The Wayward Spectator by Carlo Comanducci A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of doctor of philosophy Department of English Literature School of English, Drama and American & Canadian Studies College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham, May 2015 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract Through a heterogeneous set of contributions from film studies, psychoanaly- sis and critical theory, including Leo Bersani and Laura Marks, Jacques Rancière and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, the dissertation confronts spectatorship, film theory, and their relation, on the issue of emancipation and of its discursive regulation. Against the pedagogical forms of film theory and the authoritarian framing of the spectator’s position that can be seen to be integral to the functioning of the cine- matographic apparatus, this work suggests that we consider theory as an internal aspect of film experience, rather than as its external explanation. Arguing for the fundamental emancipation of the spectator together with the heteronomy of the subject and the discursivity of film experience, the dissertation addresses what, in film experience, resists being reduced within intellectual mastery, metapsycho- logical structures, and the logic of interpretation, and rather remains radically incommensurable with the principles of its intelligibility. Indeterminacy and a lack in mastery are thus taken to be the constitutional ground of spectatorship as a praxis and of the spectator as a site of tensions and dissensus. More specifically, three basic dimensions and categories of this “wayward” ground of film experi- ence will be examined in their correspondences and connections: contingency, free association, and embodiment. Acknowledgements A work may have one author, but it is made of many people. If there is anything good in what I have written, it goes to them. Thanks to Saverio Zumbo for his amiability and for being there in the landscape of Italian academia. Thanks to Michele Aaron, so many things came from her teaching. Thanks to Jan Campbell for her thoughtful supervision and for her enthusiasm and support. Thanks to Majid, Sahid, and Hossein and everyone at the Royale Custine for their kindness and for taking me in. Thanks to Gilbert for the drinks and the stories. Thanks to Flora Cruces for being there when I was no longer there. Thanks to Marina Pensieri, Gian Siano and Antonello Mura for all they taught me about music. They saved my life a thousand times, and counting. Thanks To Andrew Hladky for the engaging conversations on psychoanalysis, painting, embodiment, and baking. Thanks to Deidre Matthee for her poems, they always came at the right moment reminding me about the pleasure of writing. Thanks to Stella Ghirlanda, the funniest and most liberal sponsor a scholar may desire. Thanks to my father for all the sound advice I never followed and for telling me what Battleship Potemkin truly is. Thanks to Giacomo Conti for his unflinching friendship and twisted sense of humour. Thanks to Valentina for suggesting that I read Pontalis, and for pointing out that there might be more important things than film theory. For almost everything else, thanks to Nic. Contents Introduction. A divided passion? 6 Spectatorship as a site of conflict 15 Spectatorship as an ideological institution and as a discursive practice. ..... 16 The ideological unconscious. ......................... 22 The future of disillusion: emancipation as a knowledge effect. ...... 24 Agency and heteronomy. ........................... 27 Heteronomy of the subject and masochistic spectatorship. ........ 31 The spectator as a site of tensions. ......................... 36 Interpellation and reflexivity. ........................ 40 Theory and implicational spectatorship. .................. 43 Spectatorship as a ground of disagreement. .................... 45 Hard science, soft humans. ......................... 49 The film theorist and the emancipated spectator 52 Film theory as an integral element of the experience of film. ........... 52 Academic film theory as an incitation au discours. ............ 57 Breaking the spell of theory. ......................... 61 The beginnings of film theory. ............................ 65 The child, the fatum and the infans. .................... 67 The spectator as an infans. ......................... 71 Rancière’s critique of Althusser. ........................... 73 Film experience and the aesthetic regime. ................. 82 Contingency 89 Contingency and film theory. ............................ 89 Contingency and universality. ........................ 94 Radical contingency. ............................. 96 Contingency and the psychoanalytic subject. ............... 98 The flesh blanket: levels of contingency. ...................... 101 Telling a story about watching a film. ................... 105 Dissonance and the music of chance. .................... 110 If only a bat hadn’t come into the story. ...................... 112 The bat and the cinema. ........................... 116 Free association 121 Metapsychology and film theory. .......................... 122 Metapsychology and analytic experience. ................. 125 The mastery of concepts. .......................... 128 Hysteria and “the great complex of associations”. ................. 133 Displacement and screen memories. ..................... 136 Method and process of free associations. .................. 139 The metapsychological spectator and the paradigm of interpretation. ...... 143 Free association and film experience. .................... 148 Embodiment and film experience 154 Ontology and the phenomenological turn. ..................... 154 Non-objectual embodiment. ......................... 160 Discursivity of the body and incitation to discourse. ........... 164 Visibility and the visual. ............................... 170 Embodiment and contingency. ....................... 175 The fantasy of pure presence. ........................ 180 If only a fly hadn’t come into the body. ...................... 181 More computing than commuting. ..................... 182 Normative mapping of the body. ...................... 183 Inaccurate self-replications. ......................... 184 Metamorphosis and anamorphosis. ..................... 186 On choice and the benefit of doubt. .................... 190 The wayward spectator 192 Partages de l’ombre. ................................. 192 Spectatorship as an act of illumination. .................. 195 Heteronomy and homoness. ......................... 198 Afterimages. ................................. 202 Man in the Dark. ................................... 204 Theory as a form of forgetfulness. ...................... 207 It takes two (to make less than one). 213 Bibliography 218 Introduction. A divided passion? The film analyst by his very activity places himself [...] outside of the institution. Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Film. [Lady Ottoline Morrell to Bertrand Russell] Listen, just get through the seminar and let’s go to the cinema. Derek Jarman, Wittgenstein. “How can you tell a psychoanalyst in a party crowd? When a beautiful woman enters the room and everyone turns to look at her, he is the one who turns away to look at everyone else.” There are versions of this joke about sociologists and psychologists as well, but it is really the film theorist that should figure in it: he, or she, would be that spectator who, as soon as the film begins, turns away from the screen to stare at the other members of the audience. It is sometimes the case with film theorists, indeed, especially when they deal with spectatorship, that they shift their attention from the contingencies of their own involvement with film and from the personal significance that it holds for them, to the visible signs of the involvement of everyone else and to the intelligible meaning of the text. So that the desire animating the study of film would seem to come less from the theorist’s own enjoyment of film as a spectator, than from its fascination with the other’s visual pleasure, made into the object of its look. Like the psychoanalyst in the joke, the film theorist 6 would seem to be somewhat removed - or to wish to remove itself - from the power of attraction exerted by the spectacle: more than being directly engaged in its own visual pleasure, and with the lures that fantasy and ideology have prepared for it, the theorist would rather look at the ways others perform the one, and bite the others. Understood in this way, the position of the theorist would imply a movement away both from the source of pleasure and from the theorist as the site of it. Driven by this fundamentally perverse pleasure in looking at the other’s looking, but necessarily aiming at the sublimation of this pleasure and bringing about the objectification of both the spectacle and the gaze, film theory - and a theory of spectatorship in particular - would thus be essentially, as Christian Metz put it, a divided passion.1 On the contrary, the intention