The Difficulty of Difference

Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference and Film Theory

D. N. Rodowick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317928546
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book argues that serious misreadings of Freud and Lacan on sexual difference have characterized prevailing models of psychoanalytic film criticism. In critiquing theories of identification and female spectatorship, the author maintains that early film theorists and feminist critics are equally guilty of imposing a binary conception of sexual difference on Freud's thought. By embracing such a rigid definition of male/female difference, they fail to understand the fundamentally complex and fluid process of sexual identification as it is articulated in Freud's writing, constructed in film texts, and negotiated by spectators.

The book turns to Freud's work on fantasy to develop an alternative model for interpreting sexuality in the visual and narrative arts, one that emphasizes a 'politics of critical reading' over accepted theories of ideological identification. Originally published in 1991, its strategic focus on psychoanalysis itself as an object of historical and critical inquiry, and not simply as a reading method is the unique quality of this book.

Chapter 1
The Difficulty of Difference

Binary Machines

In Dialogues, a book cowritten with Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet comments on the function of “the binary machine.”¹ In these interesting pages she resumes an argument begun by Deleuze concerning the relation of philosophy 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 century’s contribution to Enlightenment philosophy. As philosophy becomes more specialized and departmentalized, its role is to contribute in a “detached” way to the refinement of procedures of thought. Increasingly, the “image” of thought invoked, along with criteria for its perfectibility, is associated 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 motivated by a different emphasis. Philosophy is confronted as an “image of thought” that in its historical manifestations all too perfectly prevents people from thinking. And not only because “thought” is left to specialists, but also because the definitions of thought produced by specialists accord perfectly with the State’s 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 intricately tied to the mechanics of power.

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 self-identical “ideas” that brook no contradiction or invasion from the outside. Hegel’s dialectic is the Utopia of this technology, dividing and reconciling into ever higher unities and hierarchies until spirit and subject became one in an image of universal rationality. Nowadays binary thought—which has reproduced itself in the discourses of law, economy, medicine, science, and politics no less than epistemology and aesthetics—is content with cellular division and horizontal replication. According to Parnet,

Dualisms no longer relate to unities, but to successive choices: are you white or black, man or woman, rich or poor, etc.? Do you take the left half or the right half? There is always a binary machine which governs the distribution of roles and which means that all the answers must go through preformed questions, since the questions are already worked out on the basis of the answer assumed to be probable according to the dominant meanings. Thus a grille is constituted such that everything which does not pass through the grille cannot be materially understood ….

[The] binary machine is an important component of apparatuses of power. So many dichotomies will be established that there will be enough for everyone to be pinned to the wall, sunk in a hole. Even the divergences of deviancy will be measured according to the degree of binary choice; you are neither white nor black, Arab then? Or half-breed? You are neither man nor woman, transvestite then? (D 19–21)

The binary machine always pretends to totality and universality. And to 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 picture of language developed in structural linguistics differs so much from the image of thought in the Hegelian dialectic.² The smallest possible unities—phonemic—are integrated into ever higher levels of unity—morphemic, syntactic, syntagmatic, narratological—that are simultaneously equivalent to “higher” levels of thought. And when grafted on to structural anthropology, these branching divisions and hierarchies become equivalent to the “meaningful” organization of human collectivities. This is one way of understanding the feminist critique of Lévi-Strauss, for example, where the binary division and hierarchy of the sexes informs the intelligibility of language, labor, and social life. But Parnet’s point is that granting linguistics’ recognition and exacting description of the dualities that work language and society is to leave untouched its own language—its patterns of logic, rhetoric, and argumentation—which, tautologically, only produce the legibility and intelligibility of that which is already structured by binary division. A similar tautological situation is no less evident in the ways that contemporary film theory has appropriated the logic of structural semiology and psychoanalysis for the formal analysis of films and the spectatorial relations they imply.

If language and linguistics so perfectly replicate one another, the latter reproducing the “thought” of language as the limit of what language can render “thinkable,” what alternatives can be imagined? Parnet and Deleuze warn that it is futile to propose a thought “outside” of language. (How many theories of avant-garde literature and art have been wrecked on this utopian island?) Nor can it be said that language deforms identities, concepts, or realities that can be returned to their proper states. “We must pass through [passer par] dualisms,” writes Parnet, “because they are in language, it’s not a question of getting rid of them, but we must fight against language, invent stammering … to trace a vocal or written line which will make language flow between these dualisms, and which will define a minority use of language” (D 34). Rather, it is a matter of reconsidering what “language” is or could be, of understanding what it leaves aside, and of remembering that totality is a pretension that displaces recognition of the multiplicities it covers over. It is a question above all of reading differently.

The question of reading can now be rephrased: how to understand otherwise these schemata of language and thought? How can one recover the “individuations without ‘subject’” that fall between the terms of binary division and are de-territorialized by the law of the excluded middle? How can one apprehend the minority languages and the multiple collectivities that are displaced and overcome by the universalizing unity of binary thought? For Parnet, the Achilles’ heel of this logic is the term that not only constitutes the middle, but also guarantees the contiguity and multiplication of binary modules:

And even if there are only two terms, there is an AND between the two, which is neither the one nor the other, nor the one which becomes the other, but which constitutes the multiplicity. This is why it is always possible to undo dualisms from the inside, by tracing the line of flight which passes between the two terms or the two sets, the narrow stream which belongs neither to the one nor to the other, but draws both into a non-parallel evolution, into a heterochronous becoming. At least this does not belong to the dialectic. (D 34–35)

I have left to one side the principal targets of Parnet and Deleuze’s criticisms: structural linguistics, psychoanalysis, and more profoundly, the alliance between them represented by the work of Jacques Lacan. There is much to be said for this critique of psychoanalysis which is more complex and compelling in the Anti-Oedipus than it is in the pages of Dialogues. The questions that interest me, however, are on one hand how contemporary film theory has read and incorporated psychoanalysis, and on the other, to what degree the logic of psychoanalysis, above all the work of Freud, is inflected by the binary machine? In The Crisis of Political Modernism, I argued that the most substantial accomplishment of contemporary film theory was its formulation of new practices of reading that profoundly transformed our notions of filmic and literary texts.³ But blocked by a formal conception of text, spectator, and the relation between them, Anglo-American film theory has been unable to comprehend historically or theoretically the implications of these reading practices. Despite the gains they have enabled, neither semiology, psychoanalysis, nor feminist theory have entirely eluded the logic of the binary machine in their theoretical language and in their formal conceptualization of film text and film spectators.

The consequences of this situation must be addressed. What I question now is the way that Freud has been mobilized in film theory to address questions of textual analysis, on one hand, and sexual difference in spectatorship on the other. Do Freud’s writings implicitly propose a model of reading that might erode the version of language and power formulated by the binary machine? Does the work of Freud enable a different way of understanding sexual difference? Rather than following the “law” of unity and identity, is Freud among the first to understand the possibilities of “individuations without ‘subject’” and a minority language of sexuality? Is there in Freud a theory of reading that renders legible otherwise deterritorialzed languages, identities, and meanings?

Pleasure and its Discontents

“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.” This phrase from Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is undoubtedly and deservedly one of the most well known in contemporary film theory.⁴ I begin with Mulvey’s essay not because I disagree with what it “says,” but to open up tensions in Mulvey’s own reading of Freud, and, more importantly, in how Mulvey’s work has been read and appropriated. Without doubt, it is and will remain one of the most important essays in contemporary film theory. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” has indeed been successful in its original, polemical objective: to place questions of sexual difference at the center of 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 often been treated as axiomatic. What is at stake is how film theory has read Freud in order to understand the construction of “femininity” by audiovisual media and to reconceptualize the value of psychoanalysis for a theory of narration and spectatorship.

Mulvey’s early argument, which is still the subject of an ongoing debate in her own work, remains the best and most brilliant exposition of the reading of Freud produced by Anglo-American film theory in the seventies.⁵ Mulvey’s project and the many essays inspired by it are organized around the question of identification. The first task of this project is to target and examine the codes and mechanisms through which the classical cinema has traditionally exploited sexual difference as a function of its narrative and representational forms. The second task is to ascertain the affects these mechanisms might inspire in the spectatorial experience of sexed individuals as well as their role within the more general ideological machinery of patriarchal culture. The analysis of narrative forms, and the forms of spectatorship implied by them, are thus intimately related. Similarly, the analysis and criticism of patriarchal ideology by film theory has had a historic impact on these questions.

One of the most striking aspects of Mulvey’s argument is the association of a fundamental negativity with the figuration of femininity characteristic of the classic, Hollywood cinema. The great strength of Mulvey’s analysis is that it is not a simple condemnation of how women are represented on the screen. Instead she identifies a powerful contradiction in the heart of the structure of image and narrative in Hollywood films. In order to begin to define these issues more precisely I have isolated a rather long citation from Mulvey’s essay. My motive is neither to completely sustain nor subvert Mulvey’s argument, but rather to illuminate a series of assumptions and a system of oppositions that organize her discussion of sexual difference and mechanisms of visual pleasure in film. In a section entitled “Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look,” Mulvey makes the following argument:

But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence over-valuation, the cult of the female star). This second avenue, fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The first avenue, voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness. This sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory and defeat, all occurring in linear time with a beginning and an end. Fetishistic scopophilia, on the other hand, can exist outside linear time as the erotic instinct is focused on the look alone. (VP 13–14)

Unlike Raymond Bellour, whose work has many affinities with Mulvey’s, Mulvey is less concerned with problems of textual analysis than with the definition of structures of identification and the mechanisms of pleasure or unpleasure that accompany them. I am now using the term identification in its strictly psychoanalytic sense: “Psychological process whereby the subject assimilates an aspect, property or attribute of the other and is transformed, 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.”⁶ Mulvey herself does not develop the argument in precisely these terms. Her argument does presume, however, a potentially transformative relation between the object (the narrative film and the mechanisms of visual pleasure characterizing it) and the spectatorial subject such that the libidinal economy of the latter is organized and sustained by the signifying economy of the former. In fact all theories of the subject invoked by psychoanalytic film criticism cast signifying processes in film as the “other” with the power to transform or sustain categories of subjectivity.

For Mulvey these subject/object relations are a product of the point of view mechanisms of Hollywood cinema. This idea is emphasized by the division of gender and labor in the title of this section: “Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look.” In the interlacing of diegetic looks between the characters, the look of the camera, and that of the spectator, an economy is preserved where set subject-positions are continually reconfirmed and reproduced by avoiding avenues of identification leading to unpleasure and by seeking out avenues leading to pleasure. That the analysis of sexual difference reveals an imbalance in the social system represented in films is of course important. But of greater significance is the suggestion that visual and narrative forms produce pleasure, that this pleasure is produced for someone, and that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Note on Abbreviations
• Preface
• Chapter 1 The Difficulty of Difference
• Chapter 2 The Return of the Exile
• Chapter 3 Reading Freud … Differently
• Chapter 4 Metamorphoses
• Chapter 5 The Difference of Reading
• Chapter 6 Analysis Interminable
• Notes
• Index