20 THE IMAGINARY SIGNIFIER uncoupling of the laws of signification from short-term histori- cal developments. does not mean a naturalisation of the semiotic (its psychologisation), but on the contrary re-emphasises its radical, as it were definitional, sociality. There is always a moment after the obvious observation that it is man who makes the symbol when it is also clear that the symbol makes man: this is one of the great lessons of psychoanalysis, anthropology and linguistics. Abstracting from the immense sector in which it is specificall cultural (varying in a time scale which is of the same order as that of history), the symbolic is thus not precisely a superstructure This does not make it an infrastructure, unless one departs from the strict(Marxist) sense of the term and there is nothing to be gained from such a melange Rather, in its deeper strata it repres- ents a kind of juxtastructure to use a term which has already been put forward for other phenomena of the same kind, a juxtastruc ture in which are expressed, in the last analysis, certain charac teristics of man as an animal (and as an animal different from all other animals, i. e as a non-animal too). i shall only recall two well-known examples of these laws'(of these aspects of'The Law as lacan would say that help underpin all significatory work. In linguistics, in all known idioms, double articulation the paradigm/syntagm opposition, the necessary duplication of the logical generation of sentences into a categorial component and a transformational component. In psychoanalysis, in all known societies, the prohibition of incest(and yet sexual procreation, as in all the higher animals)along with the inevitable corollary of these two as it were contradictory facts, the very remarkable re lationship(whether or no it consists of an Oedipus complex of the classical type) which each human offspring must definitively enter into with respect to its father and its mother or to a more diffuse world of kin) and thus a variety of major consequences such as repression, the division of the psychical apparatus into several systems which are relatively ignorant of one another, hence the permanent coexistence in human productions(such as films)of two irreducible logics, one of which is illogicaland opens permanently on to a multiplicity of overdetermination, etc To sum up, the influence of linguistics and of psychoanalysis may lead gradually, in combination, to a relatively autonomous science of the cinema(='semiology of the cinema), but the latter
THE INVESTIGATORS IMAGINARY 21 will deal simultaneously with facts which are superstructural and others which are not without for all that being specifically infr structural. In both these aspects its relation to truly infrastructu- ral studies(cinematic and general) will continue to hold It is on these three levels that the symbolic is social (hence it is entirely social). But, like the society which creates it and which it creates it too has a materiality, a kind of body it is in this almost physical state that it concerns semiology and that the semiologist desires It FREUDIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND OTHER PSYCHOANALYSES In the formula' occupying my mind at the moment of writing and that I am unwinding as I write, I feel another point of insist ence: 'Freudian psychoanalysis'(How can it contribute to the study of the cinematic signifier? ) Why this word or rather why these two words? Because as is well known, psychoanalysis is not entirely Freudian, far from it, and the vigorous return to freud imposed by lacan has its origin and its necessity in this very situ- ation. but this return has not affected the world psychoanalytic movement as a whole. Even independently of this influence, psy choanalysis and Freudianism are inter-related in a manner varying from region to region (in france psychoanalysis is as a whole more Freudian than it is in the USA, etc. ) so anyone claiming to make any use of psychoanalysis, as i do at this moment for the cinema, is necessarily called on to say what psy- choanalysis he is talking about there are plenty of examples of psychoanalytic' practices, and more or less explicit accompany ing theories, in which all that is vital in Freud's discovery, every thing that makes it(should make it)an irreversible achievement a decisive moment in knowledge, is smoothed out, pared down, recuperated'as a new variant of ethical psychology or medical psychiatry(humanism and medicine: two great evasions of Freu dianism). The most striking example(but far from the only one is that provided by certain 'American-style,therapeutic doc- trines. solidly installed more or less everywhere which are in large part techniques for the standardisation or banalisation of character, for avoidance of conflict at any price. What I shall call psychoanalysis will be the tradition of Freud
22 THE IMAGINARY SIGNIFIER and its still continuing developments, with original extensions such as those that revolve around the contributions of melanie Klein in England and Jacques Lacan in France Our distance in time from Freud's work enables us without too much difficulty or arbitrariness to distinguish even within it for t is not only immense by virtue of its quality, certain fairly indi- vidualised 'sectors'which are unequal in their intrinsic interest (at least in the sense that some are more obsolete than others and also unequal -and it is this that is of importance for me-in the contribution they can make outside their original field (the study of the cinema is basically one of the branches of what Freud an Id psychoanalysts sometimes call applied psychoanalysis which is a curious term because here, as in linguistics, nothing is ever applied, or if it is, so much the worse; it is a question of some thing else: certain phenomena that psychoanalysis has illumina- ted or can illuminate occur in the cinema, they play a real part there). To return to the various writings of freud i shall(some what hastily) distinguish six main groups 1. His metapsychological and theoretical works, from The In terpretation of d reams to inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety via the Papers on Metapsychology, including the ' major articles'such as On Narcissism: an Introduction,, Beyond the Pleasure principle, The ego and the ld, The Economic Problem of masochism A Child is Being Beaten", Negation,,Fetishism, etc 2. The more strictly clinical works: the five Case Studies and also the Studies on Hysteria(with Breuer), articles such as 'On the Beginning of Treatment, etc. 3. Works of popularisation: Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and various others (New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, On Dreams, a ' version of The interpretation of Dreams, etc.) 4. Studies of art and literature: Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's 'Gradiva, The moses of michelangelo, leonardo da vinci and a Memory of his Childhood, etc 5. Studies with an anthropological or socio-historical aim such as Totem and Taboo, Civilization and its Discontents, group Psychol y and the Analysis of the ego, etc 6. There is a last group, less clearly outlined than the others and
THE INVESTIGATOR S IMAGINARY 23 perhaps half-way between the fourth and fifth, which would include e. g. The Psychopathology of Everyday life and okes and their Relation to the unconscious; in other words, investigations which focus especially on the psychology of the preconscious and whose object is cultural but not strictly speaking aesthetic unlike those in the fourth category), and social but not strict ly speaking historical or anthropological (unlike those in the fifth category) Having thus arranged the books in several piles, what am I going to do with them? Some of them pose no special problems. For example, the didactic pile: it retains precisely its didactic in- terest, but for the same reason it is inadequate Or the ' clinical pile: by definition, neither directly nor on every page could we expect it to concern the analysis of cultural productions such as the cinema, but it is clear that it does concern it nonetheless through the great wealth of very varied insights it contains, and also because without itit is not really possible to understand the books of theory. Or the sixth group of works, on parapraxes verbal slips, humour, the comic: they will be especialy useful to us in the study of the corresponding cinematic phenomena, the comic, the burlesque, the gag, etc (see for instance the contribu- tions of Daniel Percheron and Jean- Paul Simon) The situation is more unexpected, on the other hand, though it has often been signalled in the conversations of specialists and no doubt also in written form when we turn to the works Freud saw as plainly sociological or ethnological, such as Totem and Taboo Their very object might seem to make such studies more import- ant to our semiological perspective, at any rate more pertinent to my present purposes, than the works of pure' metapsychology However, ethnologists often say that the opposite is the case(and I think so too); even if Freud's general theory is one of the great permanent inspirations of their labours, the specifically ethno- logical works are those least useful to them. basically this is not all that surprising: Freud's discovery in its breadth is of concern to virtually all fields of knowledge but only if it is suitably articu lated with the data and exigencies peculiar to each of them, and notably to those whose object is directly social; nothing guarantees that the 'discoverer'(the father), just because he is
24 THE IMAGINARY SIGNIFIER the discoverer should be best placed to carry out this readjust ment in domains of which he sometimes had no fundamental knowledge.(I have noticed the same thing where the linguistic import of freud's work is concerned it is potentially very con siderable, and Jacques Lacan has brought this out very force- fully but it is not to be found or only very rarely, in Freuds explicit allusions to linguistic facts; these passages are sometimes a disappointment for the linguist. It is well known that the phy logenetic hypothesis' which forms the background to Totem and ( the primal horde, the real murder of the father in the remote past, etc. )is not acceptable to today's anthropologists. It is obviously difficult to decide quite what status Freud himself at- tributed to it, for the precise extent of Freud's'realism', here as in other cases(premature seductions of future hysterics, etc. )is always a problem: hypothesis of a true prehistory or mythical parable to be understood in a symbolic sense? However, there can be no doubt that in many passages Freud opted at least in part for the first(realist)interpretation, and it has been Lacan's work to 'transfer'into the register of the second(which anthro- pologists are more prepared to accept)the whole of psychoanaly- tic thought about castration, the murder of the father, the Oedipus complex and the law. More generally, it seems to me that the weakness of Freud's sociological efforts lies, in the last analysis, in a certain misrecognition, easily explicable given his own objective situation of the intrinsic importance of socio- economic factors and of the irreducibility of their specific mecha nisms. It is at this weak point that the psychologism'to be found in Freud (but not in his central discoveries and for which he has been justly criticised bursts through The situation is rather similar, although in fact a bit more muddled. when one considers Freud' s aesthetic studies. Some times one feels a need in them for less biography and more psy- choanalysis; at others for less 'psychoanalyticalness'in the interests precisely of a more psychoanalytic illumination; also for a greater concern for the specificities of each art and the auton omy of the signifier, problems which were clearly by no means central to Freud,s thought. One is tempted to exclaim that the general works contained in germ the possibility of finer ' applica tions' and above all of ones centred more on the text: this is true and besides it is in this sense that attempts are being made today to deploy the potentialities of the analytical tool. But we should