Figures of Resistance

Essays in Feminist Theory

Teresa de Lauretis, Patricia White, Patricia White

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780252090967
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

The changing face of feminist discourse as reflected by the career of one of its preeminent scholars

Figures of Resistance brings together the unpublished lectures and little-seen essays of internationally renowned theorist Teresa de Lauretis, spanning over twenty years of her finest work. Thirty years after the height of feminist theory, this collection invites us to reflect on the history of feminism and take a hard look at where it stands today. Selected essays include "Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation, " "The Lure of the Mannish Lesbian, " "Eccentric Subjects, " "Habit Changes, " "The Intractability of Desire, " and the unpublished article "Figures of Resistance." An introduction from feminist film scholar Patricia White provides an overview of the development of de Lauretis's thought and of feminist theory over past decades.

I

Representations

BORN IN FLAMES (LIZZIE BORDEN, 1983, USA)

Chapter 1

Rethinking Women’s Cinema

When Silvia Bovenschen in 1976 posed the question “Is there a feminine aesthetic?” the only answer she could give was, yes and no: “Certainly there is, if one is talking about aesthetic awareness and modes of sensory perception. Certainly not, if one is talking about an unusual variant of artistic production or about a painstakingly constructed theory of art.”¹ If this contradiction seems familiar to anyone even vaguely acquainted with the development of feminist thought over the past fifteen years, it is because it echoes a contradiction specific to, and perhaps even constitutive of, the women’s movement itself: a twofold pressure, a simultaneous pull in opposite directions, a tension toward the positivity of politics, or affirmative action in behalf of women as social subjects, on one front, and the negativity inherent in the radical critique of patriarchal, bourgeois culture, on the other. It is also the contradiction of women in language, as we attempt to speak as subjects of discourses which negate or objectify us through their representations. As Bovenschen put it, “We are in a terrible bind. How do we speak? In what categories do we think? Is even logic a bit of virile trickery? . . . Are our desires and notions of happiness so far removed from cultural traditions and models?” (119).

Not surprisingly, therefore, a similar contradiction was also central to the debate on women’s cinema, its politics and its language, as it was articulated within Anglo-American film theory in the early 1970s in relation to feminist politics and the women’s movement, on the one hand, and to artistic avant-garde practices and women’s filmmaking, on the other. There, too, the accounts of feminist film culture produced in the mid- to late seventies tended to emphasize a dichotomy between two concerns of the women’s movement and two types of film work that seemed to be at odds with each other: one called for immediate documentation for purposes of political activism, consciousness raising, self-expression, or the search for “positive images” of woman; the other insisted on rigorous, formal work on the medium—or, better, the cinematic apparatus, understood as a social technology—in order to analyze and disengage the ideological codes embedded in representation.

Thus, as Bovenschen deplores the “opposition between feminist demands and artistic production” (131), the tug of war in which women artists were caught between the movement’s demands that women’s art portray women’s activities, document demonstrations, etc., and the formal demands of “artistic activity and its concrete work with material and media”; so does Laura Mulvey set out two successive moments of feminist film culture. First, she states, there was a period marked by the effort to change the content of cinematic representation (to present realistic images of women, to record women talking about their real-life experiences), a period “characterized by a mixture of consciousness-raising and propaganda.”² It was followed by a second moment, in which the concern with the language of representation as such became predominant, and the “fascination with the cinematic process” led filmmakers and critics to the “use of and interest in the aesthetic principles and terms of reference provided by the avant-garde tradition” (7).

In this latter period, the common interest of both avant-garde cinema and feminism in the politics of images, or the political dimension of aesthetic expression, made them turn to the theoretical debates on language and imaging that were going on outside of cinema, in semiotics, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and the theory of ideology. Thus, it was argued that, in order to counter the aesthetic of realism, which was hopelessly compromised with bourgeois ideology, as well as Hollywood cinema, avant-garde and feminist filmmakers must take an oppositional stance against narrative “illusionism” and in favor of formalism. The assumption was that “foregrounding the process itself, privileging the signifier, necessarily disrupts aesthetic unity and forces the spectator’s attention on the means of production of meaning” (7).

While Bovenschen and Mulvey would not relinquish the political commitment of the movement and the need to construct other representations of woman, the way in which they posed the question of expression (a “feminine aesthetic,” a “new language of desire”) was couched in the terms of a traditional notion of art, specifically the one propounded by modernist aesthetics. Bovenschen’s insight that what is being expressed in the decoration of the household and the body, or in letters and other private forms of writing, is in fact women’s aesthetic needs and impulses, is a crucial one. But the importance of that insight is undercut by the very terms that define it: the “pre-aesthetic realms.” After quoting a passage from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Bovenschen comments:

Here the ambivalence once again: on the one hand we see aesthetic activity deformed, atrophied, but on the other we find, even within this restricted scope, socially creative impulses which, however, have no outlet for aesthetic development, no opportunities for growth. . . . [These activities] remained bound to everyday life, feeble attempts to make this sphere more aesthetically pleasing. But the price for this was narrowmindedness. The object could never leave the realm in which it came into being, it remained tied to the household, it could never break loose and initiate communication. (132–33)

Just as Plath laments that Mrs. Willard’s beautiful home-braided rug is not hung on the wall but put to the use for which it was made, and thus quickly spoiled of its beauty, so would Bovenschen have “the object” of artistic creation leave its context of production and use value in order to enter the “artistic realm” and so to “initiate communication”; that is to say, to enter the museum, the art gallery, the market. In other words, art is what is enjoyed publicly rather than privately, has an exchange value rather than a use value, and that value is conferred by socially established aesthetic canons.

Mulvey, too, in proposing the destruction of narrative and visual pleasure as the foremost objective of women’s cinema, hails an established tradition, albeit a radical one: the historic left avant-garde tradition that goes back to Eisenstein and Vertov (if not Méliès) and through Brecht reaches its peak of influence in Godard, and on the other side of the Atlantic, the tradition of American avant-garde cinema.

The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions (already undertaken by radical filmmakers) is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment.³

But much as Mulvey and other avant-garde filmmakers insisted that women’s cinema ought to avoid a politics of emotions and seek to problematize the female spectator’s identification with the on-screen image of woman, the response to her theoretical writings, like the reception of her films (codirected with Peter Wollen), showed no consensus. Feminist critics, spectators, and filmmakers remained doubtful. For example, Ruby Rich:

According to Mulvey, the woman is not visible in the audience, which is perceived as male; according to Johnston, the woman is not visible on the screen. . . . How does one formulate an understanding of a structure that insists on our absence even in the face of our presence? What is there in a film with which a woman viewer identifies? How can the contradictions be used as a critique? And how do all these factors influence what one makes as a woman filmmaker, or specifically as a feminist filmmaker?⁴

The questions of identification, self-definition, the modes or the very possibility of envisaging oneself as subject—which the male avant-garde artists and theorists have also been asking, on their part, for almost one hundred years, even as they work to subvert the dominant representations or to challenge their hegemony—are fundamental questions for feminism. If identification is “not simply one psychical mechanism among others, but the operation itself whereby the human subject is constituted,” as Laplanche and Pontalis describe it, then it must be all the more important, theoretically and politically, for women who have never before represented ourselves as subjects, and whose images and subjectivities—until very recently, if at all—have not been ours to shape, to portray, or to create.⁵

There is indeed reason to question the theoretical paradigm of a subject-object dialectic, whether Hegelian or Lacanian, that subtends both the aesthetic and the scientific discourses of Western culture; for what that paradigm contains, what those discourses rest on, is the unacknowledged assumption of sexual difference: that the human subject, Man, is the male. As in the originary distinction of classical myth reaching us through the Platonic tradition, human creation and all that is human—mind, spirit, history, language, art, or symbolic capacity—is defined in contradistinction to formless chaos, phusis or nature, to something that is female, matrix and matter; and on this primary binary opposition, all the others are modeled. As Lea Melandri states,

Idealism, the oppositions of mind to body, of rationality to matter, originate in a twofold concealment: of the woman’s body and of labor power. Chronologically, however, even prior to the commodity and the labor power that has produced it, the matter which was negated in its concreteness and particularity, in its “relative plural form,” is the woman’s body. Woman enters history having already lost concreteness and singularity: she is the economic machine that reproduces the human species, and she is the Mother, an equivalent more universal than money, the most abstract measure ever invented by patriarchal ideology.⁶

That this proposition remains true when tested on the aesthetic of modernism or the major trends in avant-garde cinema from visionary to structural-materialist film, on the films of Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, or Jean-Luc Godard, but is not true of the films of Yvonne Rainer, Valie Export, Chantal Akerman, or Marguerite Duras, for example; that it remains valid for the films of Fassbinder but not those of Ottinger, the films of Pasolini and Bertolucci but not Cavani’s, and so on, suggests to me that it is perhaps time to shift the terms of the question altogether.

To ask of these women’s films: What formal, stylistic, or thematic markers point to a female presence behind the camera? and hence to generalize and universalize, to say: This is the look and sound of women’s cinema, this is its language—finally only means complying, accepting a certain definition of art, cinema, and culture, and obligingly showing how women can and do “contribute,” pay their tribute, to “society.” Put another way, to ask whether there is a feminine or female aesthetic, or a specific language of women’s cinema, is to remain caught in the master’s house and there, as Audre Lorde’s suggestive metaphor warns us, to legitimate the hidden agendas of a culture we badly need to change. Cosmetic changes, she is telling us, won’t be enough for the majority of women—women of color, black women, and white women as well; or, in her own words, “assimilation within a solely western-european herstory is not acceptable.”⁷

It is time we listened. Which is not to say that we should dispense with rigorous analysis and experimentation on the formal processes of meaning production, including the production of narrative, visual pleasure, and subject positions, but rather that feminist theory should now engage precisely in the redefinition of aesthetic and formal knowledges, much as women’s cinema has been engaged in the transformation of vision.

Take Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975), a film about the routine daily activities of a Belgian middle-class and middle-aged housewife, and a film where the pre-aesthetic is already fully aesthetic. That is not so, however, because of the beauty of its images, the balanced composition of its frames, the absence of the reverse shot, or the perfectly calculated editing of its still-camera shots into a continuous, logical, and obsessive narrative space; it is so because it is a woman’s actions, gestures, body, and look that define the space of our vision, the temporality and rhythms of perception, the horizon of meaning available to the spectator. So that narrative suspense is not built on the expectation of a “significant event,” a socially momentous act (which actually occurs, though unexpectedly and almost incidentally, one feels, toward the end of the film), but is produced by the tiny slips in Jeanne’s routine, the small forgettings, the hesitations between real-time gestures as common and “insignificant” as peeling potatoes, washing dishes, or making coffee—and then not drinking it. What the film constructs—formally and artfully, to be sure—is a picture of female experience, of duration, perception, events, relationships, and silences, which feels immediately and unquestionably true. And in this sense the “pre-aesthetic” is aesthetic rather than aestheticized, as it is in films such as Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), or Antonioni’s Eclipse (1962). To say the same thing in another way, Akerman’s film addresses the spectator as female.

The effort, on the part of the filmmaker, to render a presence in the feeling of a gesture, to convey the sense of an experience that is subjective yet socially coded (and therefore recognizable), and to do so formally, working through her conceptual (one could say, theoretical) knowledge of film form, is averred by Chantal Akerman in an interview on the making of Jeanne Dielman:

I do think it’s a feminist film because I give space to things which were never, almost never, shown in that way, like the daily gestures of a woman. They are the lowest in the hierarchy of film images. . . . But more than the content, it’s because of the style. If you choose to show a woman’s gestures so precisely, it’s because you love them. In some way you recognize those gestures that have always been denied and ignored. I think that the real problem with women’s films usually has nothing to do with the content. It’s that hardly any women really have confidence enough to carry through on their feelings. Instead the content is the most simple and obvious thing. They deal with that and forget to look for formal ways to express what they are and what they want, their own rhythms, their own way of looking at things. A lot of women have unconscious contempt for their feelings. But I don’t think I do. I have enough confidence in myself. So that’s the other reason why I think it’s a feminist film—not just what it says but what is shown and how it’s shown.⁸

This lucid statement of poetics resonates with my own response as a viewer and gives me something of an explanation as to why I recognize in those unusual film images, in those movements, those silences, and those looks, the ways of an experience all but unrepresented, previously unseen in film, though lucidly and unmistakably apprehended here. And so the statement cannot be dismissed with commonplaces such as authorial intention or intentional fallacy. As another critic and spectator points out, there are “two logics” at work in this film, “two modes of ...