Select Bibliography

Select Bibliography The purpose of this bibliography is to indicate a relatively small number of books and articles in English to which the reader unfamiliar with the general orientations of the foregoing essays may refer. In the case of the very extensive writings of Freud and Marx I have indicated 'entry points' of most immediate proximity to the concerns of the essays in this book. Articles of interest published in the journals Screen and Screen Education (London) are too numer ous to list. Unless otherwise stated, the place of publication is London. ALTHUSSER, L., 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an investigation', in Lenin and Philosophy and other essays, New Left Books, 1971. BARTHES, R., Mythologies, Paladin, 1973. BARTHES, R., Elements of Semiology, Jonathan Cape, 1976. BARTHES,R., Image-Music-Text, Fontana, 1977. BENJAMIN, w., 'A Short History of Photography', Screen, vol. 13, no 1, Spring 1972. BENJAMIN, W., 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro duction', in Illuminations, Fontana, 1973. BOURDIEU, P., 'The Aristocracy of Culture' and 'The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods', Media, Culture and Society, vol. 2, no. 3, July 1980. BURGIN, V., 'Art, Common-Sense and Photography', Camerawork, 3,1976. BURGIN, V., 'Modernism in the work of Art', 20th Century Studies, 15-16, Canterbury, 1976. COWARD, R. and ELLIS, J., Language and Materialism, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977. 218 Select Bibliography ECO, u., A Theory of Semiotics, Indiana University Press, 1976. ERLICH, V., Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine, Mouton, The Hague, 1965. FOUCAULT, M.,'Las Meninas', in The Order of Things, Tavistock, 1970. FOUCAULT, M., 'What Is an Author?', in Language, Counter Memory, Practice, Blackwell, Oxford, 1977. FOUCAULT, M., 'The Eye of Power', in Power/Knowledge, Harves ter, Brighton, 1980. FREUD, S., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, Hogarth Press, 1953-74. A useful guide to the above is ROTHGEB, C. L., (ed.) Abstracts of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sig mund Freud, International Universities Press, New York, 1973. Major works from the Standard Edition are being reprinted in the Pelican Freud Library; see especially vol. 1, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1973; vol. 4, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1976 (particularly ch. 6); and vol. 7, On Sexuality, 1977 (particu larly 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality' and 'Fetishism'). For a superb guide to Freudian concepts, see Laplanche and Pontalis. For an intellectual biography of Freud, see Mannoni. HALL, S., 'The Social Eye of Picture Post', Working Papers in Cultural Studies, vol. 2, Birmingham University, Spring 1972. HIRST, P. Q., 'Althusser and the Theory of Ideology', Economy and Society, vol. 5, no. 4, November 1976. LAING, D., The Marxist Theory of Art, Harvester, Brighton, 1978. LAPLANCHE, 1. and PONTALIS, I.-B., The Language of Psycho- Analysis, Hogarth Press, 1973. MacCABE, C., Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics, Macmillan, 1980. McLELLAN,D., Marx, Fontana, 1975. MANNON!, 0., Freud: The Theory of the Unconscious, New Left Books, 1971. MARX, K. and ENGELS, F., Collected Works, vol. 5, Lawrence & Wishart, 1976. The most frequently quoted remarks of Marx and Engels on ideology come from ch. I, section 4, of The German Ideology, in this volume. MARX, K., Capital, vol. 1, Lawrence & Wishart, 1954. The later notion of 'fetishism', also important to a Marx-derived theory of ideology, is described in ch. I, section 4. (For brief general introductions to Marx's work, see McLellan and Singer.) Select Bibliography 219 MITCHELL, J., Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Penguin, Har mondsworth, 1975. MULVEY, L., 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, Autumn 1975. ROSENBLUM, B., Photographers at Work, Holmes & Meier, New York,1978. SEKULA, A., 'The Instrumental Image: Steichen at War', Artforum, vol. 14, no. 4, December 1975. SINGER, P., Marx, Oxford University Press, 1980. SOCIETY FOR EDUCATION IN FILM AND TELEVISION, Screen Reader 1: Cinema/Ideology/Politics, 1977. SPENCE, J., DENNETT, T. et al., Photography/Politics: One, Photo graphy Workshop, 1979. STURROCK, J. (ed.), Structuralism and Since, Oxford University Press, 1979. TAGG, J., 'Power and Photography', Screen Education, no. 36, Autumn 1980. WALTON, P. and DAVIS, H., Language, Image and the Media, Black- well, Oxford, 1981. WILLIAMS, R., Problems in Materialism and Culture, Verso, 1980. WILLIAMS, R., Culture, Fontana, 1981. WILLIAMSON, J., Decoding Advertisements, Marion Boyars, 1978. WOLLEN, P., 'The Two Avant-Gardes', Studio International, vol. 190, no. 978, November-December 1975. Notes and References Chapter 1: Walter Benjamin 1. Address delivered at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris, on 27 April 1934. 2. Benjamin himself (see Schriften, Frankfurt, 1955, vol. I, p. 384). 3. Benjamin makes a play on words here with Schreibender (one who writes), Beschreibender (one who describes) and Verschreibender (one who prescribes). (Translator's note.) 4. The following passage, later deleted, originally appeared in the manuscript in place of the next sentence: 'Or, in Trotsky's words: "When enlightened pacifists undertake to abolish War by means of rationalist arguments, they are simply ridiculous. When the armed masses start to take up the arguments of Reason against War, however, this signifies the end of War.'" 5. See Benjamin, 'Linke Melancholie' (Left Melancholy), on Erich Kastner's new book of poems, in Die Gesel/schaft, 8,1931, vol. I, pp. 182ff. In quoting from himself, Benjamin has altered the original text. Chapter 2: Umberto Eco [The following notes are by Peter Wollen; they accompanied the original publication of Eco's article in Cinemantics, 1, 1970.] 1. Eco insists that all signs, including images - i.e. not only verbal signs - are arbitrary and conventional and we therefore have to learn how to interpret them. They are cultural rather than natural. However, he con cedes that looking at a photograph of a zebra is closer in some respects to looking at an actual zebra than it is to hearing or reading the word 'zebra'. Nevertheless, Eco insists that what the semiologist must concentrate on is the differences between looking at and understanding the image as opposed to the object in the world of action. 2. Eco adopts a thoroughgoing binarism. He believes that the brain works like a digital computer, dissolving everything continuous into a series of discontinuous alternative choices. Perception works rather like a TV scanning mechanism. This brings up the problem of the delicacy of percep tion. In verbal language there is what Martinet calls a 'safety margin' Notes and References 221 between the different phonemes: 'p' stays quite separate from 'b' and the intelligibility of language would begin to collapse if there were an indefinite number of slurred half-way sounds. This is not true about visual images, as anybody will know who has looked at a colour atlas. Colours blend into each other and it is extremely difficult to identify one colour as opposed to another. The degree of delicacy varies from individual to individual (for instance, tea-tasting or wine-tasting, which require the same order of skill as colour-matching). What is true about colours is also true about tones, about squirls and squiggles, etc. There is no safety margin. Nevertheless we are able for all practical purposes to tell the time from a clock, however imperceptible the movement of the hands: we can, in fact, interpret the angle of two lines with sufficient delicacy to catch trains. 3. Eco uses the French version 'syntagm', as opposed to the American (Bloomfieldian) 'syntagma'. The terms describe similar concepts, and differ in as much as the French and American schools differ in their approaches. 4. Eco translates the French Seme (as used by Buyssons, Prieto et al.) into the Italian 'serna'. 5. Verbal language has two articulations. The first articulation is that of phonemes and, as Hjelmslev showed, this can be established by a simple commutation test. Thus if we change 'pig' into 'big' we get a different meaning; hence, we can identify 'p' and 'b' as separate phonemes. The second articulation is that of morphemes. Here too, we can apply a simple commutation test. If we change 'full-speed' into 'half-speed' we also get a different meaning, but at a different level. Similarly, we can change 'full-speed' to 'full-back' and 'half-speed' to 'half-back'. In this way, we identify four separate phonemes: 'full', 'half', 'speed' and 'back'. Verbal language, then, has two articulations. According to Eco, when we begin to study visual images, we find we need to postulate three articulations, three levels at which meaning may be affected. The first articulation is that of 'figures'. By this Eco seems to mean the way in which we can tell one abstract painting from another by detecting variations in colour, the angle of lines, etc., and that these variations are meaningful, that a formal variation of this kind necessarily maps out a corresponding semantic variation. The second articulation is that of 'signs'. Here Eco seems to mean the way in which we recognise a certain line or shape as having an object or class of objects in the outside world, in the world of action, as referent. Thus we recognise an oval with a dot in it as an eye. The third articulation is that of 'semes'. Here Eco means, roughly speaking, the way in which we build up a whole picture from a combination of elements: two eyes + nose + mouth = face. Eco does not discuss whether some kind of commutation test could be applied at each of these levels in order to establish them firmly. Chapter 3: Victor Burgin 1. Based on lectures given at the Polytechnic of Central London and the Slade School of Fine Art, 1974. 222 Notes and References 2.

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