THE IMAGINARY AND THE GOOD OBJECT IN THE CINEMA 15 Knowledge of the cinema is obtained via a reprise of the native discourse, in two senses of the word taking it into consideration and re-establishing it The turning I am discussing is never anything but a return. In the cinema, too, the product presents us with a reversed image of the production, as it does in the materialist conception of ideol- ogies, or in neurotic rationalisations, as in the camera obscura which, with its 180-degree-turned optical image, is the very starting-point of cinematic technique. The effort towards knowing is necessarily sadistic insofar as it can only grasp its object against the grain, re-ascend the slopes of the institution (whereas the latter is designed for one to followthem,to descend them), like the interpretation that goes back along the path of the dream-work, acting by nature in the manner of a ounter-current To be a theoretician of the cinema, one should ideally no longer love the cinema and yet still love it: have loved it a lot and only have detached oneself from it by taking it up again from the other end,taking it as the target for the very same scopic drive which had made one love it. Have broken with it, as certain relatior ships are broken, not in order to move on to something else, but in order to return to it at the next bend in the spiral carry the institution inside one still so that it is in a place accessible to self- analysis but carry it there as a distinct instance which does not over-infiltrate the rest of the ego with the thousand paralysing bonds of a tender unconditionality. not have forgotten what the cinephile one used to be was like, in all the details of his affective inflections, in the three dimensions of his living being, and yet no longer be invaded by him: not have lost sight of him, but be keeping an eye on him Finally, be him and not be him, since all in all these are the two conditions on which one can speak of him This balance may seem a somewhat acrobatic one. It is and it is not Of course no one can be sure to attain it perfectly everyone is in danger of slipping off on one side or the other. And yet, in principle, considering the very possibility of maintaining such a position, it is not true that it is so very acrobatic, or rather it is no more so than the other (really very similar) mental postures required for tasks more ordinarily evoked. This is forgotten because it is not customary (it is one of the great taboos of scien
16 THE IMAGINARY SIGNIFIER tism, one of its terrors) to mention the metapsychological precon- ditions of scientific work. But for anyone who is prepared to consider them, the kind of deliberate ambivalence i am trying to describe, this special variety of splitting, at once salutary and fragile, this minimum of fexibility in one's relations to oneself, this economic conversion by which a strong object cather l here attraction to the cinema), initially molar and opaque, sub- sequently undergoes an instinctual vicissitude that bifidates it and arranges it like a pair of pliers, one pincer (voyeuristic sadism sublimated into epistemophilia) coming to meet the other in which the original imaginary of the dual effusion with the object is retained as a(living, surviving)witness-in short, this itinerary and the present configuration that results from it are not in the end especially exceptional or contorted (even if for some scientists they are among those things that must not be stated) It is itineraries and economies of the same kind (tendentially still, never as a finished result that also define the objective con ditions of the subjective possibility of the ethnologist's work, or tance in the semiotic and Peircean sense of the word of that of the analysand in the cure, ultimately of all work of interpre tranS- lation from one system into another ). What really is uncommon is not the thing itself, but simply the idea that cinematic studies are not in themselves blessed with any special privilege of exemp tion, any magical extra-territoriality any adolescent immunity from the common requirements of knowledge and symbolic cathexis which are(sometimes)more clearly perceived in other fields
The Investigator's Imaginary I ask myself: what in fact is the object of this text? What is the driving uncertainty without which I should not have the desire to write it, and thus would not be writing it? What is my imaginary at this moment? What is it that i am trying, even without il- lusions, to bring to a conclusion It seems to me that it is a question, in the material sense of the word-a sentence terminating in a question mark- and that, as n dreams, it is inscribed right there in front of me, armed from head to toe. i shall unfold it here, with, of course that slightl obsessional coefficient which is party to any aspiration to rigour. So let me spell it out: What contribution can Freudian psy choanalysis make to the study of the cinematic signifier? This is, in other words, the manifest content of my dream, and its interpretation will(I hope)constitute my text. I can already see three vital points, three nodal points in it. Let me examine them separately the interpretation of dreams invites us to do so, as does the minimal necessity of having a plan), and associate freely from each of them. They are the words 'contribution Freudian psychoanalysis and above all cinematic signifier PSYCHOANALYSIS. LINGUISTICS. HISTORY Contribution', then, first of all: this term tells me that psycho analysis cannot be the only discipline concerned in the study of the cinematic signifier, and that its offering has to be articulated with others. To begin with, and fairly directly, with that of classi- cal semiology- based on linguistics-a guiding principle in my earliest filmic investigations and today in those of several others 17
THE IMAGINARY SIGNIFIER Why directly? Because linguistics and psychoanalysis are both sciences of the symbolic and are even come to think of it the only two sciences whose immediate and sole object is the fact of signifi cation as such obviously all sciences are concerned with it but never so frontally or exclusively) To be slightly cavalier, linguis tics-together with its close relations, notably modern symbolic gic egarded as taking for its share the exploration of the secondary process, and psychoanalysis that of the primar process:that is to say, between them they cover the whole field of the signification- fact taken in itself. Linguistics and psychoanalysis are the two main sources'of semiology, the only disciplines that are semiotic through and through That is why both in turn have to be set within the horizon of a third perspective, which is as it were their common and permanent background: the direct study of societies, historical criticism, the examination of infrastructures. This time the junction is much less easy(if the other one can be described as easy), for the signi- fier has its own laws(primary and secondary), and so does politi cal economy. Even technically, if one thinks of the daily work of the investigator, of his reading his documentation, etc the dual competence' which was not impossible a moment ago now becomes a bit of a gamble: thus in the case of the cinema, where is the semiotician who could seriously claim, given his education and his specialised conceptual tools, to be able to explain the role of capitalist monopolies in the film industry in as pertinent and rigorous a way as economists like Henri Mercilon and his dis- ciples have? In cinematic studies as in others, semiology (or semi ologies) cannot replace the various disciplines that discuss the social fact itself(the source of all symbolism), with its laws that determine those of the symbolic without being identical with hem: sociology, anthropology, history, political economy, demo- graphy, etc. It cannot replace them, nor must it repeat them (danger of ritual repetition or reductionism). It must take them into account, move forward on its own front (it too is materialist in its own way)and mark the anchorage points in all the cases in which the state of research already makes this possible( for example the spectator's psychism as a factor of historical adjust- ment and a link in the chain of the money circuit). In other words it must be inscribed in advance by a kind ofepistemologi- cal anticipation(but one which must not become the pretext for a voluntary paralysis), in the perspective of a true knowledge of
THE INVESTIGATOR S IMAGINARY 19 man-a perspective still only present as a dotted line in most of its circuit, and a knowledge in the singular very different from today' s human sciences,, so often gnawed by scientism and yet necessary, for today is not tomorrow of a state of knowing in which the way the development of technologies and balances of social forces(society in its physical state, as it were) finally comes to influence infections peculiar to the work of the symbolic such as the order of 'shots'or the role of sound off in some cinematic sub-code, in some genre of films, for example, would be knowen in all the reality of the intermediate mechanisms without which only a global inkling and postulation of causality is possible Here i am touching on the famous problem of relative auton- omies but not necessarily (although the two things are often con fused)on a simple distinction between infrastructures and superstructures. For if it is clear that the cinema as an industry, its modes of financing, the technological development of film stock, the average income of the spectators(enabling them to go more or less often to the cinema), the price of seats and many other things belong fully to infrastructural studies, it does not follow that, by some mechanical symmetry, the symbolic (primary or secondary)is exclusively superstructural in its order It is partly so, of course, and even largely so in its most apparent strata, in its manifest content in those of its features that are directly related to precise social facts and change when the latter change: e.g. in linguistics broad sectors of the lexicon(but already much less of phonology or syntax), in psychoanalysis the various historical variants of the Oedipus complex-or perhaps the Oedipus complex itself, which is far from being the whole of psychoanalysis which are clearly linked to the development of the institution of the family but signification also has more buried and permanent springs (ones by definition less visible less striking to the mind) whose validity extends, in our present state of knowledge, to the whole of humanity, i. e. to man as a bio gical 'species. Not that the symbolic is something natural non-social; on the contrary in its deepest foundations(which are always structures and not facts'), signification is no longer just a consequence of social development, it becomes, along with the infrastructures, a party to the constitution of sociality itself, which in its turn defines the human race. The partial