A. A
Political Use of Psychoanalysis
This paper
intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fascination of film
is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within
the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him. It
takes as starting point the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the
straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which
controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle. It is helpful to
understand what the cinema has been, how its magic has worked in the past,
while attempting a theory and a practice which will challenge this cinema of
the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriate here as a political weapon,
demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured
film form.
The
paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the
image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of
woman stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that produces the
phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the
phallus signifies. Recent writing in Screen about psychoanalysis and the
cinema has not sufficiently brought out the importance of the representation of
the female form in a symbolic order in which, in the last resort, it speaks
castration and nothing else. To summarise briefly: the function of woman in
forming the patriarchal unconscious is two-fold, she first symbolises the
castration threat by her real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her
child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the
process is at an end, it does not last into the world of law and language
except as a memory which oscillates between memory of maternal plenitude and
memory of lack. Both are posited on nature (or on anatomy in Freud's famous phrase).
Woman's desire is subjected to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound, she
can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it. She turns her
child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis (the condition,
she imagines, of entry into the symbolic). Either she must gracefully give way
to the word, the Name of the Father and the Law, or else struggle to keep her
child down with her in the half-light of the imaginary . Woman then stand&
in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic
order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through
linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to
her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.
Continue to read here
No comments:
Post a Comment