Review article on the series 'Language, Discourse, Society' edited by Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe, specifically four books in that series:
Jane Gallop, Feminism and Psycholanalysis: The Daughter's Seduction, Macmillan, 1982
Paul Hirst, On Law and Ideology, Macmillan, 1979
Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and the Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, Macmillan, 1982
Michel Pecheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, Macmillan, 1982
This review was immensely difficult to write. The Journal gave me an initial unity of 'the series' (though only a 'sample' of it), which proved the place not of a unity but of a dispersion. The title of the series - Language, Discourse, Society - was around concepts neither self-evident nor necessarily related. The more I sought the series, the more it dissolved, marked a void, an empty space, a scattering, not a convergence. The individual 'books' no more cohered than the series of which they were presumed to be a part. The 'books' were radically intertextual; they spread beyond themselves into other series, other relations.
There were common themes but these were treated in different ways resistant to formalisation because apparently same objects were not the same even if they were called by identical names: the imaginary, the symbolic, discourse, the subject. The concrete 'writing' differed even more: the 'writings' were in distinct styles which took them further apart into clusters and groupings which did not coincide and which transformed an apparent identity of referents by the singularity of manners of signifying.
I have chosen to treat each text on its own as if they are the unities they are not and to mark when it occurs places where the texts seem momentarily to come together. My choice is traditional and fictional. I must stress the as if: it is only a way to begin, and not a way to conclude. I shall treat the Pecheux first and the Hirst last, the two most related of the four authors, and, at the same time, the most distant.
Before I begin, a further note: imagine it is the Pecheux I first take up; after I read the Hirst, the Pecheux is not the same, it has altered position. The third text (Gallop) shifts the other two and the relation
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that I had made. The texts move each other about and make any definite mark difficult to place. What is pursued is always shadowy, a
trace, nothing in any case very certain or stable.
The Pecheux Language, Semantics and Ideology is concerned to displace the linguistics derived from Saussure (Pecheux calls it subjective and idealist) by a view of language informed by material-ism, 'science' and Marxism-Leninism. The important couple for Pecheux is the (Althusserian) distinction, science/ideology; Saussurian linguistics is placed with ideology.
The first move of the book is to connect semantics with philosophy, to uncover the philosophical in semantics (what really lies behind it)
which linguistics hides from itself by joining semantics with its more apparent 'scientific' aspects: morphology, phonology, syntax. Pecheux wants to reveal the non-scientific 'ideological' aspect of
Semantics within linguistics and to transform semantics (and linguis-tics) into an objective scientific pursuit, to reveal the false and advance the true, science conquering ideology.
What is the matter with Saussurian linguistics for Pecheux? What are the unfortunate tendencies that it has bequeathed and that continue to be practised?
To Pecheux the central (and weak) point of Saussurian linguistics is the opposition language/parole which establishes a 'contradiction between linguistic system (the langue) and non-systematic determinations (parole) which, on the fringes of the system, oppose it and affect it' (italics Pecheux's). An opposition is formed between a 'formalist-logicist' linguistics of the system and a linguistics of deviation, transgression, disruption. The linguistics of deviation, he says, con-tests systematicity on the basis of notions such as creativity, desire, expression, notions which are essentially subjective. The idea of creativity involves the idea of the subject who indents out of the abstraction of the system. The idea of the subject (full conscious subjectivity) is dependent then on conceiving the system (full objectivity) in extreme terms.
The consequence of this for Pecheux is that the objective and subjective become confused such that 'everything is transformed into Something subjective', while the 'subjective acquires the appearance of objectivity', it simulates the objective, appears as if it is objective. The subjectivism of parole is part consequence and part cause of a more fundamental subjectivism which hides within the concept of (langue. Saussurian linguistics is based on the idea of a conscious subject taking itself as a subject (who uses the language system (langue) to express himself/herself); subjectivity is taken as a self-evident fact, an objective truth. What is only an ideological effect (the subject thinking itself a subject, acting as if it were a subject, taking its subjectivity as 'truth') becomes inscribed by Saussurian linguistics as very basis of that linguistics: what is not true is taken as true; this
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falsity becomes the ground for Saussurian 'scientific linguistics', a linguistics wholly and utterly given over to the ideological, the very gesture at the heart of the ideological, the construction of the subject as if it is a subject. The subjective becomes the objective, is taken as if it were the objective. Just as the-idea-of-the-subject-as-if-it-is-a-subject becomes the objective (is regarded as 'true'), the objective {langue) is seen from the point of view of subjectivity, simply a system to be manipulated by the subject but which is without determinant effects on subjectivity. That is, in Saussurian linguistics rather than the subject being an effect of language, the subject becomes the one who uses language for self-expression (parole), forming itself by means of language. (The language system {langue) is both objective and inert). The language (langue) is only there as a function of the subject's expression of its own subjectivity ('I speak myself) but is without any formative effect on the subject. The subject is conceived outside language and it appears to itself as its own origin ('I speak myself), forming itself in what Pecheux calls the Munchausen effect after the German philosopher who pulled himself up by his own hair.
What is to be done? How to break the distorting mirror of the ideological in Saussurian linguistics? How to practice a 'true' linguistic science?
Two things need to be done. First, to recognise the subjectivity of linguistics, the ideological in linguistics and to break with it ('the epistemological break'); and, second, to establish 'a process without a subject' outside of ideology which can 'know' the real. The 'real', for Pecheux, 'exists independently of the fact that it is known'; the task of science is to grasp this real correctly. Essentially there are two kinds of representations, false representation which does not correspond with reality (ideology) and true representation which does correspond with reality (science). It is important to note that Pecheux's criticism of Saussurian linguistics rests on the presence of the ideological, which in turn results in falsity, misconception of the langue, misconception of the objective, misrecognition of the subject (both the subject and parole) hence the need to expose the ideological in order to seize upon the truth (true representation).
I think there are major problems with these ideas and particularly with Pecheux's notion of representation, but I want to leave these to one side for now until I discuss Hirst who eloquently deals with them. I want to write instead of a matter that is more 'operational' in the book and only to note first in passing that Pecheux's positions in part derive from a traditional Marxism which speaks of ideology as false knowledge, that he places no importance on 'means' of representation, and that he conceives of 'the real' as outside and pre-existent of language and knowledge even if he criticises Saussurian linguistics for placing the subject as outside language and as essentially self-constituting by means of language.
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Let me return to Pecheux's founding gesture in his criticism of Saussurian linguistics. His shifting of semantics away from linguistics towards philosophy (semantics is the philosophical in linguistics, the ideological in linguistics) effects a substitution of philosophy not only for semantics but for linguistics as a whole. Pecheux in fact seldom if ever directly speaks of linguistics. Instead he speaks of philosophy as if the criticism he offers of it equally serves as a criticism of linguistics. Semantics and linguistics lose all specificity in being made the same as idealist philosophy (principally the philosophy of Husserl). I want to attend to this lack of address in the book to linguistics, or rather to linguistics deputised for by philosophy.
Pecheux associates Chomsky with the 'formalist-logicist' tendency of Saussurian linguistics (langue) and Kristeva, Derrida, Barthes with what opposes system as the linguistics of deviation (parole). But since langue/parole are tied to each other as the founding couple of Saussurian linguistics all difference between Chomsky (who is a linguist) and say Barthes (who is not) gets lost for though they are on either side according to Pecheux of the langue/parole couple, that couple requires each other, are two faces of the Same, the ideological. So too is lost any distinction between Barthes, Kristeva, Derrida (all linguists of parole and all subjectivists). This operation is a reduction of the various tendencies in language and writing associated with those figures Pecheux cites; is a misapprehension of Saussure who provided a point from which representational means could be con-sidered (in the division of the sign for example and in the relations posited between signifier and signified); and is most of all an ignoring of the radicalism in linguistics and in philosophy that the writings of Chomsky et al represent. (What enables Pecheux to do this is this likening Saussurian linguistics to idealist philosophy and asserting that these writers and linguists are all Saussurians, all subject to the idealism inherent in the langue/parole couple of Saussurian linguist tics as Pecheux conceives it. My argument is that the opposition is wrong both with regard to Saussurian linguistics and with regard to its supposed 'followers' and presumed heirs). To argue that Barthes is subjective is to take no account of the fact that Barthes in practice, in the concrete practice of his writing, challenges notions of the subject as origin, as source, and instead conceives of the subject as textual effect, And Barthes less declares that or asserts it than he performs it; it becomes a structured(more precisely destructured)relation of reader to in the activity of engaging with Barthes' writing.
I am not holding out Barthes against Pecheux (it would not be a contest and besides I could equally have referred to Kristeva's work or that of Derrida) but rather to note that Pecheux ignores the concrete-ness of linguistic practice (i t is absorbed into philosophy), of differing positions within linguistics (all become Saussurian), of differing writings (representational means are given no effectivity) and has least appreciation for practices such as those of Barthes (and Derrida) that
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can't be restated in abstract terms (that refuse reduction). It is most bizarre to read this book which condemns so much on behalf of concrete science but which lacks all means to measure the concreteness which it rejects. Nothing could be more abstract and irrelevant (idealist?) to political practices or representational practices than Pecheux's invocation of science and the materialism of Marxism-Leninism which 'holds' only by losing hold of all difference. .The Jane Gallop title Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter's Seduction is the setting out of an equivalence, a ratio: feminism and psychoanalysis are to each other as the daughter's seduction of the father is to the father's seduction of the daughter. It is the seduction of each from its position, hence a certain dissolution of the 'and', and even of the pure ratio nal of the ratio, so that psychoanalysis shifts by the 'lure' of feminism (it was 'pressure' not 'lure' that I wanted to write but it would be wrong to Gallop) and feminism shifts by the attraction of psycho-analysis. They do not remain the Same in contact. Once together they can no longer be identified in the (rigidity) of their old positions.
I want to begin my discussion of Gallop with her own near beginning (the First Chapter, not the Introduction) which is a discussion of Juliet Mitchell's writing Psychoanalysis and Feminism against which Gallop's own book Feminism and Psychoanalysis is posed as a direct and explicit reversal. Before I treat the substance of that reversal, certain other aspects of it: it is the only chapter of the book that does not institute a dialogue between two writers, two writings which Gallop almost conjoins, to force them to change positions along the lines of the shift of positions set by the coming together of feminism and psychoanalysis. Here, in the Juliet Mitchell chapter, rather than a conjunction, Gallop seeks a displacement; her, Gallop, for Mitchell. She takes Mitchell's place (a place she will claim as of right) because Mitchell has not taken the correct place along the couple, psychoanalysis and feminism, since the result of Mitchell's book (Gallop argues) is that psychoanalysis remains and feminism remains set on either side of Mitchell's and, do not accomplish that (radical for Gallop) change of positions. The place for Gallop that Mitchell inhabits (inhabited) is important to claim for it is the place not only for the representation of psychoanalysis to feminism but of French psychoanalysis to feminism by an English-speaking writer within the Anglo-Saxon world. To a degree (I don't wish toover-labour it) Mitchell is Gallop's 'father' (of psychoanalysis in its relation to feminism) which Gallop seeks to overcome; as Mitchell brought psychoanalysis to feminism (Psychoanalysis and Feminism), Gallop brings feminism to bear on psychoanalysis (Feminism and Psychoanalysis) but with a very different, reversed notion of the function of the 'and'; and it is not only that Mitchell's words are reversed but the 'and' is reversed in its meaning. Gallop argues that Mitchell by not essentially altering psychoanalysis or feminism in the con tact between them has lost both; Gallop's reversal of the Mitchell title does not 'lose’
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that title,(a simple replacement),but retains it so that even if Feminism now appears in the place of Mitchell's Psychoanalysis, that Psycho-analysis (by reference and by recall) continues to be there, but altered, as Mitchell's Feminism (equally by reference and recall) when in its place appears Gallop's Psychoanalysis. The full title of Gallop's book might be Feminism and Psychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis and Feminism, which is in effect the sense of the sub-title on the other side of Gallop's ratio(nality) mark: The Daughter's Seduction.
A last word on this title. Gallop in her Mitchell chapter makes much of the 'and' of Mitchell's book title, not only to mark the reversal I have outlined but also to mark Gallop's precise criticism of Mitchell's use (or rather misuse) of Lacanian (and Freudian) psychoanalysis and Gallop's further claim to displace Mitchell. The interest of Lacan to (Gallop is Lacan's attention to 'the letter' of the Law, of psychoanalysis, above all to the discourse of the unconscious. For Gallop any excursion into the psychoanalytic must of necessity be an excursion into the 'letter' of texts, into their fabric and concreteness as writing. Mitchell, according to Gallop, fundamentally misreads Lacan (does not pay attention to the writing and letter of the Lacanian text) and what is fundamental in that misreading is Mitchell's inattentiveness to Lacan's concern with the inscription of the unconscious in the letter,
in the specificity of desire along a discursive signifying chain. Mitchell must be displaced because she doubly demonstrates her incompetence: she cannot represent psychoanalysis to feminism since she does not attend to the letter of psychoanalysis nor does she attend to the discussion by psychoanalysis of the letter, of the linguistic. Gallop does; she demonstrates it. She, Gallop, can play with the letter; she plays with Mitchell's and, and, she overturns it. She, now, not Mitchell, can turn to the letter, the writings of feminism and psycho analysis.
Gallop, throughout her book (with the exception of the 'first' chapter on Mitchell), stages (she is best as a metteur-en-scene) a series of encounters between couples: Lacan and Ernest Jones, Kristeva and Sollers, Irigaray and Lemoine-Luccioni, Irigaray and Lacan, Clement and Cixous. The couples re-enact the drama of Gallop's full book title, representing it and varying it: the seduction of the daughter (feminism) 'out of her resistance to psychoanalysis (the father)' and the seduction of the father 'out of his impossible self-mastery into showing his desire', out of 'the imperialistic, idealising reductions that have been solidary with a denigration of the feminine...', out of being a prick.
Gallop does not simply stage-manage but she plays as an 'other' third voice in the dialogic dramas and mutual seductions. Irigaray not seduce Lacan, nor Lacan Irigaray. It is Gallop who urges them on, moves them closer, makes them closer, makes them move to the other side, has them touch and 'come' to/for each other. Gallop lows them how to do it. She takes one side, then the other, possesses a
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text, then lets it go, surrenders, slides away, never in a single position, always in a variety. What is crucial in her writing is its sensuousness and material insistence(on the 'letter', on language), uncovering what it conceals, its slips, connective puns, unseen associations. She seduces and stages a seduction within the specificity of language, both signifier of desire and the necessity of the Law through which desire must travel, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, desire and the Law, feminism and psychoanalysis (these are not exact oppositions which can be folded one over another, nor strictly speaking oppositions at all, precisely the 'force' of Gallop's text). It is in the writing, the letter of the Law and the signifying of desire that the intercourse, conjunction, dissolution of boundaries takes place between the 'bodies' of feminism and of psychoanalysis; it is where they stick, cling, ooze, disperse.
I want to present two passages from Gallop. The first concerns the very act of quoting, of representing the 'other' in one's own terms:
In my enthusiasm, I am much tempted to quote that passage... I have trouble thinking of representing it in my own words (fear of inadequate representation, fraudulence?). Yet my dilemma about quotation participates in the very dialectic at stake here. To represent another text is to assimilate the other's discourse into ones own, to re-establish a single economy. But in an opposite and perhaps equally defensive homogenisation, to efface one's own discourse and simply quote inextenso leaves us once again with a single economy. The 'new love', a heterosexuality that is not 'mythic fusion' might be a text that alternately quotes and comments, exercises and criticises.
(Is this not the ideal analytic situation: not to master the voice of the analysand in the generalised science of analysis; to listen to the voice of his/her desire, the particular of the analysand, not to lose all in abstraction of the Law? Gallop's passage is staged to take two voices, to adopt two positions, to avoid 'the single economy'.)
The other passage concerns this same problem but in a different register:
This problem of dealing with difference without constituting an opposition may just be what feminism is all about (might even be what psychoanalysis is all about) Difference produces great anxiety. Polarisation, which is a theatrical representation of difference, tames and binds that anxiety. The classic example is sexual difference which is represented as a polar opposition (active-passive, energy-matter - all polar oppositions share the trait of taming the anxiety that specific differences provoke).
Both passages share an anxiety. The first of being fraudulent, of inadequate representation and 'in parenthesis'. How to represent 'the other' is the problem of the book. The fear is structured into the writing of each vignette which represents 'the other' and 'the other' representing his/her 'other', Lacan, Jones or Irigaray, Lacan. In the play of seduction between texts and differing positions, the markers which Gallop seizes upon often are those of misrepresentations, misapprehensions evident in the slips of language (of desire, of anxiety) which she plays upon, opens out, and the misrepresentations (also as signs of anxiety) which take possession of the other' make the other' into that 'other' which confirms 'one' in opposition. So, there is the double
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anxiety revealed in possession and in the uncertainty of it (slips, mistakes, anxieties in the letter) and the anxiety of taking possession, of the pose of certainty (Gallop's fear) which she places on 'others' (there are exception, hence her delirium in the first passage with the 'new love' of the Kristeva/Sollers couple in which their relation, freed from the desire to represent the other can engage in the parallelism and alternation of quotes, comments, exercises, criticism which avoids the anxieties elsewhere exhibited: the Sollers/Kristeva couple is the model for the overcoming of the fear of fraudulence, the anxiety of misrepresenting, of not listening to 'the other', of being a prick of an analyst: 'Any discourse phallicizes, but somehow it is in the possibility of a dialogue between two heterogeneous discourses that the "impossible dialectic of two terms" might be found. No one (as one) can speak the double discourse of the "permanent alternation!": never one without the other...' In the Sollers/Kristeva dialogue (which Gallop singularly quotes in extenso) he, poet, plays with her, theorist, he, desire, with her, the Law, he, the Imaginary with her, the Symbolic, the joy and interpenetration and dissolution of a doubled bisexuality with Sollers (he) in the place of' the woman' and Kristeva (her) in the place of' the man'; in this double division (social, sexual), the 'one' is never singular, never 'in' a fixed position. The game commences at a different place and with a different end: not to take hold, to take possession, but to let go, to be lost, to come.
The anxiety in the second quoted passage is more pronounced (and perhaps more fraudulent): it is marked equally in the hesitation and disruption of a parenthesis which uncovers a tense difference, the saying and not saying of 'may just be' and the more emphatic in parenthesis 'might be', 'may just be what feminism is all about'/ '(might even be what psychoanalysis is all about)' (might even be, may just be what Gallop is all about). Elsewhere that tense-ion is repeated: 'I begin to feel less and less sure of what might be the "correct position" for me...' Gallop identifies that as a possible ruse, the maybe of a feint which then transfers, again as a subjunctive mood, to psychoanalysis itself: 'whether I... am trying to regain self-mastery by the best ruse of all. Of course that may be the goal of psychoanalysis: greater self-possession not through rigidity but through more resiliency, more openness to the effects of one's unconscious.' (my italics)
There are passages in Gallop (not at all numerous) in which she risks being wrong, risks not having the correct position, risks being unsettled, risks her anxiety, when she comes out with it, is assertive, when the tense changes and she relaxes (not into rigidity) into an acceptance of being between, not the worry of either/or, not even the worry (and ruse) of not having a position, but the joy of it, the complete and utter conviction in the pleasure of it: 'an "other bisexuality". Neither the fantasmic resolution of differences in the imaginary, nor the fleshless, joyless assumption of the fact of one's lack of unity in the symbolic, but an other bisexuality, one that pursues, loves and accepts
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both the imaginary and the symbolic, both theory and flesh.'
Most of the writing is not like this, is not declarative, but performative; it does not say something, or demonstrate, or assert, but unsettles (the Law, the saying something, the declaration), caresses. The feint, the ruse, the disguise are not fraudulences (even that mask is pointed out, to don the disguiseof fraudulence, and the fraud of that as some ultimate last, final, safe place) but necessities. The only way to write seriously (to write 'serious' things as opposed to writing seriously) is often to deny any 'power' to writing, above all to its ruses, its disguises; Gallop is always so intent to reveal how writing 'betrays' at just the point when one feels safe and clear, when one knows, can declare. I want to accept her assertions but also to refuse them. It is not that Gallop(this too is of course a fiction, a ruse; what Gallop? where? from what position?) does not 'say' anything, but rather that is not the point, or more precisely, not the whole point. (I feel somewhat silly just here imagining what Gallop would do with that sentence, playing with it, finding the (w) hole in it, teasing me with my cavalier sympathy, behind which is really a prick trying to pin her down, force her, however gently, into a commitment that I might then represent and by means of the worst chivalric ruse of all, understanding).Of the books in the series of four the Christian Metz Psychoanalysis and the Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier is the one I least wish toengage with, the one I most dislike, am most out of sympathy with, and not because of explicit things that are said in the book which are often true-seeming, always intelligent and sometimes helpful, but because I detest the project itself.
Metz'sproject is to use psychoanalysis to discover/uncover the work of the imaginary in the cinema upon the spectator (he composes something of a mock simulacrum of the analytic situation) and by a doubling operating, the work of the imaginary in the activity of theorising (within the theorist, the analyst) in order to protect oneself against the power and attractive force of that imaginary. It is like the necessary analysis analysts must undergo before they are licensed to analyse, before they may practice the discipline ... license, Law, discipline, theory, analysis so that the theorist might be better positioned, strengthened in his theoretical/scientific project. (Might not Metz be called the Father of Cinema Semiotics, the founder of a 'science' as Freud has been called the Father of Psychoanalysis? I always felt when reading Metz that I was reading the Law, things I had to learn all neatly numbered in their 'proper' categories, each 'correctly' in place, in the ‘right' relation and order and that after I went through all this and had completed the course I would have something to take away with me, something I had learned, much as one learns from a text book, which is the' style' of the writing even when it seeks to play, since then it appears as so awkward, so forced, so out-of-keeping).
To understand the cinema for Metz is primarily a defensive and self-protective gesture in the face of the provocation by the cinema of
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desire, of love, of pleasure, of an adherence(science must be objective); the cinema is made to seduce one from knowledge and serious pursuits to god-knows-what-imaginings. For Gallop the seduction of the father by the daughter is seduction out of 'his impossible self-mastery' and to 'a showing of his desire'; for Metz, the Father of cinema semiotics (Gallop was a daughter, a seducer), such desire is a danger. The value of 'psychoanalysis is as a tool to delimit the area of the imaginary, to name it, and thereby to keep it in bounds for the sake of the Law, or, more precisely, to hand it over (this is a 'stick-up') to the symbolic. It is 'unpleasant work: 'necessarily sadistic', 'grasp its object against the
grain', 're-ascend the slopes', an anal, hurtful, continuing labour, the monumental task of the precise categorisation of the Law of the cinema.
The work of the symbolic, in the theoretician who would delimit the share of the imaginary, and that of the symbolic in the cinema, is always in danger (my italics) of being swallowed up by the very imaginary which is sustained by the cinema, which makes the film likeable, and which is thus the instigation of the theoretician's very existence (='the desire to study the cinema'...):to sum up, the objective conditions that give rise to the theory of the cinema are one and the same as those that make the theory precarious and permanently threaten it (my italics) with sliding into its opposite, in which the discourse of the object (the native discourse of the cinematic institution) insidiously (my italics) comes to occupy the place of discourse about the object.
The Gallop anxiety was with being in (the falsity) of the 'correct' position; the Metz fear and loathing is not to be in the 'correct' position, to lose it, 'sliding into its opposite', 'insidiously'.
The science of the cinema would be quite different say than a science of natural objects since it is the cinema itself, in its very structures, that is organised to promote the imaginary, (that actively seduces). The project of the cinema is to please and the mechanisms of that pleasing are primarily/according to Metz, to immerse one ('swallowed up by') in a fictitious imaginary relation. The work of the theorist is to understand this pleasure, the film such as it has pleased', to analyse the mechanism of his own desire, and, to understand the motor of that pleasure in the structures of the cinema which conspire to create and enforce an imaginary relation to it. What happens most often, according to Metz, is that the symbolic is used to reinforce the imaginary: one likes something and then one finds a reason for it, and those reasons appear as an objectification of the cinema (' the rational- isation of a taste into a theory') when in fact for Metz it is nothing more (he belittles the 'other', it is not adequate) than the projection of the phantasy of the theorist on to the film, a misrecognition, false, and 'scientifically' invalid. 'The traits of the symbolic are convoked, since the texture of the discourse is often sufficiently close, but they are taken lover by the imaginary and work to its advantage alone'.
At precisely this point Metz wishes to intervene (to take his place, to reassert his mastery, to be the Father, once again, of the theory of the cinema) by virtue of his realisation of this mechanism of displacement
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by the object and by the phantasy relation to it of a rational discourse about the cinema ('discourse about the object'): a 'truly' scientific position would require the recognition of this false position (of phantasy) in order to correctly reposition the object in relation to the theorist (able now to produce 'true' theory by virtue of his ability to be in a known place, a place of consciousness, able to combat the insidious callings of his desire and of the imaginary produced by the film ... to reveal that imaginary signified which characterises the cinema).
The imaginary (of the theorist, of the cinema, of the spectator) creates false impressions, mis-recognition, mis-representation, hence the need for psychoanalysis now in combination with the earlier semiotics for a complete knowledge of the cinema, since before (the first' Metzian semiotics 'before' psychoanalysis) the specific work oi the cinema was not adequately known. It failed to take account in the Law of the cinema which it declared (the 'cinematic' codes) the law of the imaginary in the cinema necessary in order to make the Law more f ull, more authoritative. If the 'danger' for Metz is for the imaginary to don the garb of the symbolic, to appear as if it were the Law, theory, Metz's sadistic work is to know the imaginary, to give it its law, to return it to the Law. Psychoanalysis had unsettled semiotics; Metz now uses it to reassure semiotics, to further confirm it. The imaginary signifier which Metz details (categorises) and whose law he explains is very close to being the essence of the cinema; I not only find little difference’ in project' between the first' and 'second' Metz semiologies. but I believe that the phenomenology of the first is well and as strong as ever in the second. The effect of Metz's use of psychoanalysis is to ensure - once the analysed - the maintenance of a phenomenology oi the cinema (to which his semiotics of the cinema was tied, I would even assert, was that semiotics) one of whose phenomena given to consciousness by theory is the imaginary signifier of the cinema, its very nature.
Metz has always been concerned with constituting the unity of the Cinema rather than attending to other unities such as the individual specific film, the parole of the cinematic langue. (It is not I, but Metz, who has given these aspects their unity; it is amusing to skim through Language and Cinema and to see the compelling order it imposes between general particular, the Law the instance, the system the text in which the second opposed term is always reabsorbed into the first. legalised so to speak, much as the desire of the imaginary is legalised in the 'second' semiotics. In the 'first' semiotics Metz talked of the individual film in terms of the notion of the 'textual system' characterised as the specific, unique animation of 'the codes' (cinematic and filmic). This curiously confirms Pecheux's version of Saussurian linguistics as producing the idea of langue as absolute systematic it. and parole us individual creativity which uses the elements contained in the langue, activates the system. This structure from the 'first
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semiotics is incorporated into the 'second', though somewhat dis-placed: we still have the dichotomy of the objective and subjective but now at the level of langue itself, within the system, in the notion of the imaginary signifier as the Law, the very essence of Cinema as well as in the dichotomy of the objective and subjective in the work of the theorist, overcoming the personal (desire) to produce true theory, the law-langue of the cinema. Those who seem to have taken a different path to that of Metz, such as Raymond Bellour who concentrated on analyses of the workings of specific films, have rather reproduced Metz's ideas though by a somewhat altered route. Just as Metz has been concerned with finding the cinematic as a system within but independent of individual films (and without usually discussing them) Bellour too is after the regularity, the systematic both at the level of the individual text, but more crucially as an example of a more general coding (that monster myth the classical Hollywood cinema'). In this regard it is not unlike Metz's syntagmaticanalysis of Adieu Phillipine but unlike it not so directly geared to establishing a precise theoretical model, La grande syntagmatique. I mention all this in part to remark on Metz's (and Bellour's) accord with Pecheux's image of Saussurian linguistics (an accord more marked with Metz than with the 'linguists' whom Pecheux mentions), and most especially its philosophical idealism. Phenomenology is an excellent example.
The procedures of Psychoanalysis and the Cinema are similar to those of Language and the Cinema; once Metz has reckoned with the dangers of the phantasies of the theorist and has set out the road to true science and consciousness, the cinema itself is directly addressed to find psychoanalytic implications of the cinematic' outside the analysis of any particular film', as Language and the Cinema had similarly sought the cinematic, though in primarily linguistic rather than pychoanalytic terms. Metz's concerns indeed are far from particular texts and the specific imaginary that each may represent or the cinema generally happens to represent (the great figure for him of 'the fiction film) but rather with the imaginary that thecinema is, 'from the start, the imaginary that constitutes it as a signifier'.
In Language and the Cinema Metz sought to specify the cinematic both on the basis of structural linguistic models (which served as analytic tools) and in contradistinction to natural language (what specifies the cinema as opposed to 'language' became an analytic goal). A semiotics of the cinema emerged as the particular fashioning of a theory of the modes of signification of 'cinema' in that space where (cinema departed from language and where the analytic methods for distinguishing 'the cinema' distinguished themselves from both linguistic approaches and more general semiotic ones: the specificity of the 'cinema' was founded in the specificity of a cinema-semiotics, a specific theory one of whose principal tasks was the definition of a specific object, the Cinema, appropriate to it. Psychoanalysis and the Cinema plays a similar game, though this time with terms borrowed
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from psychoanalysis (the mirror, the imaginary, the symbolic, fetish, the unconscious, dream) instead of from structural linguistics (parole, langue, code, sub-code, utterance, moneme, image, sign). The primary difference (apart of course from the fact that different aspects of the phenomena of the cinema are being analysed) is that in the 'first' semiotics the cinema is studied as an object independent of its being viewed, whereas in this 'second' semiotics it is the viewing situation, the relation of spectator to film, the film-effect, that is more directly engaged: the differential effects of cinema / theatre on the spectator, the fetish relation of cinema to the spectator, the 'dream' situation of the spectator, the mirror projection and self-identification by the spectator, in other words, the peculiar effects similar to certain psycho-analytically observed phenomena that the cinema has on spectators and principally due to the imaginary aspect of the cinema as signif ier, namely, that what is there on the screen is in fact absent:
The unique position of the cinema lies in this dual character of its signifier: unaccustomed perceptual wealth, but at the same time stamped with unreality to an unusual degree and from the very outset. More than the other arts, or in a more unique way, all the cinema involves us in the imaginary: it drums up all perception, but to switch it immediately over into its own absence, which is nonetheless the only signifier present.
Much of this is the echo of Language and Cinema - the search for the generality which will specify the cinema, the Law of its uniqueness in the opposition to an 'other' like it, but different. In Language and Cinema it was 'the cinema is like a language, but. ..';in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema it is 'the cinema is like the mirror, but...', and, 'the cinema is like the fetish, but...'. The imaginary signifier of the cinema is defined in its similitude to psychoanalytic phenomena and in its difference from them as once the cinema had been defined in an analogous relation to language. Language as a model threatened to overwhelm the cinema. Metz used the model (the cinema had very early been spoken of in terms of a grammar, e.g. the Russian theorists, and in the thirties, nearly everyone; Metz significantly is now working on Arnheim) but seemed to specify it for the cinema and in so doing specify the cinema itself; exactly the same operation of psychoanalysis and the cinema (the imaginary was here the threat) but with psychoanalysis the threat seems to have been reckoned as more acute and the response was more defensive. It was semiotics itself that psychoanalysis seems to have put at risk and it is that which Metz strains to save, to retain (both are 'linguistic', both are truly semiotic!) in an exaggerated scientism based on parallelisms between semiotics and psychoanalysis which I think need a different handling. For some the entry of psychoanalysis into the study of discourse was not only the entry of desire but the subversion and dispersion of the Law, of legality, of that aspect of semiotics which not only tied it to the Law and the established but to a notion of science which resisted desire (insidious, corroding, seductive). What for many was the letting loose of the imaginary for Metz became its bounding and repression to maintain
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the Law of the cinema he early helped establish. Psychoanalysis as one as well knows may function to contain the work of the imaginary or to liberate it, to name and locate desire or to unname it, permit it to speak, to provoke the difference of desire or to absorb it into the indifference of a science. Metz I believe belongs sadly in the negative and not the positive impulse, as one terrified of what threatens his 'science' and what his 'science' is there to domesticate, and so all those pigeon-holes, those categories, those places of infinite, infinitesmal boundaries, a minute, mean catalogue of desire (if it were laid out, topographically, his text would look like a suburb), nothing not accounted for, both law and its enforcement, not just the Father, but the gendarme.The Paul Hirst book On Law and Ideology is an elegant appreciation and criticism of the work of Althusser on ideology and most specifically Althusser's important essay 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses'. Though Althusser crucially transforms aspects of Marxist theory, especially in thearea of ideology and the practice of a theory, he nevertheless also represents major tendencies of Marxist theory: Hirst's criticism of Althusser is not confined to Althusser alone but extends beyond him to Marxist theory itself. In Hirst's final essay of the book 'The Law of Property and Marxism' he criticises Marxist thought generally on 'the Law' (which bears on Althusserian notions of ideology) and at the same time offers concrete instances of alternative (and what Hirst would call socialist) approaches to an understanding of the Law and of the political possibilities/positions such an understanding represents and offers.
I think this is a superb book both for what it argues (for specific theorisations of institutions and discursive practices and against I notions of totality and impulses towards reductive totalisations) and for the manner of argument which theoretically confronts Althusser's ideas carefully, seriously, in detail, never once descending to mere contrary assertion, contrary examples from the 'real', or political posturing. It bears a relation to all the other books under review, | though from 'another place', there being no direct relation, no mutual citations or sitings; yet, in Hirst's critique of Marxist 'scientism', all scientism (Metz's pose as humble scientist striving to push back the imaginary for the sake of the law and objectivity) is criticised, not least for the 'politics' of that practice, or rather the impossible politics which it entails. The scientific stance of Metz, for example, secure in its presumed objective intent, appears somewhat less secure, more clearly 'ideological' and political after a reading of Hirst. Pecheux too becomes different: his notions of representation, his unreasoned faith - in Marxist materialism (a practice without a subject which appropriates the concrete in thought), his unquestioning use of Althusser, his idea of the conscious subject appear after Hirst as variously obscurantist, dogmatic, unreasoned and even irrelevant. If there is any point of dialogue between Hirst and Gallop, it is perhaps that Hirst like Gallop is concerned with the specificity of things, their concreteness and
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particularity, but unlike her Hirst is more within a framework that must be called 'theoretical', within the Law but opposed to its reductive abstraction, its totalisations. Hirst is concerned to 'free up' theory, make it more flexible, more politically responsive, more sensitive to change and to differences; Gallop is somewhat on the other side, not so much asking that of theory (it is necessary in the games she plays both with language and concepts to maintain the Law of the Father ... seduction is not once and for all but continual, perpetual, always calling the Father, tempting him but needing him there) as playing against theory in an area more directly to do with desire and its specific, subversive urgings.
I want to summarise parts of Hirst's book: his critique of Althusser, what he says of representation and of 'the subject', and the 'politics' of his ideas. My summary is intended as an appreciation.
The importance of Althusser for Hirst, his central theoretical advance, was to treat 'ideology' not as reflection of the real, a representation in the area of 'ideas' of social relations, but rather as part of social relations itself, insisting that ideas are 'real' not 'ideal' and that they exist in objective social forms and institutions, thus combating both the sociologism of much of Marxist thinking about ideology and the notion of ideology as 'false' consciousness, an error along an oppositional grid of truth/falsity, illusion/reality. It is in this last notion that Althusser develops his ideas of representation and of the subject.
For Althusser (I am repeating some things already said in speaking of Pecheux, but I think the repetition is necessary, since it helps also to mark a departure from Pecheux), the subject lives a relation to his conditions of existence as if he/she were a subject.
The 'as if involves the position that subjectivity is both constitutive and non-constitutive. Subjects do not constitute their social relations, they are not the origin of their social relations. But they live them in a different mode to that, and they live them 'as if they did do more than that. This means that they are subjects because they arc constituted as if they constituted themselves.
This imaginary relation to the conditions of existence is neither a representation of them (a reflection) nor a falsity (a misrepresentation) but the very relation the subject lives to his/her conditions:
The imaginary does not represent anything other than what it is, and it cannot be false since it is not an idea or conception of things, but is a part of social relations which has a definite effect. In living 'as if, subjects do not live in illusion, this 'as if is the reality of their existence as subjects.
These ideas are in fact restated by Metz when he discusses the Imaginary Signifier of the cinema, i.e. the imaginary relation of the subject/spectator in the cinema created and constructed by the machine of the cinema itself. It is this imaginary relation that Metz seeks to reveal, in his case, the way the subject is related, 'lives' the cinema. At the same time this revelation, this understanding, knowledge of the cinema and of its imaginary signifier is the foundation for
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a science of the cinema which breaks (Althusser's 'epistemological (break') with the imaginary, breaks its closure into subject-hood and subjectivity, which transcends the imaginary relation by means of science, an autonomous knowledge, a process without a subject, breaking from the imaginary and its imaginary space ... what Metz refers to the symbolic, the Law of the cinema.
Though Hirst argues that Althusser is not entirely free from traditional Marxist concepts of representation, Althusser nevertheless renders these problematic by his insertion of the notion of the imaginary' between the real and ideological representation, so that representation can no longer be held as the correspondence or non-correspondence with reality (truth/falsity), the very basis for classical sociological notions of ideology, and the idea that it is the represented, the real that is the actual motive for representation, that thereal 'causes' its image and to that extent pre-exists it, a signified prior to all signification. I take this in fact to be the extreme 'materialism' which Pecheux argues in his definite mis-reading of Althusser, by in effect abolishing Althusser's notion of the imaginary which is what, as Hirst points out, 'saves' Althusser from the crudity of traditional Marxist concepts of representation and ideology.
Hirst's criticisms of Althusser's fundamental ideas of the subject and of representation are part of a more general critique of Althusser's notion of ideology and of the ideological apparatuses of the State, and take the same form as his more general critique of Marxist theory: namely, that it constructs unities(homogeneities, totalities, the Same) where in fact (and in theory) there are instead differences, specificities, heterogeneity, particularity which Marxism cannot accommodate, (so committed is it to a view of itself as a 'science' and not, for example, the more preferable view according to Hirst, that it is a medium of political calculation) and a science whose work is to unify social relations 'in a general concept and locate them as an element in a social totality, an element which both serves to reproduce it as a totality, and which in turn is subject to the logic of its reproduction'. It is this general objective, and the premises for it, that Hirst calls into question, and by doing so the politics (largely irrelevant he would claim to current political realities) which issues from it. Specifically in the case of Althusser and the notions of subject and representation under review, Hirst argues that Althusser's idea of the subject is of a subject as conscious and as concrete individual, unities, Hirst would claim, Which cannot be established since subjects need not be individuals (they can be agents e.g. corporate bodies, trusts, groups representing 'others': Hirst's examples mostly come from the area of the law) and if agents (and not individuals) the entire framework of the imaginary and the imaginary relation of the subject to the real dissolves. Moreover though Althusser opposes the idea of 'false consciousness' so dear to traditional Marxism he nevertheless retains the idea of falsity as the function of ideology, that is, false representation as the principal
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functional effect of ideology; the function of that falsity is the reproduction of the relations of production and of the relations deriving from them. By misrepresenting these, by making them impossible to recognise, the system itself is maintained and reproduced. Hirst points out that this latter aspect ('representation') tends not to be discussed by Althusser who rather concentrates on the former (the 'lived relation' to conditions of existence, subject-hood, the 'as if' of the subject's imaginary relation). 'Surely', Hirst writes, 'the "Imaginary" and its "representation" (ideology) cannot be separated? Does not Althusser's imaginary consist in representations in the broadest sense of the terms (signs, concepts, etc.)?' But if this is so, a number of questions arise, principally to do with the conditions of existence of the imaginary, which could not arise from the subject (the subject then would truly be constitutive) nor from reality (back to a simple reflection theory). Hirst argues that the notion of signifying needs to be enlisted and attention given to the means of representation in order to conceive of the imaginary as effects of the action of the means of representation, which in turn raises questions regarding the determinations of those means. In other words, representations and the imaginary are the product of a practice of signifying, and that practice is not immediately given by social relations, i.e. signifying is not determined nor motivated by the signified nor limited nor bounded by it. What Hirst has done by these questions and critique of Althusser's ideas of the subject and representation and by his contesting of these with a concept of signifying practice is to break the unity of the 'ideological' in its connection with social relations (as representation) or with a subject (constitutive of the imaginary).
Hirst's book does not propose theory or theories but is rather the questioning of these in the areas of ideology, and of law and of attendant notions in support of them such as the subject and representation. My appreciation of the book is for this modest and major activity of making a space within theories of discourse (but theoretically) for the specificity of representational means, of political realities and political responses; and for politicising theory not by means of the vaunted objectivity of a presumed science but as political calculation, a taking of position in order to assess consequences rather than to declare advance truths, the very obverse both of the dogmatic (also of the empirical) and of the 'scientific'. If Gallop plays with theory 'from the other side', Hirst engages it more directly, from within, though the comparison is perhaps not exact and somewhat reductive since in the one case it is desire, the imaginary itself, that is both theoretical object and theoretical stake, in the other it is ideology, which must be, and is, approached by a different route. To place them together, even if somewhat artificially in this last paragraph, is a sign of my own 'taking sides' with those who take seriously the sound and feel of differences.
Sam Rohdie teaches at La Trobe University.
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