THE IMAGINARY AND THE GOOD OBJECT IN THE CINEMA are as culture and society. As in political struggles, our only weapons are those of the adversary, as in anthropology, our onl 5yy source is the native, as in the analytical cure our only knowledge is that of the analysand, who is also (current french usage tells us so)the analyser [analysant]. The posture which inaugurates knowledge is defined by a backward turn and by it alone -a back- ward turn is the movement common to my three examples, which are more than examples. If the effort of science is constantl threatened by a relapse into the very thing against which it is con stituted, that is because it is constituted as much in it as against it, and because the two prepositions are here in some sense synony mous(in a very similar way, the neurotic defences set to work against anxiety themselves become anxiogenic because they orig inate in anxiety). The work of the symbolic, in the theoretician who would delimit the share of the imaginary and that of the symbolic in the cinema, is always in danger of being swallowed up in the very imaginary which is sustained by the cinema, which makes the film likeable, and which is thus the instigation for the theoretician's very existence(=the desire to study the cinema to use more ordinary terms to sum up, the objective conditions that give rise to the theory of the cinema are one and the same as those that make that theory precarious and permanently threaten it with sliding into its opposite, in which the discourse of the object (the native discourse of the cinematic institution) in- sidiously comes to occupy the place of discourse about the object This is the risk that has to be run, there is no choice anyone who does not run it has already fallen victim to it: like certain cinema journalists, he gossips about films in order to prolong their affective and social incidence, their imaginary, that is, perfectly real power. In Part Ii, The Fiction Film and its Spectator, I attempt to show that the cinema spectator has veritable ' object relations with films. In Part Il, ' Story/Discourse', my aim is to specify, fol- lowing Jean-Louis Baudry, but obliquely with respect to his remarkable analyses what the voyeurism of the spectator has to do with the primordial experience of the mirror, and also with the primal scene(with a unilateral voyeurism without exhibitionism on the part of the object looked at This is thus the moment to recall certain given facts which will
THE IMAGINARY SIGNIFIER be very important for the rest of this study, facts that pre-exist my intervention and belong to the history of the psychoanalytic movement. The very notion of an object relation-a phantasy relation, quite distinct from real relations to real objects and yet contributing to their construction -constitutes one of Melanie Klein's unique contributions to the Freudian field, and is inscribed entirely within what was to become for Lacan the dimension of the imaginary. Lacans discourse in fact 'skirts certain Kleinian themes without coinciding with them(= partial objects, role of the breast, importance of the oral stage, per- secution phantasies of fragmentation, depressive positions of loss, etc.), but this only on the side of the imaginary. and the main grounds for Lacan's criticism of Melanie Klein will be fam iliar: her reduction of the psyche to only one of its axes the im- aginary, the absence of a theory of the symbolic, " incapable of even so much as suspecting the existence of the category of the signifier. On the other hand, the experience of the mirror as it is described by lacan is essentially situated on the side of the im- aginary ( formation of the ego by identification with a phantom, an image), even if the mirror also makes possible a first access to the symbolic by the mediation of the mother holding the child to the glass whose reflection, functioning here as the capita- lised Other, necessarily ly appears in the field of the mirror along- side that of the child To sum up, what I analyse, or attempt to analyse in Parts I III (written in fact several months before this first part, and constituting my first two Freudian inspired studies)turns out without my having precisely intended it, to be already estab- lished on one of the flanks of the ridge-line, that of the imaginary cinematic fiction as a semi-dreamlike instance, in Part Iii. and in Part II, the spectator-screen relationship as a mirror identi fication. That is why I should now like to approach my ' object from its symbolic flank, or rather along the ridge-line itself. My dream today is to speak of the cinematic dream in terms of a code the code of this dream GOING TO THE CINEMA For the spectator, the film can on occasion be a " bad object' then we have filmic unpleasure, which i deal with elsewhere(see
THE IMAGINARY AND THE GOOD OBJECT IN THE CINEMA 7 pp Ill and 112)and which defines the relation of certain spec tators to certain films, or of certain groups of spectators to certain groups of films. Nevertheless, the good object relation is more basic from the standpoint of a socio-historical critique of the cinema, for it is this relation and not the opposite one(which thus appears as a local failure of the former) that constitutes the aim of the cinematic institution and that the latter is constantly attempting to maintain or re-establish Let me insist once again, the cinematic institution is not just the cinema industry(which works to fill cinemas, not to empty them), it is also the mental machinery -another industry-which spectators 'accustomed to the cinema have internalised histori- cally and which has adapted them to the consumption of films The institution is outside us and inside us indistinctly collective and intimate, sociological and psychoanalytic, just as the general prohibition of incest has as its individual corollary the Oedipus complex, castration or perhaps in other states of society different psychical configurations, but ones which still imprint the institu tion in us in their own way. The second machine, i. e the social regulation of the spectator's metapsychology, like the first, has as its function to set up good object relations with films if at all possible; here too the bad film'is a failure of the institution one goes to the cinema because one wants to and not because one has to force oneself, in the hope that the film will please and not that it will displease. Thus filmic pleasure and filmic unpleasure, although they correspond to the two imaginary ob- jects shaped by the persecutory splitting described by melanie Klein, are not in my view arranged in positions of antithetic symmetry, since the institution as a whole has filmic pleasure alone as its aim. In a social system in which the spectator is not forced physically to go to the cinema but in which it is still important that he should go so that the money he pays for his admission makes it possible to shoot other films and thus ensures the auto reproduction of the institution -and it is the specific character istic of every true institution that it takes charge of the mechanisms of its own perpetuation- there is no other solution than to set up arrangements whose aim and effect is to give the pectator the ' spontaneous'desire to visit the cinema and pay for
8 THE IMAGINARY SIGNIFIER his ticket. The outer machine(the cinema as industry) and the inner machine (the spectator's psychology) are not just meta- phorically related, the latter a facsimile of the former, internals g it as a reversed mould, a receptive hollow of identical form but also metonymically related as complementary segments wanting to go to the cinema is a kind of reflection shaped by the film industry but it is also a real link in the chain of the overall mechanism of that industry. It occupies one of the essential pos- itions in the circulation of money, the turnover of capital without which films could no longer be made: a privileged position since it intervenes just after the outward movement(which includes the financial investment in cinematic undertakings, the material manufacture of the films their distribution their hire to the cinemas) and inaugurates the circuit of return which brings the money back eventually, if possible with a profit, from the pockets of the individual spectators to those of the production companies or the banks supporting them, thus giving the go-ahead for new films to be made. In this way, the libidinal economy(filmic pleasure in its historically constituted form) reveals its ' corre spondence' with the political economy (the current cinema as a commercial enterprise), and it is, moreover -as the very exist ence of market research'shows-one of the specific elements of that economy: this is what is euphemistically translated by the term motivation' in socio-psychological surveys directly geared to Ifi am concerned to define the cinematic institution as a wider instance than the cinema industry (or than the ambiguous com- monplace notion of the commercial cinema)it is because of this kinship- mould and segment, facsimile and component between the psychology of the spectator(which is only apparent- ly individual: as everywhere else only its most minute vari- ations can be described as such) and the financial mechanisms of the cinema. My insistence on this point may be irritating, but imagine what would occur in the absence of such a state of affairs we should have to suppose the existence of some special police force (no less or some statutory system of a posteriori inspection a stamp in one's identity card on admission to a cinema)to force people to go to the cinema: a little piece of science fiction which is of course absurd but does at least have the paradoxi- cally dual advantage that it both corresponds to a situation which is not quite without real examples of an attenuated and
THE IMAGINARY AND THE GOOD OBJECT IN THE CINEMA 9 localised kind(such as those political regimes in which certain direct propaganda films are practically obligatory' for members of the movement or of the official youth organisations), and yet clearly designates a modality of regular cinema attendance very different from that on which the institution depends in the vast majority of cases, i.e. in what one would (for that very reason call its normal forms. Here I am touching on political analysis,; and the difference there is between a cinema-institution which would be of a fascist type (and has hardly ever existed on a large scale, even in regimes which might have made a greater call on it and a cinema-institution which is capitalist and liberal in inspira- tion,and is broadly dominant almost everywhere, even in countries otherwise more or less socialist TALKING ABOUT THE CINEMA In the register of the imaginary(= Klein's object relation), the institution thus depends on the good object, although it may happen that it manufactures bad ones. At this point we perhaps glimpse the existence within the cinema of a third machine which I have so far only mentioned pp. 4-5, and even then not named. I shall now leave the industry and the spectator to consider the cine- matic writer(critic, historian, theoretician, etc. ) and I am struck by the extreme concern he often reveals-a concern which gives him an odd resemblance to producer and consumer-to maintain a good object relation with as many films as possible, and at any rate with the cinema as such This proposition will immediately ' arouse'a host of counter- examples but i shall not stop for them since i accept them entire- ly. All the same, let me recall one of them, chosen at random: the representatives of the French 'new wave, when they had not yet made any films and were working as critics for cahiers du cinema based a broad sector of their theory on the denunciation of a ertain type of film, the ' French quality'film; this attack was no pretence, it went much further than a mere disagreement at the intellectual level, it conveyed a real and profound antipathy for the films denounced it constituted them as bad objects, for the denouncers themselves first of all. then for the audience that attached itself to them and a little later guaranteed the success of their films(thus restoring a 'good'cinema). Besides, cinematic