brechtian destruction of the fourth wall, the transsubjective point of view does not operate as a pure negation of suture, but as a subversion immanent to suture, precisely as its own extimization. In this sense, the scene produces that double-effect which according to Rancière is constitutive of political aesthetics: “the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification.”68 The factory scene produces an aisthetic shock, which opens a wound in the textual fabric that cannot be closed up again. In Europa 51, the collapse of filmic suture is inherently linked to a failure of social integration. Nevertheless, in the course of the film Rossellini does not entirely resist the temptation to bestow embodiment on the hors-lieu. Irene is increasingly transformed into a modern, feminine version of St. Francis of Assisi, who was the subject of another film of Rossellini’s. Her conversion when faced with the “unbearable” (Deleuze) is re-signified, at the end of the film, as a Christ-like epiphany. The contradiction between the materialist and Catholic-idealist Rossellini is finally resolved in favor of the latter. Between the composite face of Irene as an expression of her shock in the factory and the transfigured visage of the icon in the concluding image, the film nonetheless seems to return to a consensual de-acousmatization of exteriority. In polemical terms: while the factory scene holds open the hors-lieu as an unrepresentable political exteriority, the conclusion of the film compromises its political aesthetics in favor of a theological transcendental subject. The leap into the transcendental marks the sharp boundary between Rossellini and Antonioni, as Angelo Restivo has stressed in his brilliant study on Italian post-war cinema: “While the Rossellini/Bergman films always culminate in the epiphanic moment that – however ambiguous – serves ultimately as an anchoring point; it is precisely this moment that is rigorously excluded from Antonioni’s work.”69 In Antonioni’s cinema, this remnant of an idealistic subjectivity has completely disappeared. If Deleuze 67 Rancière, Film Fables, p. 126. 68 Jacques Rancière, “Interview with Gabriel Rockhill,” in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 63. 69 Angelo Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 97.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture

143

speaks of Antonioni’s “critical objectivism,”70 he also turns against the commonplace characterizations of Antonioni as a poet of alienated bourgeois interiority. On the structural level, the opposite is true: the apparently subjective focalization of enunciation repeatedly leads to an expropriation of the diegetic looks through transsubjective points-of-view. The central formal technique of Antonioni’s objectivism is the impossible re-entry of the character in their own field of vision, as had already been memorably demonstrated by Rossellini in his factory scene. In Antonioni, the transsubjective point of view is transformed into a recurring aesthetic cipher: beginning with his first feature, Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair, 1949), nearly all his films have been marked by paradoxical modulations and retroactive re-codings of the point of view, which invariably come down to a suspension of diegetic subjectivity. From this perspective, Antonioni’s objectivism naturally has nothing to do with the neutral status of the invisible observer in classical cinema. As Deleuze has established, Antonioni’s objectivity is inseparably tied with the emanation of an unidentifiable subjectivity: in his films, “it is as if the most objective images are not formed without becoming mental, and going into a strange, invisible subjectivity.”71 At this point too, the theories of Deleuze, Lacan and Rancière converge: invisible subjectivity is the acousmatic gaze of the hors-lieu. The transsubjective points of view are uncanny precisely in their separation of an organ without bodies from the organic eye of the diegetic character. The gaze almost autonomizes itself as a dissimilar doppelgänger of the subject and undermines the referential stability of the image: “It is the split between reality and image which Antonioni emphasizes and simultaneously condenses in the external, objective yet self-regarding look of the camera in which the look becomes the object of its own gaze.”72 It is no coincidence that Noël Burch, the first systematic theorist of the hors-champ, has given a detailed description of the first appearance of transsubjective point of view in Antonioni’s debut film Cronaca di un amore: In a later scene during which the lovers take refuge on a staircase, we follow their ascent in a series of long crane shots, and just as we hear the loud off-screen sound of an elevator door slamming shut, the lovers break off their argument (they are already talking about murdering the husband) and lean over the railing, sharing the same painful memory of Guido’s 70 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 6. 71 Ibid., p. 8. 72 Sam Rohdie, Antonioni (London: BFI, 1990), p. 175.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

144 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

fiancée falling to her death down the elevator shaft. The next shot shows the elevator approaching the camera from a very pronounced downward angle. The shot is invariably experienced by the viewer as a ‘subjective’ shot, as something the lovers see. Nevertheless, when a tilt, begun as the elevator started upward, brings the camera back to horizontal position, we realize that it is actually on the other side of the elevator shaft, and that the lovers still looking over the railing are actually facing us and quite a distance away.73

In contrast to the Europa 51 sequence, which has the supposed point of view shot terminate behind the back of the character, the gaze here takes on a spatial standpoint, which is situated on the opposite side to that of the character. Shot and reverse-shot almost appear to collapse into one, as the point-of-view shot ends up revealing itself as an objective shot flipped around 180 degrees. Antonioni’s radicalization of this paradox leads to a point where subjective and objective shots, shots and reverse-shots are completely indistinguishable. A kind of short-circuit is produced in which, in like manner to a Moebius strip, front and back and inside and outside converge. Žižek labels this short-circuiting of suture the “interface,” which overrides the syntactic articulation of shots in an impossible simultaneity: “Shot and counter-shot are here not only combined within the same shot – it is one and the same image which is at the same time the shot […] and the counter-shot.”74 In Antonioni’s following films, the interface also makes an incursion into the diegesis, such as during the island sequence in L’Avventura (1960), as Sandro, the male lead played by Gabriele Ferzetti, apparently directs his gaze to a small puddle, but then walks into his own field of vision in the background of the image. In La Notte (1961), Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) learns by telephone of the death of a close friend. In despair, she perceptibly lowers her gaze, and a cut shows a group of party-goers from a position that would correspond to her point of view. But a slow vertical camera movement ends in a long-shot of Lidia, whose point of view is revealed to be outside of the building. In all these scenes, the emanation of the transsubjective gaze is tied to traumatic situations of absence, loss and death: the reminder of the death of the former lover in Cronaca di un amore, the mysterious disappearance of Anna in L’Avventura, the death of the friend in La Notte. They symptomatically stand in a spectrological film aesthetic, which places 73 Burch, Theory of Film Practice, p. 78. 74 Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears, p. 49.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture

145

the mimetic relationship of image and reality, subjectivity and truth in a state of permanent crisis. Antonioni’s Monica Vitti trilogy shifts this aesthetic-epistemological consequence to more decidedly political terrain in its last installment, L’Eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962). The title of the film apparently refers not only to a solar eclipse or nuclear catastrophe, but also seems to allegorize his own strategies of the hors-champ, hors-corps and hors-lieu. The darkness that L’Eclisse alludes to is also the obscuring of neorealism’s phenomenological transparency. L’Eclisse conclusively departs from the neorealist belief in the transfiguration of reality through the filmic image, which still seems to be shared by the Rossellini of Europa 51, in spite of all his materialist doubt. Gilberto Perez is right to state that: “If the neorealists (in André Bazin’s words of praise) ‘put their faith in reality,’ Antonioni puts any perspective on reality, any account of it, in doubt.”75 This transition from a Catholic belief in the image to a modernist skepticism towards the visual corresponds to the change from the referential objectivity of neorealism to the transsubjective objectivity of post-neorealist cinema. Like Antonioni’s earlier work, L’Eclisse is marked by unresolved empty spaces and absences, but in contrast to an ethical dimension of the unrepresentable, the later film appears to revolve around a political problem of representation. Here, too, a comparison between Rossellini and Antonioni is instructive: it is certainly not a coincidence that the central scene in Europa 51 takes place in a factory, while L’Eclisse has a lengthy scene set in a stock exchange. From a Marxist perspective, the historical difference between both films is articulated in this economic transition from the Taylorist/Fordist factory line to a new regime of speculative accumulation. The film captures the hermetic world of share trading as a chaotic melee of shouting, running and gesticulating bodies. It is not only Vittoria (Monica Vitti) who is incapable of deciphering the rules and codes of financial transactions; the spectator, too, is confronted with an audiovisual excess that is not immediately decipherable. On a narrative level, the breakdown of signification can be understood as a response to the stock market meltdown. The anamorphic distortion of the image through a transsubjective point-of-view shot directly follows on from the stock exchange sequence. Vittoria follows a man who has just lost millions of lire into a café. An exchange of shots between Vittoria and the man again suggests a point of view that once more ends in an externalization of the gaze: “What began as a point-of-view shot through her eyes becomes 75 Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1998), p. 370.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

146 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

without a break […] a shot turning her inquisitive eyes on her, so to speak, no longer a subjective shot from her perspective but a shot in which the impression of an observing subjectivity remains.”76 Antonioni’s characters are caught in a gaze whose absent presence neither they themselves nor we the spectators are capable of understanding, just as they (and we) are incapable of grasping the abstract sphere of finance capital. Unlike in his earlier films, the unrepresentable in L’Eclisse is no longer linked to an individual trauma. Rather, it is concerned with the unrepresentability of the late-capitalist economy itself: an epistemological dilemma which cannot be resolved through a return to the neorealist belief in the redemption of the real, but only evoked in its effects – the effects of an absent cause. “Antonioni’s art,” according to Deleuze, “is like the intertwining of consequences, of temporal sequences and effects which flow from events out-of-field,”77 and this is also the case because the hors-champ is linked, under the surface, to the hors-lieu of the social totality. The gaze of the hors-lieu does not emerge from the intersubjectivity of Sartrean alterity, but from the objective alterity of a social whole become opaque: “This inability to understand the question of the Other is directly related to the emergence of the view of the city as a set of arbitrary, contingent connections. The telephone, a recurring motif in the film, testifies to the new conception of space as a grid of networks; Piero is a stockbroker who is totally dependent upon being ‘plugged in’ to an abstract network that no one seems to understand.”78 “His concern is how to adjust human imagination to modernity,”79 so writes Noa Steimatsky on Antonioni. The transsubjective point-of-view attests to the fact that Antonioni faced up to this imagination of the unimaginable hors-lieu.

Bibliography Burch, Noël, Theory of Film Practice (New York: Praeger, 1973). Chiesa, Lorenzo, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Copjec, Joan, “The Orthopsychic Subject,” in Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 76 Ibid., p. 377. 77 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 23. 78 Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles, p. 118. 79 Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 4.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture

147

—, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). Cremonini, Andreas, “Die Nacht der Welt. Ein Versuch über den Blick bei Hegel, Sartre und Lacan,” in Hans-Dieter Gondek, Roger Hoffman and Hans-Martin Lohmann (eds.), Jacques Lacan – Wege zu seinem Werk (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 2001), pp.164-188. –––, Die Durchquerung des Cogito: Lacan contra Sartre (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003). Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). –––, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Dolar, Mladen, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). Doane, Mary Ann, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1991). Elsaesser, Thomas, and Malte Hagener, Filmtheorie zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2007). Fink, Bruce, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Pleasure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1975). Gondek, Hans-Dieter, “Die Angst als ‘das, was nicht täuscht,’” in Bernhard H. F. Taureck (ed.), Psychoanalyse und Philosophie: Lacan in der Diskussion (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992), pp. 107-137. Klammer, Markus, unpublished lecture on Lacan, Freie Universität Berlin, June 2008. Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981). Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bernard Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1974). Lebeau, Vicky, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Play of Shadows (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). Lipowatz, Thanos, “Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). Das Begehren des Subjekts und des Anderen in der Psychoanalyse,” in Martin Ludwig Hofmann and Sibylle Niekisch, Culture Club: Klassiker der Kulturtheorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004). McGowan, Todd, “Looking for the Gaze: Lacanian Film Theory and its Vicissitudes,” in Cinema Journal 42:3 (2003). Metz, Christian, Impersonal Enunciation, or The Place of the Film, trans. Cormac Deane (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

148 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Mulvey, Laura, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006). Perez, Gilberto, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1998). Silverman, Kaja, “Fassbinder and Lacan: A Reconsideration of Gaze, Look, and Image,” in Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London: Routledge, 1992). Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie, Jacques Lacan und die Philosophie der Psychoanalyse (Weinheim: Quadriga, 1989). Rancière, Jacques, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julian Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999). –––, The Philosopher and His Poor, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster and Andrew Parker (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). –––, Short Voyages to the Land of the People, trans. James Swenson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). –––, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004). Restivo, Angelo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). Rohdie, Sam, Antonioni (London: BFI, 1990). Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). Silverman, Kaja, The Threshold of the Visible World (London: Routledge, 1996). Steimatsky, Noa, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Vogl, Joseph, “Lovebirds,” in Claudia Blümle and Anne von der Heiden (eds.), Blickzähmung und Augentäuschung: Zu Jacques Lacans Bildtheorie (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2005). Žižek, Slavoj, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). –––, Grimassen des Realen: Jacques Lacan oder die Monstrosität des Aktes (Cologne: Kiepenheur und Witsch, 1993). –––, The Fright of Real Tears (London: BFI, 2001). –––, Organs without Bodies (London: Routledge, 2004). –––, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2008).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

5.

The Political Uncanny, or the Return of the Repressed: Caché Abstract Suture opens up the possibility of a reference to a radically conceived outside of film that cannot be integrated diegetically in a simple way. This aesthetics is based on a mode of film that does not superimpose but endures this radical, unbridgeable gap. This becomes political with regard to the constitution of the subject kept open in this way, which is neither interpellatively nor narratively closed. It is the constant perceptible presence of the Absent One that history allows to seep into films, as I demonstrate in an analysis of Michael Haneke’s Caché. In Caché the gaze of the videos articulates the historical guilt of the protagonist and reveals his entire social and political positioning. Keywords: Diegesis, Video, History, Return of the Repressed

The uncanny is that which eludes causality, that which does not return to the calming ground of the homely. The uncanny cannot be concealed… Even the title of Michael Haneke’s film Caché (2005) refers to an absence that can no longer be hidden or concealed, but, as the repressed, must necessarily make a return. Alongside this Freudian association, the title can also be read more specifically as a paraphrase of Bazin’s concept of the cache (mask) – as that which is obscured by the cache. To briefly recapitulate: in contrast to the fixed frame of painting, Bazin conceives of the frame of the filmic image as a mobile cache or mask. Summarizing his argument, Deleuze writes: “sometimes the frame works like a mobile mask according to which every set is extended into a larger homogeneous set with which it communicates, and sometimes it works as a pictorial frame which isolates a system and neutralizes its environment.”1 1 Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 16.

Lie, S., Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462983632_ch05

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

150 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Of course, the boundary of this virtual appropriation of the relative hors-champ is from the perspective of suture theory the hidden camera itself as the point of the absolute hors-champ. This hidden cache, which does not extend into a homogenous off-screen space, structures the latent trauma in Caché. The f ilm is thus clearly distinguished from Haneke’s earlier films, such as Funny Games (1997), in that the deictic address of the spectator through the look of the character into the camera is the central hallmark of its enunciation. The Brechtian/Godardian Gestus of the theatrical interpellation of the spectator is, in Funny Games, combined with a self-reflexive critique of media, which forces the spectator into a perverse complicity with the violent sadists. The political and aesthetic limitations of this kind of media-reflexivity, which aims at the demolition of the fourth wall, may well have become clear in the meantime. And yet Caché cannot be subsumed into this politics of addressing the spectator: if, in Funny Games, it is always clear that the look to the camera coincides with the look of the camera, Caché stands for an undoing of this contract with the apparatus. The fourth wall is impenetrably shielded off, but the diegesis opens itself up to an uncanny outside. In other words, in Caché a political film aesthetics distinct from that of political modernism is articulated, one which – as Kaja Silverman has demanded 2 – radicalizes the separation of film and spectator and also avoids the strategies of closure and suture practiced by classical Hollywood cinema. It is no coincidence that the enunciatory register of interpellation through the look into the camera is transformed into the impossible gaze of the camera itself. The reception of Haneke’s films often sketches out a portrait of an ascetic modernist who skeptically stands in radical opposition to the continuity editing of Hollywood, and who sabotages the identificatory suture strategies of manipulative montage through long, distanced sequence-shots in films such as Code inconnu (2000): “His reticent use of close-ups and medium close-ups, shot/reverse shots, and subjective point-of-view shots emphasizes this skepticism, as if confirming to classical continuity editing debases the veracity of the image and the represented situation.”3 Even if this may apply to the majority of his films, Caché, at least, cannot be reduced to such a one-sided anti-Hollywood opposition. Since, from the outset, the 2 See Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, pp. 83ff. 3 Fatima Naqvi, “The Politics of Contempt and the Ecology of Images: Michael Haneke’s Code Inconnu,” in Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick (ed.), The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary: 1945 to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), p. 245. In fact, Haneke incorporated a small film parodying continuity editing into Code inconnu.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED: CACHÉ

151

film does not shun the mechanisms of suture, but immanently dissects them, it can be read as as a subversive attempt at a “European Hollywood film.” Caché, after all, is not only deeply indebted to the detective-style whodunnit motif of the psychological thriller, it can even, in many ways, be seen as a European rewrite of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, which works with the same point of view paradox as Haneke’s film, the shot without a reverse-shot. 4 As I have already explained, for Žižek the renunciation of the reverse-shot, in addition to the transsubjective point of view, is one of the two different forms which acousmaticize the gaze as an instance of impossible subjectivity at the threshold between the diegetic and the non-diegetic – that is, it is an “Outside, which eludes the standard exchange of shot and reverse-shot, that is, which must remain excluded if the field of that which is imagined is to retain its consistency.”5 Like Lost Highway, Caché is of interest as a film about the logic of suture because it doubly externalizes the gaze of the Absent One, by transferring it to another medium that can be characterized as an extimate duplicate of the cinema: the externalized gaze of the absent cause is further externalized in Caché as a video gaze. Even the beginning of Caché is a small didactic play about suture. We are shown a static, frontal long-shot of a house in a quiet residential area – the camera is positioned on an adjacent street – and the shot is framed to the left and right by the façades of other buildings, which direct the gaze to the house’s entrance. A woman leaves the house. The supposition that we are watching a normal establishing-shot at the beginning of a normal film is soon revealed to be deceptive. The image persists in real time for far too long (more than three minutes), thus instilling us with a growing discontent. Suddenly, voices can be heard over the image, voices that are impossible to place in the diegetic space of the shot. A hard cut to a closer view of the entrance to the house follows, as Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) step onto the street. They appear to be looking for something. Another cut takes us back to the first shot, and suddenly the image is fast-forwarded. The film image is revealed to be a video watched 4 “By refusing the reverse-shot in Caché’s opening, Haneke not only inhibits ‘suture,’ or the binding of the spectator into the diegesis, he also introduces as part of his narrative space that ontological no-go area, namely, the space in front, first theorized by Noël Burch in the 1970s.” Thomas Elsaesser, “Performative Self-Contradictions: Michael Haneke’s Mind Games,” in Roy Grundmann (ed.), A Companion to Michael Haneke (Malden/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 65. 5 Slavoj Žižek, Die Metastasen des Genießens: Sechs erotisch-politische Versuche (Vienna: Passagen, 1996), p. 30.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

152 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

by Georges and Anne in their living room. Their dialogue lets us know that the video tape was anonymously sent to them. The supposedly objective establishing-shot is recoded as the protagonists’ subjective view of the television screen; the gaze of the spectator coincides with the gaze of the protagonists. Yet the question as to who made the video tape remains open. The shots alternate in a three-step from an objective to a subjective and finally a transsubjective gaze, without this transsubjective perspective synthesizing the previous two perspectives in any way. On the contrary: the transsubjective gaze suspends the difference between subjectivity and objectivity.6 What remains is the central question of suture theory: “Who is watching this?” The question of the video’s author becomes the main thread of the narrative, in the course of which Georges Laurent is confronted with a repressed act from his past. When the anonymous videos turn up, the carefully sutured tear in Georges’ bourgeois existence as the successful host of a literary talk show on television is ripped open again: the video tape leads Georges back to his childhood, when he jealously slandered his parents’ Algerian foster child, Majid, who was then sent to an orphanage. Majid’s parents were victims of the Paris massacre of 1961, when the police killed more than 200 peacefully demonstrating Algerians and threw their dead bodies in the Seine. Georges supposes that Majid uses the videos to wreak revenge on him, and after more than forty years the perpetrator and his victim meet each other again. But both Majid and his young son stubbornly deny that they had anything to do with the videos. As a message without an author, the videos open up an abyss in Georges’ bourgeois identity. As always in Haneke, form and content are strictly consubstantial with each other. It is not only the film that tells of a character haunted by the appearance of mysterious videos, the enunciation itself is haunted by the potential shattering of the filmic image by the unknown video-author. The opening sequence also produces a visual-epistemological shock, which proceeds to infect every “normal” filmic image with an insidious video-virus. The spectator can never be entirely sure whether they are watching a neutral objective shot (in Casetti’s terminology), or the retroactive viewing of a video whose creator remains unknown right up to the end of the film. More so, perhaps, than any other film before it, Caché thus insists on the fundamental insight of suture theory – namely that, strictly speaking, there can be no 6 See Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 144. Frampton also uses the term “transsubjectivity,” but in a phenomenological more than psychoanalytic perspective.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED: CACHÉ

153

objective shot in the cinema because the Absent One spectralizes the camera. Caché thus leads the gaze back to its zero-degree, by converting the classical suture of a “nobody” into a “somebody” and reconverting the embodied gaze of a “somebody” into the disembodied gaze of a “nobody.” The video’s anamorphic contamination of the filmic image is, in the final instance, mediated by the acousmatic gaze, for which there can be no reverse-shot. The “video doppelgänger” aptly spoken of by Martine Beugnet is none other than the uncanny doppelgänger of the eye as a Lacanian objet petit a: the gaze. Cinema’s “inferior” double thus makes its way not only into the diegesis, at the heart of the educated, upper-middle-class home, but into the body of the film itself. At the beginning when the film first takes us back and forth from the virtual (images of the street shot a few hours before) to the actual (Georges exploring the same street, looking for traces of the mysterious observer), the latter sequences, shot at dusk, appear drained of light, as if vampirized by their video doppelgänger.7

In Caché, the precarious relationship of a dissimilar similarity between film and video is decided in favor of the latter medium, despite its supposedly lesser value on a technical and aesthetic level. Here, too, there is a difference from Haneke’s earlier works, in which the video image is “remediated” by the film image, and not vice versa.8 Hence, Benny’s Video (1992) ends with a starkly framed shot of a police station surveillance monitor, thereby suggesting the superiority of the filmic medium with respect to its electronic successor: “the cold formalism of Haneke’s cinema contains and masters video. If Haneke’s camera encompasses and transcends even the eye of the Law, whose eye does it represent? If these images meant to gesture toward a higher authority, its identity remains enigmatic.”9 Here, too, the enunciatory status of the shot remains open, but the epistemological and ethical primacy of the film seems unscathed. If films like Funny Games and Benny’s Video can be characterized as examples of a metavideological cinematography that uses its critique of media to reflect on the socio-psychological effects of video technologies, Caché, by contrast, stands for a “metacinematographic videology”10 – a remediation of film through video, and one that does not 7 Martine Beugnet, “Blind Spot,” Screen 48:2 (2007), p. 230. 8 On the concept of remediation, see Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 9 Brigitte Peucker, The Material Image, p. 138. 10 Garrett Stewart, Framed Time: Towards a Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 210.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

154 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

boil down to the same old story of media self-reflexivity, but videologically spectralizes, acousmaticizes and extimizes the hidden camera as the structural condition of the cinema. The hypothesis that Caché’s filmic enunciation is initially conveyed by the video has prompted exegetes of the film such as Thomas Y. Levin to read it as an allegory for the ubiquitous presence of surveillance devices.11 That the filmic image is tendentially distinguishable from its videological remediation is ascribed by Levin to the internalization of surveillance technologies, which have not only long been established in public spaces, but have also seeped into the media reception practices of the private sphere. Hence, the obsessive rewinding and fast-forwarding of the video tape by Georges and Anne can be understood as a schooling in the surveillance gaze – as an almost criminological scanning of the image for those inconspicuous details which may be able to provide the decisive piece of evidence about the culprit. In fact, it is not only the real-time indexicality of the motionless opening shot of the film that betrays a proximity to the surveillance image. The swimming pool sequence later in the film, in which Georges and Anne’s son Pierrot swims laps, is filmed with the mechanical equanimity of a slow back-and-forth camera movement, and thereby unmistakably alludes to the signature movement of an automatically programmed surveillance camera. And when Georges picks up his son from school, the camera observes Pierrot’s walk to the car with a long tracking-shot, thereby suggesting a forensic pursuit of a suspicious individual. As evident as this affinity with the visuality of surveillance may at first glance appear, moments of irritation nonetheless quickly creep in. The obsessive search of the protagonist for the person who made the video tapes quickly makes clear that it is not the subjectless automatism of the technical images that is at the center of the film, but the question as to the ominous subject behind the camera. Caché is expressly not about surveillance as a dispositif that has autopoetically taken on a life of its own in an infinite loop; rather it is actually about the subject of enunciation. Furthermore, from the very beginning, a strange social reversal between the surveilled object and the unknown subject of the surveillance takes place: whereas surveillance technologies are normally deployed to protect private property and class hierarchies, and thus function in a top-down manner, in Caché the surveilling gaze observes the one surveilling. Not unlike a small fortress, the Laurents’ house is the symbol of the gated community in which the Parisian 11 See Thomas Y. Levin, “Five Tapes, Four Halls, Two Dreams: Vicissitudes of Surveillant Narration in Michael Haneke’s Caché,” in A Companion to Michael Haneke, pp. 75-90.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED: CACHÉ

155

upper class lives, barricaded off in their luxurious interiors from migrants, beggars and the poor in general. “What won’t people do so as not to lose anything,” Majid will later say to Georges, expressing the property-owner’s fear of anyone who could rob him of a piece of his property. Everything thus indicates that the Laurents’ house must be decked out with surveillance cameras registering suspicious subjects around the clock – such as the young African man, whom Georges insults after a visit to the police, because he had accidently knocked him with his bicycle. Unabashed racist sentiments pour out of the bourgeois literature afficionado, as he feels backed into a corner by the video tapes. In Caché, the social stratification of surveillance is thus turned on its head: the rich bourgeois is caught in the spell of an insistent gaze, which seems to come from the very bottom, from a post-colonial victim of French society, the Algerian Majid, who ekes out an existence in the Parisian banlieue. Whereas the f irst video messages seem, therefore, to originate in a “reversed surveillance,” in the later tapes the surveillance signature of the images becomes less and less decodable: one evening, as the Laurents dine with friends, another new tape appears at the front door, but instead of the expected view of the front of the house, as in the film’s opening image, the nonplussed Georges now sees a point-of-view shot from a traveling car, which approaches his parents’ country house and ends with a view of the farmyard through the windscreen. Whereas, in the first shot of the film, the specific logic of an objective camera prevailed (in spite of the unidentified sender), with the second video the subjectivity of the image becomes increasingly manifest. While the maker of the first video could still have set up the camera and then disappeared from the scene, the shots from the car must be filmed by a concrete person with a handheld camera. It is at the very latest with this increasing subjectivation of the videos that the film suggests that something other than the omnipresence of surveillance is at issue. The videos increasingly become witnesses to an impossible subjectivity. In fact, in the course of the film the plausible causality of the videos becomes increasingly more absurd and impossible. Who, when, how and where the videos were shot increasingly eludes any realistic anchoring in a diegetic subject. Even an early scene in Caché, however, stages the impossible, aporetic status of the acousmatic camera: the f irst shot is exactly repeated in a night-time image. For several minutes, once again, nothing of note happens, until, on the right-hand edge of the screen, a parked car illuminates the dark street with its headlights. There is something that perhaps remains unnoticed with an initial viewing of the film, but becomes apparent upon

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

156 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

repeated viewings, especially with the help of a DVD player allowing the spectator to play the image back and forth and pause it: the headlights of the car briefly but clearly show the shadow of the unnoticed camera in the bushes on the left-hand side of the screen. The camera momentarily shows itself filming – not through a self-reflection as in Godard’s La Chinoise, but through its own shadow. What is decisive, however, is the fact that Georges, getting out of the car and walking to his front door, does not see the camera, even though he would have had to have seen it. The shadow proves that the camera was openly placed on a tripod in the street, and was not hidden in any way. The shadow as an indexical sign unmistakably evinces the existence of the camera, but in the diegesis it seems to remain invisible. The simultaneously absent and present phantom camera highlights the paradox of the acousmatic image: on the one hand the bearer of the gaze must be localized in the diegesis, which is impossible, since Georges could not have otherwise missed seeing him; on the other hand, it cannot be the strictly extradiegetic camera of Haneke himself, the Great Enunciator, since the videos really do exist in the diegesis. The acousmatic gaze is thus an unreal and impossible gaze, “at once remote and ‘outside,’ yet totally ‘inside’ as well.”12 It entangles enunciation and énoncé, non-diegesis and diegesis, hors-champ and champ. In Caché this indeterminacy is made more acute by the fact that Haneke did not shoot the film on the classical 35mm format, but on high-resolution digital video. Garrett Stewart thus asserts that the camera shadow reveals the contours of Haneke’s own HD-video camera. 13 There is no escape from this metafictional diffusion of film and video: the acousmatic gaze of video is an immanent component of the filmic diegesis, as well as being external to the fictional world, without denoting, in a Godardian fashion, enunciation as the site of the apparative production process. In line with suture theory, Caché disembodies the camera as an enunciation without an enunciator – a phantomic apparatus, which hollows out the visibility that it generates. Ironically, the street from which the video was shot is called Rue des Iris. Neither in film nor in video is there a seeing without masking, without a constitutive blindness: “The medium of presence is also the medium of absence.”14 12 Elsaesser, “Performative Self-Contradictions,” in A Companion to Michael Haneke, p. 67. 13 Garrett Stewart, “Waking Glyph/Making Live: Cinema after the Digital,” in Lisa Åkervall, Adina Lauenburger, Sulgi Lie and Christian Tedjasukmana (eds.), Waking Life: Kino zwischen Technik und Leben (Berlin: B_Books, 2016). The shadow, of course, could also have been added digitally. 14 Beugnet, “Blind Spot,” p. 229.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED: CACHÉ

157

This sequence is interrupted by an abrupt cut to Georges’ literature show, but it is later repeated as a video-replay. And once again, Georges and Anne fail to spot the camera’s shadow, which distorts and anamorphizes the image from the side. Following Lacan and Žižek, anamorphosis appears to the subject as a grimace of the real only from a laterally distorted viewpoint, which is obliquely set apart from monocular perspective. This possibility of an optical change in perspective seems to be forbidden to the characters in Caché. This time, the video tape is wrapped up in a piece of paper that is daubed with a disturbing child’s drawing: we can see a face shooting blood out from the mouth. These drawn part-objects burrow into Georges’ psyche, and eventually lead to the repressed primal scene of his childhood, when he forced Majid to decapitate a chicken in order to discredit the boy in the eyes of his parents. The replay of the video is abruptly interrupted by a brief dream-image, in which the young Majid, with a bleeding mouth, directly looks into the camera. Video footage and images from dreams or memories of a traumatic real continue to alternate with each other: here a decapitated chicken, there Majid with an axe, which, not unlike the phantom camera, appears to the young Georges as a dark shadowy shape.15 Memories that Georges would have gladly consigned to the hors-champ of his mind penetrate in metastatic fashion into both the carefully stitched fabric of his existence and the textual fabric of the film itself. If Chion understands the acousmatic voice as an organic remnant which is condemned to an undead existence because it has not been properly “buried” (that is, embodied), then the acousmatic gaze in Caché corresponds with the undead victims of colonial and post-colonial violence, who, in the case of the Paris massacre, were not even given a symbolic burial: “Majid lives on in George’s world as the undead, or the inhuman, even if he has actually been sacrificed as the all-too-human victim to Georges’ unstoppable anxiety and colonial guilt.”16 The acousmatic gaze haunts Georges as an undead object of both a collective and an individual crime and anamorphizes his identity. What Žižek says about the voice is no less pertinent for the gaze: “It floats freely in a terrible between-space; it functions in turn like a stain, a spot, whose 15 Like the video footage, even these “subjective images” remain unmarked in the f ilm, as Michel Chion maintains: “All these images are equally clear and sharp, and appear to derive from the same material. Nothing distinguishes them a priori – it is through editing, through content, through abstract deduction that they appear after the event as real, imaginary, dreamed, retransmitted, projected. The images of the dream sequences are as precise as those in the ‘real’ sequence; the mediatized images (TV, video) are just as clear as those seen directly, with the naked eye.” Michel Chion, “Without Music: On Caché,” in A Companion to Michael Haneke, p. 165. 16 Ranjana Khanna, “From Rue Morgue to Rue des Iris,” Screen 48:2 (2007), p. 244.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

158 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

supine presence has the same disturbing effect as an alien body, and prevents me from gaining a self-identity.”17 Georges’ existence itself has something undead or zombie-like about it: steeped in high culture, Georges Laurent is internally a dead man, without memory or empathy. His only way of showing emotion is through aggression. As the snapshot of a frozen, dead life, Caché affirms Benjamin’s famous dictum that there has never been a document of culture that is not also a document of barbarism. When the videos begin to disrupt his life, the façade of normality proves to be as thin as the false bookshelves on the television set where Georges’ literature show is shot. In Georges and Anne’s living room, the books are indeed real, but they appear to function as bulwarks against the infiltration of an excluded Real, rather than an opening to the world. In a parody of centralized perspective, the Laurents’ living room is shown in a threefold framing: in addition to the external frame of the image (the cache), there is the internal frame produced by the bookshelves, in the middle of which is the widescreen television set, which (like all TV sets in Haneke’s films) is never turned off, even when the characters are not consciously watching television. The vanishing point of the image is thus centered on the television, from which news items on global conflicts and catastrophes are broadcast, but never given even the slightest (ethical) attention by the characters. In Caché, Haneke continues his polemic against television as an anaesthetizing medium which immunizes the viewer against the traumatic Real, which here resurfaces from among the buried dead bodies of French colonial history. Unlike in Funny Games, in Caché Haneke foregoes the schematic opposition between idyllic middle-class existence and external violence; here, it is the aseptic life of the bourgeoisie itself that is horrifying. This is yet another way in which the film resembles Lost Highway: “instead of the standard opposition between hyper-realist idyllic surface and its nightmarish obverse, we get the opposition of two horrors.”18 Horror lies in the uncannily clean, crisply framed images: the stylized interiors of the Parisian literati are always a little too clean to avoid instilling the viewer with a chilling disquiet. The clinical sheen of the high-definition image, which is perceptibly distinct from the saturated, warm colors of 35mm film, should not be mistaken for an aesthetic drawback of the film. Even the blank neutrality of the video image is part of an uncompromising form, in which video not only 17 Slavoj Žižek, Liebe dein Symptom wie dich selbst! Jacques Lacans Psychoanalyse und die Medien (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1991), p. 60. 18 Slavoj Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle: Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2000), p. 13.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED: CACHÉ

159

“zombifies” the gaze, but also neutralizes the pictorial image aesthetic of classical, analogue film. The icy coldness of the high-definition image is fundamentally inherent to Caché’s metacinematographic videology. On all levels, therefore, Caché lets irreversible contaminations, infections and fusions set in: between film and video, past and present, public and private. This logic of de-differentiation also encroaches on the spatial order: the rich, haut-bourgeois Paris of the cultural elite is suddenly confronted with the poor Paris of the immigrant proletariat. The street in which Majid lives is called Avenue Lénine. Once again, the street name is an ironic reference: this time to the failure of emancipatory politics, but also to the persistent presence of those class and race antagonisms which Georges would very much prefer to keep at bay. Following on from Code inconnu, in Caché the social space of Paris appears as a site of diverse antagonisms: “Contemporary Paris is marked by a diversity of competing ‘realities’ and histories, immediately butting up against one another. And it is a center implicitly connected to other spaces.”19 Georges hopes to prevent the violent penetration of this other space with all his might: he repeatedly attempts to privatize class and race antagonisms as biographical faux pas. In the auto-narrative of the bourgeois subject, class hatred and racism are reduced to harmless youthful indiscretions. Over and over again, Georges frenetically tries to ascertain his normality: “C’est normal, non?” Georges also performs this praxis of normalization, homogenization and consensualization in his work as a TV presenter. In yet another dissembled remediation, a televised roundtable of literature critics moderated by Georges, which we initially take to be happening in first-order diegetic time, is suddenly revealed through a freeze-frame on the image to be a recording – or, more precisely, a “second-order” television image, which Georges and a colleague are working on in an editing room. Georges urges his assistant to cut out passages in the conversation that strike him as too “theoretical.” Whatever does not yield to the regime of conformity must be excised. In contrast to the uncanniness of the videological remediation, in this televisual remediation the status of enunciation remains fully intact: it is Georges, the enunciator, who, as the author of his program, semanticizes the succession of shots through an edited sequence, which in contrast to the dissensual montage of the rest of the film is held together by the consensual causality of establishing shots and eyeline-matches. This is the only time that Georges, the arranger of these shots, is shown as master of his own 19 Janet Harbord, The Evolution of Film: Rethinking Film Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 81.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

160 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

gaze, whose transsubjective expropriation is recounted by the film – yet another little allegory of televisuality, in which the suture system still seems to function without any friction. The televisual praxis of suturing images is presented as a strategy that strives to eliminate every disruptive factor and every alien body. Television and video in Caché are far from following the same hegemonic logic: whereas television participates in the regime of the spectacle (both in Debord’s sense of the term and in the sense of an ideology of the visible), video qua gaze rejoins the repressed Outside of the spectacle. The electronic image in Caché is not perfectly identical with itself – this is one way, perhaps, in which the film departs from Haneke’s earlier works, which are indifferent to this distinction and in which both television and video simply accumulate the anaesthetizing terror of media spectacle. The acousmatic video gaze, my thesis has it, is counterposed to both the social-control regimes of television and surveillance, and the suture strategies of classical cinema. As Hermann Kappelhoff has asserted, the metafilmic videology of films such as Lost Highway denotes not so much the similarity between film and video as their thoroughgoing alterity: In these films, videos are designated as the literal Other of the cinema, the magnetism of its unconscious. This should be understood in a double sense: on the one hand, video images in these films point to a fantasy work, which is separated from official culture and repressed – trash, pornography, representations of extreme violence. On the other hand, they mark out a different plateau of consciousness, a level of traces of perception and memory, which denotes an ahuman, artificial consciousness.20

Of course, this paradox of an unconscious Cogito is, I have already stated, none other than the externalization of that which is already externalized in film – the gaze as absent cause, which represses the suture in vain. Or, in Lacanian terms: the video gaze further extimizes the extimacy of film. Is the unconsciousness, as Žižek has repeatedly stressed, not also the extimacy in the heart of subjectivity itself, an unassimilable alien body deep within ourselves?21 If the suture becomes fragile, the antagonism breaks out again. Suture can only repress the Absent One at the price of its reoccurrence: 20 Hermann Kappelhoff, “Der Bildraum des Kinos: Modulationen einer ästhetischen Erfahrungsform,” in Gertrud Koch (ed.), Umwidmungen: Architektonische und kinematografische Räume (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2005), p. 147. 21 Slavoj Žižek, Die Nacht der Welt: Psychoanalyse und deutscher Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), p. 17.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED: CACHÉ

161

We can see how, in this precise sense, suture is the exact opposite of the illusory, self-enclosed totality that successfully erases the decentred traces of its production process: suture means that, precisely, such self-enclosure is a priori impossible, that the excluded externality always leaves its traces within – or to put it in standard Freudian terms, that there is no repression (from the scene of phenomenal self-experience) without the return of the repressed.22

As such, Caché is not, after all, a schooling in the ubiquitous surveillance apparatus, as Thomas Y. Levin insists in his reading of the film, but, on the contrary, it is concerned with the ethics of the gaze, which confronts the self-identical Eye/I with its extimate doppelgänger: “Narratographically, it is a victory for the POV of the Other in the mode of surveillance, a new and suddenly inverted ethics of the gaze.”23 An ethics of the gaze, which also implies a politics of the gaze: Caché outlines the aetiology of a political uncanny, in which the individual psyche and the collective psyche cannot be divorced from one another. The interface between the micro-level of individual guilt and the macro-level of French colonial history is mediated through an unassimilable gaze, which also totalizes the singular history of the subject. That the acousmatic gaze does not only stage the enigma of the Other, but also the division of Georges’ own gaze, becomes clear in the sequence in which Georges and Majid reunite for the first time. Earlier, another video was filmed from a moving vehicle, but it then shows a moving point of view shot of a corridor, which breaks off before a closed door to a house. After Georges has identified the name of the street (Avenue Lénine) by freezing the video image, he follows the trace that the video leaves behind. We then see nearly the same subjective camera movement through the corridor, but this time it is clearly attributed as Georges’ subjective perspective, even if it lacks any suturing with a previous objective view. If we exclude the retroactive subjective embeddedness of the video images, which always represents the point of view shared by Georges and Anne, then this image is the first direct point of view shot in the film. In it, Georges’ own gaze coincides with the anonymous gaze which threatens him from without. Here, too, the suture logic is retroactive: because we have the unknown point of view of the video in front of our eyes, for a moment the gaze of the video overlaps with Georges’ look. Is the gaze of the Other Georges’ 22 Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears, p. 58. 23 Stewart, Framed Time, p. 199.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

162 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

gaze on himself? But the observation of others and the observation of oneself are even more indissolubly mingled, as Georges suddenly steps into his own field of vision, and what we took to be a point of view shot once again reveals itself to be a deceptive signal. Hence, we here have a zone of perfect indeterminacy between internal and external perspectives, in which our own gaze is also the gaze of the Other and vice versa. A better filmic evocation of Lacanian extimacy than that present in this folding and unfolding of gazes is hardly imaginable: “The gaze is a lacuna, a structural dead end, the significance of which can neither be intellectually probed nor triangulated. Any response to the gaze must come wholly from the unconscious of the subject, since there can be no ‘answer’ from the side of the object.”24 Georges strains against accepting the acousmatic gaze of the Absent One as his own gaze. He is incapable of recognizing the (non-)place of the alien psyche as the place of his own unconscious. “Georges must replay tapes of himself because the whole point of the exercise is that he should recognize his actions from the outside at last – and hence see his way, via historical response if not direct responsibility, into the place of the other.”25 The return of the repressed takes place both in the invisible violence of the gaze and in the shocking image in which Majid beckons Georges into his apartment, denies any participation in the videos, and then suddenly slits his throat with a razorblade. The shock of this suicide for the spectator remains undiminished even after repeat viewings. To find images and imaginations of violence which cannot be consumed has always been Haneke’s goal, and it is precisely in a film which otherwise barely contains any explicit images of violence that violence erupts with such sudden, traumatic force. Georges leaves Majid’s apartment and flees the shock of the Real by, of all things, going to the cinema, which is indicated by an elliptical cut. In a long-shot, we see Georges leaving a cinema, in which films with such suggestive titles as Ma mère, Deux frères and Almodóvar’s La mala educación are playing. This is less a dig in the ribs aimed at Haneke’s Spanish colleague as it is a critique of the Imaginary of private European arthouse cinema, which is here ironized as a pendant to the “anesthetic” nature of television. Both television and a certain type of European auteur cinema (it is notable that Georges does not flee to a Hollywood film) are allegorized in Caché as protective shields against the irruption of the Real. And it is this consensual filter of 24 Hugh S. Manon, “Comment ça, rien? Screening the Gaze on Caché,” in Brian Price and John David Rhodes (eds.), On Michael Haneke (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), p. 111. 25 Stewart, Framed Time, p. 198.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED: CACHÉ

163

hegemonic televisual and cinematographic images that is split apart by the acousmatic gaze in Caché. This does not, however, mean that, in line with the political modernism of a Godard, we have broken with the fiction. In spite (or because of) its externality, the acousmatic gaze remains a fictional construction. It is nonetheless a fiction that does not mimetically represent and reproduce “reality”; rather, it is a fiction which opens itself up to the impossibility of the “Real.” And yet, at least for the protagonist of the film, the confrontation with the Real does not result in any ethical or political conversion. This self-identical persistence is also at the center of that mercilessly long, uninterrupted longtake that follows the suicide: in the Laurents’ darkened bedroom, Georges finally confesses his earlier deed to Anne. The clearly lit spaces of the films suddenly cede to a darkness in which the characters become increasingly anonymous. Georges and Anne are perceptible only as shadows; their faces can barely be made out: “The spectator does not initially perceive on the screen what is present in these figures, but what is absent in them.”26 In this scene, Caché recalls, in spite of its other differences with Godard’s aesthetics, the beginning of Weekend, another endgame of bourgeois subjectivity. Like the abstract silhouettes in Godard, Georges and Anne, in the very moment of intimate confession, are stripped of their individuality. What Harun Farocki wrote about the couple in Weekend can also apply to them: “The two human figures in this scene are less persons than positionalities, into which a multitude of characters could be slotted.”27 Haneke refuses the filmic convention of marking the apparent emotional highpoint with close-ups, and holds the camera at an icy distance. The visual depersonalization makes the protagonists interchangeable: Georges Laurent is an Everyman; he could be me, you, him or her. In this scene, the film takes the form of confession to the point of absurdity: if you do not feel any guilt, the confession is meaningless. Since Georges is blithely unaware of bearing any responsibility, his admission has no cathartic effect. Georges, the bourgeois character-mask, who professionally smiles at the camera, continues what he was doing before, and now blames Majid’s young son for producing the anonymous videos: “I have nothing to hide (rien à cacher),” says Georges to Majid’s son, who seeks him out in his office. “Despite George’s attempt to escape the gaze of the Other in the form of its fictional dispersion by screen projection, what 26 Georg Seeßlen, “Strukturen der Vereisung: Blick, Perspektive und Gestus in den Filmen Michael Hanekes,” in Christian Wessely, Georg Larcher and Franz Grabner, (eds.), Michael Haneke und seine Filme. Eine Pathologie der Konsumgesellschaft (Marburg: Schüren, 2005), p. 50. 27 Farocki/Silverman, Speaking of Godard, p. 87.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

164 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

asserts itself against him at this turn is the uncanny of the real itself. What there is certainly no escaping is the optic of the unconscious.”28 According to Garrett Stewart, the uncanniness of the Real in Caché is “transnational, mnemonic and historical” in nature. To this list, we could also add the “political uncanny.” If politics is based, at its core, on an irreducible antagonism, then this antagonism is manifest in Caché both as the Real of the subject’s “psychic reality”29 and the Real of French imperialism. It is this antagonistic core of politics which haunts the film in the guise of an unassimilable gaze. Georges cannot escape it by his actions: coming home after the encounter with Majid’s son (the opening shot is repeated here for the last time) and taking two sleeping tablets (cachets in the French), turning the light out in the bedroom and lying naked in bed. Even the cachets, after all, cannot hide the hidden cache. Georges’ last attempt at repression is followed by the return of the repressed as the film’s final dream-image. It is a replay of the “primal scene”: Majid, who after being dobbed in by Georges has been sent away, struggles in vain against being dragged into the vehicle, which will convey him into the hors-champ, in a dual sense. The scene is again filmed in the real-time mode of surveillance cameras: a static long-shot from inside the barn, and with an inner framing enclosed by darkness, which suggests the darkness of the absent camera-cause. “The camera is never decoded,”30 and yet in this sequence more than any other, the film comes close to a suture. Even if the reverse-shot is suspended up to the end, in an earlier dream we had seen the young Georges inside the shadow-bedecked barn. And even if the epistemic status of the dream image (and thus all of the film’s supposed dream-images) remains open, and we do not precisely know whether it is a mimetic memory-image or a retroactively imagined scene, Georges must face the paradox of his unconscious: that the extimate gaze of the Other coincides with his own gaze. “Projecting a camera into the unconscious itself,”31 as Garrett Stewart sums up this f inal enunciation without an enunciator. At this point, the idea of the camera as a Vorstellungs-Repräsentanz or ideational representative, briefly alluded to in the context of Psycho in Chapter 2.3, can be revisited. In Caché, the camera is only present in a kind of double absence – as the invisible representative of an absent, imagined 28 Stewart, Framed Time, p. 199. 29 Lacan’s concept of the Real is based on, among others, Freud’s notion of “psychic reality.” 30 Khanna, “From Rue Morgue to Rue des Iris,” p. 243. 31 Stewart, Framed Time, p. 199.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED: CACHÉ

165

gaze, whose real status is always uncertain. In this psychoanalytic sense, the camera is the “Vorstellungs-Repräsentanz, the signifying representative of the lack of representation.”32 If Georges remains forbidden from traversing the negativity of this ideational representative, the film at least indicates, in its closing shot, a possible line of flight that escapes the spell of negative totality without denying its wounds. Once again, we see an immobile long-shot in real-time. This time it is the steps of a school building, which we recognize from an earlier scene as being Pierrot’s school. There is a bustle of moving bodies which decenter the image and are not directed towards a perspectival vanishing point. It is initially unclear who or what is meant to be shown in the shot, with its apparent visual and narrative indeterminacy. Once again, it is only upon a repeated viewing of the film that a conversation between Majid and Pierrot (which we cannot hear) can be seen on the left-hand side of the screen, after which they each go their own way without any apparent hostility. It may well be in the under-determined nature of the shot that its difference to the unrelenting (over-)determination of the acousmatic gaze lies: even if the image seems once again to have been videologically remediated, we briefly forget the question posed by the suture theorists, “Who is watching this?” in favor of a “What is happening in the image?” And it is no coincidence that the asignificance of the image is associated with a possible solidarity between the two sons. Perhaps it is the timid hope of the film that the new generation of sons may be freed of the forcible repetition of the “tradition of all dead generations, which weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (Marx), and that new opportunities and constellations may be made possible precisely in the awareness of the antagonistic history of the fathers’ generation. Caché thus ends with a fragile, but strangely calming, “pacified” shot, in which the image – as Lacan might say – tames the uncanniness of the evil-eye and supersedes itself. For a brief moment, there is a certain dialectical reconciliation of image and gaze, which the film – and, of course, this book – predominantly has resolved and will resolve in favor of the irreconcilable negativity of the latter. And in spite of this brief moment of peace, Caché is still, of course, a film which more than any other mobilizes the gaze as a negative force, and thereby highlights the theoretical problematic of this book (or at least its first part) in an uncompromising aesthetic form. To sum up: the acousmatic video gaze in Caché is the return of repressed history. The film’s video images designate the magnetism of a political uncanny in a double sense: they externalize the repressed Outside of filmic 32 Žižek, Die Nacht der Welt, p. 26.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

166 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

suture as an extimization of both a psychic and a historical antagonism. The open wound of the film is consubstantial with the open wound of history. In this sense, Caché enables a “seamless” transition to the second part of this book, which turns its focus to the political film aesthetics of Fredric Jameson. “History is what hurts,” as Jameson wrote in a famous dictum: the absent cause is, for him, none other than history itself, which repeatedly catches up to us: “Conceived in this sense, History is what hurts. […] We may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them.”33 The protagonist in Caché would prefer to ignore it, but a political aesthetic and theory of the cinema should face up to them and look the abyssal ground of the absent cause in the eyes.

Bibliography Beugnet, Martine, “Blind Spot,” Screen 48:2 (2007), pp. 227-231. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). Chion, Michel, “Without Music: On Caché,” in Roy Grundmann (ed.), A Companion to Michael Haneke (Malden/Oxford: WIley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 161-167. Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Thomas Elsaesser, “Performative Self-Contradictions: Michael Haneke’s Mind Games,” in Roy Grundmann (ed.), A Companion to Michael Haneke (Malden/ Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Farocki, Harun, and Kaja Silverman, Speaking about Godard (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Frampton, Daniel, Filmosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 2002). Khanna, Ranjana, “From Rue Morgue to Rue des Iris,” Screen 48:2 (2007), pp. 237-244.
 Harbord, Janet, The Evolution of Film: Rethinking Film Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Kappelhoff, Hermann, “Der Bildraum des Kinos: Modulationen einer ästhetischen Erfahrungsform,” in Gertrud Koch (ed.), Umwidmungen: Architektonische und kinematografische Räume (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2005), pp. 138-149. Levin, Thomas Y., “Five Tapes, Four Halls, Two Dreams: Vicissitudes of Surveillant Narration in Michael Haneke’s Caché,” in A Companion to Michael Haneke (Malden/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 75-90. 33 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 88.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED: CACHÉ

167

Manon, Hugh S., “Comment ça, rien? Screening the Gaze on Caché,” in Brian Price and John David Rhodes (eds.), On Michael Haneke (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), pp. 105-120. Naqvi, Fatima, “The Politics of Contempt and the Ecology of Images: Michael Haneke’s Code Inconnu,” Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick (eds.), The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary: 1945 to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 235-252. Peucker, Brigitte, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). Georg Seeßlen, “Strukturen der Vereisung: Blick, Perspektive und Gestus in den Filmen Michael Hanekes,” in Christian Wessely, Georg Larcher and Franz Grabner, (eds.), Michael Haneke und seine Filme: Eine Pathologie der Konsumgesellschaft (Marburg: Schüren, 2005), pp. 47-65. Silverman, Kaja, The Threshold of the Visible World (London: Routledge, 1996). Stewart, Garrett, Framed Time: Towards a Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). –––, “Waking Glyph/Making Live: Cinema after the Digital,” in Lisa Åkervall, Adina Lauenburger, Sulgi Lie and Christian Tedjasukmana (eds.), Waking Life: Kino zwischen Technik und Leben (Berlin: B_Books, 2016). Žižek, Slavoj, Liebe dein Symptom wie dich selbst! Jacques Lacans Psychoanalyse und die Medien (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1991). –––, Die Metastasen des Genießens: Sechs erotisch-politische Versuche (Vienna: Passagen, 1996). –––, Die Nacht der Welt: Psychoanalyse und deutscher Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998). –––, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle: Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2000). –––, The Fright of Real Tears (London: BFI, 2001).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Part II Allegories of Totality: Fredric Jameson’s Political Film Aesthetics

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Introduction Abstract In the second part of this book, the political aesthetics of negativity is worked through from a different perspective. In Fredric Jameson’s writings on film, which are based on an idiosyncratic synthesis of Hegelian Marxism and psychoanalysis, the absent cause of the Lacanian real is that of a social totality which has become inaccessible to the subject under the conditions of late capitalism. For Jameson, the problem of a political film aesthetic refers primarily to an epistemological problem of aesthetically sensualizing the incommensurability between subject and totality. Keywords: Totality, Subject, Capitalism, Epistemology

“Dialectical analysis is ultimately analysis of form, it endeavors to dissolve the positivity of its object in the totality of its formal mediations.” – Slavoj Žižek, on Fredric Jameson

The “vanishing mediator”: Fredric Jameson developed this important dialectical concept with the aid of the writings of Max Weber. According to Jameson, in the transition to capitalism, Protestantism took over the function of an ideological transmission belt, and after the fulfillment of its historical mission it not only forfeited its hegemonic position, but totally vanished. Once the Protestant ethic of rationalization had been anchored in the subjects’ forms of consciousness and habitus, its religious authority and autonomy vanished: There remains to be characterized the final transition to the situation of modern capitalism, and it is here more than anywhere else that Protestantism assumes its function as a “vanishing mediator.” For what happens here is essentially that once Protestantism has accomplished the task of allowing a rationalization of innerwordly life to take place, it has no

Lie, S., Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462983632_intro_part02

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

172 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

further reason for being and disappears from the historical scene. It is thus in the strictest sense of the word a catalytic agent that permits an exchange of energies between two otherwise mutually exclusive terms; and we may say that with the removal of the brackets, the whole institution of religion itself (in other words, what is here designated as “Protestantism”) serves in its turn as kind of overall bracket or framework within which change takes place and which can be dismantled and removed when its usefulness is over.1

Protestantism as a vanishing mediator realizes itself in its self-abolition. Its ideological triumph is identical with its own liquidation. Jameson understands his contribution as an intervention in the old Marxist debate on the relation between base and superstructure: the concept of the vanishing mediator brings into play a more complex causality model compared to the reflection model of vulgar Marxism, one which ascribes to the superstructure itself the capacity for reverse determination. If we divorce Jameson’s term from the specific historical dialectic of economic transformation and changing forms of subjectivation, then the theoretical proximity to the structural concept of the absent cause becomes clear. What else is the camera qua gaze than a vanishing mediator that disappears from the field of its effects? It seems to be no coincidence that Jameson does not speak of vanishing “mediation,” but grammatically subjectivizes his notion. Likewise, Oudart did not speak of Absence, but of the Absent One. This negative figure of the vanishing mediator leads directly to the fundamental problematic of suture and enunciation theory: is it not precisely in the necessary disappearance of the subject of enunciation that the cinematic apparatus is condemned to ideology? Can the mediator, once it has vanished, be positively determined? The first part of this book has treated these questions and defended a political and aesthetic affirmation of the disappearance of the apparatus. Here, in the second part of the book, Fredric Jameson stands as the theoretical guarantor of such a political aesthetics of negativity. Or, in other words: a Marxist aesthetics of production without production. With Jameson, whose voluminous œuvre has received little critical attention outside of the English-speaking world, the critical turn away from apparatus theory is continued, without in any way giving up on the epistemological potential of a political aesthetics of cinema. The notion of the “Outside” of film should 1 Fredric Jameson, “The Vanishing Mediator; or Max Weber as Storyteller,” in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986 vol. II: Syntax of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 25.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Introduction

173

not, after all, be understood as a mystification of absence and evacuation, but as an opening of the aesthetic to an extra-aesthetic totality, which must be penetrated precisely in its non-transparency. As I will show, the basic terms of Jameson’s theory, such as representability, allegory and cognitive mapping, target the production of a political knowledge that goes far beyond the act of making the disappeared means of production visible again. In the following two passages from Signatures of the Visible, Jameson makes clear his skepticism towards apparatus theory, as well as the strategies used by Godard to bring about the re-emergence of the vanished mediator: Rather, “truth” (or what was formerly called authenticity) is here an iconoclastic and negative or a sheer deconstructive project, identified almost exclusively with experimental film, which undermines all forms of representation and yet thereby in some way requires representation in order to do its work. It seems fair to suppose that this position (which takes a variety of conceptual and philosophical forms) is still the hegemonic aesthetic today.2

He further writes: Indeed, if commodity fetishism can in one way be usefully characterized as “the effacement of the traces of production from the object,” then aesthetic dereification will naturally enough be identified as the will to deconceal those traces: yet the book or the painting remains produced, no matter how insistently it tries to unravel itself; and even the films of Godard in hindsight seem susceptible to a kind of retroactive canonization-reification in which ostentatious marks of improvisation or editing interventions are frozen over after the fact (and by the sheer familiarity of numerous rescreenings) into the timeless features of the “masterwork.”3

Jameson here refers to the aporia that the fetishistic separation of production and product, of enunciation and énoncé, can never be completely transcended, because, to a certain degree, the cause always separates itself from its effect: the trace cannot be retroactively stamped onto the traceless object. The political anachronism of a demasking of the production process, as we could argue in line with Jameson, is made all the more acute in light 2 Fredric Jameson, “The Existence of Italy,” in Signatures of the Visible (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 220.
 3 Ibid., p. 259.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

174 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

of a social totality in which, more than ever before, the economic relations of production result in a fundamental decentering and displacement. This growing cleft between subject and totality is for Jameson the epistemic dilemma of the late-capitalist present. In the demand to demystify and make visible the relations of production, we can see the articulation of a nostalgic desire for the concrete, which is no longer commensurable with the level of abstraction in late-capitalist society. Whereas classical film theory had ascribed the aesthetic and political capacity of film to its affinity with the concrete nature of profilmic, physical reality, and apparatus theory strove towards the concretization of the filmic reverse-side, Jameson sought to outline a political film aesthetics that faces up to its abstract Outside. Thus, Jameson writes in his study on Adorno: It would then be equally justifiable to say that aesthetics always leads back to history itself, and that for art the ‘non-identical’ is society. […]the real problem perhaps being, as has been said above, the very matter of representation itself, of the representation of this totality, about which all of postmodernism concurs that even if it exists it would be unrepresentable and unknowable. 4

If, for the Marxist Jameson, there can be, in the final instance, no pure autonomy of art, then this does not mean that the aesthetic somehow reflects the social, or that it can be derived from it. Society, which is non-identical with art, leaves behind its wounds, and thus makes the aesthetic nonidentical with itself. A political aesthetics can never hermetically close itself off from the social totality, nor can it make the totality meaningfully intelligible as a meaningful whole. And yet it insists on the mediation of the unmediatable, the representation of the unrepresentable, the commensurability of the incommensurable. For Jameson, dialectics begins at this extreme point of the impossible: “Now we may begin to hazard the guess that something like the dialectic will always begin to appear when thinking approaches the dilemma of incommensurability, in whatever form; and that the dialectic henceforth seems to be the shift of thinking on to a new and unaccustomed plane in an effort to deal with the fact of distinct and autonomous realities that seem to offer no contact with each other.”5 4 Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or The Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 225, 248. 5 Fredric Jameson, “Three Names of the Dialectic,” in Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), p. 24.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Introduction

175

In other words: a political aesthetics in Jameson’s sense must fail in order to be successful. But it would be false to draw a left-wing melancholy, a pathos of failure, from this position. The aesthetic, for Jameson, creates new organs, which transsubjectively expand the perceptive and cognitive capacities of the subject. At this point, Jameson’s central concept of allegory intersects with suture theory: both allegory and suture originate in a wound in representation; their motor force is the power of the negative. Even in its most stable forms, suture can never entirely close shut the wound of the Absent One, while allegory designates its object through an imperfect representation. In allegory and suture, success and failure are inseparable. Hence, they are vanishing mediators, but in their disappearance they leave behind a trace which becomes overt in the moments of failure or parapraxis, in the symptomatic nodal points, where false connections, traumatic blockades and involuntary stoppages coincide. It is not, however, the trace of production relations that reveals itself here, but a traceless trace, in which the disappeared cause persists as a phantom. Allegory and suture, we could preemptively say of the following discussion on Jameson, produce in their failure a sensorium for unreal organs, which is related to so-called phantom pains: “In Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, for example, the experience of the body finds its Archimedean point outside itself in the peculiar borderline exceptionalities of the so-called ‘phantom member’ – that is, the continuing sensations ‘in’ limbs which have been amputated.”6 In this sense, the psychoanalysis of the cinematic phantom limb begun in the first part of this book will be prolonged by using Jameson’s Marxism. The cinema amputates the eye of the subject through the anorganic organ of the gaze. A political film aesthetics must cut across the pain of this phantom limb.

Bibliography Jameson, Fredric, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986 vol. II: Syntax of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). –––, Late Marxism: Adorno, or The Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990). –––, Signatures of the Visible (London: Routledge, 1992). –––, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009).

6 Jameson, Late Marxism, p. 134.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

6. The Dialectics of Mass Culture Abstract Jameson reads popular Hollywood films as political allegories. Three different levels of allegory can be distinguished, which in my opinion are characterized by a growing degree of abstraction. In his interpretation of Jaws and The Godfather, allegory describes the mode of personification of class relationships that have become invisible. The fictional characters are decoded as allegorical representatives of different class positions. The abstract dimension of collective processes is thus simultaneously embodied and kept open by means of concrete characters. In Jameson’s analysis of Dog Day Afternoon, we can observe a change in his use of allegory, away from the concrete character towards abstract spatial images. In this film, it is precisely the manifest political dimension of the character played by Al Pacino that sabotages the political significance of the film, while the evocation of totality is set in motion by an apparently insignificant secondary character, and, finally, by the airport images in the film’s conclusion, which are completely detached from any figurative personification. Keywords: Allegory, Class, Personification, Space

Whenever a political aesthetics is to be determined, then alongside an over-evaluation of self-reflexivity, we can often observe a second, related reflex which takes it as self-evident that only those politically radical works of art should be treated whose modernist or avant-gardist autonomy is irreconcilable with the consumable commodity forms produced by capitalist mass culture. As I have already pointed out, 1970s film theory, in particular, constructed a monolithic Hollywood cinema whose ideological hegemony was to be opposed. If there is one theorist who can be used to counteract such anachronistic but still quite prevalent reflexes, then it is Fredric Jameson. Although he is a great advocate for all forms of European modernism, Jameson has always stressed the political forms articulated in Hollywood

Lie, S., Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462983632_ch06

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

178 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

cinema.1 As Colin MacCabe pointed out in his introduction to Jameson’s book The Geopolitical Aesthetic, since apparatus theory’s over-evaluation of Godard, film theory has not advanced a single noteworthy attempt at a new political film aesthetics.2 That this is perhaps not entirely the case was demonstrated in the first part of the present book. Jameson, however, is indeed one of the few writers who has explicitly taken it upon himself to reformulate the relationship between film and politics, and, in doing so, to find a way out from the dogmatic dead-ends of 1970s theory. He is not merely concerned with a simple reversal of the hierarchies between high and low, but with a dialectical intertwining of modernism and mass culture, which relativizes their apparent irreconcilability. It is thus no coincidence that two early essays Jameson dedicated to the cinema seek to root out the progressive potential of Hollywood film as a dialectic of mass culture. Nor is it any coincidence that both of these essays center on New Hollywood films, and thus a period in American cinema which, in spite of its immense commercial popularity, appropriated certain elements of modernist European cinema. For Jameson, it is perhaps because the New Hollywood cinema of the 1970s has inscribed the tension between modernism and mass culture into the films themselves that it is of such interest.

6.1 Reification and Utopia: Jaws and The Godfather In Europe (and especially in Germany), popular culture has long had difficulty in gaining recognition as an object of study or intellectual interest. But that has now changed. In recent decades, various analyses (based on cultural studies, sociology, media history, etc.) of numerous pop-culture forms and phenomena have been carried out. In a US context, Jameson nonetheless observes that the analysis of mass culture and popular culture is essentially constructed in opposition to high culture; in order to justify their research object, its theorists have defamed a preoccupation with high culture as the private pleasure of an intellectual elite. Jameson recognizes this as an unthinking anti-intellectualism, typical of sections of the American left. In his view, the American apologists of mass culture not only are ignorant of the critical or negative attitude to mass culture 1 For Jameson’s most recent grappling with modernism, see Mythen der Moderne (Berlin: Kadmos, 2002), and The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007). 2 See Colin MacCabe, “Introduction,” in Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. xv.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Dialectics of Mass Culture

179

that aesthetic modernism would take against the social status quo, but they also lack a methodological framework for the analysis of popular cultural forms that would go beyond the mere pronouncement that the products of mass culture generally reach broader layers of the population than do the products of high culture. For Jameson this affirmation of the popular is diametrically opposed to the cultural theory of the Frankfurt School: “Briefly, this view can be characterized as the extension and application of Marxist theories of commodity reification to the works of mass culture.”3 The concept of reification is drawn from Georg Lukács’ famous book History and Class Consciousness: Lukács’ conception of reification is best initially grasped as a synthesis of Marx and Weber. It is a development of Marx’s description, not merely of commodity fetishism and exchange but of commodity form itself, which is now enlarged to include Weber’s account of the rationalization process; of the Taylorization not merely of the work process but also of the mind, of the scientific disciplines fully as much as of the psyche and senses. The operative paradox of this first extraordinary systemic account of the logic of capitalism lies in the way in which it insists on extreme fragmentation as a social norm. It attempts to project a process which separates, compartmentalizes, specializes and disperses: a force which at one and the same time operates uniformly over everything and makes of heterogeneity a homogenous and standardizing power. 4

For the Frankfurt School theorists, commodified reification does not leave aesthetic production unscathed. All forms of human activity are subjected to the abstract quantification inherent to capitalist rationalization. The regime of equivalence that materializes in the universal exchange-value of money makes no distinction in its commodification of all forms of human labor, regardless of whether it is that of a coal miner or an opera composer. What the Frankfurt School’s reification theory describes on the level of production is, for Jameson, no less applicable when it comes to consumption, since, “by its transformation into a commodity, a thing, of whatever type, has been reduced to a means for its own consumption. It no longer has any qualitative value in itself, but only insofar as it can be ‘used’: the various forms of activity lose their immanent intrinsic satisfactions as activity 3 Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (1979), p. 130. 4 Fredric Jameson, “History and Class Consciousness as an Unfinished Project,” in Valences of the Dialectic, p. 204.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

180 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

and become means to an end.”5 In the end, this process of “becomingcommodity” even colonizes nature: the tourist, so to speak, consumes the landscape by photographically reifying it into an image and repurposing it as a personal possession. For Jameson, this explains the significance of the famous scene in Godard’s Les Carabiniers in which the protagonists return from their military campaign and show off their postcards of tourist attractions. Photographic representations replace the real referents, just as in the cinema sequence in the same film Ulysse (Marino Mase) mistakes the filmic image for reality, as he tears down the whole screen in his desperate attempt to enter the image of a naked woman taking a bath. Here, Jameson follows Guy Debord’s thesis that in the “society of the spectacle” the image itself is the epitome of reification: “The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.”6 In a consumer society saturated with images, it is less the object in its specific use-value that is consumed, and more cathected pictures and fantasies (“images” in both senses of the word), which are fetishistically coupled with specific commodities. For Jameson, the commodification of culture in the culture industry remarked upon by the Frankfurt School is closely intertwined with the culturalization and aestheticization of capitalist commodity production, which penetrates art on both a macro- and a micro-level. On the macro-level, the expansion of commodity logic changes the traditional definition of the aesthetic (Kant’s “purposefulness without a purpose”), by turning artistic production into a branch of general commodity production, which must make profits. On the micro-level, the commodity-form penetrates the formal structure of art itself: in the popular detective-novel, for example, the narrative structure is entirely determined by instrumental purpose-means-relations: storylines progress in linear fashion to their conclusion, certain highpoints in the plots make serial returns, the narrative produces a certain sensation of recognition, etc. Even the differentiation of different popular genres is understood by Jameson in analogy to the differentiation between consumer goods in the service of permanent repetition: “The atomized or serial ‘public’ of mass culture wants to see the same thing over and over again, hence the urgency of the generic structure and the generic signal.”7 Jameson remains loyal to the Frankfurt School’s critique of reification, but he proceeds to criticize their undialectical affirmation of aesthetic 5 Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” p. 131. 6 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donal Nicholson Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), p. 24. 7 Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” p. 137.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Dialectics of Mass Culture

181

modernism: “What is unsatisfactory about the Frankfurt School position is not its negative and critical apparatus, but rather the positive value on which the latter depends, namely the valorization of traditional modernist high art as the locus of some genuinely critical and subversive, ‘autonomous’ aesthetic production.”8 Against the normative over-evaluation of modernism, Jameson stresses the historicity of modernism itself. From a historical standpoint, the division of modernism and mass culture is a relatively recent phenomenon that only sets in with the totalization of the commodity form. For Jameson both mass culture and high culture can only be understood as dialectically related surface forms of a deeper reification of aesthetic production. In this light, the perspectives on both high and low culture are displaced. The popular was, in its historic form as the culture of the people, an authentic expression of homogeneous social groups, and thus a collective world of experience. Among the conditions of late-capitalist socialization, this organic relationship between collectivity and art is eroded through the atomization of community structures into market individuals and commodity-money-monads isolated from one another: “the ‘popular’ as such no longer exists, except under very specific and marginalized conditions. […] The commodity production of contemporary or industrial mass culture thus has nothing whatsoever to do, and nothing in common, with older forms of popular or folk art.”9 In Jameson’s dialectical model, modernism, together with the aesthetics of negativity favored by Adorno, is not the solution to the occupation of art by the culture industry, but is itself a reactive symptom to reification. In this sense, modernist art reacts to the ubiquity of the commodity form, by radically renouncing consumption itself. It seeks “not to be a commodity, to devise an aesthetic language incapable of offering commodity satisfaction, and resistant to instrumentalization.”10 If both mass culture and modernism can be conceived of as a dual symptom of totalized commodification, then there can be no art that is external to this entanglement. But Jameson’s Lukácsian diagnosis, as negative as it may sound, does not imply that the stigma of the commodity form in and of itself makes art completely impossible. For a start, nothing else is stated about the possibility of a political aesthetics, other than that it forcibly falls under the sole aegis of modernism. Although Jameson critically opposes the tendency of the forms of mass culture towards repetition and serialization, he nonetheless sees more in them than the eternal recurrence of exchange-equivalence 8 Ibid., p. 133. 9 Ibid., p. 134. 10 Ibid., pp. 134-135.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

182 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

and reification. Against the manipulation theory of vulgar Marxism (mass culture as a form of brainwashing in the service of the ruling class), but equally against the ideological critique of mass-culture as the stabilizer of “false consciousness,” Jameson insists on popular culture’s ambivalent ability to seek a mediation between real social contradictions and their imaginary re-shaping. Far from functioning as escapist regression, as the manipulation thesis would have it, mass culture must, in order to have any actual effect, relate to social forms of experience. Mass culture, according to Jameson, does not deny the antagonistic reality of late capitalism, but transforms this into imaginary, consensual constructions. Jameson’s recourse to the concept of the imaginary is, even without any explicit reference to Lacan and Althusser, clearly legible as modeled on the psychoanalytic theory of ideology: Both modernism and mass culture entertain relations of repression with the fundamental social anxieties and concerns, hopes and blind spots, ideological antinomies and fantasies of disaster, which are their raw material; only where modernism tends to handle this material by producing compensatory structures of various kinds, mass culture represses them by the narrative construction of imaginary resolutions and by the projection of an optical illusion of social harmony.11

Mass culture as the imaginary resolution and repression of real contradictions – the echo of Althusser’s famous def inition of ideology as the representation of “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”12 is here hard to miss. But in this early period of Jameson’s theoretical work, the reference to psychoanalysis is still rather illdefined,13 and the result is a vacillation between a still relatively traditional Marxist conception of ideology as the veiling of “reality” and a more Lacanian conception of the repression of the “Real.” Interestingly, this vacillation manifests itself in the two film analyses with which Jameson follows his theoretical foundations: Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and the first two parts of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972-1974), thereby treating three of New Hollywood’s most successful films. Jaws has a special position in the context of 1970s Hollywood cinema, since numerous critics consider the film to be the birth moment of the 11 Ibid., p. 141. 12 See above, Part I, Introduction, fn. 3. 13 It is only explicitly formulated in his book The Political Unconscious. For more, see below, Chapter 6.3.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Dialectics of Mass Culture

183

contemporary blockbuster, whose hyper-commercial form has practically killed of the aesthetic freedom of New Hollywood. Hence, for Jim Hoberman the voracious Great White Shark is the perfect metaphor for a culture industry which from that point on began to narrate itself and celebrate the “triumph of invested capital”14 (as Adorno and Horkheimer put it) in the unleashing of pure spectacle and attraction values. Jaws is considered to be the beginning of a new conservatism in Hollywood cinema, which ideologically anticipates the 1980s. For Robert Kolker, too, Spielberg’s name rings in the end of New Hollywood: The ideological structures of most of Spielberg’s films “hail” the spectator into a world of the obvious that affirms the viewer’s presence (even while dissolving it), affirms that what the viewer has always believed or hoped is (obviously) right and accessible, and assures the viewer excitement and comfort in the process. The films offer nothing new beyond their spectacle, nothing the viewer does not already want, does not immediately accept. That is their conservative power.15

Jameson largely aligns himself with ideology critique’s skepticism towards Jaws, but in contrast to most interpreters, his symptomatic reading of the film skirts around the obvious question of the significance of the shark. In Jameson’s view, we would fall into the film’s trap if we understand the polysemous openness of the shark in a vulgar-psychoanalytic manner as the return of a repressed which in manifold ways can stand for the Other of American society (communism, the Third World, the threat of nature, the organic body, etc.). For Jameson, it is precisely this symbolic over- and under-determined quality of the shark that makes it amenable to potential progressive readings, and this is the most profoundly ideological aspect of the film: As a symbolic vehicle, then, the shark must be understood in terms of its essentially polysemous function rather than any particular content attributable to it by this or that spectator. Yet it is precisely this polysemousness which is profoundly ideological, insofar as it allows essentially 14 Jim Hoberman, “Nashville contra Jaws, or ‘The Imagination of Disaster’ Revisited,” in Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath and Noel King (eds.), The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), p. 211. 15 Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 275.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

184 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

social and historical anxieties to be folded back into apparently “natural” ones, to be both expressed and recontained in what looks like a conflict with other forms of biological existence.16

The polysemousness of a sign does not necessarily stand in the way of its naturalization – the shark is, for Jameson, an example of the perfect symbiosis of open semiosis and “second nature,” of a dispersal and recentering of signification. “And it is in this way, finally, that the shark acts as a master-signifier, as what various ideological tendencies recognize themselves in, what ‘quilts’ them, makes them equivalent.”17 Alongside this evidential ideological power of the master-signifier “shark,” Jameson identifies in the film a second, thoroughly latent imaginary homogenization of real contradictions, which is decipherable through the constellation of the three main characters. This displacement of attention to rather peripheral phenomena of the narrative material is a prominent hallmark of Jameson’s dialectical film analyses: it is a hermeneutic operation, which slides from the micro-level to the macro-level, or, to speak with Marx: from the concrete to the abstract. For Jameson, the central ideologeme in Jaws does not reside in the shark, but in the representative function of the protagonists. Briefly put, Jameson treats the three protagonists in Jaws as figurative ciphers for different class layers: the policeman Brody (Roy Scheider) is the representative of law and order, the scientist Hooper (Richard Dreyfus) is the representative of a technocratic elite, and finally the shark-hunter and ex-World War II soldier Quint (Robert Shaw) is the representative of the old, Fordist America. As Jameson’s thesis has it, the death of Quint when taking vengeance on the shark seals a new class alliance, which rings in a new era: We are thus authorized to read the death of Quint in the f ilm as the two-fold symbolic destruction of an older America – the America of small business and individual private enterprise of a now outmoded kind, but also the America of the New Deal and the crusade against Nazism, the older America of the depression and the war and of the heyday of classical liberalism. Now the content of the partnership between Hooper and Brody projected by the film may be specified socially and politically, as the allegory of an alliance between the forces of law-and-order and the new technocracy of the multinational corporations: an alliance which must 16 Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” p. 142. 17 Rex Butler, Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory (New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 45.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Dialectics of Mass Culture

185

be cemented, not merely by its fantasized triumph over the ill-defined menace of the shark itself, but above all by the indispensable precondition of the effacement of that more traditional image of an older America which must be eliminated from historical consciousness and social memory before the new power system takes its place.18

Jameson’s use of the concept of allegory here does not yet possess the complexity that characterizes his later texts, and he largely outlines a simple mode of personification, in which the characters, beyond their individual function in the narrative, equally stand for broader social positions. But even in his analysis of Jaws, the procedure that marks all his later works becomes recognizable: he deciphers films (and particularly those in which the explicitly political level is not spontaneously apparent) as political allegories. In the case of Jaws, this process of allegorizing class history works on an ideological neutralization of that historical Real which links the film with the character of Quint: “He doesn’t come from fiction, he comes from fact. […] And it would be fracturing of the rules of f iction to rehabilitate Quint because his story doesn’t belong to the film but to history.”19 The final sacrifice of Quint when taking vengeance on the shark enables the formation of a new alliance – a new “suture,” even – between the representatives of an ascendant ruling class, which “projects a whole new strategy of legitimation; and it effectively displaces the class antagonisms between rich and poor which persist in consumer society by substituting for them a new and spurious kind of fraternity in which the viewer rejoices without understanding that he or she is excluded from it.”20 To this extent, the logic of the suture (on a thematic rather than on a formal level, of course) can be transferred to the ideological work of Jaws: the exclusion of a foreign body enables the restitution of a new hegemonic articulation that produces the evidential effect of a natural imaginary resolution. Thus, in the closing image of Jaws, in which Brody and Hooper reach the beach after their victory over the shark, even the land and the sea are reconciled with each other, and the closure of suture is thereby sealed: “Jaws, after all, was a ‘film of renewal,’ which divided and united not only New and Old Hollywood, but also new and old America, a new and old alliance between democracy and capitalism.”21 18 19 20 21

Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” pp. 143-144. Antonia Quirke, Jaws (London: BFI, 2002), p. 86. Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” p. 144. Georg Seeßlen, Steven Spielberg und seine Filme (Marburg: Schüren, 2001), p. 36.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

186 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

While Jameson’s analysis of Jaws, in spite of his surprising change of perspective from the shark to the main characters, finally remains beholden to the principles of a traditional critique of ideology, his complementary interpretation of the first two parts of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather goes a dialectical step further. It is here that the announced revision of mass-culture texts as a place of false and correct consciousness is unpacked. Jameson’s key term for the progressive semantics of the popular is “utopia,” a concept which, like the terms “reification” and “ideology,” lost much of its power of attraction during the period in which critical theory was hostile to Marxism, but which Jameson in his more recent works holds onto just as firmly as he does in this text from the late 1970s: “the hypothesis is that the works of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly Utopian as well.”22 This dialectic of ideology and utopia is balanced in different ways in the two parts of The Godfather. If every gangster film is also a film about the violent mechanisms of capitalism, then the ideological function of the figure of the Godfather initially lies in substituting the world of crime for the sphere of political economy. The normal functioning of the capitalist economy is diverted from a structural level to a moral level. This displacement suggests that the excesses of the accumulation of profit are only the perverted result of a mythical evil that is embodied in the Mafia. Such an ideological reshaping is, however, overlaid by the utopia of a community of solidarity that resists the atomization processes of late-capitalist socialization. In The Godfather, this vanishing point is “the family itself, seen as a figure of collectivity and as the object of a Utopian longing, if not a Utopian envy.”23 Although the fantasy of a pre-modern, organic, patriarchally integrated community is not free of reactionary traits, for Jameson it forms, at least in the first part of The Godfather, a utopian counter-schema to the totality of reification, since “reification at once accounts for the historical processes of differentiation, separation and division under capitalism and at the same time for the psychic fragmentation at the individual experience level.”24 If, in the first part of The Godfather, something like a pre-capitalist social model is retroactively and prospectively projected as a utopian vision, in The Godfather Part II this dialectic switches from the mythical genre narrative to the global history of American capitalism itself, which extends from the 22 Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” p. 144. 23 Ibid., p. 136. 24 Sean Homer, Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1998), p. 49.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Dialectics of Mass Culture

187

complex, interwoven crosscutting in the films from the Sicilian immigration of the early 20th century to the Cuban revolution of the early 1960s: The first film held the two dimensions of ideology and Utopia together within a single generic structure, whose conventions remained intact. With the second film, however, this structure falls as it were into history itself, which submits it to a patient deconstruction that will in the end leave its ideological content undisguised and its displacements visible to the naked eye. Thus the Mafia material, which in the first film served as a substitute for business, now slowly transforms itself into the overt thematics of business itself, just as “in reality” the need for the cover of legitimate investments ends up turning the mafiosi into real businessmen. The climactic end moment of this historical development is then reached (in the film, but also in real history) when American business, and with it American imperialism, meet that supreme ultimate obstacle to their internal dynamism and structurally necessary expansion which is the Cuban Revolution.25

As a retrospective prehistory of the first part, flashbacks relay the youth of Don Corleone (Robert de Niro), as he accrues power and reputation in the Little Italy of the 1920s by murdering the local Mafia boss, and turns himself into an entrepreneur through thieving from the wealthy. Two models of violence are counter-posed here: the unjust violence of the “Black Hand” (the local godfather), who runs a protection racket in his own community, and the just violence of Vito Corleone, in the guise of an act of community formation, which in a parallel montage with a church procession is staged as a cleansing rite. This violent act forms the basis of Don Corleone’s patriarchal ethos, for whom the Mafia’s profit-drive should benefit the cohesion of the ethnic neighborhood. In the narrative present day of Part II, this unity of business and community is given over to a merciless erosion. In order to carry out the legalization and legitimation of his business empire, Vito Corleone’s successor, his son Michael (Al Pacino), must destroy his family gang, which culminates at the end of the film in the murder of his own brother. The film counter-poses flashbacks of the locality of Little Italy with the global nature of expansionist capital, which stretches out to Batista’s pre-revolutionary Cuba. The bifurcation of the narrative strands produces, in the second part of The Godfather, an almost Marxist historical dialectic: the romantic mythos of the community is conjured in order to be deconstructed. The pre-modern, feudal anachronism of the family as a 25 Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” p. 147.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

188 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

model of community formation, which still functions in Part I as a utopian line of flight, is destroyed by the structural dynamic of capital. The utopian counter-schema to capital’s global dissolution of borders is not sustained, as in Part I, by the backwards-turned projection of an organic collective, but by the future communist negation of the system, which is anticipated in Part II by the coming to power of the Cuban revolutionaries in Havana. In this sense, the film itself can be read as the attempt of a big-budget Hollywood film to narrativize Jameson’s theory of reification as a double bind of totalization and atomization. In contrast to Spielberg’s Jaws, Coppola’s film avoids ideological closures and consciously keeps its antagonistic Outside open, in the form of the Cuban revolution. The Godfather Part II is, for Jameson, the paradigmatic example of a popular film that not only fictionalizes but also historicizes the dialectics of ideology and utopia: Thus these two narrative impulses as it were reverse each other: the ideological myth of the Maf ia ends up generating the authentically Utopian vision of revolutionary liberation; while the degraded Utopian content of the family paradigm ultimately unmasks itself as the survival of more archaic forms of repression and sexism and violence. Meanwhile, both of these narrative strands, freed to pursue their own inner logic to its limits, are thereby driven to the outer reaches and historical boundaries of capitalism itself, the one as it touches the precapitalist societies of the past, the other at the beginnings of the future and the dawn of socialism.26

Hence, Jameson’s dialectical theory of mass culture is condensed in a film that leads the modernist antipathy towards the popular to the point of absurdity. As paradoxical as this may sound, there is good reason to agree with Jameson that The Godfather Part II is Marxist cinema made within the heart of Hollywood.

6.2 Class and Allegory: Dog Day Afternoon Jameson wrote his analysis of Sidney Lumet’s film Dog Day Afternoon two years before his reification essay, and the text is the first significant work on cinema in his œuvre. Like Jameson’s readings of Jaws and The Godfather, the article extracts the double layer of ideology and utopia from a popular work of New Hollywood cinema, but it also unfolds a more developed definition of 26 Ibid.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Dialectics of Mass Culture

189

allegory than the later essay. There is a clear defense of the political potency of mass culture, against those vulgar Marxists or high-modernists who despise it. Jameson unmistakably argues that a political aesthetics of Hollywood cinema, if there is such a thing, cannot be grasped as an immediately evident effect. It is essentially assigned to the work of interpretation – or, as Althusser would say, to the necessity of a symptomatic reading, which must uncover the latent thoughts behind the manifest figures. In other words, dialectical analysis requires an allegorical method, which would be capable of deciphering the encoded political allegory: “Such political logic will then not manifest itself as an overt political message, nor will it transform the film into an unambiguous political statement. But it will certainly make for the emergence of profound formal contradictions to which the public cannot not be sensitive, whether or not it yet possesses the conceptual instruments to understand what those contradictions mean.”27 The contradiction articulated in the filmic form of Dog Day Afternoon – and here Jameson once again demonstrates his unswerving loyalty to classical Marxist concepts – is none other than class conflict. Jameson is opposed to the dominant anti-Marxist credo of the disappearance of classes, which exists, for him, in two ideological variants: on the one hand the bourgeois-liberal perspective of the neutralization of class differences through the post-industrial service economy of consumer society, and on the other hand the pluralization of struggles following the new social movements, with their critique of an economistic thinking that conceives of core and ancillary social contradictions. That the minoritarian identity politics of the 1960s has been increasingly absorbed by the system is, for Jameson, proof of the Marxist primacy of classes, but he must also admit that, under the conditions of late capitalism, both being and consciousness (that is, class and class consciousness) lose the evidentiary power that they may have possessed in earlier historical periods: “There is, after all, a reality of the appearance just as much as a reality behind it; or, to put it more concretely, social class is not merely a structural fact but also very significantly a function of class consciousness, and the latter, indeed, ends up producing the former just as surely as it is produced by it.”28 Being determines consciousness, but consciousness also determines being, and the reality of appearance determines the appearance of reality. It is at this point, at the very latest, that Jameson’s complex dialectical thinking 27 Fredric Jameson, “Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film,” in Signatures of the Visible, p. 52. 28 Ibid., p. 50.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

190 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

distances itself from the base-superstructure reductionism of traditional Marxist aesthetics, even though Jameson holds firmly to the antagonism of class “in the last instance.” A decisive passage of the essay thus has it that: In the present context, the “thought” towards which reality strives is not only or even not yet class consciousness: it is rather the very preconditions for such class consciousness in social reality itself, that is to say, the requirement that, for people to become aware of class, the classes be already in some sense perceptible as such. This fundamental requirement we will call, now borrowing a term from Freud rather than from Marx, the requirement of figurability, the need for social reality and everyday life to have developed to the point at which its underlying class structure becomes representable in tangible form. The point can be made in a different way by underscoring the unexpectedly vital role that culture would be called on to play in such a process, culture not only as an instrument of self-consciousness but even before that as a symptom and a sign of possible self-consciousness in the f irst place. The relationship between class consciousness and figurability, in other words, demands something more basic than abstract knowledge, and implies a mode of experience that is more visceral and existential than the abstract certainties of economics and Marxian social science: the latter merely continue to convince us of the informing presence, behind daily life, of the logic of capitalist production. To be sure, as Althusser tells us, the concept of sugar does not have to taste sweet. Nonetheless, in order for genuine class consciousness to be possible, we have to begin to sense the abstract truth of class through the tangible medium of daily life in vivid and experimental ways; and to say that class structure is becoming representable means that we have now gone beyond mere abstract understanding and entered that whole area of personal fantasy, collective storytelling, narrative figurability – which is the domain of culture and no longer that of abstract sociology and economic analysis. To become figurable – that is to say, visible in the first place; accessible to our imaginations – the classes have to be able to become in some sense characters in their own right: this is the sense in which the term allegory in our title is to be taken as a working hypothesis.29

This extract contains, in condensed form, the essence of Jameson’s political film aesthetics, which is repeatedly developed anew in his later writings. 29 Ibid., p. 51.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Dialectics of Mass Culture

191

It is not enough, according to Jameson, to merely refute the ideological rhetoric of a supposed disappearance of class relations by pointing to the structural reality of the capitalist economy: “It is this visibility and continuity of the class model, from the daily experience in the home and on the street all the way up to total mobilization itself, which is no longer available today.”30 If, between experience and structure, a larger gap has now opened up, then between the concrete and the abstract a new mediation must be developed, which phenomenally sensualizes the abstract and thus makes it representable once more. The representability of class is, for Jameson, not only a theoretical problem of representation, but – and this is absolutely central – also an aesthetic one. What purely theoretical praxis can only formalize as abstract knowledge, aesthetic praxis can sensually and aesthetically retrieve and once again couple with the lived experience of subjects. Jameson leaves us in no doubt that a political aesthetics must, above all, operate on the epistemological level, which means making the opacity of the social totality cognitively accessible, but the epistemological potency of art is different to that of theory. Nonetheless, not even art can abolish the difference between the object of perception and the real object, as Jameson elsewhere writes in relation to Althusser, “the conceptual world is to be held completely apart from the real: thus the problem of the concept of history is essentially a question of models, and not of realities.”31 Art may be capable of creating a different imaginary (and imaginative) mediation between perception and reality, which can produce an effect of recognition, in contrast to the misrecognition effect of Lacan’s mirror stage. For Jameson, this representative capacity of art (and especially, of course, cinema) to dialectically reconf igure the division between abstract and concrete, structure and experience, absence and presence, is the basis of the difference between aesthetic and theoretical praxis. Hence, Jameson also understands the personif ication of class fractions in popular f ilms not as a reduction in complexity, but instead as an allegorical response to the increasing unrepresentability of class relations.32 30 Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. xvii. 31 Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 188. 32 In this vein, class consciousness is, for Jameson, necessarily allegorical: “For it is clear that class consciousness itself – in those societies in which it exists as an existential fact – is an allegorical mode of thought to the degree to which for it individuals are seen as types and manifestations of the social group to which they belong.” Jameson, Marxism and Form, p. 399.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

192 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

In other words, figuration needs figures to be intelligible. This is what allegory can do: as a poetic approach, allegory distinguishes itself through its constant signifying duality, as it conveys both a literal and a figural meaning.33 Allegory is “saying differently.” For Jameson, it is through this semantic shifting that allegory can fulfill the need for embodiment, visualization and representability, as well as keep open the epistemic access to a structural, unrepresentable Outside: What we have here is a kind of social Versinnlichung […], a rendering in terms of sense what cannot be represented in literal language. […] This “visceral and existential” mode of experience is the domain of culture, where the classes have to take on the function of characters. In other words, at the most basic level class consciousness is always allegorical, each class achieving figurability to the extent to which we can represent it – unconsciously through art, narrative, and other ideological productions – as a character with its own particular qualities and “personality.” Figuration, then, is essentially a mode of allegorical personification.34

That the allegorical figuration of class fractions can serve not only an epistemic opening, but also an ideological closure, is shown in Jameson’s analysis of Jaws. In Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, by contrast, the class antagonisms depicted in the f ilm make an incursion into its very form. It may have also become clear that Jameson’s analytic focus on the constellations of characters in the film does not derive from an interpretative caprice, but is immanent to his conception of allegory. For Jameson, it is as a factory of allegory that Hollywood cinema is of such interest, because it is above all an anthropomorphic cinema of actors, which regulates addresses of identification and affect through the presence of star bodies and faces. Dog Day Afternoon, for instance, is carried by the hyperbolic star performance of Al Pacino, who, as with the first two parts of The Godfather, plays alongside John Cazale. Sonny (Pacino) and Sal (Cazale) rob a bank in order to finance the sex change operation of Sonny’s transsexual lover. While the bank building is increasingly besieged by an armada of police officers, Sonny wins the sympathy not only of an ever greater number of the bank’s employees, who he has taken as hostages, but also of the gawking 33 For a thorough introduction to the concept of allegory in literary theory, see Gerhard Kurz, Metapher, Allegorie, Symbol (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). 34 George Hartley, The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 129.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Dialectics of Mass Culture

193

crowds that have gathered on the street. In his negotiations with the local police chief Moretti (Charles Durning), Sonny demands a helicopter and an airplane in exchange for the hostages. The film channels the counter-cultural impulses of the 1960s and 1970s in Al Pacino’s character, and positions the would-be gangster Sonny as a central identification figure for the audience, which is diegetically duplicated in the on-screen crowd of sympathizers. The film contains not only a positive reference to the American gay rights movement, but also to the prison uprising in Attica in 1971, which was put down with brutal police violence. There is thus an explicitly political level in Dog Day Afternoon, which shows its solidarity with the struggles of the new social movements. Yet, as was also the case in his analysis of Jaws, Jameson mistrusts the apparent semantics of the narrative: in his view, it is precisely the film’s manifestly political content that constitutes its anti-political ideologeme. For Jameson, the ideological aspect of the film is inscribed into its form, which in this case is analogous to the form of acting, or, to be more precise, with the psychological expressivity of method acting, the most outstanding exponent of which is undoubtedly Al Pacino. Jameson once more makes a dialectical volte-face in his analysis, as a result of which it is precisely Pacino’s highly praised performance that forms the cardinal ideological problem of Dog Day Afternoon: Method acting was the working out of the ideology of the anti-hero in that relatively more concrete realm of theatrical style, voice, gesture, which borders on the behavioral stances and gestural idiom, the interpersonal languages, of everyday life, where it is indeed the stylization and effect of elements already present in the parts of the American community, and also the cause and model of newer kinds of behavior that adapt it to the street and to the real world. Here for the first time perhaps we can understand concretely how what is best about Dog Day Afternoon is also what is least good about it: for Al Pacino’s performance as Sonny by its very brilliance thrusts the film further and further back into the antiquated paradigm of the anti-hero and the method actor. […] In Pacino’s second-generation reappropiation of this style something paradoxical happens, namely, that the inarticulate becomes the highest form of expressiveness, the worldless stammer proves voluble, and the agony over uncommunicability suddenly turns out to be everywhere fluently comprehensible.35 35 Jameson, “Class and Allegory,” in Signatures of the Visible, p. 58.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

194 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Pacino’s idiosyncratic method acting remains bound to a traditional conception of individuality, in that the expression of affect, even in its most extreme externalizations, always refers back to the interiority of the character. What is method acting if not an excess of individuality? In this sense, Al Pacino’s acting style blocks the allegorical mode of personification: although Pacino is portrayed as the incarnation of a specific type of the counter-cultural anti-hero, in the end he remains a monadic individual – Al Pacino himself, complete with his telltale mannerisms. This existentialism of the individual can also be seen in the film’s crowd scenes, in which a euphoric collective is only constituted through the invocation of a charismatic individual. The Hollywood star system, which Dog Day Afternoon, in spite of its semidocumentary style, leaves unimpinged, “de-allegorizes” the film’s figuration through the extreme individualization of its star. The allegorization of class founders with the form of method acting, but it succeeds on another level in the film, which at first seems to only have a marginal significance in the plot. For Jameson, the central allegorical figure of the film is neither Pacino nor his adversary, the local police chief, but the FBI agent, who initially remains in the background of the events, but towards the end of the film comes forward to be the decisive authority figure. Once again, Jameson localizes the structural core of a film in its margins, and in the unnoticeable details of the narrative. The affectless, technocratic coolness of the FBI agent, who is played by the relatively unknown TV actor James Broderick, forms the antithesis to the hyper-expressivity of Pacino’s star turn. But it is just this depersonalized indeterminacy of the agent that makes him into an allegorical representative of an unrepresentable power structure. Through him, the film is penetrated by an antagonistic externality, which is incommensurable with the f ictionally believable hyper-expressivity of method acting: His anonymous features mark a chilling and unexpected insertion of the real into the otherwise relatively predictable framework of the f iction f ilm – and this, not, as we have pointed out earlier, by traditional documentary or montage techniques, but rather through a kind of dialectic of connotations on the level of the style of acting, a kind of silence or charged absence in sign-system in which the other modes of performance have programmed us for a different kind of expressiveness. […] The FBI agent […] comes to occupy the place of that immense and decentralized power network which marks the present multinational stage of monopoly capitalism. The very absence in his features becomes a sign and an expression of the presence/ absence of corporate power in

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Dialectics of Mass Culture

195

our daily lives, all-shaping and omnipotent and yet rarely accessible in figurative terms, that is to say, in the representable form of individual actors or agents.36

Jameson’s thesis of an inversion of the relationship between foreground and background is reinforced by the mise en scène of the first confrontation between Sonny and the agent, as the latter slowly walks out of the depths of the image and into the foreground. While Sonny had dealt eye-to-eye with the Italian-American police chief, here face-to-face communication collapses – not least because Sonny is blinded by the spotlight, and can barely see the agent appearing before him. The failure of the exchange of looks corresponds with the sudden onset of night: the brightness of daylight and the naturalistic mise en scène of the Brooklyn neighborhood abruptly cedes to the artificial light of searchlights and police helicopters, as if the theatrical mise en scène of the beginning is now being dissolved into the darkness of film noir. At this narrative and figurative turning point, an aesthetic contradiction that could be symptomatically observed throughout the film is intensified: I am referring, here, to the strangely unmediated long-shots from the extreme overhead viewpoint of the helicopter, which repeatedly interrupts the chamber piece-like naturalism of the bank and street scenes. The film’s finale also marks the triumph of this non-human gaze over the physical proximity of the sweating bodies in the bank and on the street – when, that is, the camera observes from a nocturnal high-angle shot the automobile convoy traveling to the airport, where the death of Sal and the capturing of Sonny marks the sobering conclusion to the film. To speak in terms of suture theory: the long-shot scans the figures and spaces in the non-anthropomorphic gaze of an anonymized enunciation, whose allegorical placeholder is the FBI agent. The figurative exchange from Sonny to the agent is correspondingly accompanied by a spatial movement of dislocation, which leads us from the local color of the Brooklyn neighborhood to the non-place of an international airport. Thus, the allegorical form of the film does not remain bound only to the characters, but also to specific spatial models – and it is to these spatial allegories of late capitalist totality that Jameson will dedicate more and more attention in his later writings on the cinema: Finally, of course, that multinational capitalism into which the older ruling classes of our world have evolved, and whose primacy is inscribed 36 Ibid., pp. 68-69.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

196 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

in the spatial trajectory of the film itself as it moves from the ghettoized squalor of the bank interior to that eerie and impersonal science fiction landscape of the airport finale: a corporate space without inhabitants, utterly technologized and functional, a place beyond city and country alike – collective, yet without people, automated and computerized, yet without any of that older utopian or dystopian clamor, without any of those still distinctive qualities that characterized the then still “modern” and streamlined futuristic vision of the corporate future in our own recent past. Here – as in the blank style of acting of the FBI agents – the film makes a powerful non-conceptual point by destroying its own intrinsic effects and cancelling an already powerful, yet conventional, filmic and performative language.37

The formal contradictions in the f igurative and spatial logic of the f ilm are, according to Jameson, immanent to the allegorization of class antagonism. Thus, the aesthetic antagonism is decipherable as the symptom of a political/economic antagonism, but only in the (dialectical) sense that the aesthetic forms the condition for the possibility of a representability of the social totality. In his f ilm analyses, Jameson reconstructs this representability not from the center but from the periphery of the narrative material: the macrostructure must be contained in the microstructure.38 Thus, according to Jameson, Dog Day Afternoon is a thoroughly ideological product, both in its evident political tendency and in the quality acting of the method school, while the true political significance of the film is articulated in the incorporeal “character mask” of a secondary character. Hence, not only is Good in the f ilm actually Evil, but the supposed Evil reveals itself to be Good. It is only on this level that Dog Day Afternoon realizes itself as a political Hollywood f ilm, or, more specif ically, as the attempt at an allegorization of class relations by means of a personif ication that had been made structurally impossible by the star system. This is the dialectical consequence of Jameson’s symptomatic film reading, which allows us to read the political unconscious in popular cinema. 37 Ibid., pp. 69-70. 38 Clint Burnham even speaks of Jameson’s perverse reading method: “Jameson is willfully perverse in his attempts to find the ‘political’ in the film not where you would expect it, which might be, say, in the robbery as some nascent or raw political act […], or in the director Sidney Lumet’s liberalism, or in the ‘post-modern’ meta-media event of camera attention.” Clint Burnham, The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 187.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Dialectics of Mass Culture

197

6.3 The Political Unconscious Like Žižek, Jameson also regularly refers to the Lacanian triad of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. In order to determine the relationship between the three registers, Jameson has recourse to cinematic “allegories,” which come strikingly close to the problematic of suture theory. Thus, in an essay on the intertwining of the Imaginary and the Symbolic in Lacan: “It may be observed that the structural discontinuity, in film, between the visual plenitude of the filmic image and its ‘diegetic’ use in the narrative of a given film makes it a privileged object for the exercise of the Lacanian dual registers.”39 Jameson here describes none other than the standard procedure of suture, as in the three-step process outlined by Oudart, in which an initial imaginary plenitude, perceived to be missing nothing, is disturbed through the dawning awareness of absence and finally ends in the diegetic symbolization of the Absent One. The transfer of the Absent One into the diegesis hence corresponds to the movement of the Imaginary into the Symbolic through a signifying chain: “In short, one passes thereby from imaginary to symbolic, to a sign: the second shot does not simply follow the first one, it is signified by it.”40 The fact that this signifying process can never be closed, since the second shot must also be denoted by a third shot, is what led Oudart to speak of the tragic nature of the cinema, in which every imaginary jouissance is always-already lost. In Lacan’s terminology: the tragedy of the cinema consists of the act of symbolic castration, which glides from signifier to signifier, but can only asymptotically patch over the lack that it has produced. If, for Žižek, suture implies its own de-suturing, then it is just this infinite interminability of the symbolic that is meant, which can only generate presence at the cost of a new absence. How, then, can the Real be related to this double bind of the Imaginary and the Symbolic? The following passage in Jameson reads like a counterpoint to the aforementioned alternation of image and signifier: I use the terminology of framing here by way of analogy with off-camera space in film, where a peculiar lateral effect is possible in the insertion, as it were, of images between the camera apparatus and the eye, images that have nothing of the density of the objects before the camera but rather 39 Fredric Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986 vol. I: Situations of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 195. 40 Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears, p. 32.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

198 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

hover, divested of their object-world or background, and thereby of their normal materiality, with something of the free-floating quality of hallucinations that move across the perpetual field without belonging to it.41

Jameson’s definition of off-camera space bears all the traits of the objet petit a as an anamorphous alien body in the image: an inter-image, which can be ascribed neither to the camera nor the eye, but which hallucinatorily glides over the field of the image like a disembodied event. Jameson’s description seems to evoke the acousmatic enunciation of the gaze. This de-realized gaze can never be integrated into the evidence of the visual nor adapted to the signifying order of the diegesis. The gaze as emanation of the real thus eludes not only a reflection in the Imaginary, but also its designation by the Symbolic. As Lacan wrote, in a famous turn of phrase, the Real is “what resists symbolisation absolutely.”42 From the perspective of suture theory, the Real is that excessive element that is released when the signifying chain does not function frictionlessly. This is precisely what happens in the impossible, transsubjective points of view in Hitchcock, Rossellini, Antonioni and Haneke, in which the gaze refuses, in a sense, its symbolic taming of the image, and the body that it ought to be welded to is missing a nuance. And this nuance, this tiny gap between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, becomes the entryway to the Real. Hence, suture can be described as a fragile filmic configuration of the three Lacanian registers, which normally keeps the Real of the Absent One at bay, but which can set it free through minimal disturbances and deviations. Through the mediation of suture theory, a pronounced positioning of the Real can be discerned in Jameson’s reading of Lacan, which, as with the writings of Žižek, distinguishes itself from earlier psychoanalytic film theory and its (political) preference for the Symbolic. Jameson, however, gives a specifically Marxist twist to the notion of the Real: “Nonetheless, it is not terribly difficult to say what is meant by the Real in Lacan. It is simply History itself; and if for psychoanalysis the history in question here is obviously the history of the subject, the resonance of the word suggests that a confrontation between this particular materialism and the historical materialism of Marx can no longer be postponed.”43 The Real is thus a conceptual bridge between Marxism and psychoanalysis, which Jameson, in a second step, 41 Fredric Jameson, “The Ideology of the Text,” in Ideologies of Theory vol. I, p. 49. 42 See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-1954, trans. John Forrester (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), p. 66. 43 Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” p. 104.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Dialectics of Mass Culture

199

fuses with Althusser’s notion of structural causality: The Real is history as the absent cause. “The Lacanian notion of an ‘asymptotic’ approach to the Real, moreover, maps a situation in which the action of this ‘absent cause’ can be understood as a term limit, both indistinguishable from the Symbolic (or the Imaginary) and also independent from it.”44 As an unrepresentable causality which lies at the basis of all individual and collective activity, there can be no immediate knowledge of the Real or of history. As an epistemological consequence, Jameson places political aesthetics before the problem of representability, which he diagnoses in his analysis of Dog Day Afternoon. Once again, mediation is the key word: neither the mediation between subject and history nor the mediation between aesthetic object and extra-aesthetic referent can any longer be conceived of as a simple reflection in the sense of the vulgar-Marxist base-superstructure model, since the Real of history, in its “transsubjectivity,” is never completely accessible to the subject: The units of individual life, whatever meaning we try to give them, are never the same as those of history, even when in rare and punctual convulsions – what we call revolutions – they briefly coincide. The “desire called Marx,” then, is not the will to reduce one of these dimensions to the other (in any case an impossible matter), but rather to develop organs of perception capable of enabling as fitfully to position ourselves in that other temporality, that other story, over which we also hope – but now as group and collectives, rather than as individuals – to assert some influence and control. The “desire called Marx” can therefore also be called a desire for narrative, if by this we understand, not some vacuous concept of “linearity” or even telos, but rather the impossible attempt to give representation to the multiple and incommensurable temporalities in which each of us exists. 45

Thus Jameson’s demand for the aesthetic representability of the Real through narrative and allegory (which he often uses in a largely interchangeable manner) implies a new Marxist hermeneutics, one which does not supersede the meaning of the text in the reflection of a clearly identifiable extra-textual referentiality, but, on the contrary, deciphers the effects and symptoms of an absent cause whose referentiality is structurally inaccessible in the moments of the text where meaning breaks down: “The study of the referent however, is the study, not of the meaning of the text, but of the limits of 44 Ibid., p. 105. 45 Fredric Jameson, “Introduction,” in The Ideologies of Theory vol. I, p. xx.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

200 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

its meanings and of their historical preconditions, and what is and must remain incommensurable with individual expression.”46 Jameson calls this incommensurability the political unconscious, a term which he coins in his magnum opus of the same name. In the center of this book, we can find a critical examination of Althusser’s notion of structural causality, which in contrast to the expressive causality of a conceptual relation of essence and appearance implies a more complex mode of determination. The absent cause is, according to Althusser, not a principle that transcendentally stands in contrast to the paradoxical interleaving of absence in the field of immanence of its effects. The cause determines the effect, but at the same it exists (or rather, insists) only in this effect. Thus, for Althusser, the absent cause is also “a cause immanent in its effects”;47 it exists in a separation-connection of inside and outside: “To speak of history as an ‘absent cause’ is similarly to speak of the structure of the totality as something immanent in its elements or effects, not as something that is additional to and apart from them.”48 The absent cause is “intimately foreign” (as Foucault put it in his Velazquez analysis) to the field of its effects, and it is this intimate foreignness that Lacan dubs extimacy. Jameson thus links Althusser’s absent cause and Lacan’s extimacy of the Real in the same way as Žižek: “This is the paradox of the Lacanian Real: although it does not exist (in the sense of really existing, of occurring in reality), it nonetheless has a series of qualities – it effects a specific structural causality, and can bring about a series of effects in the symbolic reality of the subject.”49 Or, as Žižek puts it elsewhere: “Here lies the particular paradox of the Lacanian notion of the cause as the Real: it is produced (secreted) by its own effect.”50 When Jameson speaks of “history,” he means, in contrast to the vulgar-Marxist theory of reflection, not the mechanical causality of any ability to directly depict historical processes in the text, but a representability which emerges in the structural unrepresentability of history. This does not, however, mean that any indication of external referentiality can be shelved in a post-structuralist manner, but rather that the referent can only be grasped through the effects that it indirectly brings about: What Althusser’s own insistence on history as an absent cause makes clear, but what is missing from the formula as it is canonically worded, is that 46 Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” p. 108. 47 Althusser/Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 209. 48 William C. Dowling, Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to the Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 70. 49 Žižek, Liebe dein Symptom wie dich selbst!, p. 129. 50 Žižek, Grimassen des Realen, p. 160.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Dialectics of Mass Culture

201

he does not at all draw the fashionable conclusion that because history is a text, the “referent” does not exist. We would therefore propose the following revised formulation : that history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious.51

The political unconscious is the unconscious of the object rather than the subject. Hence, Jameson’s Marxist hermeneutics does not share with post-structuralism the abandonment of extra-textual referentiality, but he does believe in the death of the author. Hence, the ineluctable precedence of the object also pertains to Jameson’s aetiology of the absent cause. The symptoms and parapraxes which appear in the anamnesis of the text never refer to the clinical disposition of the author-subject, but to the transsubjective dimension of history. In this way, Jameson gives new meaning to the Marxist imperative of a mediation between the art work and its social “basis”: mediation must penetrate the immediacy of symptoms, which do not directly convey any meaning, and apparently resist all interpretation. In other words: there is no mediation without anamorphosis, no linear path from the text to the hors-texte: “For Jameson (contra Derrida) history is outside the text, and indeed the outside of text, yet (in partial agreement with Derrida) only accessible to us in textual form and therefore very much inside the text too. This is the essential paradox the concept of the political unconscious must resolve.”52 As the praxis of a symptomatic reading, the process of mediation must reveal the invisible in the visible, the unsaid in the said, dissensus in consensus: “the opening up of the individual text into that hors texte or unspoken (non-dit) ground of intolerable contradiction.”53 It may have become clear, that in this context, the opening up to the horstexte coincides with the opening up to the hors-champ, the hors-corps and the hors-lieu of the film. With Jameson, the Outside of the film can be thought of as a mode of articulation of the political unconscious, which in its externality is invariably inscribed into form itself, as Jameson notes in an important passage: The literary or aesthetic act therefore always entertains some active relationship with the Real; yet in order to do so, it cannot simply allow 51 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, pp. 20. 52 Ian Buchanan, Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 58-59. 53 Dowling, Jameson, Althusser, Marx, p. 85.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

202 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

“reality” to persevere inertly in its own being, outside the text and at distance. It must rather draw the Real into its own texture, and the ultimate paradoxes and false problems of linguistics, and most notably of semantics, are to be traced back to this process, whereby language manages to carry the Real within itself as its own intrinsic or immanent subtext.54

Translated back into the language of film theory, this means: in line with Althusser’s concept of structural causality, enunciation must be retroactively decoded in the very énoncé that it produces. Thus the concept of the absent cause not only refers to the concealed nature of the instance of determination, but rather, causality is conceived of as a dialectical paradox: no effect without a cause, but also no cause without an effect. In this sense, Jameson’s Marxist aesthetic is not simply a more elaborate version of the old base-superstructure thinking, which necessarily implies a one-sided, linear causality, but is closer to the psychoanalytic concept of retroactive causality. For Freud, a given event causes a delayed trauma, which, however, also functions as the causation of the event. From this perspective, Jameson conceives of the praxis of mediation as a straightforward reversal of the derivative logic of vulgar Marxism, which reduces the aesthetic to an epiphenomenon of social relations. In sharp contrast to this, a hermeneutics of the political must “derive” the real from the aesthetic, in order – as Jameson does in his reading of Dog Day Afternoon – to make it intelligible for knowledge and experience. As the site of production of this sensualized knowledge, the aesthetic is the privileged location of a merging of epistemology and phenomenology. Interpretation must constantly miss the Real, but it is precisely in this failed contact that it can come to terms with it. In a further step, Jameson adds another definition to history as the Real of an absent cause, one which bears the Lukácsian name of totality. As the border of thinking itself, totality is not an empirically graspable reality, but a negative causality: “The problem of totality first enters narrative construction, as it were, vertically: it becomes visible when we begin to ask our- selves questions about the ultimate determinants of a given act or experience.”55 Rejecting the apparent irreconcilability between Lukács’ expressive causality and Althusser’s structural causality, Jameson insists on the theoretical proximity of the two thinkers: “Totality is not available for 54 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, pp. 66-67. 55 Jameson, “History and Class Consciousness,” in Valences of the Dialectic, p. 205.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Dialectics of Mass Culture

203

representation, any more than it is accessible in the form of some ultimate truth (or moment of Absolute Spirit).”56 Thus, he finally combines, in a grand theoretical synthesis, two currents of Western Marxism that have usually been understood as being hostile to one another.57 If Jameson uses the major concepts of Althusser, Lacan and Lukács in a largely interchangeable manner, then the reason for this lies in the holistic, totalizing tendency in his own thinking, which seeks to be the equal of a totality “in which everything depends on everything else.”58 Jameson’s imperative towards mediation relates not only to the interdependencies of politics, the psyche and art, but also to the differentiation of theoretical discourses, whose apparent irreconcilability is “transcoded” by the master-code of Marxism: “The equation at the heart of Jameson’s program asserts that the totality is humanity in History, and it holds in no matter what order the terms are rearranged.”59 History is what hurts, but a (film) aesthetics of the political unconscious must keep the wounds of history open.

Bibliography Anderson, Perry, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1979). Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2009). Buchanan, Ian, Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (London: Routledge, 2006). Butler, Rex, Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory (New York: Continuum, 2005). Burnham, Clint, The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donal Nicholson Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995). Dowling, William C., Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to the Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1984). Hoberman, Jim, “Nashville contra Jaws, or ‘The Imagination of Disaster’ Revisited,” in Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath and Noel King (eds.), The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), pp. 195-222. 56 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 39. 57 On the history of Western Marxism, see Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1979). 58 Jameson, Marxism and Form, p. 188. 59 Dowling, Jameson, Althusser, Marx, p. 38.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

204 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Hartley, George, The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Homer, Sean, Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1998). Jameson, Fredric, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). –––, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972). –––, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (1979), pp. 130-148. –––, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986 vol. I: Situations of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). –––, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986 vol. I: Situations of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). –––, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). –––, Signatures of the Visible (London: Routledge, 1992). –––, Mythen der Moderne (Berlin: Kadmos, 2002). –––, The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 2002). –––, The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007). –––, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009).
 Kolker, Robert, A Cinema of Loneliness, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Kurz, Gerhard, Metapher, Allegorie, Symbol (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-1954, trans. John Forrester (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988). Quirke, Antonia, Jaws (London: BFI, 2002). Seeßlen, Georg, Steven Spielberg und seine Filme (Marburg: Schüren, 2001). Žižek, Slavoj, Liebe dein Symptom wie dich selbst! Jacques Lacans Psychoanalyse und die Medien (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1991). –––, Grimassen des Realen: Jacques Lacan oder die Monstrosität des Aktes (Cologne: Kiepenheur und Witsch, 1993). –––, The Fright of Real Tears (London: BFI, 2001).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

7.

Cartographies of the Postmodern Abstract One of Jameson’s key concepts is cognitive mapping – which can be understood as a modification of his concept of allegory. In a surprisingly aff irmative reformulation of Althusser’s def inition of ideology as the subject’s imaginary representation of its real conditions of existence, the term outlines the possibility of a political aesthetics under the conditions of an a-historical postmodernism. The Lacanian triad of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real also plays an important role in Jameson’s work. By means of the imaginary image function as well as the symbolic sign function of cartography, the subject can navigate its position towards the real of totality. Antonioni’s Blow Up is analyzed as a key film in the transition from modernism to postmodernism. Keywords: Postmodernity, Cognitive Mapping, Cartography, Imaginary

After the methodological foundation of his theory of the political unconscious, Jameson’s work in the 1980s stands under the sign of the postmodern, of which he can be regarded as one of the most important thinkers. Since that time, the postmodern seems to have lost interest for the humanities and cultural studies. Jameson, however, never resorted to a simple set of pros and cons surrounding postmodernism as a variety of contemporary art production, but insisted on the historical diagnosis of a dominant cultural phenomenon, which has its objective conditions in a totality which is even more “total” than earlier capitalist formations, and which Jameson, taking inspiration from the Marxist economist Ernest Mandel, calls late capitalism. Late capitalism is the name for a systematic closure that subjects all structural levels and living spaces in society to an irreversible commodification. Following on from his earlier thesis, even art can, for Jameson, no longer be treated as an enclave beyond the grip of reification. If modernism had emerged as a reactive symptom to reification, this loss of artistic autonomy under postmodernism is exacerbated: not only has

Lie, S., Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462983632_ch07

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

206 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

aesthetic production become an utterly integral component of general commodity production, but even the opposition between high and low is diffused in postmodernism, in favor of a bricolage of both elements, such that even the negativity of modernist art with respect to the commodity-form is ex post positively integrated. In an essay that has since become famous, Jameson undertakes the spectral analysis of the postmodern as the cultural logic of late capitalism, which results in deep changes not only to art, but also to subjectivity. Such changes, of course, have significant effects in popular cinema, which, in the case of Hollywood, at least, entered into a new period in the 1980s, a period which is often portrayed by critics as a break with the modernist impulses of the 1970s New Hollywood filmmakers. One of my main questions will thus be whether the notion of the postmodern also contributes to an understanding of the “Post-New Hollywood” cinema of the 1980s, and whether this cinema, widely decried as reactionary, really does bury the potential for a political aesthetics (a potential which Jameson still ascribed to 1970s films such as The Godfather and Dog Day Afternoon), or whether, in the postmodern, too, the dialectics of ideology and utopia casts out lines of flight in films which otherwise appear fully enclosed by the regime of reification.

7.1 Nostalgia and Historicism For Jameson, the transition from modernism to postmodernism leads from the object to the “phantomatic objectivity” of the commodity (Marx). This transformation can be seen in the functional transformation of two different representations of shoes – one by Van Gogh, the other by Andy Warhol. Shoes possess a particularly intimate relation to the materiality of the physical world. Drawing on Heidegger’s interpretation of Van Gogh’s “peasant shoes”, Jameson finds that the object-linguisticality of the still life shows a divide between the de-semanticized materiality of the “Earth” and the semanticized materiality of the “World”: Van Gogh’s depiction evokes the arduous nature of peasant labor, which is, of course, not directly visible in the image, but speaks to the viewer as the use-value of the shoes. The champ of the image evokes the hors-champ of an absent object world, which embeds the shoes in a social life world. The raw material of the social, however, undergoes an aesthetic metamorphosis, which takes us from the misery of peasant life to a utopian realm of pure color. For Jameson, Van Gogh’s shoes depict two different materialities, which cannot be separated from each other: “the transformation of one form of materiality – the earth itself and its paths

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Cartogr aphies of the Postmodern

207

and physical objects – into that other materiality of oil paint affirmed and foregrounded in its own right and for its own visual pleasures, but nonetheless it has a satisfying plausibility.”1 This aesthetic and social materiality of the image is literally atomized in Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes. The eloquence of Van Gogh’s tatty pair of shoes is totally absent in Warhol’s X-Ray filtered stilettos. They are also mute objects: serially disindividualized, they float in an airless space, torn away from both the Earth and a specific sociality, which would seek to give the shoes a contextual life-world. The material use-value of Van Gogh’s peasant shoes, visible in the traces of time, is neutralized in the vacuum of the Warhol image. The particular materiality of the shabby peasant shoes is transformed into an interchangeable immateriality, while use-value is transformed into an exchange-value that overtly displays the fetish character of the commodity. In Warhol, the boundaries between art and commodity, art and advertising, art and consumerism have become fluid – the beautiful appearance of the world of commodities is not unveiled, but affirmed in its seductive superficial sheen. In this shift from the expressive depth of the peasant shoes, which refuse to be reduced to a hermeneutic determination, to the opaque surface of Diamond Dust Shoes, Jameson sees the symptom of a new kind of “flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense, perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms.”2 The postmodern neutralization of the deep structure, which concerns both the plasticity of the image space as well as the expressive character of the objects, goes together with a further disintegration, which directly targets subjectivity: Jameson characterizes it as the “disappearance of the affect.” What is brought into question here is the expressiveness of the subject itself, which conveys its feelings and can communicate them as the expression of an interiority. Thus, for Jameson, Munch’s painting The Scream is emblematic of the expressivity of the modern subject, which, while it is monadically immured in its angst and isolation, can still project such emotions to the outside. In Munch, it is the pictorial nature of the image itself, which, as a space for the resonance of the desperate affect, is made to shake and vibrate. In this way, the image space is transformed into the perceptual space of the subject, whose pain vibrates in the landscape itself. In spite of the alienation of the individual monad of the world, there is still, in modern art, an organic homeostasis of subject and object. This 1 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 8. 2 Ibid., p. 9.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

208 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

causal relationship of subject and object, interiority and exteriority, depth and surface, breaks apart in the decorative cheerfulness and mortified elegance of Warhol’s shoe, much like his famous portraits of stars like Marilyn Monroe, which no longer reveal any interiority that looks for expressivity. In postmodernism an externalization of emotions that no longer seems to be bound to the singular experience of the subject takes the place of the expression of affect. According to Jameson, the release of disembodied “intensities” follows the disappearance of the affect: As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling. This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings-which it may be better and more accurate, following J.-F. Lyotard, to call “intensities” – are now free-floating and impersonal and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria, a matter to which we will want to return later on.3

Thus emptied out of its singular expressivity, the subject is no longer the cause of its own affect, and is transformed into a catch basin of flowing intensities. With the disappearance of the original affect, the signature of the original also vanishes. This devalorization of the original in the sphere of art has, as a consequence, the valorization of a process, which Jameson characterizes as “pastiche,” which is “the identical copy for which no original has ever existed.”4 In contrast to the modern practice of parody, pastiche entails the loss of both a relation to the stylistic singularity of the author-subject and any reference to a concrete referent that could function as an object of citation: “The pastiche is a blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs.”5 Jameson understands pastiche as a symptom of postmodern “historicism,” which precisely results in the annulling of “historicity.” Jameson’s Debordian equation between pastiche and spectacle evokes, once more, the postcard scene from Godard’s Les Carabiniers: This omnipresence of pastiche is not incompatible with a certain humor, however, nor is it innocent of all passion: it is at the least compatible with addiction – with a whole historically original consumers’ appetite for a 3 4 5

Ibid, pp. 15-16. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 17.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Cartogr aphies of the Postmodern

209

world transformed into sheer images of itself and for pseudo­events and “spectacles” (the term of the Situationists). It is for such objects that we may reserve Plato’s conception of the “simulacrum,” the identical copy for which no original has ever existed. Appropriately enough, the culture of the simulacrum comes to life in a society where exchange value has been generalized to the point at which the very memory of use value is effaced.6

In this sense, the postmodern for Jameson is the name for a universal dereferentialization of sign systems, which on the basis of the autonomization of exchange-value contaminates all levels of social life. It concerns both contemporary art production and post-structural theory, which replaces the referent with what Barthes called the pure “pleasure of the text.” Nonetheless, Jameson’s diagnosis should not be confused with a pessimistic lament for culture: if the aesthetic of the political unconscious only positions history as asymptotic to the tangent of the Real, then there can likewise not be any transparency of history before the totalization of late capitalism and postmodernity.7 This means nothing other than that the absent cause in the postmodernity appears even more intangible than in modernity. We have shown that, for Jameson, the effectiveness of political aesthetics must be measured by its allegorical force, which opens itself up to the Real and does not shy away from bearing the wounds of this process. And yet, it is precisely this capacity for a confrontation with the Outside that Jameson denies to the so-called wave of nostalgia in 1980s Hollywood cinema, in which postmodernity’s pastiche-mania proliferates in a particularly eyecatching manner. For Jameson, the final triumph of historicism over history is manifested in these films, which are obsessed with reconstructing the features of a bygone era. But nostalgia merely relates to the style of the past as yet one more commodity offer of fashion, old times and other fetish objects. In other words: the past is not the referent of historical representation, but rather the pastiche of a historicistic “ideational representative,” which derives more from earlier images and films than it seeks to establish in any way whatsoever “how things really were.” Perhaps, therefore, the culture of the remake, which begins in Hollywood in the early 1980s, is particularly indicative of this nostalgic retro-chic. 6 Ibid., p. 18. 7 Nonetheless, Jameson consistently argues for a historicization of the “Real,” in the sense that there have been different historical periods in which the relation between subject and totality has been more epistemically “representable” than it is in the impenetrably complex totality of late capitalism.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

210 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Retro, here, means above all the revival of old films, and nostalgia, as a yearning for the past, is thus inseparably connected with the nostalgia for past films and film eras. It is therefore surely no coincidence that Jameson chooses Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1980) as an exemplary instances of the nostalgia film. The film continues the fetishistic reanimation of film noir that began in 1974 with Roman Polanski’ Chinatown. Body Heat is a double remake of two of the most famous classical noir films: firstly, as Jameson notes, Tay Garnett’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and secondly, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944). In the nostalgia film, the de-referentialization of history is substituted with a referentialization of film history, which Noël Carroll has described as “the future of allusion.” Body Heat is hence “a film based on references to film history, a film that tells us that for this very reason it is to be regarded as intelligent and knowing, a film that demands that the associations which accrued to its referents be attributed to it and that it be treated with the same degree of seriousness as they were.”8 The film’s plot is a familiar one, revolving as it does around the murder of a rich husband, carried out by a femme fatale and her lover, who ends up himself becoming the woman’s victim. Body Heat is set in the present, but incorporates, in a retro mode, all the signs of the 1930s and the 1940s – from the elegant art deco opening credits and elegiac jazz score of John Barry, right up to the slightly shimmering lighting set-up.9 This superimposition of two historical periods, by means of which we perceive the present through the filter of a glamorous (cinematic) past, indicates for Jameson the loss of historical experience under postmodernity: This approach to the present by way of the art language of the simulacrum, or of the pastiche of the stereotypical past, endows present reality and the open­ness of present history with the spell and distance of a glossy mirage. Yet this mesmerizing new aesthetic mode itself emerged as an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way.10 8 Noël Carroll, “The Future of Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (and Beyond),” in Interpreting the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 24. 9 “But nostalgia films do not even necessarily have to be set in the past to achieve this particular effect – they can, and frequently do, reshape the present to look like an image of the past by editing out all signs and traces of our present. In this way both history and historicity are erased, leaving us with nothing but the brightly-lit nightmare of an eternal present.” Buchanan, Fredric Jameson, p. 96. 10 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 21.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Cartogr aphies of the Postmodern

211

For Jameson, the ideological core of the postmodern nostalgia film lies in the attempt to formulate an imaginary solution for real contradictions; the only difference is that the imaginary fantasy, unlike in Jaws, is not personified through the narrative, but nourishes itself from the stockpile of film history. As such, the stylistic and generic qualities of film noir function as a phantasmatic shield, which filters out the antagonisms of the present (there are references in the film to companies engaging in real estate speculation, etc.), or rewrites them in an archetypical narrative of drives and destinies. According to Jameson, reification affects, above all, a film’s acting style, which here appears like a kind of star cinema without stars. The following passage can be read as a continuation of the analysis of the acting in Dog Day Afternoon: The protagonist, William Hurt, is one of a new generation of film “stars” whose status is markedly distinct from that of the preceding generation of male superstars, such as Steve McQueen or Jack Nicholson (or even, more distantly, Brando), let alone of earlier moments in the evolution of the institution of the star. The immediately preceding generation projected their various roles through and by way of their well-known off-screen personalities, which often connoted rebellion and nonconformism. The latest generation of starring actors continues to assure the conventional functions of stardom (most notably sexuality) but in the utter absence of “personality” in the older sense, and with something of the anonymity of character acting (which in actors like Hurt reaches virtuoso proportions, yet of a very different kind than the virtuosity of the older Brando or Olivier). This “death of the subject” in the institution of the star now, however, opens up the possibility of a play of historical allusions to much older roles – in this case to those associated with Clark Gable – so that the very style of the acting can now also serve as a “connotator” of the past.11

Jameson seems here to suggest that William Hurt’s performance is less an example of the method school than it is a pastiche of this acting style. If Pacino’s performance still aims for a belief in an unmistakable individuality, Hurt transforms himself more into a vessel full of allusions to film history than the embodiment of a consistent character. The future of allusion is also, here, a form of retromania, which layers citation on top of citation, until all extrafilmic referentiality disappears under the multiplication of pastiches. Thus, Kathleen Turner’s hyper-lasciviousness evokes all the codes 11 Ibid., p. 20.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

212 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

of the blonde femme fatale, from Lana Turner to Barbara Stanwyck, but Body Heat’s erotic passion strangely lacks all the jouissance that it possessed in Wilder and Garnett’s films. Even Kathleen Turner functions as a pastiche of the femme fatale. Jameson’s critique of historicism is perhaps unfair to Body Heat, which historicizes its own nostalgia status. “My history is burning down” is, in fact, one of the first lines of dialogue in the film, as Ned Racine (William Hurt) watches an old building that was tied to his childhood memories burn to the ground. The loss of historicity is substituted with the phantasmatic substrate of film history. The reanimation of film noir in Body Heat is not only a nostalgic wish fulfillment, but carries out a demystification of the genre, which coincides with the depersonalized acting-pastiche that Jameson imputes to the film. It is precisely in its under-determined psychology that the “post-method acting” style of Hurt and Turner reveals the materialist core of film noir, in which the driving force of money ends up triumphing over the driving force of sexuality. In other words, if, in films like Double Indemnity, the mixed relationship between calculation and passion remains ambivalent, then Body Heat dissolves this ambiguity in favor of the former. Kathleen Turner’s femme fatale is driven by pure monetary greed – the seduction of the man is part of a planned mise en scène. In the end, Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) is no femme fatale, but a deceptive image. Even her sexual ecstasy is part of the simulacrum. Exceptionally, the title of the German version of the film is actually quite apt: Eine heisskalte Frau (A Hot-Cold Woman). While the continuously sweating bodies in Dog Day Afternoon still aid in the expression of an aesthetic experience, the sweat also flows in Body Heat, but the bodily expressive moment is separated from any interiority, which no longer exists. Body heat is guided by cold money. In this view, Body Heat can be read both with and against Jameson as a metacommentary on the logic of late capitalism, and the disappearance of affect can be reinterpreted as a strongpoint of the film. Is it not, precisely, the pastiche strategies of Body Heat that neutralize the ideological existentialism of method acting, which Jameson criticized in Dog Day Afternoon? In a short scene, the film seems to allegorize the end of the unity between the method actor and the rebel. Matty gifts Ned a black gangster hat as a sign of coolness and non-conformity, but the hat is far too big for him. Anamorphically distorted in the mirror image of the car window, Hurt appears as an interchangeable figure incapable of following in the footsteps of earlier generations of actors. Perhaps, however, the crisis of method acting does not provide for an outburst of melancholy, but allows for new allegorical

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Cartogr aphies of the Postmodern

213

figurations, at least if we take Jameson’s reading of Dog Day Afternoon at its word. In any case, the standard counterposition between the progressive New Hollywood of the 1970s and the conservative Post-New Hollywood of the 1980s should, both with and against Jameson, be brought into doubt. The nostalgia for film noir that Body Heat revels in is thus more than a mere ideological shield blocking out the historical present. Instead, it represents the attempt, through a double exposure of film history, to make the absent Real of “burned down history” representable and imaginable. This means nothing more nor less than historically understanding the historicist antihistoricality of postmodernity itself, a vision which “is meant to derive from the shock of grasping that confinement and of slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach.”12 The nostalgia film, therefore, cannot be separated from an “aesthetic situation engendered by the disappearance of the historical referent.”13 But this disappearance of the historical reference does not necessarily have to change into the object of a positive affirmation. In this view, it is of decisive importance which epoch stands in as a nostalgic object for which epoch. The nostalgia, in Body Heat, for the “materialist” film noir of the 1940s is different from the nostalgia for idyllic small town life and rock and roll culture in the 1950s, which for Jameson is the nostalgic era par excellence (at least for Hollywood cinema in the 1970s and 1980s). In the first case, nostalgic fascination relates to a genre which both aesthetically and thematically bears witness to the diverse antagonisms of the immediate post-war era. In the second case, the fascination is for the apparent pacification of these antagonisms in the Eisenhower era. The postmodern nostalgia film is thus situated in a tense relationship between historicality and historicity, which Jameson elsewhere distinguishes in exact terms: Historicity is, in fact, neither a representation of the past nor a representation of the future (although its various forms use such representations): it can first and foremost be defined as a perception of the present as history; that is, as relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective. […] Yet everything in our own culture suggests that we have not, for all that, ceased to be preoccupied 12 Ibid., p. 25. 13 Ibid.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

214 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

by history; indeed, at the very moment in which we complain, as here, of the eclipse of historicity, we also universally diagnose contemporary culture as irredeemably historicist, in the bad sense of an omnipresent and indiscriminate appetite for dead styles and fashions, indeed, for all the styles and fashions of a dead past.14

The crisis of historicality concerns not only the aesthetic object, but also the subject, which increasingly loses its ability to integrate past and future as organic elements of its experience. According to Jameson, this dismemberment of the historical experience of time leads to the unleashing of a desemanticized shock of presence, which arises in the collision of the symbolic order. Following Lacan, Jameson describes the postmodern devalorization of temporality as a de-suturing of the signifying chain characteristic of schizophrenia. With the disintegration of the syntagmatic articulation of the signifiers, the temporal capacity of the ego to experience the present as part of a continuous syntactic and semantic context is also destroyed: “With the breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time.”15 Schizophrenia, here, is not so much the clinical phenomenon as it is a kind of psychic reification, which is brought about through the autonomization of the signifier: But “autonomization” also takes on another sense: the fragmentation of film and other cultural production into mere sequences of “effects” for their own sakes (“pastiche” again), effects detachable from any larger structural whole or meaning, as well as from any larger langue or semiosis that would generate or allow intertextual significances. The modernist “motivation of the device” has developed into a postmodern aesthetic of the device for its own sake, or its own motivation.16

7.2 The Totalization of Totality: Cognitive Mapping With respect to the post-structuralist affirmation of the materiality of the signifier, Jameson understands the schizophrenic breakdown of meaning less 14 Fredric Jameson, “Nostalgia for the Present,” in Postmodernism, pp. 284, 286. 15 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 27. 16 Steven Helmling, The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson (Albany: SUNY Press 2001), p. 129.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Cartogr aphies of the Postmodern

215

as a subversion of the centered bourgeois subject, and more as a symptom of a paralysis of the ability to take action in the face of a veritably deranged present, which Jameson, not coincidentally, relates to the aesthetic category of the sublime. James conceives of the sublime in close relation to the triad of the Real (Lacan), the absent cause (Althusser) and totality (Lukács). The sublime is also a border concept, which points to the necessary collapse of representability. In postmodernity, the experience of the sublime is shifted from nature to “second nature” – that is, culture. The discrepancy between the sublime of nature and the physical finitude of the human body is transposed onto a postmodern hyperspace, whose urban, architectural and technological immensity is radically anti-anthropomorphic. Jameson’s key notion of aesthetic representability undergoes a new turn thanks to the postmodern incommensurability of body and space. For Jameson, an architecture of the sublime materializes in the urban spaces of postmodernity, which overwhelms the perceptual and cognitive capacities of the subject. Hence the following programmatic statement: I am proposing the notion that we are here in the presence of something like a mutation in built space itself. My implication is that we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution; there has been a mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject. We do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace, as I will call it, in part because our perceptual habits were formed in that older kind of space I have called the space of high modernism. The newer architecture therefore – like many of the other cultural products I have evoked in the preceding remarks – stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions.17

In the postmodern, space triumphs over time. In analogy to the transformation of the image, pastiche and superficiality are the most prominent hallmarks of post-human hyperspace, which, even though it is of human provenance, is no longer humanly comprehensible on a perceptual level, as Jameson demonstrates with his famous analysis of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. The hotel has a pastiche form because it creates a simulacrum of the world. The opaque glass roof of the hotel shields off the external environment, instead of enabling an architectural exchange 17 Jameson, Postmodernism, pp. 38-39.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

216 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

between building and city: the Bonaventure “does not wish to be a part of the city but rather its equivalent and replacement or substitute.”18 Inside the hotel, a baroque, labyrinthine arrangement of escalators and elevators not only disturbs the visitor’s sense of orientation, but it even seems that “the escalators and elevators here henceforth replace movement but also, and above all, designate themselves as new reflexive signs and emblems of movement proper.”19 The postmodern space stops functioning as the experiential space of the subject, and autonomizes itself in the automatism of a movement far from the materiality of walking that Van Gogh’s Peasant Shoes bore witness to. The superficiality of postmodern visual culture has its architectural equivalent in a maximized immersion effect, which strips the visitor of any ability to judge spatial depth: “it is an element within which you yourself are immersed, without any of that distance that formerly enabled the perception of perspective or volume. You are in this hyperspace up to your eyes and your body.”20 From Jameson’s allegorical viewpoint, the immensity of postmodern hyperspace naturally stands in for an even more unfathomable totality, which goes by the name of late capitalism. The Bonaventure Hotel is, for Jameson, a gigantic, materialized allegory for a historical era, in which the gap between the subject and the real appears greater than ever.21 My principal point here [is] that this latest mutation in space – postmodern hyperspace – has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. It may now be suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment […] can itself stand as the symbol and analogon of that even sharper dilemma 18 Ibid., p. 40. 19 Ibid., p. 42. 20 Ibid., p. 43. 21 Jameson thus observes a “growing contradiction between lived experience and structure, or between a phenomenological description of the life of an individual and a more properly structural model of the conditions of existence of that experience. Too rapidly we can say that, while in older societies and perhaps even in the early stages of market capital, the immediate and limited experience of individuals is still able to encompass and coincide with the true economic and social form that governs that experience, in the next moment these two levels drift ever further apart and really begin to constitute themselves into that opposition the classical dialectic describes as Wesen und Erscheinung, essence and appearance, structure and lived experience.” Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Michael Hardt and Kathy Weeks (eds.), The Jameson Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 278.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Cartogr aphies of the Postmodern

217

which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.22

What Jameson here, in the early 1980s, presents as an epistemological dilemma for postmodernity, is perhaps even more pertinent for our present day, which can best be characterized as an era of globalization. If we follow Jameson’s symptomatology, the problems for political aesthetics remain unchanged: the representability of the unrepresentable, the concretization of the abstract, sensual knowledge: “While Jameson is certainly aware that social reality is unrepresentable in any ultimate or final sense, he nevertheless insists that, whatever aesthetic or formalizing strategy we adopt at present, the problem for us remains one of representation.”23 Hence, political aesthetics must be allegorical: “For allegory is precisely the dominant mode of expression of a world in which things have been for whatever reason utterly sundered from meanings, from spirit, from genuine human existence.”24 And yet, in contrast to the 1970s, in the 1980s the allegorical method (at least in Jameson’s film analysis) seems to have been displaced from problems of the figure and figuration, to those of space and spatiality. This shift, which can be observed in the hermeneutic practice of the allegorical method, has little to do with interpretative caprice, and more to do with the Marxist recognition of the precedence of the object over the subject, which is further intensified in postmodernity. As such, Jameson’s works of film theory in the 1980s begin where his analysis of Dog Day Afternoon ends: in allegorical space. Jameson pays theoretical tribute to the primacy of space in postmodernity through the coining of a new term: cognitive mapping. Cognitive mapping is for Jameson the key to a political aesthetics of postmodernity. The earlier demand for allegorical figuration is now broadened by a cartographic component drawn from from the geographer Kevin Lynch. In the 1950s, Lynch further developed his notion of perceptual geography. A cognitive cartography becomes necessary when the subject is not in a position to relate their own location with the urban totality. Cartographic markings serve as mnemotechnic orientations, through which the subject can experience their place within the whole city. Cognitive mapping thus adheres to the necessity of representation, but detaches it from any mimetic 22 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 44. 23 Christopher Wise, The Marxian Hermeneutics of Fredric Jameson (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), p. 132. 24 Jameson, Marxism and Form, p. 71.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

218 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

function. Jameson does see the concept as the consequence of the epistemic aspiration of realistic aesthetics, but in the changed historical conditions there is no more organic contiguity between realism and totality: “For better or for worse, art does not seem in our society to offer any direct access to reality, any possibility of unmediated representation of what used to be called realism.”25 Cognitive mapping can better be described as the paradoxical project of a “realism of the Real,” which accounts for the irreducible gap between experience and knowledge. “There comes into being, then, a situation in which we can say that if individual experience is authentic, then it cannot be true; and that if a scientific or cognitive model of the same content is true, then it escapes individual experience.”26 Once again, Jameson insists on the singular capacity of the aesthetic to build a bridge between phenomenal experience and scientific recognition. The practice of cartography thus seems made for this purpose, but the map operates precisely in the interval between the asymptotic appropriation of an unfathomable totality (in order to heighten the subject’s radius of perception and action), and a necessary abstraction that replaces imitation though cognitive projection. In a second step, Jameson connects the projective dimension of cartography with a surprising re-reading of Althusser’s definition of ideology as the “‘representation’ of the imaginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”27 According to Althusser, ideology has the function of mediating between the existential experience of individuals and an inaccessible structural causality. In contrast to the reception of Althusser in 1970s film theory, Jameson takes Althusser’s thesis of a permanence of ideology seriously. This has a twofold implication. Firstly, Jameson departs from the teleological idea that there can ever be a transparent relationship between totality and the subject. Even a postcapitalist society will require ideology in order to equip the subject with the mental maps of the Real. Secondly, Jameson, in contrast to 1970s film theory, places an emphasis on the recognition function of the Imaginary over and above the misrecognition function. The Real only remains representable 25 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 150. “‘Cognitive mapping’ functions as Jameson’s version of a new realism. Importantly, this realism is not ‘exactly mimetic in that older sense’ but does retain what Jameson sees as the originality of the concept of realism: its claim for cognitive as well as aesthetic status. Unlike its nineteenth-century variants, this form of realism attempts finally to ‘produce the concept of something we cannot imagine.’” Carolyn Lesjak, “History, Narrative, and Realism: Jameson’s Search for a Method,” in Ian Buchanan and Caren Irr (eds.), On Jameson (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), p. 28. 26 Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” p. 278. 27 See above, Part I, introduction, fn. 3.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Cartogr aphies of the Postmodern

219

and visible through the Imaginary. Jameson’s idiosyncratic theoretical triangulation of Althusser, Lacan and Lukács is condensed in the concept of cognitive mapping: Indeed, of the three Lacanian “orders” (the Imaginary, the Symbolic, the Real) two make an official appearance in Althusser’s formulation. The Real – as absent cause, as that which “resists symbolization absolutely,” as the source of anxiety but also the locus in which we can alone come to provisional terms with our “desire” – is here the social totality itself, something no individual can ever grasp or “represent,” and which is as it were invisible at the same time that it is omnipresent and inescapable.28

This thesis, which also harbors consequences for the political aesthetics of cinema, does not per se fall under the general suspicion post-structuralism had towards the imaginary Imagination. Alongside the imaginary dimension of visual representability, the register of the symbolic is also inscribed into cognitive mapping. The map is both similar and essentially dissimilar to what it is intended to designate. In this sense, we can read cognitive mapping as the operation mediating between Lacan’s three registers: Cognitive mapping fills in the absent place of the Symbolic in Althusser’s adaptation of the Lacanian tripartite schema of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. Cognitive mapping has the effect of coordinating these other two poles, the existential and phenomenological experience of people in their daily lives and the abstract and global economic, political, and social realities we always already inhabit. […] Cognitive mapping, like totalization, is always already, as the verb suggests, a process, a way of making connections, and situating ourselves as both individual and collective subjects within a particular spatial system.29

As the amalgamation of politics, aesthetics and epistemology, cognitive mapping targets the imaginary and symbolic processing of an untotalizable totality. Totalization, as Jameson, following Sartre, writes: should initially be sharply distinguished from that other stigmatized word, totality […]. Indeed, if the word totality sometimes seems to suggest that 28 Fredric Jameson, “Ideological Analysis: A Handbook,” in Valences of the Dialectic, pp. 340-341. 29 Phillip E. Wegner, “Periodizing Jameson, or, Notes towards a Cultural Logic of Globalization,” in On Jameson, pp. 266-267.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

220 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

some privileged bird’s-eye view of the whole is available, which is also the Truth, then the project of totalization implies exactly the opposite and takes as its premise the impossibility for individual and biological human subjects to conceive of such a position, let alone to adopt or achieve it.30

In this sense, political film aesthetics is confronted with an impossible task: how to create new organs that can restitute the cartographic coordinates for the postmodern subject? As I argued in the f irst part of this book, however, should we not conceive of the cinema as a site of production of anorganic organs? Or, as Jameson writes, in unerring proximity to suture theory: “Cinematographic perception is in that sense neither subjective nor psychological: there is nothing private or personal about it.”31 Cognitive mapping must be created out of this transsubjectivity of film.

7.3 The Implosion of the Referent: Blow-Up If there is any film that affirms Jameson’s diagnosis of the loss of the historical referent as, itself, a historical moment, then it is Blow-Up by Antonioni (1967). The first film Antonioni made outside of Italy does not exhaust itself in treating the precarious relationship between photography and reality on a metalevel; rather, it historicizes the crisis of photography’s relation to the world as a further phase in the reification of late capitalist image culture. In a certain sense, Blow-Up narrates the prehistory of postmodern visuality, as Jameson has described it, but this is not retrospective. Filmed in 1966 at the zenith of “Swinging London,” and a pop culture that was becoming increasingly dominant, the film localizes the birth of postmodernity in its immediate present. Blow-Up is the draft of a spectral analysis of the Sixties as an archaeology of the future, which discerns the traces of the future from the symptoms of the present. In this sense, Blow-Up is just as little a postmodern (or pre-postmodern) film as Jameson is a postmodern theorist just because he writes about the phenomenon. Hence, in both Antonioni and Jameson, a normative aesthetic judgement about postmodernity and its stylistic markers consists of historically and cognitively charting postmodernity’s conditions of possibility. But what is indisputably subject to negotiation from the perspective of film theory is the political valency of a photographic and filmic realism in 30 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 332. 31 Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” in The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007), p. 159.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Cartogr aphies of the Postmodern

221

the face of a dual epistemic dilemma in postmodernity: on the one hand, the exclusion of the Real from the simulacrum-like multiplication and circulation of images, and on the other hand an exclusion by the real which as a non-transparent totality structurally eludes any possibility of becoming a mimetic image. If the Real can no longer be referentially inscribed into the image, then the ontological and aesthetic belief in realism goes into crisis. In the cinema, this crisis is articulated through the shattering of photography’s power of causality: the automated indexical semiosis of the filmic image guarantees less than ever an objective access to the real. It is this crisis that Blow-Up works through. The film begins with a dissensual montage, a juxtaposition of two apparently irreconcilable life forms and social milieux: a shot of a group of clowns and pantomimes merrily riding a car through the city is followed by an image of bedraggled homeless men leaving their doss house. The hedonistic leisure culture of consumer society is immediately placed side by side with the misery of lumpenproletarian indigence. As a clear allusion to the film La Sortie des usines (1895) by the Lumière brothers, this image refers to the documentary spirit lying at the genesis of the cinema: the protagonist of the film, the photographer Thomas (David Hemmings) has embedded himself among the homeless men in order to photographically record their misery with the greatest possible intimacy. This differentiation of the social is transposed, in the film, onto an antagonism between two image-regimes, which intersect in the figure of the photographer. The same Thomas, who we initially take for a portrait photographer in the social-realist tradition of a Walker Evans, is revealed to be a fashion photographer, who in a purpose-built studio apartment arranges his models for his shoots with an almost misanthropic authority. This marks an abrupt change in the identity of the character, but also in the relation to the photographic object: the documentary gesture turns into a reifying impulse, which stages the models as interchangeable objects. After they are used up, the models lose all value. The exchangeable form of the aestheticized body coincides with a strange de-sexualization, although all gestures during the photo shoot are maximally sexualized. The famous photography scene with Veruschka is akin to a sexual act: Thomas frenetically pushes her to ever more daring scenes, urging her to give everything. He stands over her body and deploys the camera almost as a phallic prosthesis, until both are completely drained. When Thomas finally thinks he has the perfect shot, he lets an exhausted Veruschka lie down on the floor and jadedly sinks onto the sofa. This is undoubtedly a kind of allegorical orgasm, but it is one without any physical touching:

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

222 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

this de-sexualized sexuality seems to be symptomatic of a pornographic image-regime, which maximally decorporealizes the body. Pornography shifts the libido from the body to the image and thereby produces a new structure of visual drives, which according to Jameson only unleashes its full effect in the postmodern era: The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the more thankless effort to discipline the viewer). Pornographic films are thus only the potentiation of films in general, which ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body. On the other hand, we know this today more clearly because our society has begun to offer us the world – now mostly a collection of products of our own making – as just such a body, that you can possess visually, and collect the images of.32

Jameson understands this pornographization of the visual as a barometer of reification, which also does not leave sexuality untouched. In a second photography scene, which follows directly after the session with Veruschka, this motif is once again varied: Thomas, still in a bad mood, arranges five models standing in front of transparent glass panes into a series of tableaux whose Warholian artificiality reproduces that superficiality of the image which Jameson has described as the signature of postmodern visuality. An arrangement shows the models as an ornamental layering of surfaces of bodies and glass: all sense of volume seems to have been extracted from these body-images, and even the mute models appear under their thick make-up and futuristic costumes more as lifeless shop-window mannequins than as flesh-and-blood human beings – reification as mortification, transforming the living body into a mechanical object. It is therefore perfectly congruous that the film is also extremely gelid on the emotional level – not one of the characters discloses anything about their inner feelings. Jameson’s thesis on the disappearance of affect manifests itself above all in the protagonist himself, who here presides over the birth of a new type of pop culture subject: the hipster. As Thomas, David Hemmings is, it could be argued, the first cinematic incarnation of the hipster, who no longer has much in common with the anomie of the bourgeoisie in Antonioni’s 32 Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, p. 1.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Cartogr aphies of the Postmodern

223

Italian films nor with the rebel attitude of the 1950s. With a serene coolness, immaculately styled and with a contemporary Beatles haircut, Thomas roams through photo-shoots, hashish parties, rock concerts and happenings. He is everywhere, but he never really participates. He always maintains a certain detached distance, and nothing can bring him out of this attitude. The figure of the hipster marks a clear break with the neurotic desire of Antonioni’s earlier protagonists, a desire which is still desperately directed towards the Other. In Blow-Up, this Other has lost its consistency, in a double Lacanian sense: there is neither an Other who reflects Thomas’ desire, nor is there the “Big Other” of the socio-symbolic order, which could guarantee the identity of the subject. This disintegration of the Symbolic can be seen in three cryptic sequences which are actually devoid of any immediate narrative significance. In each case, there is an abrupt devalorization of different objects, which had initially awakened desires: the propeller that Thomas buys in an antique store, a demonstration poster, and finally the rock band’s smashed-up guitar. Thomas adamantly wants to own the propeller, but when it is delivered to his house, he seems to have lost all interest in it. A similar thing happens with the poster bearing the slogan “Go Away,” which a female demonstrator leaves on the backseat of Thomas’ car. During the trip it falls out of the car and is buried by traffic, but this time Thomas’ reaction is not shown. Towards the end of the film, Thomas watches a rock concert which could hardly be more unusual: a crowd of mods impassively follows the frenzied performance of a band, whose guitarist smashes his guitar and throws its detached neck into the crowd. A tumultuous tussle abruptly breaks out over the object, which ends up falling in Thomas’ hands. Yet on the street he heedlessly throws the guitar fragment away. What had seemed to possess cult value is transformed into rubbish. These objects are fetish-objects, the possession of which is meant to procure auratic uniqueness, but which, by the light of day, turn, as it were, from gold into shit.33 The process of reification under late capitalism unstintingly produces such part-objects, which carry within themselves the promise of a maximal jouissance, but which exhaust themselves in direct consumption and – the decisive factor in the three sequences – no longer possess any ability to form a symbolic community: “What is interesting in the case of the last 33 Kaja Silverman similarly speaks of a specific “anality” of consumption in Weekend, a film Godard made at the same time as Blow-Up: “With this serialization of the exchange process, the moment of enjoyment of each new commodity also becomes briefer and briefer, so that it passes for this reason as well much more quickly into the category of ‘shit.’ Anality would thus seem much closer than the phallus to the ‘truth’ of late capitalism.” Farocki/Silverman, Speaking of Godard, p. 90.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

224 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

two objects is the fact that they acquire their ‘meaning’ (or really, their ‘density’ or ‘exchange value’) only within a very particularized, subcultural Symbolic system. […] Both of these part-objects speak of the fragmentation of the social fabric into postmodern subcultures whose relationship to one another can only be antagonistic.”34 In this psychoanalytic sense, reification also designates an extreme differentiation and individualization of enjoyment, which can no longer be intersubjectively shared: everyone should have their own jouissance! Slavoj Žižek has described this postmodern regime of pleasure as a unique short-circuiting of lack and excess: Therein resides the libidinal economy of the capitalist “consumption”: in the production of objects which do not simply meet or satisfy an already given need, but create the need they claim to satisfy (the publicity usually operates in such a way that the consumer “becomes aware of desires they were not even aware they possessed”), giving the ultimate twist to Marx’s old claim that production creates the need for consumption, for the objects it produces. Which is why these objects are no longer (as in Lacan of the 1950s, the 1960s) constrained to the “natural” series of oral object, anal object, voice, gaze, and phallus, but comprise the proliferating multitude of cultural sublimation, which, however, is strictly correlative to a certain lack – the excess of capitalist consumption always functions as the reaction to a fundamental lack.35

Hence, the proliferation of prosthetic fetish objects in postmodernity can only guarantee such a highly monadic and extremely short-term sublimation effect, a particular form of pleasure that Žižek characterizes as masturbatory. In Blow-Up, images circulate as direct components of this new libidinal economy. Whether it concerns fashion pictures, the documentary photographs of homeless men, or the pointillist paintings of Thomas’ friend Bill – every image awakens our appetite for a new image, which promises 34 Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles, p. 111. Jameson has expressed himself on the particularization of the Symbolic under postmodernity in the following terms: “The structure thus confirms the description of postmodernism as something for which the word fragmentation remains much too weak and primitive a term, and probably too ‘totalizing’ as well, particularly since it is now no longer a matter of the breakup of some preexisting older organic totality, but rather the emergence of the multiple in new and unexpected ways, unrelated strings of events, types of discourse, modes of classif ication, and compartments of reality.” Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 372. 35 Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 21.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Cartogr aphies of the Postmodern

225

a still more thrilling pleasure. It is thus no coincidence that the sequential snapshots in the park which trigger the film’s detective storyline, directly follow on from the frustrating visit to the antique store. Here, Thomas is idly leafing around for new photos, upon which the shopkeeper tells him “Pictures are all sold out.” When supply becomes scarce, demand rises. As if even the photographic greed for images underpinned this market law, Thomas immediately reaches for his camera and begins taking apparently random pictures of the streets, until he finally arrives in the nearby park: “I take pictures.”36 In like fashion to the factory scene in Europa 51, in Blow-Up too the parameter of the gaze shifts from the subject to the object. Through a hard cut to a long-shot from inside the park, an anonymous look at Thomas is evoked, one which precedes him and which already seems to expect him. When Thomas enters this curiously empty park, impure eyeline-matches start accumulating, which, even if they are not unambiguously transsubjective, nonetheless evince a fragility of the film’s suture. With voyeuristic fascination, Thomas follows a couple who he initially photographs unnoticed, but he ends up being discovered by the woman, who nervously demands that he return the photos. Thomas turns her down and argues for his autonomy as an artist. It is his task to make images. It is just this (lax) sovereignty of the enunciator that is progressively dismantled in the sequence that gives the film its title. When the woman from the park surprises Thomas in his studio and once again asks him to hand back the photos, Thomas’ curiosity is finally aroused. But once again his erotic interest (which remains at the level of foreplay) turns from the woman to the image. As opposed to his photographing of the model, Thomas now, however, wants to penetrate past the surface of the image. Having developed several of his snapshots, he discovers an unidentified detail in the bushes, towards which the woman’s fearful gaze seems directed. What does this woman see? By blowing up his photographs, Thomas tries to isolate the spot in the bushes; moreover, he seeks to transform the enlarged prints into a meaningful series of images. He hereby ceases to be a photographer and becomes a filmmaker. Moreover, on the basis of an eyeline-match, he constructs a thread between two shots, which with every new print developed increasingly seems to grow into a narrative sequence. The film here reveals a small allegory for suture as multiperspectival continuity editing. But this allegory is even more complex in the next part of the scene, when on the level of enunciation it is 36 See Gertrud Koch, Was ich erbeute, sind Bilder: Zum Diskurs der Geschlechter im Film (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 1988).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

226 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

precisely suture’s capacity for causality that is put into question. In a recent book, Casetti described this moment as follows: Once again, the camera passes over the different images, and at the end of the uninterrupted pan it captures the photographer intent on examining the results of his work. This final shot contains a surprising element: it begins with a scene that seems to be seen by someone (the movement of the camera on the photographs simulates, in fact, the gaze of the photographer who inspects them), but instead of cutting to that person watching, it ends with the discovery that the observer has always been in the scene, inside what was thought to be his field of vision. The two elements could not exist in the same image, since if someone is seen, that someone cannot be inside his or her own field of vision (that is, the person looking ahead cannot frame him or herself as well). Yet here object and subject coexist as equal parts inside one single gaze. This is the small paradox that renders the shift surprising: What is usually divided, and should remain as such, is instead reassembled. Thus, a unity – conspirational and a bit disturbing – emerges.37

Once again, Casetti’s conceptual apparatus is here not overly precise, since, as I argued earlier, he is incapable of conceiving of the category of impossible subjectivity in his schema. Hence, he mistakes the transsubjective modulation that is present with a half-subjective shot which unites the subject and object of the gaze – a mode that is thoroughly conventionalized and already becomes effective through a simple over-the-shoulder shot. But what is really fascinating in this sequence is not only the emergence of transsubjectivity, which relates the film back to Antonioni’s earlier work (see Chapter 4.3), but also the antagonistic relationship between enoncé and enunciation. While the diegesis allegorizes the construction of an apparently successful suture, in the enunciation precisely the opposite takes place: suture is suspended by transsubjectivity. Perhaps there is no better example of the irrevocable division between enoncé and enunciation than this scene, in which the diegetic allegorization of suturing is intersected by the non-diegetic allegorization of de-suturing. In Blow-Up, too, as already in Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, this displacing of the gaze becomes an entryway for an outside that exceeds the cognitive capacities of the subject, as Casetti, this time correctly, remarks: “He uses it in other films, always in order to mark moments in which the character’s capacity to understand a situation on 37 Francesco Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 157.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Cartogr aphies of the Postmodern

227

both perspective and cognitive levels seems to deteriorate and rupture.”38 But this is precisely what makes Blow-Up so special: the protagonist is also the allegorical representative of the enunciator/author/director, but does not coincide with the absent subject of enunciation. In the final examination of the enlarged photo, in which Thomas believes he has identified the spot as a weapon, as well as, in the last image, a dead body, the epistemological status of enunciation is extremely precarious. Once more, a false point-of-view match-cut uncouples the gaze from the gazing subject – this time, however, in an anticipatory rather than a retroactive recoding: Thomas directs his gaze to an absent object in the middle of the space, but the point-of-view does not begin with this image. Rather, it begins with the chronologically earliest image among the photos hanging on the wall. Although the missing anchoring of the gaze is evident, the impression remains of a subjective shot, but in contrast to the previous scene, the slow pan across the photos is dissolved by the assembled succession of individual photos. Through the quick series of cuts, the rupture between individual photos is once again opened up – the imaginary eyeline-match between the woman and the supposed murderer ceases to work. Through the indeterminability of the transsubjective image and the flash-like succession of still images, the almost forensic fixation of the visual referent turns into a mental reenactment of what is already a phantasmatically overdetermined scene. Like Thomas, the spectators think they fleetingly see a revolver and a dead body in the enlarged image, but the feeling of unreality is strengthened all the more when suddenly the ripple of leaves from the earlier scene in the park can be heard. Thus, the acoustic reference of the event is, on the one hand, given credence, but on the other hand it is subjectivized as an image of Thomas’ memory. The search for a reference detaches itself from the image and migrates to the soundtrack. As Angelo Restivo has established, this acoustic archiving is even more unstable than the visual: “The agency of the ‘reality effect’ is displaced from image to sound, but this is not enough to ground either the image or the subject.”39 From the Lumières up to Kracauer, the rippling of the leaves in the wind in the ontology of filmic realism has always been a unique phenomenon, as Jameson once again noted in his analysis of Blow-Up, with a view on the micrological level: The fascination with leaves and their relationship to motion seems to have marked photography (and film) from their beginning – “leaves [that] ripple 38 Ibid. 39 Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles, p. 112.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

228 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

and glitter in the rays of the sun” (Cook and Bonelli, 1860); the Lumière brothers’ first highly praised shorts of “the ripple of leaves stirred by the wind”; D.W. Griffith’s 1947 denunciation of Hollywood, its loss of interest in “the beauty of leaves stirred by the wind.” Philosophically, when the crucial issue of movement appears within the ontological meditations of Sartre’s Nausea it is in the form of wind moving in the leaves and moving them. The massy foliage of Eclipse is nothing but an episode: in Blow-Up, however, the great trees of Maryon Park are shaken with wind as though by a kind of permanent violence, day or night never at rest; it is as though in this place above the city the god of wind reigned in perpetuity. So crucial is this sound that in the most remarkable moment of the film, as David Hemmings grimly contemplates his ultimate motionless blow-up, the wind returns in the soundtrack as though to certify its authenticity.40

Here, the traditional hierarchy between image and sound is inverted: the referential instability of the image cannot anchor the sound in the visible, such that now the sound must verify the truth of the image. But the reality- and subject-effect of the sound is semiotically distinguished from the indexical trace-logic of the photographic image through the greater indeterminacy of referent and sign, original and copy. In Lacan’s terminology: the sound is too “real” to signify “Reality.” Hence, the retroactive return of the rippling of leaves can also be read as Thomas’ acoustic hallucination, as the psychological return of the Real, which in the amorphous shape of the enlarged photographic pixel stubbornly evades symbolization. If, therefore, image and sound have become anamorphic, then there can be no naturalized unity between the two: the schism between the dereferentialized image and the dereferentializd sound is, in Blow-Up, conclusively sealed. The natural mimesis of the “rippling of leaves in the wind,” to which filmic realism was so tied, is in Blow-Up substituted for a simulacrum of nature. The park is already filmically transformed by the Technicolor photography of the film into a thoroughly unreal, or hyperreal, brilliant green – a denaturalization of nature. This specific “glossiness” of postmodern visuality is also the background for Jameson’s apparently puzzling argument that the color film represents an endpoint for filmic realism and modernism: “Color thus spells the end of filmic and photographic realism and modernism alike.”41 In the end, denaturalization also concerns nature’s sign that the human body itself will at some point meets its end – the corpse. Although, in the 40 Jameson, “The Existence of Italy,” p. 270. 41 Ibid., p. 264.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Cartogr aphies of the Postmodern

229

last enlargements, both the iconic and the indexical mode of functioning of the photographic image are dissolved in the proto-digital pixels of silver nitrate grains, Thomas is convinced that he has recognized the spot in the image as a dead body. He returns to the park at night, and actually does find a corpse behind the bushes, which seems to have undergone no decay or decomposition. Does the referentialization of the image succeed after all? Jameson decisively questions this point: The principle formal doubt, of a more metaphysical nature, if I may put it that way, attaches to this corpse: should it really have been seen? Should the existence of the referent finally have been documented in this “realistic” or representational way? The corpse is however waxen, and far and away the most unreal object shown in the film – a dead body already on its way to image-or-simulacrum-status: the thought, indeed, crosses one’s mind that its features are exceptionally Italianate for this “English” film, and not without some distant fleeting resemblance to Antonioni’s own. 42

The similarity of the dead body with Antonioni himself should in no way be dismissed as a morbid joke. It provides us with a twofold allegorical codification: the death of the author is further bolstered, while at the same time Italian neorealism “dies” in England with the onset of postmodernity. Here, the decomposition of neorealism that was already initiated in L’Eclisse is continued. The allegorical status of the waxen corpses is not, however, exhausted in this metacommentary on the function of the author. In terms of film theory the dead body is not just any object but, in Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image, it is the anthropological model of the cinema itself: it is the first image of the human, which takes an imprint of the dead body in the Egyptian “mummy complex” through a proto-indexical conservation. For Bazin, photography and film represent a continuation of this natural semiosis: “Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.”43 In Blow-Up, even the dead body no longer appears as a natural phenomenon, but as an artificial doppelgänger, an image without any earthly origin. On a second, allegorical level, the dead body also stands in for the crisis of the symbolic order in the postmodern era, which is no longer held together in the “Name of the Father.” Thomas’ attempt to construct an Œdipal narrative 42 Ibid., p. 268. 43 Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” p. 12.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

230 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

on the basis of the couple he photographed in the park, fails in view of the lacking consistency of the “Big Other.” The problem is not that the symbolic father died, but that it had become a simulacrum. When Thomas, in a repetition of the Œdipal primal scene, returns to his studio, he crosses paths with a painter friend and his wife having sex, and observes them. But instead of feeling disrupted by the voyeur, the woman returns Thomas’ gaze. He will discover that during his absence all his photos have been stolen by unknown figures. Only the last enlargement of the supposed dead body remains, which the wife of the painter compares to her husband’s pointillist tableaux. In a last attempt to intersubjectively verify the “having-been” of the referent, Thomas turns to his publisher Ron, another symbolic father-figure in the film. But when he finally turns up to a party, Ron shows no interest in the case. Already, in an earlier sequence, he had judged Thomas’ pictures of homeless men purely on the basis of their possible exchange-value. Caught in an idiotic, hashish-induced jouissance, Ron also does not represent the Name of the Father, which Thomas so desperately summons. Ron is merely another one of the postmodern pleasure-monads who populate the world of Blow-Up. Early one morning, Thomas finally returns to the park, alone, only to discover that the corpse has disappeared without a trace. He dawdles a while at the place where the body disappeared, and looks, one last time, at the leaves rippling in the wind. There follows the last transsubjective modulation of the point of view, as a pan from a unambiguous subjective view of the tree ends with the inclusion of Thomas in the field. The schism of image and referent is now conclusively sealed: even the rippling of the leaves in the wind no longer functions as an indexical guarantor of physical reality: “Blow-Up, then, deploys that gaze in order to stage its allegory of the triumph of the simulacrum: the image can no longer function as guarantor of the referent, but rather hides within itself a lethal jouissance that always threatens the subject with disappearance.”44 When the postmodern image loses its epistemic evidence, then only the power of imagination remains. That the imagination is not simply psychotically distorting, but can be useful to the practice of cognitive mapping, is demonstrated by the final scene of Blow-Up. Here, Thomas encounters the pantomimes from the opening of the film, playing an imaginary tennis match without a ball. As the invisible ball ends up landing near Thomas’ feet, he decides, after a brief hesitation, to join in their game. He throws the ball back onto the court. Although the ball, through a double absence, is not visible (it is unreal, and has also been thrown into the off-screen space), 44 Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles, p. 115.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Cartogr aphies of the Postmodern

231

we can hear it, in Thomas’ acoustic imagination, being hit back and forth. The cautious appeal for the power of imagination ends, of course, with Thomas’ disappearance outside of the image: like an ironic counterpoint to his excessive enlargements, the final image of the film captures Thomas in a long-shot, and his lost shape “fades out” through a trick effect, such that with the onset of the credits, all that remains left is the park lawn’s two-dimensional, green surface-image – a long-shot without a subject and a ground without a figure, as Jameson writes: Antonioni’s ground without a figure also wishes to be this ground which is a punctum: through it now pass, purified, abstracted, the neorealist impulses of his earlier films, now reified into the photographic stills that were their deeper truth, only to find these now collectable objects literally confiscated in their turn. With their disappearance, the ›realist‹ vocation of Bazin and Kracauer, the mission of film to redeem physical reality, or rather to rein- vent the photographic libido that was its lost origin and starting point, its nostalgia and its secret death wish or eros all at once, comes to an end; and something else (which is no longer modernism either) takes its place. 45

Postmodernism follows on from realism and modernism in Jameson’s triad. With his analysis of Blow-Up, however, it should have become clear that, for Jameson, a political aesthetics of postmodernism cannot solve the problem of referentiality through the autopoiesis of simulacra: “It is a position that blocks the free-fall into sheer fictionality since the elements, the non-narrative components of the representation, are scarcely optional and mark the place of some non-narrative real, an absent referentiality.”46 It is precisely in the implosion of the referent that Blow-Up remains beholden to this Outside.

Bibliography Bazin, André, What is Cinema? vol. I, trans Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Buchanan, Ian, Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (London: Routledge, 2006). Carroll, Noël, Interpreting the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 45 Jameson, “The Existence of Italy,” p. 271. 46 Fredric Jameson, “Benjamin’s Readings,” Diacritics 22:3-4 (1992), p. 33.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

232 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Casetti, Francesco, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Farocki, Harun, and Kaja Silverman, Speaking about Godard (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Helmling, Steven, The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson (Albany: SUNY Press 2001). Jameson, Fredric, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). –––, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). Fredric Jameson, “Benjamin’s Readings,” Diacritics 22:3-4 (1992), pp. 19-34. –––, Signatures of the Visible (London: Routledge, 1992). –––, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Michael Hardt and Kathy Weeks (eds.), The Jameson Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 277-287.
 –––, The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007). –––, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009).
 Koch, Gertrud, Was ich erbeute, sind Bilder: Zum Diskurs der Geschlechter im Film (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 1988). Lesjak, Carolyn, “History, Narrative, and Realism: Jameson’s Search for a Method,” in Ian Buchanan and Caren Irr (eds.), On Jameson (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006). Restivo, Angelo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). Wegner, Phillip E., “Periodizing Jameson, or, Notes towards a Cultural Logic of Globalization,” in Ian Buchanan and Caren Irr (eds.), On Jameson (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), pp. 241-280. Wise, Christopher, The Marxian Hermeneutics of Fredric Jameson (New York: Peter Lang, 1995). Žižek, Slavoj, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

8. Geopolitical Aesthetics Abstract The third, most abstract allegorical level is that of the acousmatic gaze, which Jameson himself does not address, but which is implicit in his theoretical re-evaluation of the conspiracy motif. In analyzing the paranoia films of New Hollywood, I am interested in the theoretical mediation of the concepts of suture and allegory. I show that the acousmatics of these films correspond with the intransparency of social totality. The films diagnose the negativity of totality in order to make it graspable again for the subject’s capacity of imagination. In my discussion of Miami Vice, I try to sketch out how such an aesthetic of cognitive mapping is also effective under the new geopolitical conditions of globalization. In the final sequence of the film, for example, the almost melancholic recourse to the suture of shot and reverse-shot coincides with the allegorical utopia of an unrepresentable Cuba. In this sense, in Jameson’s aesthetics of the politically unconscious, the mapping of totality is always interwoven with a utopian impulse. Keywords: Conspiracy, Paranoia, Digital Cinema, Utopia

Totality as conspiracy: in the sense of this formula, Fredric Jameson understands conspiracy as a genuinely allegorical figuration, which gains epistemological relevance in the moment when traditional forms of realism falter at the unrepresentability of late capitalism. For Jameson, the following famous Brecht quote implies the demand for a new political aesthetics based on cognitive mapping: “The situation becomes complicated, because more than ever the simple ‘reproduction of reality’ says nothing at all about this reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG teaches us practically nothing about these institutions.”1 Brecht’s critique of photographic realism 1 Bertolt Brecht, Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe 1987-1998 vol. XXI (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), p. 469.

Lie, S., Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462983632_ch08

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

234 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

affirms the gap between the mimetic and the epistemic capabilities of photographic images – the problem that also besets Blow-Up. The concrete referential function of photography is increasingly coupled with the abstract functionality of social reality. In view of the fluid shapelessness of capital itself, which, as an “incorporeal value,” can “be represented only in its effects,”2 the indexical referentialization of photography comes up against its boundaries. In tandem with his analysis of postmodernism, Jameson also understands in The Geopolitical Aesthetic the fundamental challenge of cinema as the possibility (and impossibility) of the representation of a global totality, in which the gap between the lived experience of individuals and economic/social determinations is constantly expanded, “which is to say that those fundamental realities are somehow ultimately unrepresentable or, to use the Althusserian phrase, are something like an absent cause, one that can never emerge into the presence of perception.”3 As an allegorical mode, conspiracy targets this division of individual experience from its structural conditions. Against the realistic fixation on the phenomenological immediacy of the visible world, an allegorical aesthetics is predicated on the coexistence of different semantic layers, such as surface and depth, the manifest and the latent, visibility and invisibility. Conspiracy knowledge generates an allegorical knowledge, which goes beyond the mimetic disclosure of the world in classical realism. The epistemological imaginative power of conspiracy aims for the production “of a concept of something we cannot imagine.”4 In this sense, film appears as the art that can be both documentary and fictional, referential and narrative, on-screen and off-screen, and possesses the dialectical privilege of projecting allegorical imaginations of totality.

8.1. Totality as Conspiracy If the photograph of the Krupp factory is incapable of conveying the structural truth of late capitalism, is it possible for film to come closer to this truth? A film that sets itself this task must necessarily adopt a viewpoint from above, a bird’s-eye-view, even if this is only to process the cartography of a city and to totalize the limited close-up view of the subject. A geopolitical film aesthetics, according to Jameson, “raises the problem of the view from above, and of the invention of new forms of representation 2 Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998), p. 150. 3 Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” p. 279. 4 Ibid.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Geopolitical Aesthe tics

235

for what it is properly impossible to think or represent, and both finally coincide in the logic of conspiracy.”5 And yet it is natural that the totality cannot be depicted by even the most powerful filmic long-shot, but that, as a “non-visual systemic cause,”6 it eludes, in an almost ontological manner, any translation into the empirically representable, perceivable and visible. It is here that both human vision and the non-anthropomorphic vision of film must fail. Jameson, therefore, once again poses the question which had become virulent at the end of his essay on postmodernism: how can the cinema contribute to the production of those anorganic organs that are necessary to relate and concretize the absolute discrepancy between subject and totality? How can the invisibility of the absent cause be mediated by the visibility of the filmic world? In Hollywood conspiracy films, Jameson localizes a possible answer within the impossibility of thinking: a system so vast that it cannot be encompassed by the natural and historically developed categories of perception with which human beings normally orient themselves. […] The “conspirational text,” which, whatever other messages it emits or implies, may also be taken to constitute an unconscious, collective effort at trying to figure out where we are and what landscapes and forces confront us in a late twentieth century whose abominations are heightened by their concealment and their bureaucratic impersonality. Conspiracy film takes a wild stab at the heart of all that, in a situation in which it is the intent and the gesture that counts. Nothing is gained by having been persuaded of the definitive verisimilitude of this or that conspiratorial hypothesis: but in the intent to hypothesize, in the desire called cognitive mapping – therein lies the beginning of wisdom.7

In connection with his earlier film analysis, Jameson is also concerned, here, with the political potential of popular cinema, which must be theoretically demarcated from both the manifest political content of individual films and the political intentionality of the author. Jameson’s concept of the political unconscious relates to the arbitrary social knowledge of the aesthetic object itself. Decisive, too, is the fact that the political unconscious also works in a genre whose figure of thought traditionally stands under massive ideological suspicion; even antisemitic and racist conspiracy theories are model examples of a false and fatal personification of abstract relations. Jameson, 5 Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, p. 1. 6 Ibid., p. 2. 7 Ibid., pp. 2-3.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

236 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

however, affirms the opposite semantic process for conspiracy theories: here, personification does not function as a concretization that reduces complexity, but – as the figure of the FBI agent from Dog Day Afternoon demonstrates – as an allegorical heightening of abstraction within a concrete embodiment, that is, as an attempt to inscribe the Outside within the Inside: “Under what circumstances can a necessarily individual story with individual characters function to represent collective processes?”8 In The Geopolitical Aesthetic, too, Jameson grapples with the dialectics of epistemology and aesthetics: knowledge without intuition is empty, intuition without knowledge is blind. The unique capacity of the aesthetic to sensualize the abstract leads Jameson to a defense of narrative. It is only through narrativization – that is, through the stories of individual protagonists – that even the most abstract totality can be granted a minimum of causal intelligibility, which is necessary despite (or because of) the fact that it falters, in the final instance, at the hard kernel of the absent cause. For Jameson it is necessary “to test the incommensurability between an individual witness – the individual character of a still anthropomorphic narrative – and the collective conspiracy which must somehow be exposed or revealed through these individual efforts.”9 It is in this way that the figure (or rather figuration) of conspiracy conforms to Jameson’s theoretical triad of allegory, political unconscious and cognitive mapping.10 None of these concepts designate a positive, reified operation, but are marked by a necessary failure, an intrinsic negativity. Representing the unrepresentable, imagining the unimaginable, making the incommensurable commensurable, charting the unchartable – the success of a political aesthetics seems to be identical with its failure. Jameson ascribes this dialectic to the essence of allegory itself: “But allegory also means imperfect representation or the failure of representation. If you have the notion of the symbol, then you think that you can imagine a particular and a universal that combine in some perfect way and give a successful and full representation. Allegory means that it’s always necessarily a failure; it always breaks down.”11 This necessary failure 8 Ibid., p. 4. 9 Ibid., p. 10. 10 “Throughout Jameson’s book, the expressions ‘political unconscious,’ ‘cognitive mapping,’ and ‘allegory’ are used interchangeably to name a single set of what he calls ‘common mental operations.’” Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 197. 11 Fredric Jameson, “Interview with Sara Danius and Stefan Jonsson,” in Ian Buchanan (ed), Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 169.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Geopolitical Aesthe tics

237

is self-evidently also valid for the praxis of the allegorical method. In a passage, which reads like a commentary on his own Marxist-psychoanalytic hermeneutics, Jameson argues that “allegorical interpretation is then first and foremost an interpretive operation which begins by acknowledging the impossibility of interpretation in the older sense, and by including that impossibility in its own provisional or even aleatory movements.”12 Allegory and allegorical reading relate to each other in a strictly consubstantial manner, in a dialectic of construction and deconstruction. Success and Failure13 is immanent to the allegorical form of the aesthetic object itself, which must fail in order to be successful, and vice versa. It it also for this reason that Jameson’s hermeneutic is diminished if, as Victor Burgin for example does, one reduces it to a triumphal Marxist scientism and objectivism, since Jameson himself permanently historicizes his own thinking.14 What Jameson claims for Adorno’s theoretical practice also applies to himself: “It rather gestures towards an outside of thinking – whether system itself in the form of rationalization, or totality as a socioeconomic mechanism of domination and exploitation – which escapes representation by the individual thinker or the individual thought.”15 If Jameson asserts in the following passage the fundamental identity of text and allegory, as well as of interpretation and allegorical reading, then this is less a case of the hermetic self-referentiality of the hermeneutic circle – such is the tenor of another critique of Jameson16 – than it is a case of the non-identity of the text with itself: “I am tempted to say that every interpretation of a text is always proto-allegorical, and always implies that the text is a kind of allegory: all positing of meaning always presupposes that the text is about something else.”17 This explains the theoretical proximity of allegory and symptom – the symptom too cannot be deciphered from itself, but always refers to an overdetermination through a structural causality, which can be totally disconnected from the immediate effect of the symptom. Both in the allegory and in the symptom, the semantic effect 12 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 168. 13 See Helmling, The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson. 14 See Burgin, In/Different Spaces, pp. 194, 204. 15 Jameson, Late Marxism, p. 30. 16 See Michael Walsh, “Jameson and ‘Global Aesthetics,’” in David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (eds.), Post-Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), p. 489. “The individual film is f itted into the narrative of history by sacrif icing a good deal of its own complexity. Like Kracauer before him, Jameson has to rework the films to make prominent those aspects which can be allegorized most easily.” That this is not true, and that Jameson always allegorizes the text in its less visible margins and details, should have become clear by now. 17 Jameson, Brecht and Method, p. 120.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

238 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

of evidence is absolutely to be mistrusted. For Jameson, the allegorical symptom in the representation of technology can be found in condensed form in the conspiracy film: Since the world system of late capitalism (or post-modernity) is however inconceivable without the computerized media technology which eclipses its former spaces and faxes an unheard-of simultaneity across its branches, information technology will become virtually the representational solution as well as the representational problem of this world system’s cognitive mapping, whose allegories can now always be expected to include a communicational third term.18

The allegorical dialectic of manifest and latent significance is all the more valid for technology: “If everything means something else, then so does technology.”19 In the transition from the still largely mechanical technologies of modernity to the electronic technologies of postmodernity, the dilemma of representation is intensified.20 To return to Brecht’s problematic: if the filmic representation of a railway still comes relatively close to its kinetic mechanics, computers and television sets, as objects, are not only much less “photogenic,” but they also conceal their functioning behind the opaque flatness of monitors and screens. Jameson sees, here, a change in the political economy of technology, which means that reproduction now dominates production: These new machines can be distinguished from the older futurist icons in two related ways: they are all sources of reproduction rather than “production,” and they are no longer sculptural solids in space. The housing of a computer scarcely embodies or manifests its peculiar energies in the same way that a wing shape or a slanted smokestack do: all of which essentially means that the new reproductive technology – being a matter of process – cannot be represented in the way in which the older mechanical energies found their representation or figuration.21 18 Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, p. 10. 19 Ibid., p. 11. 20 Thus Perry Anderson writes, in a commentary on Jameson, “In the age of the satellite and optical f ibre, on the other hand, the spatial commands this imaginary as never before. The electronic unification of the earth, instituting the simultaneity of events across the globe as daily spectacle, has lodged a vicarious geography in the recesses of every consciousness.” Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998), p. 56. 21 Fredric Jameson, “Diva and French Socialism,” in Signatures of the Visible, p. 84.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Geopolitical Aesthe tics

239

Jameson thus understands the uncannily autonomous life of media technology in f ilms such as David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), with their organically pulsating television screens and flesh-shaped video cassettes, as allegorical overdeterminations of objects which are increasingly infused with subjectivity. A key scene in Videodrome highlights, in a particularly charged manner, this “landscape of media objects now endowed with a delirious life and autonomy of their own.”22 Lost in a spiral of conspiracy and counter-conspiracy, Max Renn (James Woods) is programmed into becoming an attacker against the mastermind behind the Videodrome conspiracy. Under the cover of a company producing optical devices, the firm’s boss Barry Konvex tries to implant a hallucinogenic video signal as a conspiratorial, reactionary “psycho-technology” against a public that has been ostensibly morally degraded through the consumption of pornographic and horror films. During the on-stage presentation of his new collection, Max Renn shoots Konvex. The subsequent torrent of blood, bones and entrails is more than a typical Cronenbergian “body horror” effect – rather, it reveals, in a literal sense, the non-anthropomorphic substance of allegorical personification. Konvex himself, as a representative of the conspiracy, is revealed in death to be a post-human android or alien. Even more important than this de-anthropomorphization of the allegorical actor is, once again, an apparently insignificant detail: the microphone that Konvex drops acoustically relays the organic-anorganic bursting of his body through the auditorium’s loudspeakers, until it finally ends in a noisy feedback effect. Here, we not only have an obscene medialization and mediatization of the corporeal through the late-capitalist regime of the spectacle, but also an autopoetic closure of technology, which in the circular feedback effect between the microphone and the loudspeakers installs a closed signal loop, which no longer derives from any human source. In my view, the loop of technological self-referentiality is coded according to two allegorical meanings. On the one hand it denotes the total closure of the conspiracy itself, and on the other hand the feedback loop between victim and perpetrator. One of the fatal hallmarks of the conspiracy films discussed by Jameson (alongside Videodrome, there is also Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View from 1975) is thus the trope in which the character who seeks to uncover the conspiracy ends up himself being instrumentalized by the conspiracy, such that he becomes one of its perpetrators. The apparent epistemic advantage of this investigator is retroactively identical with the interests of the conspirators: the conspiracy is thus the Outside of the social order, but does not itself seem to possess 22 Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, p. 35.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

240 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

any Outside.23 For this epistemic paradox, Jameson coins the term “social detective”: an individual who discovers a collective conspiracy network, but who has always-already been “communitarized” by the conspiracy: The detective is thus murderer and victim all at once: two mirror-image conspiracies begin to confront each other, except that one has more people and is better organized. But this means that finally bureaucracy wins out over the level, whose last glimpse in life (as his killers move in on his hiding-place) cancels the definitive closing door of the nineteenth-century carceral imagination, substituting instead the more intense nightmare of an open door that gives onto a world conspirationally organized and controlled as far as the eye can see.24

As far as the eye can see – and beyond. This is the acousmatics of conspiracy, which, not coincidentally, breaks out in these paranoia films in the form of a gaze that is worth analyzing more closely.

8.2. Conspiratorial Enunciation, or the Acousmatics of the Paranoia Film The cognitive disempowerment of the “social detective” in conspiracy narratives (anticipated in the transsubjective shots of Blow-Up) leads us back to the problem of suture, which, as we know, always implies an epistemology of the look. The diegetic interfolding of the Absent One through the suture creates an imaginary link between subjectivity, knowledge and truth. Thus, the point-of-view shot brings about an epistemological causality between seeing and the seen, the bearer of the gaze and the object of the gaze. The suture not only affirms beliefs in an “I see, therefore I am” but also an “I see, therefore I know.” “When a character looks (or listens), he always knows, or at least he acquires a kind of knowledge that tallies with that looking or that lis- tening, and with the likely pitfalls.”25 Against this epistemic formation of a subject understood to be ideological, the suture theorists still 23 In like fashion, Lacan defines the Real as that which leaves behind a lack in the Imaginary and the Symbolic, but which itself is free from any lack: “The Real is absolutely without a fissure.” Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), p. 97. 24 Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, p. 60. 25 Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, p. 90.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Geopolitical Aesthe tics

241

insisted on an aesthetics of political modernism, which – as in the films of Godard – sought to reinscribe into the visible the repressed Outside of the film as an enunciatory site of production. In what follows, however, detailed analyses of American and European paranoia films of the 1970s and 1980s will serve to sketch out a political film aesthetics in a Jamesonian sense, in which the rupturing of the suture unleashes an uncanny Outside that goes beyond the reinscription of an apparative or authorial enunciation. The theoretical articulation between suture theory’s psychoanalytic concept of the Absent One and Jameson’s Marxist version of the absent cause, which until now has only been mentioned in passing, will here be more explicitly formulated. Our guiding hypothesis will be that the various strategies of “de-suturing” in these films do not rest on a Godardian deconstruction of cinematic illusion. Instead, they evoke the spectral presence of a conspiratorial totality through the liberating of the acousmatic gaze. The point of view of the subject can now no longer be synchronized with a recognition of the totality, since Jameson also understands the asynchrony manifesting itself here as a dislocation between the enunciation and the énoncé: The detective story, clearly, seems to offer the most articulated form in which the problems raised by this or that epistemological vocation for representation have been acknowledged. Nowhere, indeed, does the now canonical distinction between story and fable (narration and narrative, act of enunciation and message, and so on) find more concrete embodiment, since the “story” of the detective – normally the narration we follow sentence by sentence, by way of a “point of view” – in no way coincides with that other story that must be reconstructed, and which is tracked like a reified object of a completely different kind, even though it is merely this kind of narration turned back into a finished narrative or récit.26

The dislocation of the social totality finds its structural equivalent in the displacement of the filmic gaze, which in like fashion to the acousmatics of the disembodied voice plunges the suturing, attributive logic of diegetic subjectivity and non-diegetic objectivity into a zone of indeterminacy. In paranoia films, a paradoxical gaze without a bearer appears, which keeps the place of the Absent One radically empty, and it is precisely for this reason that it can allegorically recover the unrepresentability of the conspiracy. 26 Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, p. 36.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

242 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

The Paranoid Reverse-Shot: All the President’s Men Alan J. Pakula’s film All the President’s Men from 1976 follows the research of the journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward from the Washington Post during the American presidential campaign of 1972, which led to the uncovering of what came to be known as the Watergate scandal and, in the end, the resignation of Richard Nixon. In the course of the film Robert Redford, in the role of Bob Woodward, regularly meets with a secret informant, about whom he only knows that his cover name Deep Throat has been taken from the title of a famous porno film. After a secret meeting in an abandoned parking garage, Woodward suddenly believes that he is being followed, and tries to flee. On the street, he turns around to look back… The scene subtly subverts the standard elements of the chase scene in the cinema. Woodward, and the spectator alongside him, reconstruct the signs of a threat in the classical action-image mode of the duel. When Woodward looks back, however, he does not see a clearly defined opponent, but an empty, depopulated night-time street. The editing of the sequence follows the familiar procedure of the shot/reverse-shot formula: when Woodward turns around, the following cut corresponds to his optic point of view. Although the suture of gazes is intact, the empty nature of the reverse-shot produces the kind of uncanny effect which Lacan characterized as the division of eye and gaze. The familiar roles of subject and object of the gaze are, to a certain extent, reversed: Woodward is spellbound by the gaze of an object whose shock effect is further intensified by the abrupt camera zoom onto his face. It is a gaze whose ubiquity has grown out of the absence, precisely, of a localizable bearer of the gaze. In contrast to the horror film, for example, where the potential presence of the monster/killer in the off-screen space transfixes the gaze of a figure, here it is the emptiness of a habitual space that inverts the structure of seeing and being-seen. Hence, a reversibility of the gaze is set in motion, one which, as in Hitchcock’s Psycho, depicts the classical syntax of the short/reverse-shot as a fundamentally paranoid system. While the latent possibility of a paranoid externalization of the gaze is, as a rule, curbed by a reciprocal relation of Me and You, in All the President’s Men this fragile balance breaks apart with the unleashing of a pure object-gaze. With the collapse of an intersubjectively guaranteed exchange of gazes, the epistemic evidence of the point-of-view shot also falls apart in view of the opaque veneer of a depersonalized menace. The enemy changes from a “Somebody” to a “Nobody”: “This purely formal climax – sheer syntax, from which all the grossness of content has been sublimated – constitutes

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Geopolitical Aesthe tics

243

the ideal empty Mallarmean category of an encounter with the absolute Other, and replaces any number of villains, torture sequences, struggles, agons, kung-fu or wrestling collisions.”27 The sequence from All the President’s Men transforms conspiracy into an abstract, empty form. The cabal evoked by the film has no definitive content, no supreme mastermind, no shadowy villains. The proliferation of indices, documents, conversations and phone calls impelled by the investigative narrative of the film leads not to the revelation of a conspiratorial secret, but, in the end, totalizes paranoia. But it is precisely though this disembodiment of the “Big Brother” eye that the film acquires its allegorical power. In his book on Brecht, Jameson describes allegory as a “reverse wound, a wound in the text”28 – the encrypted symptom of an absent cause: Allegory consists in the withdrawal of its self-sufficiency of meaning from a given representation. That withdrawal can be marked by a radical insufficiency of the representation itself: gaps, enigmatic emblems, and the like; but more often, particularly in modern times, it takes the form of a small wedge or window alongside a representation that can continue to mean itself and to seem coherent.29

As a site – or rather a non-site – of conspiracy, the empty urban space in All the President’s Men stands in for this allegorical opening. Here, the literal and figurative levels of the allegory distance themselves from each other: the space both stands in for itself and for something else, which is invisible but present nonetheless. Since the sequence bestows the diegetic object of the look itself with a spectral gaze, the economy of the suture becomes unbalanced.30 For suture theory, the suturing of enunciation in the énoncé as a process of ideological misrecognition of the apparatus does indeed correspond to the hegemonic practice of a supposedly monolithic Hollywood cinema, which can only be combated with a self-reflexive counter-cinema. In the paranoia films of New Hollywood, however, we can detect symptoms of a de-suturing, which have very little to do with the avant-garde strategy of a deconstructive revelation of enunciation. Whereas the unleashing, in All the President’s Men, of an unattributable gaze leaves the diegetic space 27 Ibid., p. 69. 28 Jameson, Brecht and Method, p. 122. 29 Ibid. 30 There is also a close theoretical articulation between suture-theory and Jameson’s concept of conspiracy as an allegorical wound, due to the fact that the term “suture” original comes from the surgical practice of sewing up a wound.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

244 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

largely intact, in films like The Conversation and American Gigolo, we can find the repeated, uncanny presence of a non-anthropomorphic site of the gaze, which directly haunts enunciation itself and can therefore be characterized as a “conspiratorial enunciation.” With Jameson, we can understand popular Hollywood cinema as a generator of conspiratorial cognitive mapping, which not only speaks of conspiracies in the plot, but holds open the wound of an absent totality through fine tears in the suture system. From Surveillance to Conspiracy: The Conversation Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film The Conversation serves as an outstanding example of this kind of conspiratorial aesthetics. Gene Hackman plays the private detective and wiretapping specialist Harry Caul, who is spying on a young couple. He has been tasked with this mission by the director of an anonymous company. The famous opening sequence of the film, in which Harry Caul and his colleagues audiovisually observe the couple in a large public square, establishes a panoptical surveillance regime that is akin to an advanced dispositif of media technology. But the assistant of the company director arouses mistrust during the planned handover of Harry’s material. Again and again, Harry listens to his recordings of their conversations and believes that he has anticipated a planned murder of the couple. He rents a hotel room in which the couple intended to meet up. With Harry’s growing paranoia, reality and fantasy becoming increasingly undifferentiated. Harry has become, so to speak, the “earwitness” of a murder, but who has murdered whom remains unclear. In the end, it becomes apparent that the supposed murder victims are actually the murderers. Harry is conscious that he has become the victim of a complot that he is incapable of apprehending. Finally, the wiretapping specialist himself becomes tapped: a phone call informs him that he is also being surveilled. In the final scene of the film, Harry, searching for the bug, systematically tears apart his own apartment, but he cannot find the technological device. As in Blow-Up, in The Conversation the perforation of the suture primarily manifests itself as a revocation of the audiovisual contract between image and sound: “Voices and images often cannot be matched up. Rather than supplement the dramatized space on the screen, the taped voices and frequently inaudible speeches of the film’s characters explode the security of the dramatic text and threaten to dismantle that organizing presence behind the projector who guarantees the spectator’s coherent subjectivity.”31 31 Dennis Turner, “The Subject of The Conversation,” Cinema Journal 24:4 (1985), p. 16.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Geopolitical Aesthe tics

245

The disjunctions in the “hermeneutics of sound” (Rick Altman) culminate in a scene in the side-room of the ominous hotel room 773, in which the couple has bunkered down. It is there that Harry bores a hole through the bathroom wall and installs a microphone. When the first snippets of conversation can be heard, the camera moves with a slow zoom onto Harry’s face. This zoom movement formally repeats the first shot of the film – a long zoom-in which targets and isolates the couple amidst a heaving throng of humanity, only to radically invert Harry’s structural position: the panoptical enunciator who sees without being seen is itself turned into the object of a penetrating gaze. At the same time, the zoom suggests a phantasmatic introjection of the recorded voices. Whereas these are initially emitted clearly from the other room, the acoustic decree of control is flipped over at that moment when suddenly the rewinding of a sound tape can be heard. For Harry, the recorded voices of the opening sequence mingle with the conversation in the side-room, to the point of becoming a psychotic de-differentiation of real and imagined sounds, interiority and exteriority. In The Acoustic Mirror, Kaja Silverman comments on this scene: Far from being in a position of secure exteriority to the sounds he manipulates, his subjectivity is completely imbricated with them – so much so that it is often impossible to determine which originate from “outside” of him, and which from “inside.” Moreover that very distinction is radically called into question both by the reversibility of the voice […], and by Harry’s obvious libidinal implication in everything he hears.32

The paranoid reversibility of the gaze in the shot/reverse-shot system as described by Jacqueline Rose here flips into the uncanniness of the voice as an internal exteriority. Since the voice is staged as the site of a paranoid indeterminacy, the f ilm again assumes Blow-Up’s skepticism towards referentiality, such that The Conversation can be seen as the earlier film’s New Hollywood remake: even the recording of the audible world no longer guarantees an epistemic referentiality of the acoustic, but becomes the entryway to deceptive phantasmas. The photographic blow-up of the supposed murder, whose visual evidence is progressively lost, in Antonioni’s film, in the proto-digital distortion of the photographic grain, has its equivalent in Coppola’s film in the acoustic primal scene of the eponymous conversation, which again and again traumatically punctuates the film without ever becoming completely decipherable for the protagonist. In the murder scene, 32 Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, p. 96.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

246 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

the human voice is finally transformed into an uncanny electronic scream, which, as in Psycho, splits apart the diegetic suture of the voice in the body. This logic of externalization leads, in the end, to the famous gush of blood from the toilet, a scene which Žižek rightly interprets as a cross between Psycho and Marnie: After a series of obvious references to Psycho apropos the bathroom (quickly pulling open the curtain, inspecting its drain), the investigator focuses on the (allegedly clean) toilet, flushes it, and then the stain appears as if out of nowhere, blood and other traces of the crime overflowing the edge of the toilet. This scene, a kind of Psycho reread through Marnie (with its red stain blurring the screen) contains the main elements of the Hitchcockian universe: it has the Hitchcockian object that materializes some unspecified threat, functioning as the hole of passage into another abyssal dimension. […] What is “Real” in the scene from The Conversation is thus not primarily the horrifying and disgusting stuff reemerging from the toilet sink, but rather the toilet’s drain itself, the hole that serves as the passage to a different ontological order.33

It is tempting to equate this foreign body from another ontological order with the Real of the conspiracy itself. A conspiracy which is simultaneously external and immanent to the subject – immanent, because the subject is unwittingly always-already coopted by the conspiracy. Thus, it is in the acoustic hallucinations of the paranoiac that we can see the paradox of the feedback effect allegorized in Videodrome: it is, of all people, the “social detective,” having charged himself with bringing the complot to light, who is revealed to be an involuntary party to the conspiracy. This paradoxical structure can be observed in many sequences of The Conversation, which unfurl in reversible loop movements: when Harry Caul, for example, accidentally notices, while visiting a convention for surveillance devices, an employee of the anonymous company on a monitor, he begins to observe him with a remote-controlled camera. But the device automatically switches to another camera, and a frontal shot of Harry’s baffled face appears on the monitor: here, too, the gaze triumphs over the eye. The key shot of the film radicalizes this conspiratorial feedback effect in the conclusive tear of the suture – the ultimate disarticulation of enunciation and énoncé is sealed at the very moment of narrative closure: after Harry 33 Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 207-208, 209.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Geopolitical Aesthe tics

247

Caul has unsuccessfully searched for the hidden bug, he sits alone amidst the wreckage of his apartment and plays the saxophone. But the final pan of the camera clearly suggests, through the familiar motions of a surveillance camera, the existence of an observing gaze which for Harry, however, cannot be located. In an essay on surveillance dispositifs in contemporary Hollywood cinema, Thomas Y. Levin highlights the unresolvable paradox of this shot: In actual fact, Harry will never f ind the surveillance device, since it belongs to a space which is epistemologically inaccessible to him within the diegesis: surveillance has become the condition of the narration itself. The site of surveillance has hence – surreptitiously yet decisively – shifted from the space of the narrated story to the basic condition of the possibility of this story. Surveillance has, here, become the formal signature of the narration.34

This space, epistemologically unattainable for Harry within the diegesis, is none other than the place (or the non-place) of the conspiracy as allegorical stand-in for an unrepresentable totality. Like the invisible camera, the conspiracy is both everywhere and nowhere. In contrast to the opening scene, which retroactively stitches the camera zoom onto the gaze of a fictional figure, the final surveillance pan can no longer be ascribed to any diegetic subject. This uncanny look does not belong to an anthropomorphic bearer of the gaze; nor, however, does the surveillance materialize itself in a concrete observational medium. This disturbing effect is intensified by the acoustic contamination of the diegetic music with the non-diegetic electronic noise that mingles with Harry’s saxophone playing while remaining a dissonant acoustic Outside. Far from disappearing in the énoncé, as the classical logic of the suture would have it, the end of The Conversation releases filmic enunciation as an irretrievable hors-champ of a conspiratorial totality. Conspiratorial enunciation, or the impossible site of the film: as a disembodied gaze, the totality of the conspiracy contaminates the diegetic reality. In this sense, the impossible gaze at the end of The Conversation, an example of the conspiratorial gaze, must be theoretically distinguished from Foucault’s surveillance gaze. Whereas, in Foucault’s understanding, surveillance is to be understood as a spatial-material stratification of power relations, the spectrality of the conspiracy eludes any secure locatability 34 Thomas Y. Levin, “Die Rhetorik der Zeitanzeige: Erzählen und Überwachen im Kino der ‘Echtzeit,’” in Malte Hagener, Johann N. Schmidt and Michael Wedel (eds.), Die Spur durch den Spiegel: Der Film in der Kultur der Moderne (Berlin: Bertz Fischer, 2004), p. 354.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

248 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

in a panoptical dispositif. The space of the conspiracy begins where the surveillance dispositif ends: the empty space of the conspiratorial enunciation can be filled neither with the technical materiality of the camera, nor the standpoint of the narrator, nor even the stylistic signature of Coppola. This negativity stands, in the Jamesonian sense, for the dislocation of the social totality as an absent cause, which persists even when all the causal levels of the conspiracy have been plumbed: “Fair enough: every causal level invites the deeper digging for another one and sends us back another step, to construct a more fundamental ‘causal level’ behind it.”35 In the conspiracy, Althusser’s dictum on the elusiveness of the last instance proves once again to be true. As such, it can never actually be embodied; instead, only something of its effects can be understood.36 The final shot of The Conversation dramatizes this exteriority as a structural potency which is immanent to the filmic gaze itself: the primary site of enunciation in the film is necessarily concealed. Subjectivity without a Subject: American Gigolo Conspiracy can thus be conceived of as a genuinely acousmatic phenomenon, whose laterality can never be recovered. The acousmatic presence of a free-floating gaze without a diegetic source is, in this context, the open wound that the classical suture system seeks to close. In the acousmatic gaze of the conspiracy in the paranoia films of New Hollywood, this wound irrupts as the return of totality. The same spectralization of the gaze also makes an appearance in a film which, on the face of it, has nothing to do with the corpus of paranoia films. With its visual panache, Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980) rings in the commodified, superficial sheen of the 1980s and, like Body Heat, belongs to that postmodern wave of Hollywood cinema that, even in Jameson’s view, seems to be devoid of any political value. When, in the opening sequence, Richard Gere drives his black Mercedes through the coastal highways of California, with Blondie’s “Call Me” playing on the soundtrack, we indeed seem to have a conscious adieu to the self-reflexive impulses of New Hollywood. Richard Gere plays the high-end callboy Julian Kay, who peddles himself to rich women from the Californian upper class. His glamorous life of sex, cocaine and Armani suits 35 Fredric Jameson, “The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation,” in The Cultural Turn (London: Verso, 1998), p. 77. 36 For a psychoanalytic critique of Foucault’s notion of the dispositif as a “cause that is immanent within the field of its effects,” see Copjec, Read my Desire, pp. 6ff.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Geopolitical Aesthe tics

249

begins to fall apart, however, when a client is murdered after he has paid a visit to her. As the main suspect, he suddenly sees himself confronted with a conspiracy involving the highest echelons of the political class. As in Coppola’s film, the supposed control of the protagonist over his own life is lost in a web of impenetrable interests and intrigues. It is in this sense that American Gigolo is gradually revealed to be a conspiracy film. As is the case in The Conversation, Schrader’s film is imbued with allusions to the films of Antonioni and Hitchcock. In some scenes, American Gigolo takes the transsubjective point of view from Antonioni, and the shot without a reverse-shot from Psycho. The famous camera movement at the beginning of Psycho, for instance, is echoed in a sequence, which stages a voyeuristic scene in which the voyeur-subject is lacking. With single-minded curiosity, the camera slowly moves up the stairs to Julian’s bedroom, while we can hear him off-screen, engaged in phone sex. The camera changes from a relatively deep position to a high-angle shot, as the field of vision opens up to the bed. In contrast to the mechanical pans of the acousmatic surveillance camera at the end of the The Conversation, the gliding dolly in American Gigolo clearly suggests the organic movement of a human observer. As in Coppola’s film, however, the gaze does not, in this penetration of the private sphere, have a diegetic place, since Julian would, realistically, have immediately discovered a secret intruder. With its voyeurism without a voyeur, the dolly into the bedroom symptomatically stands in for a diffusion of the public and private realms, which Jameson sees as being prefigured in Hitchcock’s films. If the figure of the callboy already personifies the de-privatization of the private sphere, then the bedroom, having become a public space through the acousmatic gaze, allegorizes the intangible proximity of the conspiracy. The spaces in American Gigolo, and in the paranoia film in general, “are therefore all admixtures of public and private in such a way that the public dimension dominates and the private one can never be separated out as an independent element or contemplated with the naked eye,”37 as Jameson, in another text, asserted with respect to Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. The perforation of the diegesis through a “surplus enunciation” (Restivo) is also, in American Gigolo, to be understood less as an auteurist flourish than as an allegorical symptom, which bears witness to a total socialization of the private sphere: “How there could be private things, let alone privacy, in a situation in which everything around 37 Fredric Jameson, “Spatial Systems in North by Northwest,” in Slavoj Žižek (ed.), Everything that You Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (London: Verso, 1992), p. 53.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

250 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

is functionally inserted into larger institutional schemes and frameworks of all kinds, which nonetheless belong to somebody – this is the nagging question that haunts the camera dollying around our various life-worlds, looking for a lost object the memory of which it cannot quite retain.”38 The evocation of a point of view without a figure belonging to it detaches filmic subjectivity from its fictional localizability and thereby empowers the paranoid charging of the field of vision: “The anticipation becomes anxious expectation when the question becomes: whose view is the camera’s look?”39 By doing without the suturing reverse-shot, the question is precisely not answered positively, and the spectral subjectivity without a subject of the acousmatic gaze is unleashed ex negativo. In an inversion of the suture process, the fictional inside is, in American Gigolo, externalized through the use of the transsubjective shot and the shot without a reverse-shot: the look of a “Somebody” changes into the disembodied look of a “Nobody.” This impossible subjectivity of an object-gaze is none other than the acousmatic exterior of conspiratorial enunciation. Like Harry Caul in The Conversation, Julian Kay also tears apart his own apartment, as it dawns on him that the murder will be pinned on him. Here, too, his search proves to be fruitless. Once again, a subjectivated camera movement indicates the presence of an observer who quietly withdraws, only to take on, in the next shot, the angle of a surveillance perspective. While, in the opening scenes of the film, Julian still moves with mimetic elegance through the luxurious interiors of the chic Californian elites, this mimicry of the world of objects now takes on a negative guise. The camera perspective suppresses spatial depth and flattens the body into an exchange-object. The silhouettes of the Venetian blinds are darkened from the fashionable insignia of the 1980s to the twilight of film noir, and striate the space into a raster of black and white lines. In the acousmatic conspiracy-gaze, the affirmative (self-)reification of the commodified body flips over into the negation of subjectivity. In a later scene, as if to reflect this striated space, Julian sits helplessly, after the death of his pimp, in front of a series of Warhol prints of male behinds, titled Torsos, while the camera slowly glides backwards into a long-shot. On an allegorical level, the protagonist has become identical with the Warholian and Jamesonian superficiality of the postmodern reified image. The American gigolo is revealed to be an interchangeable model: anonymous, segmented and serialized. The objectivation of the protagonist has its counterpart in the uncanny sensory proximity of the 38 Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, p. 11. 39 Cowie, Representing the Woman, p. 63.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Geopolitical Aesthe tics

251

conspiratorial totality, which is always-already there, without being visible. As such, what Jameson writes with respect to Pakula’s The Parallax View is also valid for American Gigolo: “What we have here called ‘intimacy’ is the discovery that we are caught in a collective network without knowing it, that people are already much closer than we realized, even in moments of solitude, their alien body warmth testifying without melodrama to our own vulnerability.”40 In the insistence on this extimacy of conspiratorial enunciation, American Gigolo calls for a revision of the false thesis that 1980s Hollywood cinema is both aesthetically and politically reactionary: reification produces its own allegory. The Evil Eye: Cadaveri eccelenti It is, however, in the closing scene of Francesco Rosi’s Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses), an Italian paranoia film from the year 1976, that the most formally radical expression of conspiratorial enunciation can be found. While his earlier films, such as Salvatore Giuliano, are still beholden to the neorealist gesture of a semi-documentary investigation of reality, Rosi’s method of a “materialist enquiry” of social reality comes up against its epistemic limits now that this social reality has been transformed into an opaque totality: “The level of abstraction has reached its highpoint in Cadaveri eccellenti, where there no longer seems to be anything but conspiracies, and it is almost incidental that real human beings are implicated in them.”41 The epistemic crisis of mimetic realism also leads to an allegorical condensation in Cadaveri eccellenti’s closing sequence, which literally silences the image: Lino Ventura plays the police inspector Amerigo Rogas, who finds out about a planned right-wing coup after the murder of a state prosecutor. In the final scene of the film, Rogas meets with the general secretary of the communist party in a museum, in order to inform him of the plot. The camera captures both men in a long-shot, surrounded by antique statues. The marble sculptures anticipate the petrification of the image: for a brief moment, the moving image seems to have frozen into a still photograph, when suddenly two pistol shots pierce through a previously unseen window: in slow-motion, Rogas and the party secretary die a bizarrely choreographed death. Image and death: the projectile, here, is directly launched from the 40 Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, p. 66. 41 Georg Seeßlen, “Das Scheitern der Methode: Francesco Rosis Weg von der Recherche zur Oper,” epd Film 6 (1987), p. 18.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

252 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

hors-champ of the image-producing cause. The window perforated by the bullet holes is none other than the lens of the camera itself. In Cadaveri eccellenti, then, a supposedly neutral shot is converted into the gaze of an impossible subjectivity; a gaze that cannot be ascribed to any diegetic perpetrator, but directly refers to enunciation as a site that, as in The Conversation and American Gigolo, has become epistemologically inaccessible to the protagonist of the film. In this singular sequence, the conspiratorial “phantasmagoria of power as totem”42 culminates in the deadly enunciatory unity of camera lens and object-gaze. Here, the acousmatic gaze of the conspiracy is completely transformed into a Lacanian fascinum: The mortifying look is a sort of anti-communication because it affirms itself without allowing for a reply and adopts an attitude of superb impermeability to all reactions of its spectator. The look here is impersonal, unreachable: here again, it is an unbearable look, the look of the Law, the look of Death. […] The camera, as a machinic site for the capture of the living, would mythically be Death in the form of the Evil Eye. 43

In Rosi’s Cadaveri eccellenti, then, the negativity of conspiracy is driven to a fatal extreme, in which the Outside of enunciation seals the total political impotency of the characters. “The truth is not always revolutionary,” says a communist at the end of the film, while a television broadcast declares Rogas to be the murderer. Against the pessimism of Cadaveri eccellenti, the American films, even with their fatality, end with a more reconciled closure: in classical liberal Hollywood manner, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward finally uncover the Watergate scheme, while Harry Caul, at the end of The Conversation, takes flight in the existentialist gestures of his saxophone playing, and Julian Kay, at the end of American Gigolo, is saved by a woman’s love for him. But the paranoia films address the spectator neither as a victimized ally of the characters, nor as an accomplice of the conspiracy. The acousmatic gaze blocks all identification and thus prompts an allegorical imagination of the unrepresentable conspiracy. It is the spectator who must traverse the empty space of the absent cause. This interpellation process, too, must proceed as an opening from the internal to the external: the filmic acousmatics of the conspiracy externalizes the wounds of totality through the indeterminacy of the suture. This is the political uncanny of conspiracy. 42 Wolfram Schütte et al. (eds.), Franceso Rosi (Munich: Hanser, 1983), p. 29. 43 Vernet, “The Look at the Camera,” pp. 58, 61.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Geopolitical Aesthe tics

253

8.3. Digital Cinema in the Age of Globalization: Miami Vice “It concerns not what can be done with the digital, but what the digital has already done to cinema.”44 With these words from his latest book, Garrett Stewart describes the digital mutation of the cinema as an event that has long been carried out. With the notion of “framed time,” Stewart seeks to trace out the contours of a post-photographic and post-filmic cinema, which replaces the earlier mechanical succession of indexical still images with the infinite modularity of digital pixels. In the blockbuster formats of contemporary Hollywood cinema, the digital infiltration of the filmic image nonetheless all too often assumes the invisible role of a “disappearing mediator”: instead of aesthetically exposing the composite spatialization of the image field, the digital hides itself in the form of CGI effects, as the guarantor of the illusion of the old photo-realistic mimesis. The digital remediation of the filmic spoken of by Stewart is often enough neutralized by the filmic remediation of the digital. This neutralization of the digital genesis of the image is notably related to the narrative economy of the films themselves, which even in the most attraction-laden blockbuster mostly remains beholden to the analogue mode of narrative succession and linearity. Thus, digital cinema paradoxically blocks off its own potential – which for Garrett Stewart concerns, at its core, the spatial compression of a previously sequential filmic temporality. In digital cinema, as Stewart pointedly puts it, there is strictly speaking no before and after of the image; “framed time” constitutes itself through the “morphable” simultaneity of digital imagery: For time can now be framed in its change rather than just derived from a change in moving frame. In filmic cinema, the real time of rotary motion (frames plural) is converted to the secondary or inferential time that follows from the image of on-screen movement. In postfilmic cinema, no image precedes the one we see – or follows from its sequence. All is determined by internal flux (frame singular). Between whisked-away imprint and the whip-lash action of convertible pixels, then lies the difference between electrical and electronic cinema: a segmental transit vs fragmental transformation. Photograms graph motion, inscribe it by succession itself. By contrast, the computed picture, timed by binary (com)mutations, is more like a weightless easel for pixel tessellations, bit by microbit. 45 44 Stewart, Framed Time, p. 1. 45 Ibid., p. 6.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

254 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Michael Mann’s 2006 film Miami Vice is doubtless such a weightless easel for pixel tessellations. Shot, for the most part, with an innovative highdefinition digital camera, Mann’s new version of the 1980s TV series of the same name (which he co-produced) is one of the few Hollywood films that consciously breaks with the traditional visual aesthetics of 35mm film. The result is, in the first place, a singular “immaterial materiality” of the image, which enables a wholly different phenomenal cinema experience from that of regular celluloid, which the French film critic Jean-Baptiste Thoret has described as a synthesis of hyperrealism and impressionism: the high resolution of the digital image creates a glistening luminosity in the daylight shots, while the images of Miami at night put their graininess on display. In comparison with the saturated colors and high contrasts of 35mm film, in Miami Vice there is a tendency towards diffusion and blurring in both the colors and the distinctions between foreground and background. The standard hierarchy between foreground and background is shifted in favor of the background, which in spite of the extreme deep focus does not acquire any spatial depth. In contrast to the classical Bazinian thesis of a congruence between “deep focus” and “depth of field,” in the digital image the two have a strange tendency to bifurcate. The high-definition image in Miami Vice is both flat and deep. Even in the background of the image, nighttime cloudscapes gain a never before seen sharpness of detail, and we can imagine Michael Mann tweaking the textures and color shades of every image with the perfectionist frenzy of a painter. But the digital pictorialism of Miami Vice extends far beyond a pure decision of style; in fact, the specific fragility and permeability of the digital image proves to be the only suitable choice of aesthetic medium. An example of the police/gangster film genre, Miami Vice speaks of the globalized late capitalist economy as a permanent flux of commodities, drugs, bodies and information, which circulate with the rapidity of a digital click through an opaque network of big business and criminality, “the intensification of communication technology to the point at which capital transfers today abolishes space and time and can be virtually instantaneously effectuated from one national zone to another.”46 In order to investigate the death of an FBI agent, detectives Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) go undercover in a globally operative South American drug cartel run by the all-powerful Jesus Montoya. Crockett and Tubbs need to guarantee to Montoya’s right-hand 46 Fredric Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital,” in The Cultural Turn (London: Verso, 1998), p. 143.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Geopolitical Aesthe tics

255

man Jose Yero the smooth transit of cocaine to Florida, but when Crockett falls for Montoya’s girlfriend Isabella (Gong Li), the identity of the two agents threatens to be uncovered. Miami Vice breaks with the conventional narrative tension of blockbuster cinema by strictly following one of the main rules of the sphere of circulation: “go with the flow.” The flow, here, is exclusively dictated by the laws of the capitalist market economy of supply and demand: “In capitalism only one thing is universal, the market.”47 Crockett and Tubbs optimize the infrastructure of transport routes so that nothing disrupts the flow of commodities. Here, the intermediary of the sphere of circulation dominates over the levels of production and consumption.48 We see neither the process of drug manufacturing nor the sale of narcotics to consumers. Even when Miami Vice shows material commodity movements by sea or air, it is the supreme acceleration of the flows that is foregrounded. This liquidation, corresponding to the ideal type of a digitally administered system of communication and exchange, aims for the overcoming of materiality itself. For Jameson, globalization is the name for this dematerialization of the economy, which reaches its zenith in finance capital: Globalization is rather a kind of cyberspace in which money capital has reached its ultimate dematerialization, as messages which pass instantaneously from one nodal point to another across the former globe, the former material world. […] But that is precisely what finance capital brings into being: a play of monetary entities which needs neither production (as capital does) nor consumption (as money does): which supremely, like cyberspace, can live its own internal metabolism and circulate without any reference to an older type of content. 49

This new metabolism of globalization is not merely the narrative material of Miami Vice, but is immanent to the film’s form. In this sense, Miami Vice is a film that is almost entirely determined by fleeting, transitory 47 Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming (Interview with Toni Negri),” in Negotiations 1972-1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 172. 48 The proximity of Deleuze’s remarks on the society of control with Jameson’s diagnosis of late capitalism is also of note: “It’s a capitalism of higher-order production. It no longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services and what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed.” Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992), p. 6. 49 Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital,” p. 154.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

256 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

moments. All the spectacular means of motion which the film mobilizes in these scenes, including speed boats, sports cars and airplanes, do not so much serve the spectacular attraction logic of a typical blockbuster as they create a strange suspension of action typical to the genre – a kind of “breakneck stasis.” Everything is in motion, but nothing really changes. The constant motion enables the permanent liquidation of topographic borders into non-places of financial transaction. Whether Florida, Haiti, Brazil, Paraguay, Colombia or Geneva – the film is interested less in local specifics and more in the interchangeability of locales under the conditions of the hyperbolically accelerated global economy, which is mediatized by a proliferation of electronic images: “Capital itself becomes free-floating. It separates from the ‘concrete context’ of its productive geography. Money becomes in a second sense abstract (it always was abstract in the first and basic sense). […] [This is] the finance capital moment of globalized society, the abstractions brought with it by cybernetic technology.”50 Technology has become completely second nature in late capitalism, and digital cinema voraciously diegeticizes the visual culture of the society of control: there is hardly a single shot in Miami Vice that does not bear witness to the omnipresence of video surveillance, satellite monitoring, radar imagery, laptop screens, television monitors and mobile phone displays. Miami Vice is intoxicated with the glamour of electronic screen surfaces, while also validating its own high-tech digitality as an advanced Hollywood commodity in the present state of productive forces. The hyper-sensitivity and hyper-mobility of the digital camera evokes a world that finds itself amid the exhilarating rush of a fragmented transformation. Digital filming, however, seems to fundamentally change not only the cinematic image, but also narration itself. Hence, the f ilm’s breathless camerawork and editing does not operate according to the classical grammar of establishing shot, two-shot and shot/reverse-shot, instead adapting itself to the sensorial “liveness” of television war reporting. Again and again, scenes are abruptly interrupted before they can be completed, and again and again, potential panorama views of Miami are chopped up through the editing, as if there were simply no time for such contemplative postcard visions. In the final, blood-soaked shoot-out, the camera frequently takes the direct perspective of a gun, which is neither purely subjective nor purely objective. As a spectator, we feel right in the middle of events, but the look is never entirely identical with the point of view of any of the characters. This dominance of a “half-subjective” camera is, we might claim, the narrative 50 Ibid., pp. 142-143.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Geopolitical Aesthe tics

257

equivalent of a digital aesthetics of the intermediary, the modular and the transitory, which brooks no state of rest or perspectival stability. Always in flux: Miami Vice conveys the experience of a highly-compressed presence, in which now-moments do not replace each other, but accumulate one on top of the other. The film, as well as its protagonists, is lost in this grueling multitasking. This is the digital stress of the spatialization of “framed time.” What is lacking is temporal time. In Miami Vice, the factum is so “narratographically”51 acted out that “film is no longer a time-based medium […] but the medium of movement. Spatialization takes over from narrative the job of managing the film’s dynamics.”52 Synchrony triumphs over diachrony, since both the regime of the digital and the regime of the global market adhere to the law of synchrony: Filming with the camera on the shoulder gives the feeling, new in Mann, of a constant fragility of shots and, therefore, of what they show. It is as if each shot were thinking of two things at once – the event taking place (a deal, arrest) and the event to come (the same over again) – and that the best way to not collapse consists of never staying still. […] The point of view become confused, the shots fall like unhooked links, but the general signal finishes by sweeping it along in the events that make it up. It traffics, it pulls, it circulates: Miami Vice is the point of flux against man’s point of view.53

With the elegance of the commodity form, the bodies of actors Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx slip into the circulation flows. Like Richard Gere in American Gigolo, they are less subjects of the plot, and more automatic agents ensuring the smooth running of these flows: “Smooth, that’s how we do it,” as Tubbs states at one point in the film. And yet, in spite of this mimicry of the beautiful object-world of late capitalism which the film doubtless affirms in the high-style mode of the 1980s, there is, in Miami Vice, a utopian line of flight that leads to a zone outside of globalized business. For such a big-budget, mainstream production, it is astonishing that this utopia bears the name of Cuba. A desire called Cuba: before Cuba is even imaginable as the scene for Crockett and Isabella’s romance, it appears in an earlier scene (the 51 See Stewart, Framed Time, pp. 20-53. 52 Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 224. 53 Jean-Baptiste Thoret, “Gravity of the Flux: Michael Mann’s Miami Vice,” Senses of Cinema 42, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/07/42/miami-vice.html (accessed April 1, 2019).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

258 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

interrogation of a dealer), as a strangely conspicuous disruption in the unimpeded flux of images and sounds. While the dealer who is to establish contact with the drug cartel is interrogated, Crockett’s gaze unexpectedly drifts off to the open sea. On the soundtrack, ambient music briefly drowns out the dialogue, before Crockett returns to the conversation – a short moment of suspension, in which the object of Crockett’s daydreaming gaze remains invisible in the off-screen of the ocean. It is only in a later scene of the film that this shot will be filled out with its reverse-shot. It is the first appearance of Isabella, as she suddenly becomes visible from the edge of the screen. Crockett’s desire for a zone outside of the sphere of circulation is embodied in Isabella, a Cuban of Chinese extraction. While the f ilm does almost entirely without shot/ reverse-shot structures, Michael Mann resorts to the classical suturing of camera-axes in the scenes between Sonny and Isabella. The looks of the two lovers frequently lock on to each other, even though they both know that their happiness cannot last. “Time is luck,” Isabella repeatedly says to Sonny, and, in spite of the overwhelming sense of fast-paced movement, when the two race across the open sea to Havana in a speedboat, a feeling of melancholic transience sets in. But Havana is initially the place where the film’s frenetic rush abruptly vanishes. It is the place where “deframed time” stretches out. Crockett and Isabella assure themselves of their own family history, when suddenly there is an appearance of that medium which, like no other, is mnemotechnically moored to the past: photography. Isabella shows Crockett an old group photo of her dead Chinese mother. When her finder tenderly strokes the picture in memory, however, this scene also allegorizes the post-photographic memory of the film medium, which recalls an earlier photographic indexicality that is no longer proper to it. In the evocation of the auratic “cult-value” of photography described by Benjamin, the film – at least for the duration of the Havana episode – distances itself from its own digital remediation strategies, and inscribes itself into the historicity of a photographic ontogenesis. But photographic desire is, in Miami Vice, inseparable from the imagination of a utopian outside, which finds its place in Cuba. Here, in contrast to the revolution sequence from Coppola’s The Godfather Part II (see chapter 6.1), it is not the real politics of Cuba, as a socialist state that is yearningly seen as a negation of the globalized economy, but a Cuba of pop-cultural stereotypes: old-timers, salsa, mojitos and sultry eroticism. But it is precisely this reduction of the “real” Cuba to a surface on which to project popular clichés that opens the film up to a radical hors-champ which cannot be represented, “a

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Geopolitical Aesthe tics

259

utopic elsewhere that the film will never realize but whose simulacrum it will fabricate (Havana).”54 Here, we must make a strict distinction between utopia and nostalgia, or, dialectically formulated, the potentially intended nostalgia is objectively transformed into utopia. Miami Vice in no way changes the conventional filmic representation of Cuba, and yet a political line of flight is inscribed into the film, which Slavoj Žižek also attributes to a thoroughly nostalgic Cuba film like Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club: The price for this, of course, is that the image of Cuba we get is an image of a country where time is at a standstill: nothing happens, no industrial activity; there are old cars, empty railway tracks; people just walk around – and, occasionally, they sing and play music. Wenders’s Cuba is therefore the Latin American version of the nostalgic image of Eastern Europe: a space outside history, outside the dynamic of today’s second modernization. The paradox (and, perhaps, the final message of the film) is that this was the ultimate function of the Revolution: not to accelerate social development but, on the contrary, to carve out a space in which time stands still.55

In Miami Vice, this space is also created through photographic remediation. The desire of photography to hold onto time is entwined with the utopia of a future outside of the globalized sphere of circulation. In its stasis, Havana is crystallized as an allegorical island-utopia, for which there can be no image in the geopolitical order of the film. What Jameson, in his book on science fiction, called “utopian desire” also pertains to the Cuban capital: “This pocket of stasis within the ferment of rushing forces of social change may be thought of as a kind of enclave within which Utopian fantasy can operate.”56 The enclave of utopian happiness only endures for a photographic moment; the false identity of the undercover agent is, after the concluding shoot-out, finally revealed. Crockett helps Isabella to flee to Havana; both of them know that they will not see each other again. In a bewitching parallel montage, Mann intercuts the good bye between Crockett and Isabella with the re-awakening of Tubb’s girlfriend Trudy from a coma. Proximity and distance, contact and loss are tightly enmeshed with each other. On the 54 Ibid. 55 Slavoj Žižek, Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917: V.I. Lenin (London: Verso, 2002), p. 276. 56 Fredric Jameson, Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), p. 15.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

260 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

one side, there is a final exchange of looks between Crockett and Isabella, while their bodies are torn apart from each other. Crockett’s hair sways in “telluric” unison with the famous “rippling of the leaves in the wind” (see Chapter 7.3), which can be understood as the last reminiscence of the indexical image. The points of view are now directed towards emptiness; Isabella’s last look points towards Cuba, off-screen. From the other side, the happiness of awakening is edited into these images: in a close-up, Tubbs and Trudy touch hands, and as if to preserve the fragility of this moment for ever, a freeze frame holds the image for the blink of an eye. In this image, the yearning for a duration beyond the digital flows merges with the mimesis of the photographic. But in contrast to the diegetic function of the photograph shown in the Havana sequence, the freezing of the image, as “simulated photogrammatic immanence”57 arrests the flux of the filmic moving image itself. With a melancholy gesture, it remediatizes the photogram as a lost object, which under digital conditions is doubly absent: already in analogue cinema, the photogram must disappear in the succeeding images, in order to produce the illusory continuity of movement. In the “framed time” of digital cinema, it is precisely this temporal succession that has become obsolete. And yet Miami Vice pauses its post-photographic flux for the micro-moment of a photographic freezeframe, in order to indexically conserve a moment of human contact.58 As Garrett Stewart writes, in an earlier book on the photogram in the cinema: “In the age of digital generation rather than the chemical registration of images, there is […], a growing nostalgia for the real itself – and for the way the real once gave itself up to film, first photography and then to cinema.”59 But the film also knows 57 Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 13. 58 Michael Mann’s latest release, the gangster film Public Enemies (also shot in high-definition digital) operates with a very similar photographic allegory. Towards the end, the film refers to its own digital hyper-modernity, and becomes a form of meta-cinema, which recalls its own historical genesis: “Public Enemy No. 1” John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) secretly enters the headquarters of the Chicago police and peruses police photos of himself and his gang. His gaze roams over the numerous crossed-off faces of his dead friends, until he stops at his own unmarked portrait. Dillinger is still alive, but the encounter with his own photographic doppelgänger anticipates his death. The change from the photographic to the post-photographic image here appears neither as a pure rupture nor as pure continuity, but rather as a retroactive, mutual effect. In contrast to the previous dominance of the half-subjective shot, Michael Mann dissolves Dillinger’s gaze upon himself in a classical shot/reverse-shot process. This gaze is varied in the end of the film: in a Chicago movie-theater, Dillinger sees a Clark Gable film, while outside the police have the building surrounded. Johnny Depp now suddenly appears as a Clark Gable’s revenant, with the same moustache and the same elegant smile. 59 Stewart, Between Film and Screen, p. 238.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Geopolitical Aesthe tics

261

that in the digital era photographic desire cannot conceal the lack of the Real: “In Miami Vice, the image is not deduced from reality, but reality from the image.”60 Nonetheless, in the ephemeral photographic moments of the film, the shimmer of another temporality opens up, one that lies beyond the circulation sphere of a digitally networked global economy. Hence, photographic desire in Miami Vice is in no way a nostalgic yearning for the past – it is the utopia of an unrepresentable future: “Utopia is not what can be positively imagined and proposed, but rather what is not imaginable and not conceivable. Utopia, I argue, is not a representation but an operation calculated to disclose the limits of our own imagination of the future, the lines beyond which we do not seem able to go imagining changes in our own society and world.”61 This utopia is, in Miami Vice, connected with the (non-)place of Cuba: it is the happiness of the film’s “framed time.”

Bibliography Anderson, Perry, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998). Brecht, Bertolt, Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe 1987-1998 vol. XXI (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003). Burgin, Victor, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Copjec, Joan, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). Cowie, Elisabeth, Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Cubitt, Sean The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). Deleuze, Gilles, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992), pp. 3-7. –––, Negotiations 1972-1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Jameson, Fredric, Late Marxism: Adorno, or The Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990). –––, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). –––, “Spatial Systems in North by Northwest,” in Slavoj Žižek (ed.), Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 47-72. –––, Signatures of the Visible (London: Routledge, 1992). 60 Thoret, “Gravity of the Flux.” 61 Fredric Jameson, “Utopia as Replication,” in Valences of the Dialectic, p. 413.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

262 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

–––, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). –––, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998). –––, “Culture and Finance Capital,” in The Cultural Turn (London: Verso, 1998). –––, “The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation,” in The Cultural Turn (London: Verso, 1998). –––, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Michael Hardt and Kathy Weeks (eds.), The Jameson Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 277–287.
 –––, Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005). –––, “Interview with Sara Danius and Stefan Jonsson,” in Ian Buchanan (ed), Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 151-170. Helmling, Steven, The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson (Albany: SUNY Press 2001). Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991). Levin, Thomas Y., “Die Rhetorik der Zeitanzeige: Erzählen und Überwachen im Kino der ‘Echtzeit,’” in Malte Hagener, Johann N. Schmidt and Michael Wedel (eds.), Die Spur durch den Spiegel: Der Film in der Kultur der Moderne (Berlin: Bertz Fischer, 2004), pp. 349-366. Metz, Christian, Impersonal Enunciation, or The Place of the Film, trans. Cormac Deane (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Schütte, Wolfram, et al. (eds.), Franceso Rosi (Munich: Hanser, 1983). Seeßlen, Georg, “Das Scheitern der Methode: Francesco Rosis Weg von der Recherche zur Oper,” epd Film 6 (1987), pp. 14-21. Silverman, Kaja, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Stewart, Garrett, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). –––, Framed Time: Towards a Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Thoret, Jean-Baptiste, “Gravity of the Flux: Michael Mann’s Miami Vice,” Senses of Cinema 42, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/07/42/miami-vice.html (accessed April 1, 2019). Turner, Dennis, “The Subject of The Conversation,” Cinema Journal 24:4 (1985), pp. 4-22. Vernet, Marc, “The Look at the Camera,” in Cinema Journal 28:2 (1989), pp. 48-60.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Geopolitical Aesthe tics

263

Walsh, Michael, “Jameson and ‘Global Aesthetics,’” in David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (eds.), Post-Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). Žižek, Slavoj, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London: Routledge, 2001). –––, Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917: V.I. Lenin (London: Verso, 2002).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

9. The Political Uncanny, or the Return of Domination: The Shining Abstract My concluding interpretation of Kubrick’s The Shining is once again a synthetic reading of the whole work using the tools of film analysis. In a Lacanian/Žižekian extension of Jameson’s reading of the film, I will demonstrate how Kubrick, in the guise of a popular genre film, creates a spectral analysis of the postmodern, late capitalist totality. In a second step I seek to go beyond Jameson in order to prove that The Shining, in its natural-history totalization of capitalism, is even more total than Jameson ascribes to the film in his class-history reading. Like perhaps no other film, The Shining opens itself up to the wounds of the social totality, but at the same time, in its hermetic formal perfection, the film creates the counter-measure of a purely aesthetic totality, which may itself be utopian. Keywords: Form, Genre, Horror, Natural History

The Dance of Death The Shining is a cinematic dance of death.1 The vitalistic and naturally beautiful associations of the sunny title are already thwarted in the opening credits by a sense of looming catastrophe. Accompanied by the alien, electronic sounds of the famous Dies Irae motif, the camera swoops in a helicopter shot over an alpine lake. The surrounding mountains are reflected in the crystal clear water with almost perfect axial symmetry. Initially, the camera moves towards the geometrical vanishing point of the landscape, until it tilts slightly to the right and turns in the same direction. Thus, the first shot already contains all the aesthetic parameters that structure the 1 In the following pages I will not analyze the European version of the f ilm, reduced by Kubrick himself to 120 minutes, but the original, 145-minute American version.

Lie, S., Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462983632_ch09

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

266 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

film: a spatial slipstream movement, motifs of mirroring and doubling, the dominance of symmetry and central perspective and anamorphic distortions. These are all condensed in an image of nature denuded of any human presence, which, despite (or because of) its immense beauty, congeals into a monument of inhuman creation. It is for this reason that the first shot of The Shining is not so much an establishing shot as it is an emblematic image that sets the film’s allegorical process in motion. The second shot of the film perpetuates the sublime inhumanity of nature: from an extreme bird’s-eye view, the camera follows a car that appears tiny and lost amidst the forest. Over the course of several shots, the camera movement initially seems to be synchronous with the motion of the car, but then a dislocation happens: the camera accelerates its speed and drops to the viewpoint of the moving car, but instead of retaining this proximity, it rushes past the car to its left, in a drifting movement complementary to that of the first shot. Through this a-narrative autonomy of the camera, a rupture arises between the two modes of motion, which in the classical moving image are generally inseparable from each other. In this drifting apart of the camera movement and the movement of the diegetic object, the pure power of enunciation manifests itself, which here calls to mind the gaze of a malevolent deity. As in the opening sequence of Psycho, the remains of a subjective position of the gaze are inscribed into the images, in spite of the de-subjected automatism of the airborne camera movement. “The opening camera movements swoop through the Rocky Mountains and pass over Jack’s yellow VW like a bird of prey.”2 Here we have an evil eye that subjects the image to the spell of Lacan’s fascinum. Alongside Hitchcock, Carl Theodor Dreyer forms an important cinematic point of reference here, as Brigitte Peucker has argued: “The familiar Dies Irae melody with which the film begins conjures up Dreyer’s Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath, 1943), reinforcing a connection with the earlier film in its use of a mobile camera. Here, as in Day of Wrath, the camera seems to have the ‘evil eye’ as well as the witch’s power of invocation, the power to call up ‘the Quick and the Dead.’”3 From the beginning, The Shining is marked by the (non-)place of an impossible subjectivity, “a subjectivity which taints the very objectivity with a flavour of unspeakable, monstrous evil. An entire heretic theology is discernible here, secretly identifying the Creator Himself as the Devil.”4 2 Thomas Allen Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 203. 3 Peucker, The Material Image, p. 109. 4 Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears, p. 36.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

267

This mortifying gaze finds its equivalent in the ever icier and more barren landscape of the Rocky Mountains. The lush, green forest seen in the opening shots gives way to the stony gray of the mountain range. When, in the sequence’s final shot, the Overlook Hotel is shown, it seems to have almost been swallowed up by the surrounding landscape; embedded in the rock structure, figure and ground meld into a natural unity. In the hotel’s first visualization, it already appears as the crossover point between culture and nature. The manmade world returns to the timeless duration of nature: “The cultural artefacts are inserted into the cold beauty of the age-old, immeasurably vast space of nature, in which humanity and its history seem meaningless.”5 This is the film’s element of natural history, which is already crystallized before the actual narrative begins. This anticipated determination is also reinforced by the fact that the hotel is shown to the viewer before the car reaches it. Enunciation preempts the diegesis: the hotel is already waiting for the arrival of its guest.

The Child’s Vision This guest is introduced with the intertitle “The Interview”: Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) meets with the manager Ullman (Barry Nelson), in order to tick off the last formalities of his stay in the hotel. Torrance is an author and former teacher, who has accepted a caretaker job at the Overlook for the five-month winter break, in order to dedicate himself to writing a new novel. Torrance, who seems enthusiastic about the prospect of a period of creative solitude, and claims that this joy is also shared by his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd), cannot even be deterred by an incident from the hotel’s recent past, which Ullman reluctantly informs him of: in 1970, the then caretaker Charles Grady went mad and murdered his wife and two daughters with an axe, before piling the bodies up in a room and then shooting himself. He had fallen victim to a kind of “cabin fever,” Ullman explains, a psychotic breakdown that can arise in conditions of claustrophobic isolation. Well-versed in literature, Torrance can only see an eerie horror story in these events, which he gleefully relates to his wife. The conversation also sheds light on the economic subtext of the caretaker position: built in 1907, the hotel remains closed over the winter, since the excessive amounts of snow prevent the surrounding landscape from being 5 Bernd Kiefer, “Shining,” in Thomas Koebner (ed.), Filmklassiker vol. III: 1965-1981 (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1995), p. 518.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

268 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

used as snowfields. This, too, is a reference to the triumph of nature over culture. On Ullman’s desk sits a miniature American flag that is impossible to overlook: the history of America since the beginning of the 20th century is the timespan covered by the storyline of The Shining. After an opening medium-long shot that symmetrically shows the office in the classical shot/reverse-shot manner, the scene between Torrance and Ullman is formally concluded, but a disturbing element subtly enters into the reciprocity of typical filmic face-to-face communication. After some initial platitudes, Bill Watson, a colleague of Ullman’s who is beckoned into the office in order to show Torrance around the different parts of the hotel, silently sits next to Torrance during the entire conversation. The sequence focuses on the dialogue between Torrance and Ullman, so that the spectator barely even registers the presence of this third figure. It is only when Ullman tells of the murder that an unexpected reverse-shot fleetingly cuts to the still silent Watson. In this way, the otherwise conventionally played out introduction scene gains an uncanny tinge. The intersubjective economy of shot and reverse-shot is almost imperceptibly unbalanced by the present-absent figure of the secretive third person. Here, in spite of the intactness of the suture process, an acausal element irrupts into the filmic structure, an alien body that supplements the exchange between “Me” and “You” with an excessive element. This introductory conversation is punctuated by a temporally parallel sequence showing Wendy and Danny watching television. Their conversation also revolves around the impending stay in the hotel: Wendy is happy about it, while Danny is not unwilling, but appears skeptical about it. In this scene between mother and child, there is also a third figure present. This time, however, it is a powerful imaginary figure, “Tony,” who speaks through Danny’s (disguised) voice and is figurally present-absent in the shape of the boy’s crooked index finger. When Wendy asks him for Tony’s opinion, he replies that he absolutely does not want to go to the hotel. Since Tony does not address Danny’s mother as “Mom,” but as “Mrs. Torrance,” it is at the very least clear that he is not a member of the family, but an alien body within it. After the end of this dialogue, the film returns to the Torrance’s house. Accompanied by foreboding sounds, the camera slowly moves up towards the bathroom, in which Danny is having a discussion with Tony. As in American Gigolo, there is the suggestion, here, of the presence of an uncanny observer that cannot exist on the diegetic level. Another slow zoom frames Danny’s face in a close-up of the bathroom mirror. In the doubling produced by the mirror, the boy tries to tease out of Tony the reason why he does not want

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

269

to stay in the hotel, but his efforts are initially fruitless: the invisible Tony is in possession of a knowledge that not even Danny can have access to. In this sense, Tony can be understood as a figure of the unconscious: he is the guardian of a “knowledge that doesn’t know itself.”6 This knowing-more is followed by a seeing-more, since Tony’s eyes see in Danny the hotel’s past horrors. The famous image of the blood gushing out of the elevator in giant cascades, flooding the hotel lobby, is followed by a short flashback showing Grady’s two murdered daughters, upon which we see Danny’s face contorted in terror, as he stares these horrors directly in the eye, in a kind of hallucinatory suture. The gaze into the camera is also a confrontation with a traumatic event, which Danny himself cannot have lived through, but which Tony reactivates in what he sees. In the close-up of Danny, Kubrick repeats the overwhelmed expression of the astronaut in the psychedelic color sequence towards the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. But here the movement is spatially inverted: the blood gushes towards the camera, until it sloshes over the camera and plunges the entire image into darkness. It is a vision that transcends the visual: the excess of Danny’s “Shining” denotes an imaginative capacity which is not coincidentally brought into connection with the figure of the child: “Danny’s ability to ‘shine’ enables him to read thoughts […], to locate missing objects, and to ‘see’ things from both the past and future.”7 Thus, the “Shining” stands in for a childlike imagination that coalesces memory and anticipation, but also self-experience and the experience of others. The dark, blood-filled images literally leads to Danny’s blackout. In the next scene, a visibly shocked Danny lies in bed as he is investigated by a doctor. He can only remember speaking with Tony in the bathroom. All the doctor’s attempts to learn more about Tony come to nothing. Tony is an invisible boy, says Danny, who lives in his mouth and hides in his stomach. In the background of the shot, the open bathroom door affords a view of the toilet bowl. For the first time, a visual motif is introduced which will recur multiple times in the course of the film. As an excremental, obscene object, the toilet in The Shining threatens to return down the same path of obscenity and excretion. In the syntax of shots, the image of the toilet follows the vision of gushing blood – a semantic conjunction that recalls the bleeding lavatory in Coppola’s The Conversation. This excess of childhood imagination is rationalized and neutralized by the pedagogical discourse of the adults. Although her investigation did not lead to any aetiological 6 See Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), p. 58. 7 Nelson, Kubrick, p. 201.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

270 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

realization, the doctor, in her subsequent discussion with Wendy, diagnoses a benign episode of juvenile self-hypnosis which is unlikely to reappear. But Wendy admits that Tony first emerged after an “accident,” in which a drunk Jack had dislocated Danny’s shoulder. Wendy’s concerted attempt to excuse Jack’s patriarchal violence reveals her weakness and fearfulness: at the very least, she notes, the incident turned him off alcohol. In The Shining, the dyadic unity of mother and child has thus long been broken. A car-trip after the intertitle “Closing Day” seems once more to repeat the beginning of the film. Again, a long-shot captures Jack’s car from an airborne perspective, but this time the interior of the car is shown. Jack, Wendy and Danny definitively find themselves on the way to the hotel. Their conversation turns to a local anecdote concerning a group of settlers trapped by snow in the Rocky Mountains who ended up turning to cannibalism. Jack sprinkles the discussion in the car with macabre remarks that produce an icy mood. He is still unaware that he himself will face the prospect of becoming a cannibal. After their arrival in the Overlook Hotel, Ullman leads Jack and Wendy through the central rooms of the hotel, while the last summer guests prepare for their departure. In a long tracking-shot, they walk through the gigantic hotel lobby. In its halcyon days, the hotel was said to be a stopover for the international jetset, Ullman explains, beaming with pride. Presidents, film stars – in short, “all the best people.” There follows a sobering cut: we see Danny throwing darts in a 1970s-era gaming room, whose interior design does not quite exude the upper class glamor evoked by Ullman. Instead, it appears as a proletarian sphere within the hotel, to be expressly used by its poor employees rather than the rich jetsetters. Here, Danny has his second “Shining,” as the undead Grady daughters stand at the door to the gaming room. In this way, the socially stratified spaces of the hotel are metonymically linked with the Torrance family: while Jack and Wendy marvel at the lost greatness of the past while walking through the “Colorado Lounge,” Danny seems to be associated with the underprivileged hotel workers. As Ullman leads Jack and Wendy into their private living quarters, the couple can barely hide their disappointment at the humbly appointed room. The sequence concludes with the patterned walls of the bathroom: the gold that was expected seems to have turned into shit. In contrast with the first vision, the second apparition of the sisters is not enunciatively marked as Danny’s internal focalization. The alternation of shot and reverse-shot provides evidence of the “objective” existence of the girls in the film’s diegesis, rather than being a product of Danny’s hallucination. The diegetic diffusion of materiality and fantasy is intensified over the course of the film, such that a clear distinction between objective

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

271

appearance and pathogenic imagination becomes impossible. As Deleuze asks: “And, in The Shining, how can we decide what comes from the inside and what comes from the outside, the extra-sensory perceptions or hallucinatory projections?”8 We cannot. In The Shining, the inside and the outside collapse into a zone of indeterminacy.

The Traceless Trace The hedge maze is located outside of the hotel, but even the hotel’s labyrinthine interiors remind Wendy of a “maze.” A striking parallel between the Overlook and Jameson’s description of the Bonaventura Hotel (see Chapter 7.1) imposes itself. As they proceed with their tour, Ullman tells the Torrances that the hotel was built in 1905 on an Indian burial ground, and that they even had to defend themselves from various Indian attacks during construction. The interior design of the Overlook is correspondingly decorated with Indian artistic insignia: architectural ornaments with Navajo and Apache motifs thus co-exist with the art deco chic of the ballroom. In the Overlook, there reigns a kind of “visual schizophrenia,”9 which is none other than postmodernity’s obsession with pastiche. In a voracious re-appropriation of past styles, this architectural pastiche relieves the building itself of any historical substance. Jameson’s distinction between historicism and historicity is materialized in the spatial structure of a hotel in which historicistic retro-nostalgia does not stop at the art of the victims, instead obscenely degrading the relics of Indian art to elements of interior design. To repeat Jameson: historicism annihilates history – it is a form of postmodern cannibalism. And yet the reference to the Indian burial ground is a red herring which takes the immanent (vulgar-)Freudian postulate of a return of the repressed, typical for the genre, to the point of absurdity. After this allusion to their burial ground, horror connoisseurs in the audience may expect an impending revenge of the Indian undead. But The Shining gives this generically standardized and politically correct phantom logic a still more uncanny twist: “[It] turns out that the hotel is haunted not by Indians but by descendants of the white barbarians who destroyed the Indian culture – in particular by jazz-age sophisticates.”10 8 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 206. 9 See Nelson, Kubrick, p. 215. 10 James Naremore, On Kubrick (London: BFI, 2007), p. 193.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

272 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

The “Closing Day” sequence, with its visual and verbal details, undoubtedly hints at a series of determinant social antagonisms: class contradictions, patriarchal violence, colonialism. This implicit discourse is continued in the next scene: at Ullman’s request, the black cook Halloran leads Wendy and Danny through the hotel’s enormous kitchen area. The metonymic connection between woman and kitchen, which was already evident the first time we see Wendy on screen, is here reinforced anew. While the men continue their reconnaissance tour, the others concern themselves with the reproduction of (male) labor power. Halloran shows Wendy and Danny the cool room (in which Jack will later be trapped) and the food pantry. His lengthy enumeration of all the kitchen appliances adds up to an ironic commentary on the society of consumer excess, in which such a quantity of commodities is accumulated that it would not be used up for many years to come. Wendy is surprised that Halloran intuitively calls Danny by his nickname “Doc” (a reference to the Bugs Bunny cartoons that Danny likes watching). Between Halloran and Danny, an immediate spiritual connection is made. Through the “Shining,” not only can Danny read Halloran’s mind while he is conversing with Wendy, but Halloran can also guess what Danny is thinking, and offers him an ice cream. In a long dialogue in the kitchen, the two characters share their paranormal experiences. Halloran has inherited the ability to silently speak with others from his grandmother. Unlike with the doctor in the earlier scene, Danny can speak openly with him about Tony. Thus we learn that Danny appears in Danny’s sleep and tells him things that he forgets upon waking up. Halloran and Danny are troubled by a vague fear of the Overlook Hotel. “Some places are like people,” Halloran states, and the Overlook also seems to possess the capacity to “shine.” “You know when something happens, it can leave a trace of itself behind. […] Not things that anyone can notice. But things that people that shine can see.” The psychoanalytic term for this traceless trace of an event, this latent marking, is trauma: “We need to invent the category of ‘negative performativity,’ because it is precisely through its traceless nature that trauma has an effect on the texture of experience.”11 The vision of a bleeding hotel thus indicates a traumatic wound whose suture suddenly breaks open. Halloran’s disquiet grows when Danny insistently asks about a “Room 237” in the hotel. In this section of dialogue, 11 Thomas Elsaesser, “Traumatheorie in den Geisteswissenschaften, oder: die Postmoderne als Trauerarbeit,” in Terror und Trauma: Zur Gewalt des Vergangenen in der BRD (Berlin: Kadmos, 2007), p. 203.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

273

Kubrick operates with rhyme-like repetitions, as he would do as a structuring principle for his dialogues in his later work, above all in Eyes Wide Shut: Danny: “What about Room 237?” Halloran: “Room 237?” Danny: “You’re scared of Room 237, ain’t you?” Halloran: “No, I ain’t.” Danny: “Mr. Halloran, what is in Room 237?” Halloran: “Nothing. There ain’t nothing in Room 237.”

Here, we are not dealing with the redundancy of bad dialogue-writing, as some of Kubrick’s critics have insinuated. Through the use of such rhymes, words are strangely denuded of their meaning, their designation function seems to be reduced to an uncanny self-referentiality. As such, “Room 237” is here transformed into an ominous signifier. In his brilliant study of Eyes Wide Shut, Chion dubs such verbal repetition “parroting”: The instances of parroting have several functions. They transform a particular phrase spoken by an individual at a particular moment into a set phrase, a hidden code: they make it resonate. Yet they also remind us that these words belong to somebody, and that what we say is constantly taken from us, even and above all when we say “I,” because everyone says “I.” […] But it also reminds us of the literality of speech. It emphasizes that language is not thought, it is words, a succession of words. Through spoken language, through prose, it reminds us that all this is a matter of signifiers.12

The “shining” between Halloran and Danny establishes a subterranean resonance between the tradition of an Afro-American animism and the visionary imaginary capacity of the child. This minoritarian enchaining between the black man and the child constitutes one of the few relationships of solidarity in a film in which the late capitalist erosion of sociality has long seeped into the heart of the bourgeois nuclear family.

The Labyrinthine Hyperspace According to Jameson’s diagnosis of postmodernity, this fragmentation, atomization and monadization of society also penetrates into the 12 Michel Chion, Eyes Wide Shut (London: BFI, 2002), pp. 75-76.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

274 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

spatio-temporal experience of the subject (see Chapter 7.1). Thus, the time markers of the title cards in The Shining no longer serve the narrative organization of a coherent temporal duration, but its disorienting disintegration. The ever-decreasing lapses of time (“One Month Later,” “Tuesday,” “Thursday,” “Saturday,” “Monday,” “Wednesday,” “8am,” “4pm”) express the compression of temporality into moments of the present cut off from one another, which James on has described as the schizophrenic disintegration of syntactically articulated signifying chains: The breakdown of temporality suddenly releases this present of time from all the activities and intentionalities that might focus it and make it a space of praxis; thereby isolated, that present suddenly engulfs the subject with undescribable vividness, a materiality of perception properly overwhelming, which effectively dramatizes the power of the material – or better still, the literal-signifier in isolation.13

The collapse of temporality in The Shining corresponds with a new filmic dynamization of space. In Kubrick’s famous Steadicam-shots of Danny’s go-cart trips through the labyrinthine corridors of the hotel, the movement of the body is absorbed by the hotel’s spaces. A sensory hyperspace replaces the “narrative space” (Stephen Heath) of the classical cinema; a displacement which in Jameson’s reading of the film is symptomatic of the postmodern sublime: In Kubrick also, the emptiness of life in the dead season of the hotel is characteristically punctuated by the favorite sense perceptions of this auteur, so that the tireless pedaling of the child on his big wheel through-out the empty corridors is transformed into a veritable Grand Prix, an implacable space probe heading through tunneled matter like an interstellar vehicle with meteorites tumbling past. Such embellishments of the narrative line – micro-practices of the “sublime” in the 18th-century sense, yet also closely related, as formal symptoms, to the bravura sequences in Hitchcock […] – mark the dissociation of Fancy and Imagination in contemporary cultural production and stand as so many diverse signs of the heterogeneity of the contents into which modern life has been shattered.14 13 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 27. 14 Fredric Jameson, “Historicism in The Shining,” in Signatures of the Visible, p. 120.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

275

These moments of a sensation of total immersion, which assume an independent reality in the narrative economy of the film, are, beyond Kubrick’s own stylistic signature, a central aesthetic hallmark of the return of the “cinema of attractions” (Tom Gunning) in 1980s Hollywood cinema. In terms of film history, The Shining stands alongside Body Heat and American Gigolo at the threshold of a Post-New Hollywood era, in which postmodernism has finally become culturally dominant. In the deep-focus delirium of The Shining, the Bazinian aesthetic of filmic space as modernity’s space of theatrical action is conclusively bid farewell. The perspectival control of space by the camera flips over into the domination of space: “The eye that demands and realizes optical domination, is the same eye of fear, which cannot escape terror, the awareness of that which cannot be tolerated.”15 In the labyrinthine spatial structure of the Overlook Hotel, the characters are no longer subjects of their own movement. But this transposition of subject and object is only a part of the truth: Danny’s solitary meanderings through the endless corridors of the hotel can be read as the attempts of a child to extract a mental map of the totality of the hyperspace. Rhythmed through the tactile change between parquet floors and carpeted surfaces, Danny overcomes the fear of exposing his body to this unfathomable space. In any case, Danny’s sense of spatial orientation will save his life at the end of the film: The maze might be taken as a metaphor for the mind itself, but more specifically […] it is a puzzle connecting sight – and particularly acute powers of vision – to knowledge. […] Danny’s movement is always purposeful, although he doesn’t necessarily know where he is going. This is exploration, and space explored becomes space known. Danny is learning something about his position in the real world, but in doing so he is also constructing an internal world. By the end of the film, he has the best knowledge of the hotel as well as the maze, a knowledge that will save his life.16

Here, too, Jameson’s imperative is pertinent: cognitive cartography must face up to the unrepresentable. 15 Hans-Thies Lehmann, “Die Raumfabrik – Mythos im Kino und Kinomythos,” in Karl-Heinz Bohrer (ed.), Mythos und Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), p. 144. 16 William Paul, Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror & Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 338-339.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

276 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

The Incompossible Gaze While Danny devotes himself to this adventurous mission, the chapter titled “One Month Later” begins with a satirical caricature of feigned marital harmony. In the manner of a perfect housewife, Wendy brings Jack breakfast in bed. In one of the film’s innumerable zoom movements, the camera shifts away from the mirror image of the still sleeping Jack as Wendy enters the room, but then zooms back to the original camera position. That Kubrick is one of the few directors capable of deploying the zoom as a singular aesthetic tool has been evident since Barry Lyndon at the very latest. In that film, the slow backwards zooms make the characters appears as tiny details within overpowering tableaux. As in the opening sequence of The Shining, the complete beauty of the form is revealed to be a fundamentally ahuman matrix: “The images do not convert content into form – form always precedes and creates content.”17 The mirror-zoom in The Shining can be understood as the continuation of this objectivation of the subject: as if the power of the specular doppelgänger were prior to the egological original, the shot begins with the mirror image rather than the “real” Jack. In this inversion of the hierarchy of original and copy, reality and simulacrum, the zoom sucks Jack into the mirror. Here, too, interiority and exteriority are increasingly undifferentiated, until Kubrick, in open defiance of all the rules of suture, makes a spectacularly “false” cut: the reverse-shot shows Wendy from the point of view of Jack’s mirror image. Brigitte Peucker sees this as another allusion to Dreyer: “There follows a shot of Wendy from the point of view of Jack that emerges from an ‘impossible’ place – out of the mirror itself, a Dreyer moment, recalling the impossible point of view of the corpse in Vampyr.”18 Jack now finds himself on the other side of the mirror.19 The extimate doppelgänger has long gained power: I is an other. A schizoid crisis of subjectivity infects The Shining on all levels: it is no coincidence that the f irst indication of madness is connected with the epistemic destabilization of the point-of-view structure of classical découpage. In a further variation of the visual refutation of what had been previously stated, the next sequence shows Jack in the Colorado Lounge, frenetically throwing a tennis ball at the Indian wall decorations. Jack, who had previously stressed to Wendy the primacy of his work, now submits to 17 Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness, p. 167. 18 Peucker, The Material Image, p. 110. 19 A later horror film which plays with the reverse-side of the mirror in a refined manner, is Mirrors by Alexandre Aja (2008).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

277

a regressive play instinct, which in a certain sense is the exact reversal of the famous catchphrase which Wendy will find on the white page in his typewriter, repeated over and over again: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” In fact, here it is the precise opposite: “All play and no work makes Jack a dull boy.” Jack’s imminent human, social and symbolic regression is, in this autistic game, already laid out. Again, the camera zooms back from a further demonic object in this film to a long-shot of the lounge: the typewriter sits resplendently in the center of the dominant space, but the page is blank and the chair is empty. Here, too, the object precedes the subject: the visual autonomization of the typewriter allegorizes an automatic writing system, which immediately seems interconnected with the innermost jouissance of the subject, as we will discuss later. This obsessive game with doublings and mirrorings can also be seen in one of the closing scenes of the film. The hedge maze outside of the hotel also exists in miniature form inside the hotel. As Wendy and Danny run around in the maze, Jack’s gaze falls onto the model in the lobby. In the following slow zoom onto the labyrinth, subjectivity and objectivity become indistinguishable. As a clear optical point of view, the frontal view is sutured together with Jack’s gaze, while at the same time, the presence of Wendy and Danny suggests an objective long-shot of the exterior labyrinth. To look and to overlook: the paradoxical imbrication of interiority and exteriority, panorama and point of view, real and imaginary, yields to an “incompossible” suture. Or, to speak with Deleuze: “these two worlds are possible, but are not ‘compossible’ with each other.”20 Recognition is also grounded, here, in misrecognition: in the imagined dominant gaze over his family trapped in the labyrinth, Jack recognizes himself as a punishing super-father, and thereby misrecognizes his real de-authorization in a vision of absolutist sovereignty. The status of this gaze is, in the strict sense of the term, phantasmatic: the domination of totality through the gaze is revealed to be a deceptive image, and at the end of the film, Jack himself becomes a victim of this totality in the (exterior, life-sized) maze. In other words: Jack is retroactively turned into the object of his own phantasmatic gaze. As suture theory teaches us: the Overlook Hotel can never be conflated with the gaze of the subject. Fundamentally, Jack takes on the position of that almighty enunciator which manifests itself in the evil eye of the opening shot. Patriarch, sovereign and god: symbolic instances of domination, which have long been abdicated in the late capitalist present of the film, but which are restituted in the ideological phantasma of Jack’s nascent psychosis. 20 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 130.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

278 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

This reactionary delirium, as we can assert with Deleuze and Guattari, structures the psycho-political core of the film: “All delirium possesses a world-historical, political, and racial con­tent, mixing and sweeping along races, cultures, continents, and kingdoms.”21

Postmodernist Writing Block Title card: “Tuesday.” Jack’s delirium makes itself more clearly felt. A slow forwards tracking shot in the Colorado Lounge shows Jack from the rear. He is writing on his typewriter. When Wendy enters the room, in order to tell him about the impending snow storm, he loses control for the first time. He forbids Wendy to ever disturb him when writing. The lounge must be a prohibited zone during his work. Disturbed, Wendy leaves the room, and Jack proceeds with his writing; on his table lies a giant book with pasted in newspaper articles and photographs, which seem to have been taken from the numerous photo series on the walls of the hotel. Is Jack rewriting the history of the hotel in novel form? At this point, we know nothing about the material of his book. Like a monarch, he claims for himself the royal room and its throne. Jack celebrates his work as a creation from nothingness, as if he could conjure up the text from his own autarkic interiority. But this poetic soul has long escaped from his social conditions. The gigantic Colorado Lounge allegorizes this extreme disconnection from the outside world. Instead of spurring his literary productivity, the hyperspace of the hotel neutralizes the creativity of the writer. The Shining tells of the failure of the artist’s creative process as an effect of radical de-referentialization. Not only is the planned story of this novel at no point transparent, but cultural production as a whole seems to have been cut off from any relationship with a collective and individual world of experience. Jack Torrance is a postmodern pastiche-version of the author as an original genius. Jameson sees a central vanishing point in Jack’s anachronistic phantasma of an authentic artistic subjectivity: Jack Nicholson is not a writer, not someone who has something to say or likes doing things with words, but rather someone who would like to be a writer, who lives a fantasy about what the American writer is, along the lines of James Jones or Jack Kerouac. Yet even that fantasy is 21 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Œdipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 88.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

279

anachronistic and nostalgic; all those unexplored interstices of the system, which allowed the lumpens of the fifties to become, in their turn, figures of “the Great American Writer,” have long since been absorbed into the sealed and achieved space of consumer society.22

The late capitalist atomization, fragmentation and objectification of the social also subsumes the cultural production. According to Jameson, the nostalgia for a traditional form of artistic subjectivity arises precisely at the moment of its historical abolition. The social deprivation of the writer, who must count himself lucky to take on a caretaker job in a location decidedly remote from civilization, does not generate any counter-cultural surplus value, but leads straight to asocial paralysis: If you believe that such production must always presuppose the sustaining existence, behind it, of a community (whether identified or not, whether conscious of itself or on the contrary about to achieve such consciousness by means of the very cultural expression which testifies, ex post facto, to its having been there in the first place), then it is clear why “Jack” has nothing to say: even the family unit of which he is part has been reduced to a kind of stark isolation, the coexistence of three random individuals who henceforth represent nothing beyond themselves, and those very relations with each other thus called (violently) in question. Meanwhile, whatever possibility this particular family might have had, in the social space of the city, of developing some collective solidarity with other people of similar marginalized circumstances is henceforth itself foreclosed by the absolute isolation of the great hotel in winter. Only the telepathic fellowship of the child, as it strikes a link with the motif of the black community, offers some fantasmatic figure or larger social relationships.23

In Jameson’s considerations on method acting, Jack Nicholson’s exalted performance in the film is fundamental for the representation of the monadic worldlessness of the would-be writer: “The very content of the star system itself, as it inscribes itself in Kubrick’s movie, the semiotic content of ‘Jack Nicholson’ as post-contemporary hero, makes the same point by its very distance from the older generations of new rebels (Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman, and even, transitionally, Steve McQueen).”24 As such, the anti22 Jameson, “Historicism in The Shining,” p. 127. 23 Ibid., p. 128. 24 Ibid.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

280 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

psychological over-acting of Nicholson’s post-method acting antinomically relates to the psychological over-acting of Pacino’s method-acting in Dog Day Afternoon: “Jack Nicholson has never been so mechanical, his smile, his furrowed brow, the light in his eyes as shoots out a sideways glance, all his capital seems to be virtuously mobilized, but he himself is absent.”25 Nicholson thus appears as a doppelgänger of himself, Jack is cleaved into Jack: “In other words, Jack is a bad version of Nicholson, played cleverly by Nicholson.”26 In a derivative pastiche of his own style, Nicholson’s acting proves to be a congenial equivalent of the uncoupling of the ego and the outside world in the schizophrenic, as described by Freud: We know that other forms of psychosis, the schizophrenias, are inclined to end in affective hebetude – that is, in a loss of all participation in the external world. In regard to the genesis of delusions, a fair number of analyses have taught us that the delusion is found applied like a patch over the place where originally a rent had appeared in the ego’s relation to the external world.27

Character Masks Jack’s affective stupor, as a nascent schizophrenia, is grounded on an autistic worldlessness. The lacking reference becomes overt in the “Thursday” sequence: the camera slowly zooms onto Jack’s rigid face. His gaze seems to be fixed on a point in the off-screen, but the preceding cut leaves the question open as to whether he is gazing at his wife and son, who are playing outside in the snow. The causality of the point of view remains vague: in this scene, Jack seems to be cut off from any relation to the outside world, and at the same time, any access to the interiority of character is also hindered. Expressiveness is suspended, and in the wan light the human traits of his face are transformed into something strange: Nicholson, we could say, already looks like the Wolf, which he would play fourteen years later in Mike Nichols’ film of the same name. “Kubrick had long been trying to capture something on a face that was undergoing a transformation from within, a face that was changing.”28 Nicholson’s facial expressiveness is reduced to 25 Georg Seeßlen, Stanley Kubrick und seine Filme (Marburg: Schüren, 1999), p. 157. 26 Naremore, On Kubrick, p. 202. 27 Sigmund Freud, “Neurosis and Psychosis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud vol. XIX (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), p. 151. 28 Chion, Eyes Wide Shut, p. 31.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

281

his famous raising of the eyebrows and his no less famous grin at the end of the shot.29 The close-up does not “read” the interiority of his face, it seals it off. This strategy was followed by Kubrick right up to his last film: “The idea that we can ‘read faces,’ of detecting what is going on inside a person through their facial expressions and behaviour, or the inflections of their voice, is a modern myth, created first by cinema and then by television. Eyes Wide Shut offers a critique of this myth.”30 Kubrick condenses Jack’s nascent madness in the negation of an affection image, in which the gaze discloses no more exteriority, and the face no more interiority. It is precisely through his hyperbolic mechanicism that Jack Nicholson’s performance fundamentally hollows out all the expressiveness of method acting. The vanishing of the affect in postmodernity as described by Jameson, in this affection image without an affect, acquires an intensity which is as uncanny as it is comic. We should not forget that in spite of its resemblance to the horror film, The Shining is also, like other works by Kubrick, it is a thoroughly grotesque film.31 As in Psycho, in The Shining, the uncanniness of the schizophrenic mingles with its comic exaggeration. In the autonomy acquired by the individual parts of Jack’s face, it does not appear as an organic wholeness, but as an agglomeration of different part-objects. It was, in the end, Tim Burton’s first Batman film that drew all the consequences of the anorganic autonomy of Nicholson’s schizo-grin: at the end of the film, the evil Joker figure embodied by Nicholson dies, but his grin survives his death. The jaw detaches itself from his face and cheerfully grins and chatters as an undead part-object. Like a “grin without a cat,” the part-object rips apart the organism through its centrifugal independent existence. Title card “Saturday”: the nuclear family disintegrates into individual monads. Their different activities are without any relation to each other. While Jack maniacally works away at his typewriter and Danny rides around in his endless go-cart tour, Wendy at least tries to establish rudimentary 29 Peucker sees his frozen expression as an allegory of the relationship between the moving and the still image: “This moment of controlled movement exemplifies the possibilities both of arresting action and of killing off the moving, hence seemingly three-dimensional, image into the photograph – and of bringing it to life by the introduction of movement once again. Macabre in the extreme, the ‘frozen’ moment and arrested action of the photograph are suggested quite literally in the ice sculpture that Jack’s body – very much a material image – will become.” Peucker, The Material Image, p. 109. 30 Chion, Eyes Wide Shut, p. 84. 31 On Kubrick’s aesthetic of the grotesque, see Naremore, On Kubrick, p. 24-43, here p. 27. “The grotesque is a somewhat broader category associated with both the carnivalesque and the terrifying – at one extreme with gross-out comedy and at the other with the monstrous, the uncanny or the supernatural.”

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

282 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

contact with the outside world, by radioing the local forestry service. The oncoming snowstorm disrupts the telephone network, but the police officer reacts to Wendy’s fear less with empathetic concern than with friendly routine. Along with Ullman, he belongs to the series of depersonalized secondary figures who completely correspond to the bureaucratic habitus of an anonymized society. Once again, an American flag hangs in the background of the station. In Marxist terms, these figures are pure character masks whose affect has disappeared. Character masks, in Jameson’s view, populate Kubrick’s filmic universe in droves: “These depthless people, whether on their way to the moon, or coming to the end of the world, are standardized and without interest, their rhythmic smiles as habituated as the recurrence of a radio-announcer’s drawn breath.”32 If the secondary characters thus allegorize their synchrony with the historical moment of the present, then the main characters also refer, in the transformation of their external appearance, to a past historical era. If Jack initially still belongs to the middle-class (which is visually demonstrated by his tweed suit), then his increasing bedraggled state not only signals a social relegation, but also a quasi-historical reverse evolution. In his scruffy lumberjack outfit, which he does not take off in the entire second half of the film, he unambiguously recalls those settler-cannibals spoken about in the Torrance’s journey to the hotel. If Jack becomes an American settler, then Wendy becomes an American Indian: in her radio conversation she wears a jacket with Indian motifs. She is the Indian daughter, hunted at the end of the film by the evil white man. Danny’s clothing, by contrast, connects him with the comic characters of American pop culture. On this level, he is a totally normal “all-American boy” who likes watching television, eating French fries and ice cream and riding go-carts. His sensitivity towards the traceless trace of past traumas at least seems not to have been anaesthetized through excessive media consumption. Perhaps the exact opposite is the case: for the third time, he is confronted with the apparition of the Grady sisters. Movement is arrested in the shock of his vision. Indeed, Georg Seeßlen sees the dialectic of motion and stasis, moving image and still image in Kubrick’s notorious corridor images as a fundamental aesthetic principle of the film: In Danny’s journeys through the corridors, which dynamically appear to us in a nearly ecstatic manner (we formally feel, since the camera shares the deep perspective of his movement, how a child can discover 32 Jameson, “Historicism in The Shining,” p. 119.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

283

motion, than something that simultaneously conveys infinite delight and transforms it into deep fear, but we do not want it to stop), and then come to a halt before visions and images of terror: this composition, this movement into the labyrinthine room that comes to a halt, is the essential form of the film itself.33

In its choice of motifs and overt frontality, the traumatic punctum of the sisters’ frozen image of terror recalls – as many interpreters have noted – the photography of Diane Arbus. But this apparently photographic stasis is followed by a cinematic coming to life. The previously mute girls now begin to speak: “Come and play with us, Danny. Forever and ever and ever.” Meanwhile, in another inversion of motion and stasis, animation and mortification, the chopped up, bloody corpses of the sisters are intercut into the scene. Here, too, the strict objectivity of what is shown in no way allows for an enunciative reference to a subjective marking of fantasy. Like Eyes Wide Shut, The Shining is also “a film clearly detached from any form of ‘subjectivism’; it is a film in which there is an objective world (even a mental image is an ‘object’), and no one, neither in the audience or among the characters, can claim to be able to get inside the head of anyone else.”34 Danny closes his eyes out of fear, and this time the child’s wish is fulfilled and the sisters disappear. Once again he turns to his imaginary friend Tony, who seeks to soothe him with the difference between reality and fantasy: “Remember what Mr. Halloran said. It’s just like pictures in a book, Danny. It isn’t real.” But this pedagogy of healthy human reason has lost its relevance: the images leap out of the books and are incarnated in flesh and blood. In The Shining, these “material ghosts” embody the reality of illusion: “The ghost materializes and is revealed to have a body; Kubrick’s uncanny is decidedly corporeal.”35

The Anal Father For Danny, however, the uncanniness of the dead sisters is surpassed by that of his own father. This is the core of the “Monday” sequence, in which, for the first and only time in the film, there is a long conversation between Jack and Danny. All Danny wants to do is fetch a toy from his 33 Seeßlen, Stanley Kubrick und seine Filme, p. 257. 34 Chion, Eyes Wide Shut, p. 24. 35 Peucker, The Material Image, p. 108.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

284 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

room, but the boy encounters his father sitting apathetically on his bed. Jack is framed to the left by the mirror and to the right by the open toilet, which, in a visual “parroting” of the earlier scene in Danny’s bedroom, can now be seen on the right image axis. When Jack, in a frontal medium close-up, sits Danny on his lap, a shot lasting for more than two minutes without a cut begins. Father and son are physically as close as they have ever been, but their looks do not meet. Once more, an icily pale light from outside falls into the room, as if the ever-thickening snow was absorbing all bodily warmth. To Danny’s question whether everything is OK, Jack answers that his work had kept him up all night, but that he is happier in the hotel than he has ever been before. He wants to stay here “forever and ever and ever,” Jack says, as if echoing the Grady sisters. When Danny asks Jack whether he would ever do anything to hurt him, Jack reassures his son that he would not touch a hair on his head. William Paul has given a precise description of this scene: Nicholson’s performance is mercurial in the way it shifts between real love and real hatred in this scene. The tone at the beginning implies genuine concern, but by the end Jack is talking to Danny in the overly emphatic mode that adults reserve for children: “I love you more than anything else in the whole world” (a declaration of love that Nicholson makes sound like one of the most terrifying things any father could say to his son). The ambivalence of the father must create ambivalence in the son. What can he be without a father’s love, yet what can he be with the love offered?36

Once again, the indeterminate switching between horror and comedy robs the visible and the sayable of their internal expressiveness. Does Jack really mean what he says, or does the exaggerated nature of what he says in fact signify its opposite? The intentionality of speech is here indecipherable – for both Danny and the spectator. The causality of speaking, feeling and acting remains opaque, or, in other words: image and language do not mutually reveal each other, but rather they conceal their signification in a kind of performative negativity. Words lose their symbolic efficacy. Both the visual and the acoustic signifier cannot be reduced to an unambiguous signified. With Chion, we can state: “Never complicit with speech, showing no evidence either for or against what is said, nor faces that ‘betray’ it, the image becomes differently invested by the audience: they become the absolute mask, which does not reproduce expressive features and movements on the outside, far 36 Paul, Laughing Screaming, p. 349.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

285

less the inner being of the characters. The image becomes what does not reveal.”37 Here too, the impenetrable mask transforms Jack into a zombie-like entity. The visual syntagma of the mirror (Imaginary), father (Symbolic) and toilet (Real) is here particularly illuminating: instead of reflecting the idealized Image of the ego, the imaginary object threatens to flip back into the anal object through the symbolic dysfunctionality of the father. Gold once again turns into shit. According to Žižek, from this crisis of the “Name of the Father” grows the obscene “anal father,” who is duplicated in the Real rather than the Imaginary. The following passage from Žižek’s Grimassen des Realen comes strikingly close to Jack’s grotesque uncanniness: In the shape of the phantom-like “living dead” – that ghost who blocks “normal” sexual relations – we can see the reverse-side of the Name-ofthe-Father, who actually does enjoy: the little, obscene man, who is the most visible embodiment of the phenomenon of the uncanny. He is the doppelgänger of the subject, accompanying it like a shadow and a certain surplus, which embodies what “in the subject is more than the subject.”38

From the next chapter, “Wednesday,” on, the jouissance of the anal father can be seen in all its monstrosity: while Danny enters the forbidden room 237 for the first time (although we do not see what happens therein), Wendy hears Jack’s guttural cries from the cellar. She rushes to him, and a disturbed Jack tells her about his nightmare, “the most terrible nightmare I ever had,” in which he murdered Wendy and Danny and hacked them to pieces. The bloody deed of his predecessor is repeated in Jack’s unconsciousness. This scene negates the earlier conversation between father and son in a twofold manner. Firstly, Jack himself appears as a helpless child seeking protection from his mother, after he had previously staged the appearance of parental care towards his son. Secondly, his performative promise “I would never hurt you both” proves to be deceptive: “I will hurt you” seems to be the actual unconscious speech act. Lacan writes in his seminar about psychoses: “What the subject tells me is always fundamentally related to a possible feint, in which sends me, and I receive, the message in an inverted form.”39 It is precisely at the moment of Jack’s murderous wish-fulfillment that Danny 37 Chion, Eyes Wide Shut, p. 70. 38 Žižek, Grimassen des Realen, p. 161. 39 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III: The Psychoses, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 37.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

286 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

enters the Colorado Lounge, sucking his thumb and visibly suffering from shock. When Wendy discovers injuries to his neck, she denounces Jack as the perpetrator. Here, too, Jack’s early drunken mistreatment of Danny seems to be repeated. In spite of Wendy’s increasingly hysterical accusations, Jacks sits in his chair, as if paralyzed. Madness has finally taken possession of him. It is an absurd image: the mad king insists on his throne.

Objective Fantasy Jack finds allies for his war on his own family in the hotel’s past. Wildly grunting and gesticulating, he lurches into the ballroom and sits at the empty bar. Kubrick stages Jack’s first vision as a Faustian pact with the devil: “I would give my goddamn soul for a glass of beer,” says Jack, and in a reverse-shot the mephistophelian barkeeper Lloyd promptly pops up. 40 “Hi Lloyd,” a cheered up Jack calls, as if the man was an old friend and he was waiting for him to turn up. Although Lloyd’s appearance can be interpreted as an alcoholic Jack’s wish-fulfillment, Kubrick here abstains from any direct visual proof of a hallucination. Lloyd is precisely not the product of a numbed perception, but is presented as a diegetically objective entity. In this scene, as in Jack’s “overlook” at the labyrinth, the indeterminacy of reality and schizoid fantasy is closely linked with subtle irritations of the point-of-view system. Lloyd’s appearance begins off-screen. In an allusion to the opening sequence of A Clockwork Orange, Jack Nicholson directs a sardonic smile straight into the camera. He thereby addresses the absent side of the film, but the reverse-shot, which Lloyd reveals, does not correspond to Jack’s visual point of view. The camera zooms back and shows Lloyd and Jack together in the frame. Now, at the very latest, it becomes clear that the reverse-shot does not perspectivally come from Jack’s gaze. Instead of suturing the absent side of the film through a complementary point of view showing Lloyd, the scene uncouples the gaze from the diegetic subjectivity of its protagonist. The expected symmetry of shot and reverse-shot is minimally anamorphized. For Chion, the shot/reverse-shot system does not signal stabilization but the collision of a reciprocal intersubjectivity: “Kubrick’s film employs classical film grammar, but in a very personal and selective way. We can see at the crux of its style a notion of the shot-reverse shot 40 With his shaved off eyebrows, Lloyd recalls the Mystery Man from Lynch’s Lost Highway, another truly devilish figure.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

287

pattern as an impossible face-to-face encounter (except in death), or in any case an encounter approached asymptotically.”41 We thus have another variant of the transsubjective point of view. Since the ghostly incarnation assumes a real existence for the pathogenic perception of the main character, the ontological difference between reality and hallucination in the image remains unmarked. The Shining renounces the unambiguous subjective coding of fantasy as the quasi-property of the characters. Instead, subject and fantasy seem to become separated off from each other. We here have a paradox that Slavoj Žižek has recently described as the objectivization of fantasy: What, then, is fantasy at its most elementary? The ontological paradox, scandal even, of fantasy resides in the fact that it subverts the standard opposition of “subjective” and “objective”: of course, fantasy is by definition not objective (referring to something that exists independently of the subject’s perceptions); however, it is also not subjective (something that belongs to the subject’s consciously experienced intuitions, the product of his or her imagination). Fantasy rather belongs to the “bizarre category of the objectively subjective – the way things actually, objectively seem to you even if they don’t seem that way to you.”42

Through a minimal tear in the suture, Jack is dispossessed of his fantasy. The gaze-causality for Lloyd’s apparition is concealed in the acousmatics of a political uncanny, as will be more precisely outlined below. The class difference between the increasingly more vulgar (and more anal) Jack and the distinguished attitude of the barkeeper is impossible to overlook. In spite of this external discrepancy, Jack seems to grant Lloyd his total trust: he gives free reign to his own sexism (calling Wendy a “spermbank”), and justifies both his violence against Danny (“a momentary loss of muscular coordination”) and his whiskey consumption (“white man’s burden”). Conversely, Lloyd treats Jack as an honored guest, who can drink to his heart’s content without having any cash on him. Jack suddenly shows a knack for sociability, which we had not expected of the manic writer-monad. The underprivileged writer and the upper-class waiter get along splendidly. Even if, at this point, the specifically historical allegory of the ghostly entity is still not unambiguously decipherable, it at least seems clear that Lloyd personifies a past epoch. In his visions, Jack makes present the phantasma of 41 Michel Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey (London: BFI, 1999), p. 82. 42 Žižek, How to Read Lacan, pp. 52-53.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

288 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

a past which he himself cannot have lived through. This historical spectralogy constitutes, for Jameson, the materialist core of the “haunted house” horror genre: “The ghost story is indeed virtually the architectural genre par excellence, wedded as it is to rooms and buildings ineradicably stained with the memory of gruesome events, material structures in which the past literally ‘weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.’”43 The return of the past goes together with the return of nature: softly, but unmistakably, the sound of the icy snow storm penetrates into the hermetic interior of the hotel, an acoustic haunting, which continues until the end of the film. Here, too, The Shining recalls Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, in which a very similar sound seems to set itself free from the logic of the diegesis and transform itself into an autonomous entity. Lloyd vanishes into thin air when Wendy hysterically bursts into the salon and tells Jack about a crazy woman in the bathtub, on whom Danny blames the cuts on his neck. “Which room was it?” Jack asks. The answer is clear: Room 237.

Anamorphotic Nausea Here begins a terrifying sequence, in which Danny and Halloran’s “Shining” is directly interconnected with Jack’s visions: Halloran lies in his bed and learns from a television news report of the snowstorm sweeping across Colorado. Symmetrical frames dominate the spatial composition of the image: two portraits of naked black women with “Black Power” afros from contemporary pop culture hang on his wall: a reference to his connection with the “black community” as well as a sign that Halloran has his sexuality under control. As his “Shining” begins with a slow zoom onto his face, an electronically distorted heartbeat appears on the soundtrack. Halloran’s paranormal shaking is followed by a cut to Danny, who, frothing at the mouth, telepathically shares Halloran’s inner gaze. A subjective camera now leads into the interior of Room 237. Through the lack of a reverse-shot, the suture is deferred to the bearer of the gaze. Slowly, the moving gaze enters the room and opens the door to the bathroom. The following cut reveals Jack to be the diegetic bearer of the point of view, but the visionary exchange of gazes between Halloran and Danny destabilizes the epistemological sovereignty of seeing, perceiving and knowing: is this Jack’s “real” point of view, or another hallucination? Or is it Halloran and Danny’s vision of Jack’s vision, the point of view of a point of view? Is it some kind of “Meta-Shining”? 43 Jameson, “The Brick and the Ballon,” p. 187.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

289

One thing can be asserted without any ambiguity: the difference between Danny and Halloran’s “Shining” and Jack’s visions is, psychoanalytically speaking, total. If Danny’s and Halloran’s gazes are confronted with the trauma of the “traceless trace,” then Jack’s gaze encounters the phantasma of a plenitude without suture or lack: a beautiful naked woman rises from the bathtub and goes over to Jack, who is salivating with desire. With a hypnotically unreal slowness, she embraces Jack, and the two kiss. A close-up shows the kiss from behind the woman’s back, her face remains hidden. Suddenly, a swish-pan to the bathroom mirror reveals the true form of the woman, whose body is strewn with festering wounds and scars. The beautiful woman has been transformed into an animated, half-decayed, witch-like corpse, who runs to Jack with a mad cackle. In another schizoid manipulation of linear temporality, the montage repeatedly cuts from the apparition of the “witch” to images showing her mechanically rising upwards in the bathtub. A paradoxical splitting up of chronology – birth and death seem to merge in the revulsion inducing corpse. If, previously, Jack’s gaze had phallically penetrated the room in a long forwards movement, there now follows a counter-penetration. A panicked Jack tumbles backwards out of the room and shuts the door to room 237. In The Shining, mirrors reflect the unreflectable. In this sense, the film accomplishes the leap from Lacan’s early theory of the gaze as part of the Imaginary to his later conception of the gaze as the objet petit a of the Real (see Chapter 4.1). The imaginary mirror, as it were, gives way to the real mirror of an anamorphotic switch of forms: “the subject looks into the mirror and sees in it ‘something else,’ not the reflection of everyday reality this side of the mirror.”44 Jack is so spellbound by the ideal outer surface of the beautiful body that he does not see its decaying backside. A front of gold, and a rear of shit. In this reversible figure, the film not only borrows from the baroque iconography of the vanitas, it also brings into play the central allegorical figure of nausea, which Winfried Menninghaus evokes in his study on the theme, namely “the figure of the disgusting old woman. She is the embodiment of everything tabooed: repugnant defects of skin and form, loathsome discharges and even repellent sexual practices—an obscene, decaying corpse in her own lifetime.”45 44 Slavoj Žižek, “Cyberspace, or the Unbearable Closure of Being,” in Janet Bergstrom (ed.), Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 98. 45 Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans. Howard Eiland and Joel Golb (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), p. 7.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

290 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Jack’s instinctive destiny is, we may assert, closely linked to a sexual repulsion towards the female body, which he shapes into the emblem of horror that is the abject witch. After this failed sexual encounter with the shapeshifting woman, his murderous desire will turn towards his own wife, and drive him into a homophilic “regime of the brother,” as will be seen below. Apparently calmed, Jack returns to Wendy in the bedroom and denies seeing anything in room 237. Danny must have hurt himself. The parental conversation is transmitted into internal voices by Danny’s “Shining.” As in Hitchcock’s Marnie, the color red stains every visual element: Danny’s red sweater, the red of another vision of the bleeding elevator, and finally, “REDRUM” written in red, an enigmatic signifier, which Danny sees for the first time in a short flash. When Wendy begs Jack to leave the hotel, he becomes violent once more: she wants to prevent him from achieving something in his life for the first time. Outside of the hotel, his career options would be working as a street sweeper or in a car wash. A pervasive castration anxiety threatens Jack: he is sexually impotent and socially depraved. In the following sequence, he flees from this fear back into the Golden Room, where he encounters his next phantasmatic scenario, which finally reveals the historical core of his delirium.

Back to the Twenties Jack lurches through the corridors, once more in a psychotic rage, until a hit song from the past can be heard emanating from the Golden Room. As Jack enters the ballroom, he encounters a high-society party drenched in luxury. The ghosts of the past celebrate in the present. Lloyd is back at the bar, and Jack’s drinks are still on the house. His credit seems as unlimited as the liquidity of the hotel. The upper-class world of excess wants for nothing. All filmic signs point to Jameson’s mode of nostalgia: the old song, the festively shimmering light, the elegant costumes, women with tousled hair and cigarette holders. The first crowd scene in the film gives a specific historical form to the nostalgic retrospection of the “Roaring Twenties.” Jameson’s political-allegorical reading of The Shining condenses itself around this point in the film. For Jameson, the nostalgic yearning for the 1920s represents a nostalgia for a lost class domination. In inimitable fashion, Jameson totalizes the film from its margins, and thereby produces the “dialectical shock 46 of an immediately evident yet mediated, theoretically 46 See Buchanan, Fredric Jameson, p. 1.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

291

complex recognition, which departs from all other interpretations of a film that has been given countless readings and – we might add – raises them up to a higher level. The decisive passage merits being cited in toto: It is by the twenties that the hero is haunted and possessed. The twenties were the last moment in which a genuine American leisure class led an aggressive and ostentatious public existence, in which an American ruling class projected a class-conscious and unapologetic image of itself and enjoyed its privileges without guilt, openly and armed with its emblems of top-hat and champagne glass, on the social stage in full view of the other classes. The nostalgia of The Shining, the longing for collectivity, takes the peculiar form of an obsession with the last period class consciousness is out in the open: even the motif of the manservant or valet expresses the desire for a vanished social hierarchy, which can no longer be gratified in the spurious multinational atmosphere in which Jack Nicholson is hired for a mere odd job by faceless organization men. This is clearly a “return of the repressed” with a vengeance: a Utopian impulse which scarcely lends itself to the usual complacent and edifying celebration, which finds its expression in the very snobbery and class consciousness we naively supposed it to threaten. The lesson of The Shining, then, its depth analysis and “working out” of the class fantasies of contemporary American society, is peculiarly disturbing for Left and Right alike. Its generic framework – the ghost story – implacably demystifies the nostalgia film as such, the pastiche, and reveals the latter’s concrete social content: the glossy simulacrum of this or that past is here unmasked as possession, as the ideological project to return to the hard certainties of a more visible and rigid class structure. 47

This is Jameson at his best. All his central theoretical concepts are here interconnected: class consciousness, nostalgia, pastiche, ideology, utopia. Jameson decodes The Shining as a meta-nostalgia film, which lays bare the reactionary core of postmodern retro-chic. 48 An ideological phantasma is 47 Jameson, “Historicism in The Shining,” p. 130. 48 See also Jameson, “The Existence of Italy,” in Signatures of the Visible, p. 309: “In fact, the privileged historical content of such films seems very largely to be constituted by the 1920s and the 1930s, as decades which entertain a kind of semiotic binary opposition in our stereotypes of American history: the first offering a wealth of images of the modish, of high styles and fashions, nightclubs, dance music, roadsters, and art deco; while the second conventionally connotes the seamy side of the real, in form of the Great Depression and of gangsters and their saga and characteristic raw material. […] The upper-class component of the system is, however, far

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

292 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

concealed beneath the supposed randomness of this epochal recycling, which offers the atomized late-capitalist subject an imaginary model of socialization. Nonetheless, the utopian desire for a fulfilled collectivity does not lead to a political class consciousness “from below” (corresponding to the real economic relegation of the Torrance family), but precisely to an inverted form of class consciousness “from above.” Marx’s talk of ideology as a “camera obscura” is validated in the psychotic over-identification of the proletarianized Jack with a past subject of domination, which could not possibly be more antinomic: when Jack, with his tattered jacket, stumbles through the chic jetsetters of the Golden Room, background and foreground are, in Jameson’s terminology, transposed. Jack appears as a foreign body in his own phantasmatic scenario. The Shining gives a fatalistic twist to the psychoanalytic return of the repressed: the Marxist nightmare of the class society of the past does not return as a counter-history of the oppressed (this would still be the classical Freudian model in Haneke’s Caché), but as the history of the triumphant oppressors. Hence, even with its demystification of nostalgia, it is difficult for Jameson to identify The Shining as a directly political film. Class consciousness is not necessarily the embryo of collective emancipation: “This is, indeed, the embarrassment The Shining has in store for viewers on the Left, who are accustomed to celebrate class consciousness as though its reemergence was everywhere politically positive and did not include the forms of nostalgia for hierarchy and domination allegorized in Jack Nicholson’s ‘possession’ by the still Veblenesque social system in the 1920s.”49 In The Shining, utopia and ideology appear to have merged to the point of being indistinguishable from each other. The utopian desire for the collective can only be articulated in an ideology based on class history. Correct consciousness is none other than false consciousness. A way out from this sinister entanglement is nonetheless indicted in the film with the minoritarian solidarity between Danny and Halloran, but the return of domination will, at the end of the film, spread out beyond the obsessive cathexis of the Twenties to a mythical, primal, natural history, which also transcends the genesis of capitalism. Whence the following paradox: The Shining historicizes the ahistorical historicism of the nostalgia film, only to more rigidly fixed in time and associated with the interwar years. It therefore stages a genuine nostalgia and longing for class content and class privileges and elegance; where the thirties material largely feed the ‘new historicism’ of the various contemporary doxa to believe absent from multinational capitalism.” 49 Jameson, “Historicism in The Shining,” p. 132.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

293

then de-historicize this historicity. In other words: even after the removal of the uppermost ideological level, historical mediation conceals an even deeper core, which suspends historical time itself. The Shining thus accomplishes a spiral movement, in which Jameson’s dictum: “Always historicize!”50 paradoxically leads to the Outside of history. In line with Jameson, Žižek has described the ideological function of nostalgia as follows: The most concise definition of historicism is as follows: historicity minus the ahistorical core of the Real. And the function of the nostalgic image consists in filling out the empty place of this exclusion, the blind spot of historicism. In other words, what the nostalgic image veils is not historical mediation, but, by contrast, the ahistorical traumatic core, which returns as the same in all epochs.51

The Regime of the Brother In this sense, the return of history in The Shining takes on an ever more ahistorical form. This is also the truth of the key scene in the men’s room between Jack and his similar-dissimilar doppelgänger Delbert Grady. After the waiter Grady accidently spills a drink on Jack, the two enter the unrealistically red-daubed bathroom. From the “Golden Room” to the “Men’s Room” – a new variant on the proximity of gold and shit is given to us. When he introduces himself as Delbert Grady, Jack identifies him as his murderous predecessor Charles Grady, but Grady insists that he was never the “caretaker.” The different historical layers of time are now hard to untangle from each other. In a futuristic room, the Jack of the diegetic present encounters his immediate predecessor from the 1970s, in the form of a British waiter from the 1920s: “The layerings are now historical, ghosts of various pasts, presents, and futures, which may in fact be alternate worlds but whose tensions and incompatibilities are all mediated through some larger absent cause, which is History itself.”52 This temporal confusion has its formal pendant in a disarticulation of filmic syntax: Kubrick breaks the golden 180-degree rule of continuity-editing, and switches the camera angle to the opposite side of the room. The psychotic tear in the suture is as difficult to glue back together as the psychotic tear in identity, since, Grady 50 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. ix. 51 Žižek, Grimassen des Realen, p. 84. 52 Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 174.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

294 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

says, it is none other than Jack himself who is the “caretaker” of the Overlook: “You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know, Sir. I’ve always been here.” In Grady, Jack finds his extimate doppelgänger, a Hegelian identity of identity and non-identity, which is accentuated through the merciless rigor of the succeeding shot/reverse-shot images. Kubrick’s montage is here truly Bressonian (see Chapter 2.1): both an absolute visual line of separation and the absence of any acoustic overlaps divide the speaking bodies from each other. A vivisection of shot and reverse-shot: “[Kubrick] maintains this structure as central, but in a highly personal way that disturbs its functioning. Instead of conserving its usual ambiguity, its intentionally insidious quality, he overplays or overexposes it.”53 A suture without suture: “What lies, in Kubrick’s work, between two shots or two sequences, is not a gap but a rupture.”54 Grady teaches Jack a lesson in matters of patriarchal family-raising: using his “Shining,” Danny has called for the help of a “nigger cook,” who absolutely must be stopped. He himself knows to treasure the effects of a physical disciplining of his wife and his two daughters: “I corrected them. I corrected her,” as Grady ends his lesson, and the pleasure he takes in rolling his R’s, with his cultivated British accent, cannot be ignored. The jouissance of the signifiers abolishes the structural lack of the symbolic in the pure auto-affection of the sound material. Grady (like Lloyd) is a phantasmatic incarnation of such an uncastrated jouissance which knows no more lack. As Lacan and Žižek would say: Grady is the phallus that Jack does not have. In this jouissance of the unlacking doppelgängers, temporality itself is done away with: The most elementary moment of the doppelgänger is that it embodies the phantomlike thing in me; that is, the dissymmetrical relationship between me and my doppelgänger is, in the end, identical with the dissymmetry between the (normal) object and the (sublime) thing. In my doppelgänger, I do not simply encounter myself (in my mirror image), but in the first place 53 Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, p. 89. 54 Seeßlen, Stanley Kubrick und seine Filme, p. 65. On the negative causality of Kubrick’s montage, Seeßlen elsewhere writes: “But the additive of montage and the classical unity of space and time in the individual (long) sequences should not deceive us that Kubrick quite radically breaks with another constant of f ilm narrative, namely the principle of cause and effect. In Kubrick, neither does shot two follow from shot one, nor does shot three follow from shot one plus shot two. The transitions are thus so grandiose and painful, because they are linked with each other through a whole series of aesthetic and thematic elements, but not the logic of cause and effect.”

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

295

that “which in me is more than I myself”: the doppelgänger is certainly “I myself,” but – to speak with Spinoza – considered in another mode, the mode of the other, sublime, ethereal body, a substance of enjoyment that is pure and exempt from the cycle of becoming and decaying. Precisely such a thing, which “is in me more than I myself,” is represented by the “Father,” before he is “abolished” in his name.55

The anal father, in the form of Grady, is Jack’s “real” doppelgänger, who implores him to eternalize his pleasure: his “always and always” is an echo of “forever and ever and ever.” This expansion of a timeless time is decisive for the meaning of the scene. Grady not only appears as the allegorical representative of the upper class of the twenties; rather, his unmistakable Britishness makes him the personification of a European aristocracy, which the US has never had in this form. The overdetermined figure of Grady can be deciphered as a revenant of those zombie-like aristocrats in Barry Lyndon, who dedicate themselves to excess in a beautiful, crystalline reconstruction of the early 18th century. At this point, Jameson’s analysis should be extended to a further allegorical level: the absent cause of Jack’s psychosis reaches back from the national history of the US to European absolutism and the early days of capitalism. In this sense, the Roaring Twenties, as a backwards-turned phantasma of the postmodern subject, is itself only a “screen memory”56 of an even earlier world-historical epoch. If the world-historical dimension of delirium postulated by Deleuze and Guattari has ever been filmically verified, then it is in the political psychopathology that Kubrick stages in The Shining. The disintegration of the symbolic efficacy of the “Name of the Father” in postmodernity seems to call forth an even more monstrous father as an obscene superego figure who closes the uncloseable gap between the symbolic order and jouissance. As Thomas Elsaesser has emphasized: It is the case that the symbolic order, represented by classical bourgeois individualism and its patriarchal identity formation, is no longer in a position to effectively regulate the integration of the man in society. What makes Kubrick’s contribution within this seemingly distant horizon of cultural criticism and analysis so special is the precision with which he 55 Žižek, Die Grimassen des Realen, pp. 162-163. On the sublime body as anal object, see also Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). 56 See Sigmund Freud, “Screen Memories,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud vol. III, pp. 301-322.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

296 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

localizes the fault-lines and points of rupture, and denotes the ambivalences and unresolvable aporias of this displacement of gender roles and symbolic functions, particularly the socio-political background to the formation of the purely male group, which embodies the prohibition function of the father, without attending to the castration law.57

The “abolition” of symbolic castration is for Žižek a central hallmark of psychosis: “when symbolic efficiency is suspended, the Imaginary falls back into the Real.”58 Jack’s madness is grounded in this short-circuit of the Imaginary and the Real in the sublime body of the doppelgänger. To repeat it once more: in The Shining, the mirror directly reflects the unreflectable real. In the phantasma of the uncastrated phallic jouissance, the father-function (the Other) tends to merge with the brother-function (the Self). In other words: the paternal logic of the phallus becomes tendentially indistinguishable from the fraternal logic of the anus.59 The Œdipal sexual difference gives way to a dominance of the similar, which Juliet Flower MacCannell has dubbed the “regime of the brother.” In the alliance between Jack and Grady, a post-Œdipal “creation of autarkic male oligarchies”60 is delineated, in which communitization proceeds from a multiplication of the same, or even a kind of cloning. The sociality of the male alliance is thus a reactionary homo-sociality, which is no less based on the triangulation of class hatred, racism and sexism than the old patriarchal regime of the father, as becomes exceedingly clear in Grady’s speech. The anal-sadistic identity of the brothers is grounded on the annulment of difference: “Like the absence of the parental relation, however, the omnipresence of the imaginary couple is a symptom of group narcissism – the failure of a real relation to the other, the actual loss of sexual difference. And it, not the Oedipal patriarchy we so often imagine we oppose, is the dominant form of contemporary social relations.”61 In this context, it is surely no coincidence that in The Shining this delirium of an unlacking pleasure is (geo-)politically projected back on 57 Thomas Elsaesser, “Evolutionärer Bild-Ingenieur: Stanley Kubricks Autorschaft,” Kinematograph 19 (2004), p. 143. 58 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), p. 374. 59 On the libidinous economy of “anal capitalism,” see Farocki/Silverman, Speaking about Godard, pp. 83-140. 60 Kay Kirchmann, Stanley Kubrick: Das Schweigen der Bilder (Bochum: Mouton de Gruyter, 2011), p. 90. 61 Juliet Flower MacCannell, The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 15.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

297

to the feudal era of the past, in which the dominant classes hermetically sealed themselves off in the luxury of their courtly world. Jack’s psychotic “American Dream” is based on the sterile reproduction of a petrified order of aristocratic domination in the age of late-capitalism: “A nostalgia grows for a time ‘before revolution,’ for the positive desiring-power of the noble classes, a nostalgia that accuses the bourgeoisie, but offers no alternative model except a reversion to a mythified (and completely distorted) image of the past when ‘desire’ was not alienated.”62 The regime of the brother strives for the annihilation of its Outside: the woman, the child and the black man have no place in the terror of the homophilic male alliance. Jack transforms into an “obscene jouisseur (the German word is Luder) in whom impotence and excessive rage coincide, a ‘humilitated father’ caught in imaginary rivalry with his son.”63 After Jack and his doppelgänger have sealed their murderous alliance, there follows a long, slowed-down sequence, which arouses hope for a lastminute rescue. Halloran arrives by plane and car on his way to the Overlook, after all his attempts at contacting the police have failed. The motif of the black community is further developed in a telephone conversation between Halloran and his friend Larry, who has organized a snow-cat for the rest of his journey. Although this is an apparently peripheral transition scene, it is, alongside the telepathy between Halloran and Danny, the only moment of communication between two people based on solidarity and not detached indifference. A classical parallel montage alternates between Halloran’s arduous path through the snow and the looming calamity in the hotel: Jack destroys the radio station, while Wendy’s fear and hysteria grows greater and greater, and Danny is completely transformed into a mouthpiece for Tony, who incessantly repeats the mysterious signifier “Redrum.”

Post-Structuralist Writing Drive Armed with a baseball bat, Wendy creeps into the Colorado Lounge, but Jack has left his desk. Wendy bends over the typewriter, and in an impossible low-angle shot the camera assumes the perspective of the typewriter itself. An object-gaze meets the shocked gaze-subject. The reverse-shot reveals the reason for her terror through a transsubjective transcendence of the apparently direct point of view (Wendy’s hair can be seen on the right edge 62 Ibid., p. 21. 63 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 313.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

298 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

of the frame): Jack has only written a single sentence, which proliferates in the most diverse typographic variations and arrangements: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” The monotony of the infinite repetition appears in the garb of productive multiplicity. Jameson reads the enforced repetition of the sentence as a pastiche of the poststructuralist valorization of textuality after the death of the author: On the other hand, whether the Jack Nicholson character can write or not, he certainly does write, as the most electrifying moment of the film testifies; he unquestionably produces “du texte,” as the post-structuralists put it […]. The text in question is however very explicitly a text about work: it is a kind of zero point around which the film organizes itself, a kind of ultimate and empty auto-referential statement about the impossibility of cultural and literary production.64

The autopoiesis of the transcription system seems to have dissolved all meaning in the psychotic autism of the signifier, whose endless repetition Lacan dubbed the refrain: “At the opposite pole there is the form that meaning takes when it no longer refers to anything at all. This is the formula that is repeated, reiterated, drummed in with a stereotyped insistence. It’s what we might call, in contrast to the word, the refrain.”65 All the same, for Jameson even the circular self-referentiality of the letter encodes the hors-texte of an allegorical referentialization. The not-being-able-to-write of the monadic would-be writer is directly materialized in his writing. The writer’s block of the artist can no longer be reflexively turned into the object of the text: Jack’s typewritten pages are not a modernist novel about the (im-)possible condition of literary subjectivity, not only because the totality of late-capitalism can no longer be related, but also because the subject can no longer narratively articulate its own experience. If the ego can no longer be narrated, then nor can the world. Hence Jack’s écriture automatique can be decoded as a manifest form of the schizophrenia of postmodernity diagnosed by Jameson, in which the temporality of the novel is negated by a meaningless succession of present moments. In line with Jameson’s triad of realism, modernism and postmodernism, the sentence announces, in a dual allegorization, both the end of the classical realist novel and the end of its modernist counterpart. If realism still believes in the possibility of narratability, and modernism, at the very least, believes in 64 Jameson, “Historicism in The Shining,” p. 128. 65 Lacan, The Psychoses, p. 33.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

299

a kind of meta-narratability, all that remains in postmodernism is the idiotic jouissance of fragmented signifiers: “Wherever sense ends, enjoyment begins: a pleasure in the margins that a discourse network of pure signifiers leaves to its victims.”66 After the eradication of the centered bourgeois subject, the practice of écriture automatique, which for the surrealists was still a poetic weapon of anti-bourgeois subversion, testifies only to the regression of the unconscious. In this context, we must also assert that the infantilization denoted in the phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” is directly acted out by Jack: the signifiers are virtually inscribed into his body, “that aspect of signification that is purely ‘dictatorial’ in that it positions its bearer as a kind of bird-brained stenographer taking dictation.”67 Towards the end of the film, animalistic, pre-symbolic grunts will even replace his ability to speak. In descending from a man to a child, and then an animal, Jack seems to be biologically climbing down the evolutionary ladder. The allegorical proliferation of rhymes is, however, by no means finished: beyond the impossibility of artistic production, the catchphrase directly articulates the universal crisis of labor in late capitalism. What is labor, what is leisure? When should one work and when should one play? Does labor ever stop, or is it endless? Does writing belong to the sphere of labor or leisure? Does Jack work, or is he unemployed? Is he an unemployed ex-teacher, a writer (with or without a book contract), or simply a caretaker? Why does Jack move to a remote mountain lodge to work? If Jack is constantly at work, as he frequently insists, why does he feel guilty about not having fulfilled his duty?68 Why does he complain that he has no time to play, when we have just seen him playing with a tennis ball? And who, exactly, is his lament addressed to? With Žižek, we can assert that the lament is addressed to the “Big Other” of the Symbolic Order, but that it no longer receives any answer. The postmodern subject, liberated from all traditional prescriptions and summoned to radically invent itself, fails to be released from its symbolic inscription into society, which is not to be mistaken with freedom: “The fact that ‘the big Other no longer exists’ implies, rather, that the symbolic fiction which confers a performative status on one level of identity, determining which of 66 Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 303. 67 Eric Santner, My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 35. 68 The German version of the film, incidentally, further emphasizes the pressure of the superego, by translating the catchphrase as “Don’t put off to tomorrow what you can do today” (“Was du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen”).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

300 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

my acts will display ‘symbolic efficiency,’ is no longer fully operative.”69 The disappearance of labor as a performative buttress of socio-symbolic identity begets the paranoid simulacrum of labor. Even if, objectively, Jack does not work at all, subjectively, he is working non-stop, and can never finish. The superego not only requires Jack to work, he must also enjoy this work. This, of course, has the consequence that he can neither work nor enjoy himself, because the difference between the two has been short-circuited. If, in contrast to alienated wage-labor, the promise of artistic and intellectual production consists in the fusion of work and play, then Jack himself, in a perverse inversion of this ideal, is at his most alienated, when he thinks of himself as a self-reliant artist. The old protestant work ethic is dissolved by the superego’s pleasure-regime: “the direct injunction ‘Enjoy!’ is a much more effective way to hinder the subject’s access to enjoyment than the explicit Prohibition which sustains the space for its transgression.”70 Hence, Jack can only derive enjoyment from a psychotic solipsism “beyond the pleasure principle”: in the idiotic iteration of the signifier and in the imaginarily real projection of the uncastrated father/brother-enjoyment. As Elsaesser writes: “Here the brother embodies the prohibition function of the father, without accepting the law of castration.”71 The delusional omnipotence of enjoyment is, however, formally unmasked in the next sequence. How little a cognitive-narratological approach is appropriate for the (delirious) aesthetic system of The Shining can be seen in the following scene description by the Spanish author Luis M. Garcia Mainar: When Wendy finds Jack’s notes and notices he keeps writing the same sentence for pages and pages, she stands dumbfounded by her husband’s typewriter. The text suddenly changes from a close view of her to a long shot that includes part of a wall on one side; the camera pans to perfectly frame Wendy, and we realize that this shot might be the character’s point of view. Our hypothesis is quickly confirmed as Jack appears in the frame and the shot is interpreted as part of his view.72

Because, in the rationalist framework of cognitivist film theory, there is no place for the construction of an impossible subjectivity, even the mere 69 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 330. 70 Ibid., p. 367. 71 Thomas Elsaesser, “Das Regime der Brüder: Back to the Future,” in Hollywood heute: Geschichte, Gender und Nation im postklassischen Kino (Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2009), p. 166. 72 Luis M. Garcia Mainar, Narrative and Stylistic Patterns in the Films of Stanley Kubrick (London: Camden House, 1999), p. 36

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

301

description of the scene, here, is already false. What takes place in this scene is not the confirmation of our hypothesis through a suturing reverse-shot of Jack, but the integration of the bearer of the gaze in his own field of vision. In other words, it is the transsubjective point of view, which robs first Wendy and then Jack of their own gaze. Jack’s own ostensible diegetic subject is stripped of his voyeurist gaze on the unwitting Wendy, and transferred to an invisible entity behind the back of the subject. In a single shot, subjectivity changes into objectivity, or, more precisely: subjectivity is objectivized and objectivity is subjectivized. This scopophilic drive is uncoupled from the voyeur and meets it from an uncanny outside position: “The gaze is not located just at the level of the eyes. The eyes may very well not appear, they may be masked. The gaze is not necessarily the face of our fellow being, it could just as easily be the window behind which we assume he is lying in wait for us. It is an x, the object when faced with which the subject becomes object.”73 Here, Jack, who, like a masked particle from the hors-champ slices through the side of the image with the black shadow of his silhouette, is subjected unawares to the “ghostly point of view”74 of an opaque off-screen zone: the enjoyment of the eyes is “castrated” by the gaze. At this point, it is necessary to contradict another hypothesis popular among Kubrick interpreters, which argues that the obsessive symmetrical and geometrical quality of visual space in Kubrick leads to a tendential elimination of off-screen space.75 Even if it is true that in Kubrick’s films the mobile frame of the cache has more of an isolating than an opening function, this in no way implies the neutralization of the hors-champ. It is precisely the release of the gaze as an acousmatic force exceeding the off-screen as a purely spatial category that is brought about by the rigorous enclosure of the visual field. The repressed off-screen of the visual space returns as a gaze. Deleuze has argued that, while the closure of the ensemble minimizes the spatial hors-champ, it makes the temporal dimension of the hors-champ all the more strongly felt: The thicker the thread which links the seen set to other unseen sets the better the out-of-field fulfils its first function, which is the adding of space to space. But, when the thread is very fine, it is not content to 73 Lacan, Freud’s Technical Writings, p. 278. 74 See Mario Falsetto, Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis (Westport: Praeger, 1994), p. 135. 75 This is the position of Kirchmann, Das Schweigen der Bilder, pp. 35ff, and Seeßlen, Stanley Kubrick und seine Filme, pp. 64ff.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

302 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

reinforce the closure of the frame or to eliminate the relation with the outside. It certainly does not bring about a complete isolation of the relatively closed system, which would be impossible. But, the finer it is – the further duration descends into the system like a spider – the more effectively the out-of-field fulfils its other function which is that of introducing the transspatial and the spiritual into the system which is never perfectly closed.76

The closed set is the germ of the time-image. In this sense, modifying Deleuze’s term, we can speak of the existence of a “time-gaze” in the many transsubjective point-of-view modulations in The Shining, a doubly present absence, in which time is deposited in the traceless trace of the gaze. This is a time-gaze, however, which expresses less the spiritual dimension of Deleuze’s out-of-field as an endless becoming, and more the inhuman and superhuman negativity of the eternalized time of natural history. Such time becomes visible in the impenetrable white of the snow, signifying the onset of an apocalyptic ice age. Jack is both the subject and object of this deterministic timeline, he haunts it and is haunted by it in turn.

The Voice of the Superego After Wendy discovers his literary determinism, Jack, the revenant of the self, finally tries to kill her. In their duel on the stairwell, Jack invokes, as he had already done, the removal of Danny (“Let’s discuss Danny”), whose ability to “shine” allows him to hear both the death-threats of his father and his absurd appeals to a moral and ethical duty towards the management of the Overlook, to whom he claims to be contractually obliged: “Do you have the slightest idea what a moral and ethical principle is? Do you?” Once again, Jack binds his symbolic mandate to a “Big Other” which no longer exists. The empty form of this obsolete (bourgeois) contractualism serves as the last guarantee of Jack’s identity. At the last moment, Wendy succeeds in striking Jack with her baseball bat, and she locks him in the kitchen’s cool room. It is here that Nicholson’s performance truly turns into hyperbolic grotesquerie. When he returns to consciousness, Jack regresses to a whimpering infant, and tries to solicit Wendy’s empathy. The camera takes on another impossible perspective: a frontal low-angle shot from the floor looking upwards at Jack, which, as a counterpoint to the all-mighty 76 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 34.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

303

gaze of the creator on his labyrinth transforms the divinely elevated gaze into a low, animalistic look. We now have, instead of an “Overlook,” an “Underlook” at a monstrous creature. Title-card: “4pm.” Jack has fallen asleep in the cool room. Delbert Grady’s voice intones from off-screen. Nothing indicates that Jack is hallucinating. Grady’s voice is objectively localized on the other side of the door. Jack does not awaken the voice, the voice awakens him. Grady reproaches Jack for not properly carrying the “business” they had spoken of to its conclusion, and accuses him of not having his whole heart in the matter. As a representative of the aristocratic community of the undead, he speaks with the royal we. Jack begs him for one last chance to settle the matter. We then hear the lock to the door being opened – the ghosts cross the threshold between fantasy and reality. In Grady’s command, we can hear the emanation of an acousmatic superego-voice in its purest form: the subject’s own internal voice has been externalized in order to take possession of the subject as an extimate object. The voice, an alien body in Jack’s own body, orders him to kill, and to enjoy it. At this point, Jack is re-programmed into a zombie. The superego-voice is the undead remains of the father. On this matter, Mladen Dolar writes: The voice appears as the part of the father which is not quite dead; it evokes the figure of enjoyment, and thus adumbrates the slide to destruction of the law based on his name. […] If the superego functions as the shadow and the supplement of the law, if it operates in and through this division, this yields some variant of the “neurotic” mechanism. But if the voice supplants the Other and immediately “makes the law,” then it entails the dramatic consequences we can witness in psychosis. Lacan scrutinized psychosis under the heading of “the foreclosure of the name of the father” – and we could say that the foreclosed “name of the father” returns in the Real precisely as the voice.77

As Dolar would have it, Jack’s superego-voice must be fundamentally distinguished from the moralistic voice of Danny’s imaginary friend Tony, who comes close to the negative, “apotreptic” function of the Socratic voice: “It is not a prescriptive voice, not a voice telling Socrates what to do; he has to decide that for himself. It merely dissuades him from certain actions, preventing him from doing wrong, but not advising him how to do good.”78 77 Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, pp. 101-102. 78 Ibid., p. 84.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

304 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

The battle between father and son is also a struggle between these two voices. For Danny, too, seems to be in thrall to the repetition-compulsion of Tony’s voice: in a trance-like state, murmuring “Redrum,” he grabs the kitchen knife next to the sleeping Wendy. For a moment, we believe that Jack’s murderous jouissance has also spread to Danny, that he wishes to kill his own mother. Instead, he takes her lipstick and writes, in fulfillment of his earlier vision, the enigmatic signifiers on the bedroom door. Woken by Danny’s continued murmurings, a terrif ied Wendy looks into the mirror and reads “REDRUM” in reverse: “MURDER.” We can say that Danny’s use of the mirror fundamentally differs from Jack’s paranoiac mirrordelusion. The apparently meaningless ritournelle signif ier nonetheless still refers to a signified, and the signified to a referent, which materalizes itself in none other than Danny’s father Jack. The “real mirror” of the father is counterposed to the “symbolic mirror” of mother and son: the psychotic amalgamation of imaginary and real is warded off through the re-appropriation of the Symbolic. Danny’s symbolic act is the condition for the possibility of a new alliance between mother and son, which is capable of resisting the murderous return of the grotesque ur- and super-father. The decoding of the signif ier is immediately followed by its threatened realization. With a cry of “Wendy, I’m home!” a grinning Jack breaks down the bedroom door with an axe. The nuclear family, the domestic nest, is transformed, in the end, into a breeding ground for the uncanny. The anal father forges a path into the bathroom, through whose narrow window frame only Danny is small enough to escape. Jack’s regression is now total: he is at once a cannibalistic settler and an evil wolf, but also the hapless coyote from Danny’s Road Runner comics. A phylogenetic devolution of man seems to have taken place: Jack is the postmodern pastiche of the mythic ur-father described by Freud in Totem and Taboo, a hybrid of animal, child and cannibal, in a terrifying, ridiculous exaggeration that is characteristic for a popular comic f igure. Jack appears to be of the same ilk as those primates who, in the prologue of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), discover bones as a tool of culture, but also, at the same time, as a violent weapon. What the bone is to the triumphant humanoid apes, the axe is to the ape-like human Jack. In the only really bloody, shocking moment of the f ilm, he uses it to kill Halloran, who had just made it to the hotel. In an act of murderous, racist jouissance, Jack allegorically repeats the extermination of the indigenous American population. The hope for a minoritarian re-writing of power relations remains unfulfilled.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

305

Natural History Nature and culture, myth and history, barbarism and enlightenment are, as always in Kubrick’s films, so intertwined in The Shining as to become indistinguishable from each other. Human evolution is at one and the same time both progress and regression. Critics on the left never tire of reproaching Kubrick for the anti-humanistic determinism, fatalism and pessimism of his evolutionary dialectic.79 Even if it is perhaps the opposite that should be asked – that is, whether humanism, optimism and voluntarism are any less politically and aesthetically suspect – it is at least true that the possibility of revolution does not exist in Kubrick’s naturalistic historical perspective. As we hope has already been made clear, The Shining does not conceive of capitalism in its historical genesis, but as the perpetuation of an ahistoric repetition-compulsion. Thus, the return of the repressed is not realized as an emancipatory counter-history of the oppressed, but as a natural history of domination. But precisely this understanding of (late) capitalism from the standpoint of natural history remains faithful to a classical Marxist hope – namely, that actual history will begin after the end of the pre-history of class societies. As Jameson writes: But insofar as Marx evoked his version of the end of history at all, it was with two qualifications: first he spoke not of the end of history, but the end of prehistory; that is to say, of the arrival of a period in which the human collectivity is in control of its own destiny, in which history is a form of collective praxis, and no longer subject to the non-human determinisms either of nature and scarcity, or of the market and money.80

The germ of this other historicity is allegorically embodied in Danny. For him, the future remains open, precisely because he has faced up to past traumas. While Jack gives himself over blindly to the meaningless Real, Danny’s knack for cognitive mapping enables him to carry out both the symbolic cartography of the spatial totality and the reconfiguration of the signifying chain. In other words: as the trace-reader of the traceless trace, Danny is precisely not a speechless infans, but a hermeneutic epistemologist of the Overlook in the Jamesonian mold. Danny (“Doc”) is a figure of knowledge anticipating a new social form. Jack, as the automatic agent of the totality, 79 See, for instance, Peter W. Jansen and Wolfgang Schütte (ed.), Stanley Kubrick (Munich: Hanser, 1984). 80 Fredric Jameson, “‘End of Art’ or End of History’?,” in The Cultural Turn, p. 88.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

306 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

must kill his son, in order to ensure the continued class domination of the undead oligarchy. In an inversion of the Œdipus myth, a hobbling Jack seeks to take the life of his son. The final duel between father and son takes place in the hedge maze: the unchained Steadicam frenzy in the labyrinth is intercut with Wendy wandering around the hotel in search of Danny. Here, the ghosts of the Overlook are also objectivized for Wendy, in three successive visions: a male pair engaging in oral sex, one of whom is wearing an absurd bear costume, a man with his skull split open and a cocktail glass in his hand, who cheerfully declaims in a British accent, “Great party, isn’t it?”; and finally, a collection of skeletons covered in cobwebs, but still wearing their tuxedos and ballgowns, as if they had been fixed in their poses during a party. Here, Wendy finally finds the obscene face of the “Golden Twenties” which had shed itself of sexual difference: homophilic sodomy, decadent hedonism, mummified afterlife. In contrast to Jack, however, Wendy sees, in her successive visions, not living bodies, but increasingly “dead” dead people. The path from the homosexual couple to the bleeding wound, and finally to the skeletons, can also be understand as a disintegration of the phantasmatic support on which the eternal jouissance of the undead had nourished itself: a “deanimation of the undead.”81 The dead stop dancing. The death-drive of the father impels the son through the paths of the labyrinth. Jack follows the footprints that Danny leaves behind in the snow. When Danny recognizes this, he resorts to an act of cunning: he slowly retraces his steps and then leaps sideways into a bush. Losing the trace of his son’s footprints is Jack’s downfall: he becomes lost in the depths of the labyrinth, while Danny f inds his way out through the traces he had left behind. He runs into Wendy’s arms, and the two use Halloran’s snowcat to escape from the Overlook. The son’s cognitive mapping has won out over the animalistic autism of the father, who only follows the blind thunderbolt of linearity and, for this very reason, ends up running around in circles. He himself is transformed from the imagined sovereign reigning over his creation to the monadic victim of an impenetrable spatial totality. In contrast to his father, the son is capable of circumventing the trace. While Jack is delivered over to the cyclical return of the same, Danny counterposes to this monolithic one-dimensionality a multidirectional mobility that sketches out cartographies and surveys lines of flight. The 81 On the ethical-political implication of a “deanimation of the undead,” see Eric Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

307

spatio-temporal vectors are again disrobed from their mythical fatality and opened up to new spheres of thinking and acting. If there is a utopian figuration in the evolutionary history of deterioration, which The Shining reflects in the motif of the labyrinth, then it is crystallized in Danny. The son allegorizes the possibility of another history, which would only begin after the end of the natural history of the ur-father: “Danny represents the victory of the seen over the written, the fertility of the child over the sterility of the father.”82 Jack roars out the name of his son, until he lapses into a werewolf-like howl and collapses in the snow; he has been completely changed into a man-eating monster.83 The last shot before his death from hypothermia shows him slumped down in the hedge. In the perspectival vanishing point of the image, a spotlight illuminates the scene in the background, but for Jack it is too late for any enlightenment, any “Shining.” Now a mere shadow of himself, he is almost swallowed up by the blackness of the image. There is, however, one last grotesque follow-up: with a sudden jump-cut, we see the frozen body of Jack by the light of day, erect and with eyes turned upwards. Garrett Stewart has written about the undead simulacrum-like nature of the body, recalling Blow-Up: As suggested by this unnatural wrench of his glazed eyes […], his inert body seems struggling to look inward and behind itself to some lost – or recovered – past. And just as to assure us that the uncanny prolongation of this frozen pose is not a freeze-frame trucage, a drop or two of water released by the sun’s light […] drips down his cheek like the tear it is all too late to shed. Such is the cheek, we can only assume, of a perfect mannequin replica of the actor who, living, could never perform such contorted immobility.84

In this penultimate shot of the film, Jack has reached the goal of his death wish. He has finally become the uncastrated, big, erect phallus. A phallus which will only ever repeatedly beget itself. In the last shot of the film, Jack is thus reborn in the past; the undead is resurrected as an undead. The final, 82 Michel Ciment, Kubrick (Munich: Bahia, 1982), p. 146. 83 “The meaning of the labyrinth for the entire film can only been unlocked, if we take into consideration the mythological origin of the motif. In this context, Wendy can be compared with Ariadne, Danny with Theseus and Jack with the Minotaur – a reading which is supported by the fact that Jack’s surname Torrance is derived from the Spanish “Torres” (bull).” Kirchmann, Das Schweigen der Bilder, p. 107. 84 Stewart, Between Film and Screen, p. 181.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

308 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

depopulated camera movement towards the photo of Jack in the year 1921 remains one of the most enigmatic moments in film history. From the deep-frozen Jack, there is a direct cut in the forward tracking shot from the hotel lobby to the Golden Room. With perfectly centralized perspectival symmetry, a dual inner framing through two balconies and two curtains focuses our gaze on a three-tiered arrangement of seven photographs in each row. In an uninterrupted, gliding forwards movement, the photograph in the middle is finally isolated, until the filmic frame penetrates into the frames of the photos, and reframes the interior of the image. In the foreground we can see, surrounded by an elegant high-society party, a merrily grinning Jack dressed in a tuxedo. There follow two dissolves that successively enlarge Jack’s face until it is shown in close-up. In a final movement, the camera drops down along Jack’s body to the photograph’s pointed caption: “Overlook Hotel July 4th Ball, 1921.” As if it had emerged from within the photograph, Ray Noble’s “Midnight, the Stars and You” appears on the soundtrack, the same nostalgic song which had accompanied Jack’s first vision of the 1920s upper-class. The temporal paradox resists all rational explanation: Jack has always-already been there. He was not only a doppelgänger of Grady, but his own revenant. In an immobilized time-loop, the return of the past coalesces with the return to the past. The subject and the object of this haunting have become indistinguishable from one another. The traumatic repetition of domination and oppression is eternalized beyond all historicity. Jameson, for his part, reads the end of The Shining as the dark reverse side of the evolutionary mutation of the star child at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The utopia of a posthuman rebirth of man in the earlier film is dystopically transformed, in The Shining, into the enforced repetition of a never-ending past: The ending of The Shining […] rewrites the embryonic face of the Star Child about to be born into the immobile open-eyed face of Nicholson frosted in sub-zero weather, for which, at length, a period photograph of his upper-class avatar in the bygone surroundings of a leisure class era is substituted. The anticipatory foreshadowing of an unimaginable future is now openly replaced by the dismal emprisonment in monuments of high culture [the regency room, the maze itself, classical music] which have become the jail cells of repetition and the space of thralldom to the past. It remains to be seen whether The Shining has succeeded in exorcising that past for Kubrick, or for any of the rest of us.85 85 Jameson, “Historicism in The Shining,” p. 134.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE POLITICAL UNCANNY, OR THE RETURN OF DOMINATION: THE SHINING

309

So Jameson closes his essay. Whether Danny will succeed in exorcizing the past is left to the imagination of the spectator. It is doubtless true that the film, in its final shot, leads its aesthetic of the political uncanny to the point of absolute negativity. Such negativity knows no alternatives, only analogies. The absorption of present and future into the past corresponds to the absorption of the hotel into the violence of a sterile rather than fertile nature. With this transformation of history into nature, subjectivity is finally liquidated under the spell of a blind objectivity, which has contaminated all levels of enunciation. What has already been announced in the tears of the suture arises here, to a certain extent, in its pure form: the total decoupling of gaze and body, gaze and subject. While the forward movement of the camera has mostly been associated with a direct optical point of view or the movement of a character, now all anthropomorphic and diegetic causality is relinquished. It is no coincidence that The Shining is here reminiscent of two of its predecessors in film history, both of which exhibit a comparable absence of humanity: on the one hand, the famous zoom in Michael Snow’s Wavelength, which also concludes with a photograph filling the frame, and on the other hand the gliding tracking shot through the empty hotel corridors in Alain Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad, another film about the undead afterlife of a luxury-obsessed aristocracy. This automatic subjectivity of a pure object-gaze finds its perfect objectequivalent in photography. The photograph attests to the objectivization in natural history that Kracaueer described in a gnomic sentence: “In a photograph, a person’s history is buried as if under a layer of snow.”86 From the snow cover of the labyrinth to the snow cover of the photo, Jack’s individual and collective history is retroactively atomized into the undead pre- and after-life of “forever and ever and ever.” In the slow reframing of the photo from a long-shot to a close-up, the subject is, for the first and only time, organically embedded in a community. The phantasma of eternal jouissance is only fulfilled, for Jack, in his photographic petrification. Here, Thomas Allen Nelson is completely mistaken to write: “The Shining recalls the ending of another film, Kubrick’s own Barry Lyndon, as it tries to stimulate our memory – not of a collective unconscious, but of a collective humanity (in the picture) tragically lost and frozen in the maze of our scrapbooks and our history. More than anything else, perhaps, it is Kubrick’s dream of civilized life – a remembrance of things forgotten.”87 86 Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 51. 87 Nelson, Stanley Kubrick, p. 227.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

310 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Nelson falls into the trap of the film’s reflected nostalgia. In the appearance of a collective humanity, the memory-image evokes a total, collective inhumanity. In the nostalgic sentiment of the old-time hit, we must also hear the “Dies Irae” melody from the beginning of the film. Benjamin’s line that there has never been a document of civilization that was not also a document of barbarism is also relevant here. In this sense, The Shining starts and finishes with a death dance after the end of man. As if the gaze had survived man, a spectral subjectivity glides through the hotel. A pure gaze, which has even left behind the theological evil of the first shot of the film. A gaze and nothing more: “To characterize this gaze as ‘divine’ already entails domesticating its status, stripping it of its ‘acousmatic’ quality, ignoring the fact that it is nobody’s gaze, that it freely wanders around without a bearer.”88 The gaze encounters its photographic pendant in the form of a spectral objectivity, which according to Garrett Stewart the film still turns into another lost cause of the cinema: The Shining ends […] with another ceding of the POV in an out-of-body shot that, rather than aching for an unretrievable past, succumbs to that past as its only present. […] Still at work in the Overlook’s maze of representation, in its tomb of presence, is a scopic drive that seems itself, in a word, ghostly. Its fit object, which it both collides with and penetrates, is the mummifying photochemistry of a single lifeless imprint.89

Conversely, the disembodied gaze of the camera seems to be ineluctably absorbed by the aesthetically reborn body of the photograph. The objectivated subject of the photograph draws the subjectivated object-gaze into its spell, and f inally extinguishes it in the opaque surface of the photographic “snow cover.” Once more this is a “taming of the gaze” in the Lacanian sense, but one which, in contrast to the closing image of Caché, has nothing satisfying about it. Instead, it seals the triumph of total objectivation. After the extinguishing of human subjectivity, the spectralogy of the gaze also comes to an end. Thus, The Shining closes with the paradoxical effect that the duplication of the absent cause of the gaze (the camera) with the absent cause of the image (film-still) leads to the mutual neutralization of absence. In other words: the Inside of an eternally immobilized visibility coincides with the invisibility of its Outside. When 88 Slavoj Žižek, Die politische Suspension des Ethischen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), pp. 91-92. 89 Stewart, Between Film and Screen, pp. 185-186.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Political Uncanny, or the Return of Domination: The Shining

311

a frontally framed Jack smiles into the camera from the eternity of the photograph, the undead gaze encounters its perfect double. To this gaze, there can be no more reverse-shot, because the suture has closed itself. No future, no suture.

Bibliography Buchanan, Ian, Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (London: Routledge, 2006). Chion, Michel, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey (London: BFI, 1999). –––, Eyes Wide Shut (London: BFI, 2002). Ciment, Michel, Kubrick (Munich: Bahia, 1982). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, Anti-Œdipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Dolar, Mladen, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). Elsaesser, Thomas, Hollywood heute: Geschichte, Gender und Nation im postklassischen Kino (Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2009). Elsaesser, Thomas, Terror und Trauma: Zur Gewalt des Vergangenen in der BRD (Berlin: Kadmos, 2007). Falsetto, Mario, Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis (Westport: Praeger, 1994). Farocki, Harun, and Kaja Silverman, Speaking about Godard (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Jansen, Peter W., and Wolfgang Schütte (ed.), Stanley Kubrick (Munich: Hanser, 1984). Freud, Sigmund, “Screen Memories,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud vol. III (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), pp. 301-322. –––, “Neurosis and Psychosis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud vol. XIX (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), pp. 209-218. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). —, Signatures of the Visible (London: Routledge, 1992). –––, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). —, The Cultural Turn. Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London: Verso, 1998).
 –––, The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 2002). MacCannell, Juliet Flower, The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (London: Routledge, 1991).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

312 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Kiefer, Bernd, “Shining,” in Thomas Koebner (ed.), Filmklassiker vol. III: 1965-1981 (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1995). Kirchmann, Kay, Stanley Kubrick: Das Schweigen der Bilder (Bochum: Mouton de Gruyter, 2011). Kittler, Friedrich, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). Kolker, Robert, A Cinema of Loneliness, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Kracauer, Siegfried, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-1954, trans. John Forrester (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988). –––, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III: The Psychoses, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (London: Routledge, 1993). Lehmann, Hans-Thies, “Die Raumfabrik – Mythos im Kino und Kinomythos,” in Karl-Heinz Bohrer (ed.), Mythos und Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983). Mainar, Luis M. Garcia, Narrative and Stylistic Patterns in the Films of Stanley Kubrick (London: Camden House, 1999). Menninghaus, Winfried, Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans. Howard Eiland and Joel Golb (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003). Naremore, James, On Kubrick (London: BFI, 2007). Nelson, Thomas Allen, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). Paul, William, Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror & Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Peucker, Brigitte, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). Santner, Eric, My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). –––, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Seeßlen, Georg, Stanley Kubrick und seine Filme (Marburg: Schüren, 1999). Stewart, Garrett, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Žižek, Slavoj, Grimassen des Realen: Jacques Lacan oder die Monstrosität des Aktes (Cologne: Kiepenheur und Witsch, 1993). –––, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). –––, “Cyberspace, or the Unbearable Closure of Being,” in Janet Bergstrom (ed.), Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Political Uncanny, or the Return of Domination: The Shining

313

–––, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999). –––, The Fright of Real Tears (London: BFI, 2001). –––, Die politische Suspension des Ethischen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). –––, How to Read Lacan (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:23:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Filmography 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1967) 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA, 1968) All The President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, USA, 1976)
 American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, USA, 1980)
 Année dernière À Marienbad, L’ (Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais, France/ Italy, 1962) Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, France, 1966) Avventura, L’ (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 1960) Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, UK, 1975)
 Batman (Tim Burton, USA, 1989)
 Bennys Video (Michael Haneke, Austria, 1992)
 Bilder Der Welt, Inschrift Des Krieges (Images of the World and the Inscription of War, Harun Farocki, Germany, 1989) Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni UK/Italy, 1966)
 Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, USA, 1980)
 Buena Vista Social Club (Wim Wenders, Germany, 1999) Cadaveri Eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses, Francesco Rosi, Italy. 1976) Caché (Michael Haneke, France/Austria, 2005) Carabiniers, Les (Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy, 1963) Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov, USSR, 1929) Chinoise, La (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1967) Chinatown (Roman Polanski, USA, 1974)
 Clockwork Orange, A (Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA, 1971)
 Code Inconnu (Michael Haneke, France/Austria, 2000) Conversation, The (Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1974)
 Cronaca Di Un Amore (Story of a Love Affair, Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 1950) Eclisse, L’ (The Eclipse, Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/France, 1962) Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, USA, 1975) Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, USA, 1944) Europa 51 (Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1952) Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, UK/ USA, 1999)
 Femme est une femme, Une (A Woman is a Woman, Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1960) Funny Games (Michael Haneke, Austria, 1997) Germania Anno Zero (Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1948) Godfather, The (Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1972) Godfather Part II, The (Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1974)

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:24:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

316 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Jaws (Steven Spielberg, USA, 1975)
 Lost Highway (David Lynch, USA, 1997) Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1964)
 Mépris, Le (Contempt, Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy, 1963) Miami Vice (Michael Mann, USA, 2006)
 Mirrors (Alexandre Aja, USA, 2008) Nana (Jean Renoir, France, 1926)
 North By Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1959)
 Notte, La (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/France 1961) Parallax View, The (Alan J. Pakula, USA, 1974)
 Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, France, 1959)
 Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1965) Postman Always Rings Twice, The (Tay Garnett, USA, 1946) Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (The Trial of Joan of Arc, Robert Bresson, France, 1962) Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1960)
 Public Enemies (Michael Mann, USA, 2009) Région Centrale, La (Michael Snow, Canada, 1971) Salvatore Giuliano (Francesco Rosi, Italy, 1962)
 Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie) (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1980) Shining, The (Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA, 1980)
 Sortie de l’usine, La (Louis Lumière, France, 1895) Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, Italien/Usa 1950) Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Frankreich/Deutschland 1932) Vent d’est (Groupe Dziga Vertov, France/Italy, 1970) Viaggio in Italia (Voyage to Italy, Roberto Rossellini, Italy/France, 1954) Videodrome (David Cronenberg, Canada, 1983) Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark, 1943) Wavelength (Michael Snow, Canada/ USA, 1967) Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy, 1967) Wolf (Mike Nichols, USA, 1994)

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:24:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Bibliography Allen, Richard, Projecting Illusion. Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Althusser, Louis, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1969). –––, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). –––, and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2009). Altman, Rick, “Moving Lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism,” Yale French Studies 60 (1980), pp. 51-66. Augst, Bertrand, “The Order of [Cinematographic] Discourse,” Discourse 1 (1979), pp. 38-57. Anderson, Perry, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1979). –––, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998). Aumont, Jacques, “This is not a textual analysis: Godard’s La Chinoise,” Camera Obscura 8/9/10 (1982), pp. 131-160. –––, “Point of View,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11:2 (1989), pp. 1-22. –––, “The Fall of the Gods: Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris,” in Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds.), French Film: Texts and Contexts (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 217-230. Baudry, Jean-Louis, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative Apparatus Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp 286-298. Bazin, André, What is Cinema? vol. I, trans Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Bellour, Raymond, “Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis: Interview with Janet Bergstrom,” Camera Obscura 3/4 (1979), pp. 70-103.
 –––, The Analysis of Film, trans. Constance Penley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 217-252. Benveniste, Émile, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1971). Bergstrom, Janet, “Enunciation and Sexual Difference,” Camera Obscura 3/4 (1979), pp. 21-31. Bersani, Leo und Ulysse Dutoit, Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjecticity (London: BFI, 2004). Beugnet, Martine, “Blind Spot,” Screen 48:2 (2007), pp. 227-231.


This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:24:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

318 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Bolter, Jay David, and Grusin, Richard, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). Bordwell, David: Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Bowie, Malcom, Lacan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Branigan, Edward, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1984). –––, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London: Routledge, 1992). –––, Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film Theory (London: Routledge, 2006). Brecht, Bertolt, Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe 1987–1998 vol. XXI (Frankfurt am Main.: Suhrkamp, 2003). Bronfen, Elisabeth, Das verknotete Subjekt. Hysterie in der Moderne (Berlin: Volk und Welt, 1998). Buchanan, Ian, Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (London: Routledge, 2006). ––– (ed.), Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Buckland, Warren, The Cognitive Semiotics of Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Burch, Noël, Theory of Film Practice (New York: Praeger, 1973). Burnham, Clint, The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). Burgin, Victor, In/Different Spaces. Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of Califoria Press, 1996). Burgoyne, Robert, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, und Robert Stam, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Beyond (London: Routledge, 1992). Butler, Rex, Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory (New York: Continuum, 2005). Carroll, Noël, Mystifying Movies. Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
 –––, Interpreting the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Casetti, Francesco, “Face to Face,” in Warren Buckland (ed.), The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995), pp. 118-139. –––, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and its Spectator (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). –––, Theories of Cinema 1945–1995 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999). –––, Eye of the Centuy: Film, Experience, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Cavell, Stanley, The World Viewed. Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:24:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Bibliogr aphy

319

Chiesa, Lorenzo, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan, Cam- bridge, Mass. 2007. Chion, Michel: Audio-Vision. Sound on Screen (New York” Columbia University Press, 1994). –––, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey (London: BFI, 1999).
 –––, The Voice in the Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
 –––, Eyes Wide Shut (London: BFI, 2002).
 –––, “Without Music: On Caché,” in Roy Grundmann (ed.), A Companion to Michael Haneke (Malden/Oxford: WIley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 161-167. Ciment, Michel, Kubrick (Munich: Bahia, 1982). Copjec, Joan, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). –––, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). Cowie, Elisabeth, Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (London: Palgrave, 1997). Cremonini, Andreas, “Die Nacht der Welt. Ein Versuch über den Blick bei Hegel, Sartre und Lacan,” in Hans-Dieter Gondek, Roger Hoffman and Hans-Martin Lohmann (eds.), Jacques Lacan – Wege zu seinem Werk (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 2001), pp.164-188. –––, Die Durchquerung des Cogito: Lacan contra Sartre (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003). Cubitt, Sean: The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). David-Ménard, Monique: Deleuze und die Psychoanalyse (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2009). Dayan, Daniel, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods vol. I, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 438-451. Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donal Nicholson Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995). Deleuze, Gilles Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). –––, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). –––, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). –––, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992), pp. 3-7. –––, Negotiations 1972-1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). –––, and Félix Guattari, Anti-Œdipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983),

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:24:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

320 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Doane, Mary Ann, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 565-576. –––, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
 –––, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1991).
 Dolar, Mladen, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). Dowling, William C., Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to the Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1984). Elsaesser, Thomas, “Evolutionärer Bild-Ingenieur. Stanley Kubricks Autorschaft,” Kinematograph 19 (2004), pp. 136-147. –––, Terror und Trauma: Zur Gewalt des Vergangenen in der BRD (Berlin: Kadmos, 2007). –––, Hollywood heute: Geschichte, Gender und Nation im postklassischen Kino (Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2009). –––, “Performative Self-Contradictions: Michael Haneke’s Mind Games,” in Roy Grundmann, (ed.): A Companion to Michael Haneke (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2010), pp. 53-74. –––, and Malte Hagener, Filmtheorie zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2007). Falsetto, Mario: Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis (Westport: Praeger, 1994). Farocki, Harun, and Kaja Silverman, Speaking of Godard (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Fink, Bruce, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Pleasure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). Flitterman, Sandy, “Woman, Desire and the Look: Feminism and the Enunciative Apparatus in Cinema,” in John Caughie, Theories of Authorship (London: BFI, 1981), pp. 242-250. Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1975). –––, “What is an Author?” trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 124-127. –––, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1989). Frampton, Daniel, Filmosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Freud, Sigmund, “Screen Memories,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud vol. III (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), pp. 301-322.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:24:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Bibliogr aphy

321

–––, “Neurosis and Psychosis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud vol. XIX (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), pp. 209-218. Fried, Michael, Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). –––, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998). –––, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Friedberg, Ann, “A Denial of Difference: Theories of Cinematic Identification,” in Ann Kaplan (ed.), Psychoanalysis and Cinema (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 36-45. Garcia Mainar, Luis M., Narrative and Stylistic Patterns in the Films of Stanley Kubrick (London: Camden House, 1999). Gaudreault, André, and Francois Jost, “Enunciation and Narration,” in Toby Miller and Robert Stam (eds.), A Companion to Film Theory (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), pp. 45-63. Gondek, Hans-Dieter, “Die Angst als ‘das, was nicht täuscht,’” in Bernhard H. F. Taureck (ed.), Psychoanalyse und Philosophie: Lacan in der Diskussion (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992), pp. 107–137. Goux, Jean-Joseph, Freud, Marx: Ökonomie und Symbolik (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1975). Harbord, Janet, The Evolution of Film: Rethinking Film Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Hartley, George, The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Heath, Stephen, Questions of Cinema (London: BFI, 1981). Helmling, Steven, The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001). Hoberman, Jim, “Nashville contra Jaws, or ‘The Imagination of Disaster’ Revisited,” in Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath and Noel King (eds.), The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), pp. 195-222. Homer, Sean, Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1998). Hoffmann, Roger, “Spannungen – Psychoanalyse, Literature, Literaturwissenschaft,” in Hans-Dieter Gondek, Roger Hoffman and Hans-Martin Lohmann (eds.), Jacques Lacan – Wege zu seinem Werk (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001), pp. 189-200. Jameson, Fredric, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:24:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

322 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

–––, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972). –––, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (1979), pp. 130-148. –––, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986 vol. I: Situations of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). –––, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986 vol. II: Syntax of History (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press, 1988). –––, Late Marxism: Adorno, or The Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990). –––, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). –––, “Benjamin’s Readings,” Diacritics 22:3-4 (1992), pp. 19-34. –––, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1992). –––, Signatures of the Visible (London: Routledge, 1992). –––, “Spatial Systems in North by Northwest”, in Slavoj Žižek (ed.), Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 47-72. –––, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
 –––, The Cultural Turn. Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London: Verso, 1998).
 –––, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998).
 –––, “Cognitive Mapping” in Michael Hardt and Kathy Weeks (eds.), The Jameson Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 277-287.
 –––, The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 2002). –––, Mythen der Moderne (Berlin: Kadmos, 2002). –––, Archeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005). –––, The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007). –––, “Interview with Sara Danius and Stefan Jonsson,” in Ian Buchanan (ed), Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 151-170. –––, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009).
 Jansen, Peter W. and Wolfgang Schütte (eds.), Stanley Kubrick (Munich: Hanser, 1984). Kappelhoff, Hermann, “Der Bildraum des Kinos: Modulationen einer ästhetischen Erfahrungsform,” in Gertrud Koch (ed.), Umwidmungen: Architektonische und kinematografische Räume (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2005), pp. 138-149. Karatani, Kojin, Transcritique. On Kant and Marx (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). Khanna, Ranjana, “From Rue Morgue to Rue des Iris,” Screen 48:2 (2007), pp. 237-244.
 Kiefer, Bernd, “Shining,” in Thomas Koebner (ed.), Filmklassiker vol. III: 1965-1981 (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1995), pp. 516-519.


This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:24:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Bibliogr aphy

323

Kirchmann, Kay, Stanley Kubrick: Das Schweigen der Bilder (Bochum: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001). Kittler, Friedrich, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). Klammer, Markus, unpublished lecture on Lacan, Freie Universität Berlin, June 2008. Koch, Gertrud, Was ich erbeute sind Bilder: Zum Diskurs der Geschlechter im Film, (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 1988). –––, “Kosmos im Film: Zum Raumkonzept von Benjamins ‘Kunstwerk’-Essay,” in Sigrid Weigel (ed.), Leib- und Bildraum: Lektüren nach Benjamin (Cologne: Böhlau, 1992), pp. 35-48. –––, “Filmische Welten – Zur Welthaltigkeit filmischer Projektionen,” in Joachim Küpper and Christoph Menke (eds.), Dimensionen ästhetischer Erfahrung (Frankfurt am Main.: Suhrkamp, 2003), pp. 162-175. –––, “Latenz und Bewegung im Feld der Kultur. Rahmungen einer performativen Theorie des Films,” in Sybille Krämer (ed.), Performativität und Medialität (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2004), pp. 163-187. Kolker, Robert, A Cinema of Loneliness, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Kurz, Gerhard, Metapher, Allegorie, Symbol (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). Kracauer, Siegfried, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981). –––, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988). –––, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991). –––, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III: The Psychoses, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (London: Routledge, 1993). –––, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bernard Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1974). Lapsley, Robert, and Michael Westlake, Film Theory: An Introduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). Lebeau, Vicky, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Play of Shadows (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:24:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

324 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Lehmann, Hans-Thies, “Die Raumfabrik – Mythos im Kino und Kinomythos,” in Karl-Heinz Bohrer (ed.), Mythos und Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983). Lesjak, Carolyn, “History, Narrative, and Realism. Jameson’s Search for a Method,” in Ian Buchanan and Caren Irr (eds.), On Jameson (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), pp. 27-50. Levin, Thomas Y., “Die Rhetorik der Zeitanzeige: Erzählen und Überwachen im Kino der ‘Echtzeit,’” in Malte Hagener, Johann N. Schmidt and Michael Wedel (eds.), Die Spur durch den Spiegel: Der Film in der Kultur der Moderne (Berlin: Bertz Fischer, 2004), pp. 349-366. –––, “Five Tapes, Four Halls, Two Dreams: Vicissitudes of Surveillant Narration in Michael Haneke’s Caché,” in Roy Grundmann (ed.), A Companion to Michael Haneke (Malden/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 75-90. Lipowatz, Thanos, “Jacques Lacan (1901-1981): Das Begehren des Subjekts und des Anderen in der Psychoanalyse,” in Martin Ludwig Hofmann and Sibylle Niekisch (eds.), Culture Club: Klassiker der Kulturtheorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), pp. 145-162. MacCannell, Juliet Flower, The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (London: Routledge, 1991). Manon, Hugh S., “Comment ça, rien? Screening the Gaze on Caché,” in Brian Price and John David Rhodes (eds.), On Michael Haneke (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), pp. 105-120. Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976). McElhaney, Joe, The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli (New York: SUNY Press, 2006). McGowan, Todd, “Looking for the Gaze: Lacanian Film Theory and its Vicissitudes,” in Cinema Journal 42:3 (2003), pp. 27-47. Menninghaus, Winfried, Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans. Howard Eiland and Joel Golb (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003). Metz, Christian, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). –––, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzzetti (London: Macmillan Press, 1984). –––, “Photography and Fetish,” October 34 (Autumn 1985), pp. 81-90. –––, Impersonal Enunciation, or The Place of the Film, trans. Cormac Deane (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Michotte van den Berck, Albert, “The Nature of ‘Reality’ in Cinematic Projections,” in Vinzenz Hediger, Kate Ince and Guido Kirsten (eds.), Inventing Film

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:24:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Bibliogr aphy

325

Studies: Selected Writings from the Révue internationale de filmologie, 1946-1961 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming). Miller, Jacques-Alain, “Suture (elements of the logic of the signifier),” in Screen 18:4, (1977/1978), pp. 24-34. Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16:3 (1975), pp. 6-18. –––, Death 24x a Second. Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006). Naqvi, Fatima, “The Politics of Contempt and the Ecology of Images: Michael Haneke’s Code Inconnu,” Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick (eds.), The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary: 1945 to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 235-252. Naremore, James, On Kubrick (London: BFI, 2007). Nelson, Thomas Allen, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). Nichols, Bill, “Introduction to Christian Metz, Story/Discourse: Notes on Two Kinds of Voyeurism,” in Bill Nichols, Movies and Methods vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 543-544. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, “A Note on Story/Discourse,” in Bill Nichols, Movies and Methods vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 549-556. Odin, Roger, “L’entrée du spectateur dans la fiction: à propos de Partie de campagne,” in Jacques Aumont and Jean-Louis Leutrat (eds.), La Théorie du film (Paris: Albatros, 1980), pp. 69-83. Oudart, Jean-Pierre, “Cinema and Suture,” trans. Kari Hanet, Screen 18:4 (1977/78), pp. 35-47. Païni, Dominique, “The Wandering Gaze: Hitchcock’s Use of Transparencies,” in Dominique Païni and Guy Cogeval (eds.), Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2000), pp. 51-78. Paul, William, Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror & Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Penley, Constance, The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Perez, Gilberto, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1998). Peucker, Brigitte, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). Piso, Michele, “Mark’s Marnie,” in Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (eds.), A Hitchcock Reader (Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1986), pp. 288-303.
 Polan, Dana: “A Brechtian Cinema? Towards a Politics of Self-Reflexive Film,” in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 661-672. Quirke, Antonia, Jaws (London: BFI, 2002).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:24:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

326 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Ragland Sullivan, Ellie: Jacques Lacan und die Philosophie der Psychoanalyse (Weinheim: Quadriga, 1989). Rancière, Jacques, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julian Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999). –––, Short Voyages to the Land of the People, trans. James Swenson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). –––, The Philosopher and His Poor, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster and Andrew Parker (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). –––, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004). –––, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
 Reader, Keith, Robert Bresson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
 Rebentisch, Juliane, Ästhetik der Installation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003). Restivo, Angelo, “Into the Breach: Between the Movement-Image and the TimeImage,” in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 171-192. –––, The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). Rodowick, D.N., The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference & Film Theory (London: Routledge, 1991). –––, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Rohdie, Sam, Antonioni (London: BFI, 1990). Rose, Jacqueline, “Paranoia and the Film System,” Screen 17:4 (1976/77), pp. 85-104. –––, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986). Rothman, William, “Against ‘The System of the Suture,’” in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods vol. I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 451-459.
 –––, and Marian Keane, Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000).
 Rushton, Richard, “Cinema’s Double: Some Reflections on Metz,” Screen 42:2 (2002), pp. 107-118. Russell, Catherine, Narrative Mortality: Death, Closure, and New Wave Cinemas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1995). Saito, Ayako, “Hitchcock’s Trilogy: A Logic of Mise en Scène,” in Janet Bergstrom (ed.), Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 200-248. Salt, Barry, “Film Style and Technology in the Forties,” Film Quarterly 29:9 (1975), pp. 45-50. Santner, Eric, My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:24:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Bibliogr aphy

327

–––, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). Schütte, Wolfram, et al. (eds.), Franceso Rosi (Munich: Hanser, 1983). Seeßlen, Georg, “Das Scheitern der Methode: Francesco Rosis Weg von der Recherche zur Oper,” epd Film 6 (1987), pp. 14-21. –––, Stanley Kubrick und seine Filme (Marburg: Schüren, 1999). –––, Steven Spielberg und seine Filme (Marburg: Schüren, 2001). –––, “Strukturen der Vereisung: Blick, Perspektive und Gestus in den Filmen Michael Hanekes,” in Christian Wessely, Georg Larcher and Franz Grabner, (eds.), Michael Haneke und seine Filme: Eine Pathologie der Konsumgesellschaft (Marburg: Schüren, 2005), pp. 47-65. Silverman, Kaja, The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). –––, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). –––, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London: Routledge, 1992). –––, The Threshold of the Visible World (London: Routledge, 1996). Stam, Robert, Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Steimatsky, Noa, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Stewart, Garrett, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). –––, Framed Time: Towards a Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Stewart, Garrett, “Waking Glyph/Making Live: Cinema after the Digital,” in Lisa Åkervall, Adina Lauenburger, Sulgi Lie and Christian Tedjasuksmana (eds.), Waking Life: Kino zwischen Technik und Leben (Berlin: B_Books, 2016). Thoret, Jean-Baptiste, “Gravity of the Flux: Michael Mann’s Miami Vice,” in http:// www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/07/42/miami-vice.html (accessed April 1, 2019). Toles, George, “‘If Thine Eye Offend Thee…’: Psycho and the Art of Infection,” in Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzales (ed.): Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (London: BFI, 1999), pp. 159-174. Turner, Dennis, “The Subject of The Conversation,” Cinema Journal 24:4 (1985), pp. 4-22. Vernet, Marc, “The Look at the Camera,” Cinema Journal 28:2 (1989), pp. 48-60. Vogl, Joseph, “Lovebirds,” in Claudia Blümle and Anne von der Heiden (eds.), Blickzähmung und Augentäuschung: Zu Jacques Lacans Bildtheorie (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2005), pp. 51-63.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:24:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

328 

Towards a Political Aesthe tics of Cinema

Walsh, Michael, “Jameson and ‘Global Aesthetics,’” in David Bordwell, und Noël Carroll (eds.), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 481-500. Wegner, Phillip E., “Periodizing Jameson, or Notes toward a Cultural Logic of Globalization,” in Ian Buchanan and Caren Irr (eds.), On Jameson (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), pp. 241-280. Winkler, Hartmut, Der filmische Raum und sein Zuschauer: “Apparatus” –Semantik –Ideologie (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1992). Wise, Christopher, The Marxian Hermeneutics of Fredric Jameson (New York: Peter Lang, 1995). Wollen, Peter, Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: BFI, 1982). Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). –––, Liebe dein Symptom wie dich selbst! Jacques Lacans Psychoanalyse und die Medien (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1991). –––, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). –––, Grimassen des Realen: Jacques Lacan oder die Monstrosität des Aktes (Cologne: Kiepenheur und Witsch, 1993). –––, “‘I Hear you with my Eyes,’ or the Invisible Master,” in Slavoj Žižek and Renata Salecl (eds.), Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 90-126. –––, Die Metastasen des Genießens: Sechs erotisch-politische Verusche (Vienna: Passagen, 1996). –––, Die Nacht der Welt: Psychanalyse und deutscher Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998). –––, “Cyberspace, or the Unbearable Closure of Being,” in Janet Bergstrom (ed.), Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). –––, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999). –––, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle: Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2000). –––, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London: Routledge, 2001). –––, The Fright of Real Tears (London: BFI, 2001). –––, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001). –––, Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917: V.I. Lenin (London: Verso, 2002). –––, Organs without Bodies (London: Routledge, 2004).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:24:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Bibliogr aphy

329

–––, Die politische Suspension des Ethischen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). –––, How to Read Lacan (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007). –––, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2008). –––, (ed.), Everything that You Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (London: Verso, 1992). Zupančič, Alenka, Warum Psychoanalyse? (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2009).

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:24:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:24:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms



Index of Names

Aja, Alexandre 276 Althusser, Louis 13-16, 19, 33, 56, 76, 103, 105, 111, 130, 133, 182, 189-191, 199-203, 205, 215, 218-219, 234, 248 Antonioni, Michelangelo 7, 117, 138, 142-146, 198, 205, 220, 222-223, 226, 229, 231, 245, 249 Aumont, Jacques 21-23, 71, 112-113 Baudry, Jean-Louis 32-33, 44-45, 107 Bazin, André 17, 22-23, 37, 70, 138, 145, 149, 229, 231, 254, 275 Bellour, Raymond 25-26, 38-45, 49-51, 56, 78, 85, 89, 91-93, 100, 105, 113, 126 Benveniste, Émile 25-28, 32, 60, 91-92, 98 Benjamin, Walter 56, 59, 158, 231, 310 Bordwell, David 36, 58, 64 Branigan, Edward 72, 74, 80, 91, 94, 137 Brecht, Bertolt 35, 104, 107, 110-111, 114, 136-137, 142, 150, 233, 238, 243 Bresson, Robert 63-67, 294 Burch, Noël 16-19, 143-144, 151 Burton, Tim 281 Carroll, Noël 26-27, 58, 210 Casetti, Francesco 36, 89-106, 113, 126, 134, 152, 226 Cavell, Stanley 19-23, 31, 33, 37, 44-45, 48, 58, 109, 112-113 Chion, Michel 81-84, 117-120, 133-134, 157, 273, 281-287, 294 Copjec, Joan 108, 117-118, 127-133, 137, 248 Coppola, Francis Ford 182, 186, 188, 244-249, 258, 269 Cronenberg, David 239 Dayan, Daniel 57, 67-77, 80, 85, 92-93, 100, 105, 112-113, 126, 133 Deleuze, Gilles 50-51, 84, 131-132, 137-146, 149, 255, 271, 277-278, 295, 301-302 Doane, Mary Ann 34, 82, 130 Dreyer, Carl Theodor 266, 276, 288 Dolar, Mladen 120, 128, 303

Garnett, Tay 210, 212 Godard, Jean-Luc 9, 21-23, 45, 75, 89, 103-115, 133, 137, 150, 156, 163, 173, 178, 180, 208, 223, 241, 296 Group Dziga Vertov 103 Haneke, Michael 7, 149-166, 198, 292 Hitchcock, Alfred 25, 38-50, 55, 77-79, 83-85, 89-90, 96, 102, 198, 242, 246, 249, 266, 274, 290 Jameson, Fredric 8, 10, 34, 166, 171-203, 205-224, 227-231, 233-244, 248-251, 254-255, 259, 265, 271, 273-275, 278-282, 288, 290-293, 295, 298, 305, 308-309 Kasdan, Lawrence 210 Koch, Gertrud 20, 33, 44-45, 52, 59, 225 Kracauer, Siegfried 227, 231, 237,309 Kubrick, Stanley 7, 265-311 Lacan, Jacques 13-15, 23, 25, 28, 32-33, 36, 56, 60, 67, 70, 75, 97, 99, 105, 115, 117-138, 143, 153, 157, 160, 162, 164-165, 171, 182, 191, 197-203, 205, 214-215, 219, 223-224, 228, 240, 242, 252, 265-266, 285, 289, 294, 298, 301, 303, 310 Levin, Thomas Y. 154, 161, 247 Lumet, Sidney 188, 192, 196 Lumière, Louis and Auguste 221, 227-228 Lynch, David 151, 217, 286 Mann, Michael 254-261 Metz, Christian 17-18, 25-44, 47, 51, 56-60, 67, 72, 75-76, 85, 89-93, 96-107, 113-114, 124, 126, 131, 134, 240 Mulvey, Laura 35, 43, 77, 141 Nichols, Mike 280 Pakula, Alan J. 239, 242, 251 Polanski, Roman 210

Elsaesser, Thomas 136, 151, 156, 272, 295-296, 300

Oudart, Jean-Pierre 7, 55-67, 71-76, 79, 86, 89, 114, 126, 130, 172, 197

Farocki, Harun 22, 163, 223, 296 Foucault, Michel 25-26, 68-70, 86, 109, 126-128, 200, 247-248 Freud, Sigmund 29, 44-45, 60, 85, 120, 129, 137, 149, 161, 164, 190, 202, 271, 280, 292, 295, 304 Fried, Michael 107-109, 112-113

Rancière, Jacques 11, 138-143 Renoir, Jean 16 Resnais, Alain 309 Restivo, Angelo 78, 142, 146, 224, 227, 230, 249 Rodowick, D.N. 31, 44 Rothman, William 20-21, 73

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:24:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Rosi, Francesco 251-252 Rossellini, Roberto 139-143, 145, 198 Santner, Eric 299, 306 Schrader, Paul 7, 248-249 Seeßlen, Georg 163, 185, 251, 280, 282-283, 294, 301 Silverman, Kaja 22, 29, 59-60, 63, 76-79, 85, 117-118, 124-128, 135, 148, 150, 163, 223, 245, 296, Snow, Michael 102, 309 Spielberg, Steven 182-188 Stewart, Garrett 153, 156, 161-12, 164, 167, 253, 257, 260, 262, 307, 310

Vertov, Dziga 44 Wenders, Wim 259 Wilder, Billy 210, 212 Wollen, Peter 75, 103-107, 110 Žižek, Slavoj 9, 82-85, 117-118, 127, 132-138, 140-141, 144, 151, 157-161, 165, 171, 184, 197-198, 200, 224, 246, 249, 259, 265-266, 269, 285, 287, 289, 293-300 Zupančič, Alenka 67

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:24:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film is a contribution to an aesthetics of cinema rooted in Marxist theory. Rather than focusing on the role that certain films, or the cinema as an institution, might play in political consciousness, the book asks a different question: how can the subject of politics in film be thought? This problem is presented in a systematic-theoretical rather than historical manner. The main aim of this book is a retrospective rehabilitation of the psychoanalytical concept of “suture,” whose political core is progressively revealed. In a second step, this rereading of “suture”-theory is mediated with the Marxist aesthetics of Fredric Jameson. From the perspective of this reconfigured aesthetics of negativity, films by Hitchcock, Antonioni, Haneke and Kubrick are analyzed as articulations of a political unconscious.

FILM CULTURE IN TRANSITION

Sulgi Lie teaches in the Division of Film Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has co-edited a German anthology of Jacques Rancière’s film writings and has recently completed a book on comedy and critical theory with the title Gehend kommen. Adornos Slapstick (Come Walking: Adorno’s Slap stick) to be published in early 2021 by Vorwerk 8 press. 9 789462 983632

‘Delivered in a crisp translation, this ambitious book’s clarifying distance from the lasting accomplishments of apparatus theory goes far toward erasing any trace of oxymoron in its title. And in the emphasis of its subtitle – with the camera variously recognized as severed from the spaces it preserves only by rearticulating – cinema’s narrative inside emerges as the material effect of its outside: not just technically but culturally. Synthesized as never before across a deep field of previous theorization, the conditioning surround of the screen image, in politics as well as production, is studied rigorously by Lie, and often brilliantly, from the inside out – in powerful extrapolations earned across nimble readings of celluloid and digital cinematography from rear projection in Marnie to pixel tessellations in Miami Vice.’ GARRETT STEWART, AUTHOR OF

‘ CINEMACHINES :

AN ESSAY ON MEDIA AND METHOD ’

AUP.nl This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 31 Jan 2021 07:24:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

(2020)