/ Filmsemiotics

Filmsemiotics: 13-11-26

Psychoanalitic Theory pg. 125

Jaqcues Lacan reformulation of Freudian theory. His relations of desire and subjectuvity in discourse. Emphasis on relation of desire and subjectivity. “The unconsious originates by which the individual enters the universe”. Unconscious processes are essentially discursive in nature, and psychic life is both individual (private) and collective (social) at the same time. Replacing cinema as object with cinema as proces seeing semiotic and narrative film studies in the light of a general theory of subject formation. The emphasis on unconscious film processes is known as metaphysiological. Psychoanalytic construction of the cinema viewing subject. Theoretisation of the unconscious. It involves the construction of a conceptual (one that defies empirical (source of knowledge by means of observing or experimentation)) verification model for functioning of the psychical and has three categories. The dynamic, the economic, and topographical. Consequence of shift from object to process they film spectatorship started to be seen in the standpoint of psychoanalitic theory. The meaning within individual film to the “production of subjectivity”. Questions of subjectuvity into notions of meaning production. Film viewing and subject formation were reciprocal (given or felt by each toward each other) Our unconcsious identuty as subject is reinforced in film viewing and film viewing is effective because of our unconscious participation. We continually yearn to repeat the experience.

Freuds psychoanalysis object is the unconscious in all of it's amnifestations. Repressed mental material to consciousness. Therapy: interprets human behaviour in terms of resistance - transference – desire. A theory of human subjectivity, psychoanalysis describes the way in which the small human being comes to establish a specific self and sexual identity within the network of social relations. Freud discovered and theorized the unconscious human life is dominated by the need to repress our tendencies towards gratification in the name of conscious activity. Libido is psychic and emotional energy associated with the transformation of the sexual instinct in relation to it's objects. The dynamic manifestation of the sexual drive. The other is always anterior (situated before or in front of) but will always outrun us. We desire what others unconsciously desire for us.

The unconscious is produced in the act of repression. The unconscious is formed from the entity entirely under sway of libidinal gratifications (the child) towards an individual capable of establishing a position in a social world of men and women. The way human culture is structured and organized in terms of the circulation of desire.

Because the child at early age (before forming ego/identity) is able to distinguish between itself and the outer world it develops a desire to communicate, it becomes a desiring being. Freud an Lacan are not concerned with the development of the individual per se but are concernde with demonstrating the work of the unconscious, the production of fantasy, and the erotic component of desire underlying our most banal activities.

First moment of loss in subject formation is associated with the breast. All biological needs are fullfilled (food warmth etc.) instinct for self preservation is met. At the same time the element of fantasy is allready present. All future yearnings for milk will be marked by a need to recover that totality of sensations – fantasmatic process. Physical need expressed by crying gets milk the signal of crying is a demand conveyed to an other. The memory of pleasure will forever be associated with a loss. With something not under the subjects control and this impossibility becomes desire. Lacan calls what arises in this discrepancy between satisfaction of need and the unsatisfied demand for love obect small. Desire will allways exist in the register of fantasy, memory and impossibility. The subject attempts, throughout his life to recapture the fabtasy of totality wholeness and unity that is associated woth the primordeal experience of the breast. The original object of desire is thus created as a fantasy in the satisfaction of instinctual need and elaborated memory. Of that satisfaction. It is never a relation to a real object independant of a subject but a relation to a fantasy. Desire is is endlessly circulating from representation to representation. Drive: instinctual energy. Directs the organisms towards an aim. Its aim has a source in a bodily stimulus; it's aim is to eliminate the tension deriving from the surce in a bodily stimulus; and it is in the object or thanks to it that, the instinct may achive it's aim. Gradual organization of the libidal drives at first centered in the childs own body (oral, anal and phallic stage) and later has an aim outside it's own body. Lacan imaginary realm: The child has no understanding of the fact that he is a whole it percieves itself of a mass of movements. When the child sees itself in a mirror or in the face of the mother he belevies this other to be his superior self. The infant internalizes this image as the ideal ego. This process forms the basis for all later identifications which are imaginary in principle. Narcissism, misrecognition and alienation in the moment of the mirror. The child is divided from the moment it foms a selfconception. Lacans language as a system of differences, meaning comes from the relation between words rather than their intrinsic properties. The split subject of psychoananlisys is the spectator in film, the gze is the objects small a.

P 133 Symbolic register of the psyche (symbolic structures which are significant to the subject) Oedipal unity - The ability to speak is an inertion into a social realm. Language a general structuring principle of culture, the inconscious is present in all of us. Into learned to speak. Our sense of self is formed through the perception and language of others, even at the deepest level of the unconscious. Language is what internaly divides us between conscious and unconscious, but it is also what externally joins us. Bound to culture by relation of desire. Symbolic introduces the recognition of cultural others. Symbolic register connotes the realm of all discourse. When we enter the symbolic order we enter languageculture itself. Symbolic is organized in terms of the speaking subject while imaginary is pre-linguistic. (M)other meaning is no longer a consequence of social development it is the very wellspring from whch social being derives space and time.

Second the symbolic is organised in terms of the speaking subject. 3D because accesion to the symbolic is predicated on the incestoues feeling for the mother. Signifier of castration is the phallus. Both sexes are presumed to be the Phallus during the pre oedipal phase. Phallus i s referred as signifier of desire. The phallus represents the replacement of the immediate satisfaction of infantile sexuality with a recogniton of the self asa exed social subject. Split subject > split between two levels of being. Conscious life of the ego or self – repressed desire of the unconscious. Split subject is distinct from the individual as conscious by ego psychology. Phallus is signifier of desire. The phallus represents the replacement of the immediate gratifications of infantile sexuality with a recognition of the self as a sexed, speaking social subject. Split subject. Split between two levels of being. Ego or sled and the repressed desires of the unconscious. The passage into and in language divides and in that division effects the individual ads subject. Split subject distinct from the individual. Psychical reality. The correlation of the world of the psyche and the material world. Subject of language and the speaking subject. Making the connection between identitysubjectivity and language a fundamental feature of the unconscious to say that the subject performs in language is to acknowledge the differing presence of the unconscious in every act of speech. What i say is untrue but the i who produces the statement is actually decieving the listener producing in decpetion a statement of what appears the truth. p. 139 sexual difference is produced in human society, psychoanalysis has been taken up by feminists interested in understaning th ecultural construction of sexuality and the implications of that for the feminine discourse. In psychoanalysis femininity is seen as a category produced psychologically and socialy rather than as a set of biological and anatomical features. Psychoanalysis does not try to describe what a woman is but sets in acqiring as to what a woman is. There is no universal feminine essence, only a fanatsy of femininity. P. 140 however such a critique of biologism can veer into the denial of the huamn body altogether.

Psycholanalitic film theory p. 141 The imaginary signifier Metz. Film themselves only come into being through the fictive works of their spectators. The films images and sounds are not meaningfull without the unconscious work of the spectator and it is in this sense that every film is a construction if it's viewer. Metz means imaginary in three ways. Fictional or fictive films are reresented by images of absent objects and people. Imaginary nature of the cinematic signifier. High degree of peceptual activity. Psychoanalituc: initial constitution of the ego. Cinema is both a symbolc system and an imaginary operation and any succesfull analysis will have to be poised between th edynamic relation of the two. Dreams are structured texts. p.143 production of archetypal production of unconscious fanatasy, the dreamwork, as analogues to the film itself. Dreams are structured texts that can be understood through analysis of ther manifest content (story told in dream) in order to reveal the latent content, the dream wish (the unconscious and forbidden desire that generates the dream) beneath the seemingly random and confused collection of images. The power of the film dream analogy comes from the cinema's peculiar construction of it's spectatir as a semi-wakefull dreamer. The spectator of the cinema can be seen as a desiring spectator. The viewing state that cinstructs this spectator in film-text itself are seen to mobilize the structures of unconscious fantasy. Unconscious ideas are organized into phantasies (imaginary scenarios) to which the instinct becomes fixated and which may be concieved as true mise en scenes of desire. When we watch a film we are somehow dreaming it as well: our unconscious desires work in tandem with those geneated in the film dream. p. 114 the fantasy is the support of desire, it is not the object that is the support of desire. p. 145 dual kinship between psychic life of the spectator and the financial or industrial mechanisms of cinema in order to show the reciproca relations between the psychological and technological components of the cinematic institution. p.146 Four distinct typesof operation. The constructio of a dream state. Certain conditions make film viewing similar to dreaming. The impression of reality is intensified by the dreamstate that you are in while watching a film. The fiction effect causes the spectator to have the feeling that they are creating the dream. The cinema creates an impression of reality but this is a total effect engufing and in a sense ceating the spectator. The womblike effect creates a desire to return to an earlier state of psychic development. One before the formation of the ego.

Leaving the theater a viewer is in a state of heightened receptivity, something like hypnosis, produced by the artificial regression of the fiction effect. Relation between the camera and the viewing subject, the central and illusory position p.147 Desire to return to an earlier state of development the one before the formation of the ego

in which the division of the self and other, internal and external have not yet taken shape. Is like the earliest forms in which the boundaries between itself and the world are confused. Cinema situation reproduces the hallucinatory power of a dream because it turns a perception into something that looks like a hallucination. A vision wit a sense of reality of something that is precisely not there. Spectators centrality, relation between the camera and the viewing object was posited as the site of ideological production and the spectator was shown to occupy a snesiry and ilusory position in the entire cinemantic arrangement.

The differnet formal elements are being interpreted as a meaningfull whole by the spectator. Te work of the aparatus is explained in terms of duplicity: the subject feels like the source of meanings when in fact this subject is the effect of meanings. Man with a movie camera shows how it is produced and in that way demystifies it's illusions. It continuallly reaffirms the fact that the spectators psychich participation is what makes the film exist.

p.149 The spectator All other descriptions in the field flow from the matrix of the spychoanalytic cinema spectator. Film theory discussing in the film spectatorship in the circulation of desire. Alain bergala: Four areas of inquiry (a seeking of request for truth) in the theory of the spectator. 1 What does the spectator desire when going to the cinema. 2 What kind of subjectsepctator is constructed in by the cinematographic apparatus. 3 What is the metaphsychological “regime” (ruling prevailing system) of the spectator during the films projection. 4 What is the spectator position, strictly speaking, within the film itself.

Psychoanalytic film theory sees theviewer not as a person, as in a flesh and blood individual, but as an artificial construct produced and activated by the cinematic apparatus. The viewer is seen as a “space” that is both productive and empty. Productive because it produces a dream work or other fantasy structures and empty because anyone and anything can occupy it. To achieve this duality the cinema in some sense “constructs” it's spectator along some psychoanalytic modalities that link the dreamer to the film viewer. A situation must be produced in which the viewer is more immediately sensitive to let his own fantasies work their way into te fictional machine. 5 intersecting factors go into the psychoanalytic constuction of the viewer. 1 state of regression is produced 2 situation of belief is constructed 3 mechanisms of primary identifications, afterwords secondary identifications 4 fantasy structures, are put into play by the cinematic fiction 5 marks of enunciation (aankondiging) that stamp the film with authorship

Metz describes belief in the cinema as a process of denial or disavowal. Whereby the subject refuses to recognize the reality of a traumatic perception. Behind every incredulous spectator lies a credulous one.

Freud calls this disavowal “a process which in the mental life of children seems neither uncommon nor very dangerous but which in an adult would mean the beginning of a psychosis, and something can be learned from the fetishism of the splitting ego. A symbolic drama becomes a metaphor for all losses both real and imaginary.

p.151 The most complicated issue in the theory of the spectator is that of identification. There is a distinction between a primary and secondary identification but also it's interpreted differently by Feud and Lacan. In psychonanalysis the most simple definition of the term involves a process of assimilation by the subject of an other. In totality or partially (identifying with an individual, assumption of a psychical trait). Because identification, the earliest emotional tie in the life of a subject plays a central role in the imaginary formation of the ego. Identification is the earliest emotional tie in the life of a subject it plays a large role in the imaginary formation of the ego. Primary identification involves early mode of constitution of self on the model of another person. And as such an erly form of affective relationship between the self and another before there is any distinction between the self and the object/other. It is on basis of identification with an image, but depends on a recognition of the self as distinct and sepearte from the image. Secondary identificaton are those under oedipal complex. The subject constitutes itself in the Symbolic (language and culture) and establishes singularity, it's identity in relation to parents and cultural others. Secondary identifications are always ambivalent, charactarized by the complexity of contradictory feelings of love and hate. All ientifications will contain transivitism; a childrens mechanism in which it projects its own behavior onto another. Consciously experienced empathy has little to do with identification. Empathy has to do with: I know how you feel Identifcation: I see as you see from your position. Primary cinematic identification. As the spectators identification with the act of looking itself. It is i who makes the film. I am the perceptor and identify with the act of percieving. In this way the spectatotor is given the capacity to be everywhere at once. The spectator identifies less with that what is represented than with what stages the spectatcle. In a sense the film viewer both loses and refinds himself over and over by continually reaanacting the first fictive moment of identification and establishment of identity. Spectators identification with its own look. Identification with characters. Subject positioning referring to the way the spectator is placed in and by the text. And made to assume roles Family romance refers to a process in the early childs life, where he fantasizes ideal parents to replace his actual ones and considers the fictional to be inferior. The daydream is a prototype for imaginary worlds in an attempt to correct percieved reality. Initially believed by freud to be a pathalogical symptom of paranoia, it was later percieved to be normaland universal part of a childs life.

Dream fantasy and the cinema all have in common that they are imaginary productions that have their source in unconscious desire, and the subject in all fantasmatic productions/projections is invariably present.