THE DIFFICULTY OF DIFFERENCE MEXUAL DIFFERENCE FiLM THEOR DNR○ DOWICK ROUTLEDGE. New York& London
APR15192 For R B and LM Contents Was d Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen st,L, 1 ID-/C pN 215 Published in Great Britain by Roll Chapter 2 The Return of the Exile 1990 Chapter 3 Reading Freud.. Differently Copyright o 1991 by Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. Printed in the United States of america Chapter 5 The Difference of Reading All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized Chapter 6 Analysis Interminable 117 retrieval system, wi otes Librar Permission in writing from the publishe Index 159 choanalysis, sexual differend references and index Motion Pictures. 2. Psychoanalytic Theory. 3. Sex 9143013-dc20 90-20695 The difficulty of difference psychoanalysis, sexual 1. Cinema fIms, Feminist theories 02午3
i PREFACE apter Wardley, Dudley Andrew, David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, Jan Matlock Anne Higonnet, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, M D, Hanna Weg, Kirsten Evans, Lynn Whisnant Reiser, M D, Georges May, Jennifer Wicke, and John from this work--at Dartmouth es Center at Yale University, and the University of California, Riverside- challenged me to hone and refine my arguments. A Morse Fellowship granted by Yale University enabled me to develop this book in its early stages. Iam Binary Machines also grateful for research support from the Whitney Humanities Center at In dialogues, a book cowritten with Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet com- Yale and for help from the Yale Department of Audio-Visual Services ments on the function of"the binary machine. "In these interesting pages resumes an argument begun by Deleuze concerning the relation of philos- ophy to the State. Every college educator knows well the official version of this story, defined according to the theory of progress that was the nineteenth Enlightenment philosophy. As philosophy becom more specialized and departmentalized, its role is to contribute in a"de crease image"of thought invoked, along with criteria for its perfectibility, is ssociated with procedures of"language"but of a special sort: that defined by linguistics and related logico-mathematical protocols. Deleuze's position and his ongoing practice of reading philosophy is moti- image of rom thinking. And not only because"thought"is left to specialists, but also because the definitions of thought produced by with the States image of power and its juridical definitions of identity. As critics and educators, the language we use to describe identity"as a difference from or conforming to an image of gender, class, or race-is itely tied to the mechanics of What Parnet calls the binary machine perfectly describes this technology of thought and the notions of identity it fabricates. Its components are easily elucidated: divide into two mutually exclusive terms or categories and thus produce two perfectly sclf- identical"ideas"that brook no contradiction or ivasion from the outside. Hegel's dialectic is the t dividing and reconciling into ever higher unities and hierarchies until binary thought-which has reproduced itself in the d and aesthet. -is content with cellular division and horizontal According Parne
2 THE DIFFICULTY THE DIFFICULTY OF DIFFERENCE 3 half? There is always a binary machine which 34). Rather it is a matter of reconsidering what"language"is or could be, hat it leaves aside, and of remembering that totality is a ince the questions are aiready worked out o be probable according to the dominant meani pretension that displaces recognition of the multiplicities it covers over. It is such that everything which does not pass through the grille cannot a question above all of reading differently ise these schemata of language and thought? How can one recover the will be established that there will be enough for everyor individuations without'subject'"that fall between the terms of binary division and are de-territorialized by the law of the excluded middle? How measured according to the degree of binary choice: you are neither white can one apprehend the minority languages and the multiple collectivities nor black, Arab then? Or half-breed? You are neither man nor woman, transves- aced and overcome by the universalizing unity of binary tite then?①D1921) thought? For Parnet, the Achilles'heel of this logic is the term that not only onstitutes the middle, but also guarantees the contiguity and multiplication The binary machine always pretends to totality and universality. And a certain extent, Parnet sees the working of language by the binary machine to have been imminently successful. In this context, one could ask if the And even if there are only two terms, le image of thought in the Hegelian dialectic. The smallest possible uni- constitutes the multiplicity. This is why it is always possible to undo phonemic-are integrated into ever higher levels of unity--morphe IC, syntactic, syntagmatic, narratological-that are simultancously equiva sets, the tream which belongs neither to the one nor to the nt to "higher"levels of thought. And when grafted on to structural her, but draws both into a non-parallel evolution, into a heterochronous anthropology, these branching divisions and hierarchies become equivalent ecoming. At least this does not belong to the dialectic. (D 34-35) to the“ meaningful zation of human collectivities of understanding the feminist critique of Levi-Strauss, for le where I have left to one side the principal targets of Parnet and Deieuze's criti the binary division and hierarchy of the sexes informs the intelligibility of ms: structural linguistics, psychoanalysis, and more profoundly, the alli language, labor, and social life. But Parnet's point is that granting linguistics' ance between them represented by the work of Jacques Lacan. There is much cognition and exacting description of the dualities that work language and iety is to leave untouched its own language-its patterns of logic, rheto impelling in the Anti-Oedipus than it is in the pages of Dialogues. The and argumentation-which, tautologically, only produce the legibility and questions that interest me, however, are on one hand how cont telligibility of that which is already structured by binary division. a similar film theory has read and incorporated psychoanalysis, and on the situation is no less evident in the what degree the logic of psychoanalysis, above all the work of Freud, theory has appropriated the logic of structural semiology and psychoanalysis flected by the binary machine? In The Crisis of Political Modernism for the formal analysis of films and the spectatorial relations they imply argued that the most substantial accomplishment of contemporary film the- language and linguistics so perfectly replicate one another, the latter ory was its formulation of new practices of reading that profoundly trans reproducing the "thought"of language as the limit of what language can formed our notions of filmic and literary texts. But blocked by a formal ender "thinkable, "what alternatives can be imagined? Parnet and deleuze warn that it is futile to propose a thought " outside"of language.(How can film theory has been unable to comprehend historically or theoretically many theories of avant-garde literature and art have been wrecked on this the implications of these reading practices. Despite the gains they have utopian island: Nor can it be said that language deforms identities, concepts, abled, neither semiology psychoanalysis, nor feminist theory have entirely or realities that can be returned to their proper states. "We must pass through eluded the logic of the binary machine in their theoretical language and r]dualisms, "writes Parnet, " because they are in language, it's not heir formal concep ion of filr of getting rid of them, but we must fight against language, inven The consequences situation must be addressed. What vocal or written line which will make now been mobilized in film theory se dualisms, and which will define a minority use of language"(D questions of textual analysis, on one hand, and sexual difference in
4 THE DIFFICULTY OF DIFFERENCE THE DIFFICULTY OF DIFFERENCE 3 torship on the other. Do Freud's writings implicitly propose a model of of the classic, Hollywood cinema. The great strength of Mulvey's analysis reading that might erode the version of language and power formulated is that it is not a simple condemnation are represented on the binary machine? Does the work of Freud enable a different way the screen. Instead she identifies a powerful n the heart of the tructure of image and narrative in Hollyw and identity, is Freud among the first to understand the possibilities of leine these issues more precisely I have isolated a rather long citation from individuations without'subject'"and a minority language of sexuality?Is there in Freud a theory of reading that renders legible otherwise deterritori- Mulvey's essay. My motive is neither to completely sustain nor subvert alzed languages, identities, and meanings th ze her discussion of sexual difference and mechanisms of visual pleasure in film. In a section entitled"Woman as Pleasure and its Discontents Image, Man as Bearer of the Look, " Mulvey makes the following argument: world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been spl rms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She between active/male and passive/female. "This phrase from Laura Mulvey's 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"is undoubtedly and deservedly one lack of a penis, implying a of the most well known in contemporary film theory. I begin with Mulvey' say not because I disagree with what it"says, "but to open up tensions Mulvey's own reading of Freud, and, more importantly, in how Mulvey' ential for the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of ork has been read and appropriated. Without doubt, it is and will remain the father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of one of the most important essays in contemporary flm theory."Visual e active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"has indeed been successful in its origin polemical objective: to place questions of sexual difference at the center of with the re-e n, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the the debate concerning film theory's appeal to psychoanalysis. But what was offered as a polemic and a' stepping stone to further analysis has instead too ent or saving of the guilty object(an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by the often been treated as axiomatic. What is at stake is how film theory has read substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish d in order to understand the construction of"femininity"by audiovisual edia and to reconceptualize the value of psychoanalysis for a theory of Itof the female star). This second avenue, fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the ysical beauty of the object transforming it into something satisfying in itse Mulveys early argument, which is still the subject of an ongoing debate The first avenue, voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with sadism: plea- reading of Freud produced by Anglo-American film theory in the seventies. s Mulveys project and the many essays inspired by it distic side fits in well with narrative, Sadism demands a story, depe rganized a he question of identification. The first task of this project is to target and amine the codes and mechanisms through which the classical cinema has d. Fetishistic scopophilia, on the other hand, can exist outside linear time as the raditionally exploited sexual difference as a function of its narrative and erotic instinct is focused on the look alone. (VP 13-14) presentational forms. the second task is to ascertain the affects thes Unlike Raymond Bellour, whose work has many affinities with Mulvey's, as well as their role within the more general ideological machinery of patri Mulvey is less concerned with problems of textual analysis than with the chal culture. The analysis of narrative forms, and the forms of spectatorshi definition of structures of identification and the mechanisms of pleasure or implied by them, are thus intimately related. Similarly, the analysis and iticism of patriarchal ideology by film theory has had a historic impact on pleasure that accompany them. I am now using the term identification in its strictly psychoanalytic sense: " Psychological process whereby the subje One of the most striking aspects of Mulvey's argument is the association assimilates an aspect, property or attribute of the other and is transformed of a fundamental negativity with the figuration of femininity characteristic wholly or partially, after the model the other provides. It is by means of a series of identifications that the personality is constituted and specified