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ALICE DOESN't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema

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ALICE DOESN't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema ALICE DOESN'T LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY Editors: Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe Published VISION AND PAINTING: The Logic of the Gaze Norman Bryson ALICE DOESN'T: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema Teresa de Lauretis CONDITIONS OF MUSIC Alan Durant FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: The Daughter's Seduction Jane Gallop ON LAW AND IDEOLOGY Paul Hirst JAMES JOYCE AND THE REVOLUTION OF THE WORD Colin MacCabe THE TALKING CURE: Essays in Psychoanalysis and Language Colin MacCabe (editor) PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA: The Imaginary Signifier Christian Metz LANGUAGE, SEMANTICS AND IDEOLOGY Michel Pecheux LANGUAGE, SEXUALITY AND IDEOLOGY IN EZRA POUND'S CANTOS Jean-Michel Rabate THE CASE OF PETER PAN OR THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF CHILDREN'S FICTION Jacqueline Rose THE MAKING OF THE READER: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry David Tr otter Forthcoming STATE OF NATURE: Ethnography and Origins Beverley Brown and] udith Ennew TO REPRESENT WOMAN? The Representation ofSexual Differencesin the Visual Media Elizabeth Cowie UNDERSTANDING BECKETT PeterGidal THREE ESSAYS ON SUBJECTIVITY Stephen Heath EPOS: Word, Narrative and the Iliad Michael Lynn-George THE GENEALOGY OF MORAL FORMS: Foucault,Nietzsche, Donzelot JeffreyMinson FEMINISMS: A Conceptual History Denise Riley POLITICAL CRITICISM Michael Ryan ALICE DOESN�T FEMINISM� SEMIO TICS� CINEMA Teresa de Lauretis M MACMILLAN Chapters 3 and 4 are revised versions of articles published originally in Screen 22, no. 3 (1981) and Discourse, no. 5 (1983). Portions of chapters I and 2 have appeared in somewhat different formin Yale Italian Studies, no. 2 (1980) and Cine-Tracts, no.ll (1980). The title and a few paragraphs of chapter I were also used for the concluding essay of Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, eds., The Cinematic Apparatus (Macmillan, 1980). ©Teresa de Lauretis 1984 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission. First published in the USA by Indiana University Press 1984 First published in the UK 1984 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in Auckland, Delhi, Dublin, Gaborone, Hamburg, Harare, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Kuala Lumpur, Lagos, Man;:;ini, Melbourne, Mexico Ciry,Nairobi, New York, Singapore, Tokyo British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data De Lauretis, Teresa Alice doesn't I. Women in moving-pictures I. Title 791.43'09'09352042 PN1995.9.W6 ISBN 978-0-333-38288-2 ISBN 978-1-349-17495-9 (eBook) DOl 10.1007/978-1-349-17495-9 f�ONTENTS PREFACE Vll ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IX Introduction 1 l Through the Looking-Glass 12 i) - Imaging 37 :J Snow on the Oedipal Stage 70 4 Now and Now here 84 vi I Contents Desire in Narrative 103 6 Semiotics and Experience 158 NOTES 187 INDEX 216 PREFACE The essays collected in this book have been conceived and written over the past four years. On or very near my writing desk, in whatever city I happened to be during that time, there was always this sign: illite doesn'tf I'd picked it up at a demonstration or a meeting-! don't remember exactly-and have kept it with me ever since. It seems appropriate to name the book after it, for not only is the book intended in the same sense as the placard, but both are signs of the same struggle, both are texts of the women's movement. The images or references suggested by the name "Alice" are many and will probably vary with each reader. Whether you think of Alice in Wonderland or Radio Alice in Bologna; of Alice B. Toklas, who "wrote" an autobiography as well as other things; or of Alice James, who produced an illness while her brothers did the writing; of Alice Sheldon, who writes science fiction, but with a male pseudonym; or of any other Alice, is entirely up to you, reader. For me it is important to acknowledge, in this title, the unqualified opposition of feminism to existing social relations, its re­ fu sal of given definitions and cultural values; and at the same time to affirm the political and personal ties of shared experience that join women in the movement and are the condition of fe minist work, theory and practice. March 1983 Vll ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My first thanks go to those women from and with whom I have learned what feminist practice is, what feminist theory should be, and, more rarely but far more delightfully, what the two can be together. I thank Tania Modleski, Catherine McClenahan, and Mary Russo for reading portions of the manuscript in draft form and rejoicing in my small victories. I thank all those who offered me their knowledges and skills, friendship or love during the writing of the essays, the hard times, and the difficulties; in particular, Elizabeth Elkins, Andreas Huyssen, Stephanie Jed, Patricia Mellencamp, Franco Mollia, Sondra O'Neale, Kaja Silverman, Michael Silverman, William Tay, Patrizia Violi. And Paul Loeffler. I thank the colleagues who welcomed me as Visiting Professor in the Literature Department of the University of California, San Diego, where I began to put the book together; and all my students, past and present, for the encouragement they gave by their seldom less than excited response. Last but not least I thank the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Center for Twentieth Century Studies, its Director, Kathleen Wood­ ward, its staff, Jean Lile and Carol Tennessen, for their magnificent hospitality during my tenure as a Fellow of the Center, where over a third of this book was w1itten; and Ginny Schauble for her patience and virtuosity in typing it. I also want to acknowledge a special debt of gratitude to Dean William Halloran and former Associate Dean G. Micheal Riley of the College of Letters and Science for their continu­ ous and generous support of my work. IX AI�ICE DOESN'T Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema: An Introduction IN THE HEART OF LOOKING-GLASS COUNTRY, between her fifth and sixth moves across the chessboard, Alice comes to the center of the labyrinth of language. This is also the center of her journey, of her dream, and of the game in which she as a white pawn plays and wins in eleven moves. On the wall of the labyrinth sits Humpty Dumpty, poised over the abyss of meaning; he thinks himself the master of language. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master­ that's all."' Like all masters, Humpty Dumpty is arrogant and very rude to Alice, tells her she's indistinguishable from all the others, and darkly inti­ mates that she "might have left off at seven" (died or, more likely, stopped growing before puberty and adult womanhood). Yet she feels obliged to be polite, as she has been taught, and tries to make conversation with no idea that her simple questions are taken by him as riddles: riddles, however, to which he has all the answers, for precisely conversation, speech and language, is the terrain in which his mastery is exercised. ("It wasn't at all like conversation, she thought, as he never said anything to her; in fact, his last remark was evidently addressed to a tree.") But of the two, it is Alice who wins in the long run because she knows that language, as Bakhtin put it, is "populated-{)ver­ populated-with the intentions of others"; and thus she knows (''I'm 2 I ALICE DOESN'T certain of it, as if his name were written all over his face!") that his crash is imminent and irreparable.2 The Looking-Glass world which the brave and sensible Alice enters, refusing to be caught up in her own reflectionon the mantelpiece, is not a place of symmetrical rever­ sal, of anti-matter, or a mirror-image inversion of the one she comes from. It is the world of discourse and of asymmetry, whose arbitrary rules work to displace the subject, Alice, from any possibility of natu­ ralistic identification. Although in the transit Alice is divested of many a smug, self-righteous certainty, still she keeps on asking questions and sensibly wanting to know, who "dreamed it all?" However inex­ tricably caught up she and the Red King may be in each other's dream and discursive universe, they are not one and the same; and her question is asked, as it should be, not metaphysically but practically. If I have chosen this text to introduce a series of considerations on feminism, semiotics, and cinema, it is in part because it prevents an easy or natural identification. Lewis Carroll's Alice is hardly a feminist heroine; and the well-known biographical fact of the author's erotic interest in the seven-year old girl for whom the book was written would suffice to discourage a sentimental reading of the character. Far from proposing this Alice (or any other) as yet another "image" of woman or as the symbol of a struggle too real and too diversifiedto be even minimally "represented" in a single text, character, or person, I like to think of her tale as a parable suggesting-merely suggesting­ the situation, the predicament, and the adventure of critical femin­ ism. Like Alice with her ball of worsted, an unheroic Ariadne's thread which the kitten keeps unraveling, feminism has dared the labyrinth of language, has dreamed and been dreamed by the Red King, has met its Humpty Dumpty and its benevolent White Knight.3 We too have been told we are all alike and should "have left off at seven"; we too have been polite, as we were taught, and have paid compliments and tried to make conversation only to be told we "have no more sense than a baby"; we too have been puzzled to see our simplest questions taken as riddles, and acquiesced to the answers given, "not wishing to begin an argument." We also know that language, of which we have no mastery, for it is indeed populated with the intentions of others, is finally much more thana game.
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