Theory As Realism Set in Drive

Conclusion Theory as Realism Set in Drive s Slavoj Žižek a theorist of film? If we are speaking about film theory as Ione that deals with the formal aspects of the cinematic medium, then the definitive answer to this question is undoubtedly no! However, as I hope is evident from the preceding, this does not necessarily mean that he is not a film theorist. The two positions, I claim, are distinct and speak to completely different objects. Although, at times, Žižek takes up examples in cinema and popular culture in order to more fully elaborate a point that he is trying to make about Lacanian psychoanalysis or Hegelian dialectics, much of his work on cinema is taken up in order to produce a profoundly original critique of ideology, one that centers on the underlying fantasies that give structure to our everyday submission to Symbolic order itself. Furthermore, his theory of subjectivity makes possible a renewed theory of cinematic spectatorship that accomplishes that which early “screen theorists” were only so eager but failed to do: Žižek helps us to see that spectatorship itself is a model of ideological interpellation in the everyday. The fact that Žižek has brought new life to Lacanian psychoanalysis, especially for film theorists, demonstrates a kind of solidarity with the ear- lier project of “screen theory.” However, Žižek’s Lacan is certainly not the Lacan of the film theory of the 1970s and 1980s. His Lacan is not that of the “mirror stage,” the Imaginary and the Symbolic; it is that of the objet petit a, the sinthome, jouissance, the drive, and the Real. Significantly, then, from a Žižekian perspective, the point of film theory is not necessarily to demonstrate the way in which the cinema interpellates spectators as subjects— that is, of showing how cinematic ideology is inscribed in the subject— but of showing how the cinema, like ideology, interpellates subjects as spectators, and here, enjoyment is a key factor: both cinema and ideology are engaged in a project to organize the enjoyment of the subject in a certain way. What possibilities exist, then, for the subject to deal with its own enjoyment in a way that makes possible its separation or subtrac- tion from the reigning ideology? M. Flisfeder, The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film © Matthew Flisfeder 2012 162 THE SYMBOLIC, THE SUBLIME, AND SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK’S THEORY OF FILM Screen theory responded to this question by proposing a cinematic solution—that is, the possibility of an alternative, revolutionary cinema that might interpellate the spectator toward an emancipatory political engagement with reality. Laura Mulvey, for example, proposed using psychoanalysis as a political weapon for feminist filmmakers. Technological innovations, such as the popular use of 16mm film— and one can imag- ine that today she would want to include digital filmmaking— according to Mulvey changed the economic conditions of film production so that the cinema could be artisanal as well as capitalist. Alternative cinema, for her, “provides a space for a cinema to be born that is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions of mainstream film.” Because the formal elements of mainstream, Hollywood cinema, according to Mulvey, “reflect the psychical obsessions of the soci- ety that produced it” (i.e., phallocentrism), alternative cinema operates by “reacting against these obsessions and assumptions.”1 This, of course, is the theoretical motivation behind her own film collaboration with Peter Wol- len on Riddles of the Sphinx (1979). Similar arguments were made by Colin MacCabe, who, while proposing that revolutionary filmmakers are capable of practicing strategies of sub- version of the dominant ideology, emphasized the potential of a “progres- sive realist text.” MacCabe proposes the possibility of a cinema capable of “displacing” the subject in ideology, or of differently constituting the subject away from the reigning ideology. Drawing on Althusser (particularly the latter’s anti- Hegelian bent), he suggests that, while it is impossible for the subject to fully escape ideology, there is the possibility of changing the subject’s position within ideology, perhaps by changing the very form of ideology along the lines of a Brechtian “rupture.” For him, film examples, such as Brecht’s own Kuhle Wampe (Slatan Dudow, 1932) and Jean- Luc Goddard’s Tout va bien (1972), demonstrate the potential of film form to alternatively interpellate a politicized spectator.2 These rather formalist solutions to political subjectivization in the cinema, however, are nothing more than the underlying negative conscience of post- Theory formalism. In the history of critical theory in the twentieth century, one of the most central debates concerning the revolutionary potential of art is that which has been dubbed by Fredric Jameson as “the realism- modernism” debate between Georg Lukács and Bertolt Brecht. On the one hand, Lukács argued against the subversive potentials of modernist aesthetics, particularly Expressionism, with a forceful critique of Ernst Bloch. Against modernist aesthetics, Lukács argued in favor of a realist aesthetic. As Jameson puts it, “[t]he originality of the concept of realism . lies in its claim to cognitive as well as aesthetic status . the ideal of realism presupposes a form of aesthetic experience that yet lays claim to a binding relationship to THEORY AS REALISM SET IN DRIVE 163 the real itself, that is to say, to those realms of knowledge and praxis that had traditionally been differentiated from the realm of the aesthetic, with its disinterested judgments and its constitution as sheer appearance.”3 Realism, in this sense, provides a representation of the “cognitive” reality behind the illusion of false aesthetic appearances. Lukács’s notion of “realism” rests on his conceptions of “totality” and the “typical.” The typical character in the realist novel speaks to the totality of the social reality, so that he or she may present to the reader the (true) essence behind the false appearances in the immanence of social reality. On the other hand, it was this very methodology that, for Brecht, spoke to Lukács’s own formalism. In defense of modernism, Brecht, along with Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, contends that— while it does not necessarily represent the underlying social content of existing reality (class antagonism)— modernism holds the potential to frame displaced social content in existing reality. As Adorno puts it, “[a]rt is the negative knowledge of the actual world.”4 He adds that “[a]rt does not provide knowledge of reality by reflecting it photographically or ‘from a particular perspective’ but by revealing whatever is veiled by the empirical form assumed by reality, and this is possible only by virtue of art’s own autonomous status.”5 The latter must be thought, as well, in terms of Žižek’s critique of The Wrong Man (see Chapter 2). Is this not the very point that Žižek makes apropos of Hitchcock’s failed attempt at “realism?” The problem with The Wrong Man, as we have seen, is that it directly confronts the spectator with the fact of its own “realism,” betraying the very terms of the Hitchcockian allegory. With realism, as evinced by the latter, one does not need to follow the rabbit down the rabbit hole only to end up on the other side of the Möbius band, which ultimately puts the subject back at its starting point, however viewed from an entirely new perspective. Realism potentially leaves room only for the subject’s interpassive relationship to the text, without itself becoming politically subjectivized. As Todd McGowan puts it, “[o]ne first becomes a politicized subject not out of some neutral concern for larger political questions or some universal desire to eliminate injustice but because of a singular desire that bears only on one’s own subjectivity.”6 The Brechtian solution to political subjectivization is one that “screen theorists” such as MacCabe adopt in their own formalist version of alternative, political cinema. The aim here is to produce an experience of rupture in the subject- spectator, like that developed in Brecht’s “epic theatre.” The objective of the “rupture,” or what Jameson refers to as the “estrangement effect,” is to stage events “in such a way that what had seemed natural and immutable in them is now tangibly revealed to be historical, and thus the object of revolutionary change.”7 In defense of Brecht, we might agree that 164 THE SYMBOLIC, THE SUBLIME, AND SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK’S THEORY OF FILM an aesthetic (or even an ethic) of realism leaves open the possible threat of its assimilation into the ruling ideology. Yet here I am forced to agree with Lukács that, at the same time, the problem with modernism is, in fact, the latter’s decadence and appeal that is often limited to bourgeois audiences with a rather high level of “cultural capital.” This point is not intended to discount the significance of modern art and alternative/avant- garde cinema but, rather, to point out the latter’s limited capabilities in interpellating a political subject among the exploited classes. In addition, as we come to understand ideological interpellation via Žižek as having to do with the organization of the subject’s enjoyment, we cannot discount the fact that subjectivization in modernism still relies on a particular way of organizing the “surplus- enjoyment” of a (knowl- edgeable) audience. Alternative cinema, I claim, still positions the subject in relation to its desire, which still attaches it ever more aggressively to ideology, the effect of which is not to change the subject’s position within ideology but to maintain and reinforce its preexisting relationship to ideology. So how then might we deal with the dilemma of applying too much realism while still avoiding the formalist trap of alternative cinema and its enjoyment? Jameson’s half- satisfactory solution to the “realism- modernism debate” is to claim that, with the rise of postmodernism, the debate itself is sublated by the very form of this newly emerging historical moment.

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