4 - On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
With Kaja Silverman’s works, a reversal within Lacanian theory becomes abundantly clear that turns away from the old identification paradigm of imaginary misjudgement in the mirror stage. Following Lacan’s reformulation of the gaze as an “objet petit a,” the gaze is thought of as divided from the subject and placed on the side of the object. In the synthesis of Copjec’s/Žižek’s work with Michel Chion’s theories of voice and sound, my aim is to conceive of a fundamental acousmatics of film: not only the voice, but also the gaze in film is structurally acousmatic. In Lacan’s understanding, gaze and voice are strictly equivalent objects. As such, it is my intention to conceive of a political aesthetics from a psychoanalytic acousmatics of film. In the point-of-view paradoxes and transsubjective gazes in Rossellini’s and Antonioni’s post-neorealist films, I analyze the political and social dimension of this acousmatics.
Keywords: Gaze, Voice, Point-of-View, Transsubjectivity, Post-Neorealism
With the dwindling importance of psychoanalytic film theory since the 1980s, suture theory also seemed to be without a future. Newer paradigms like the debate around masochistic scopophilia initiated by Gaylyn Studlar, and a generalized shift towards the phenomenological body led psychoanalysis’s “anorexic” (Vivian Sobchack) theory of the gaze to appear increasingly obsolete. In fact, apparatus theory, with its dogmatic fixation on Lacan’s specular model of the imaginary, did seem to have maneuvered itself into a dead-end, which was also, unjustly, ascribed to suture theory. For a long time, there was little recognition that, in his later texts, Lacan had developed a theory of the gaze and the image, which in many areas was diametrically opposed to his earlier work on the mirror-stage. The following chapters will strive to bring together suture theory with Lacan’s revised theory of the gaze, a task that has already been initiated by writers such as Kaja Silverman, Joan Copjec and Slavoj Žižek, but is far from having been systematized.
To draw the full consequences of this theoretical articulation does not entail, however, bringing them in any way closer to contemporary phenomenological and somatic approaches. Although Sartre and Merleau-Ponty are important reference points for Lacan, he formulated a decidedly anti-phenomenological theory. The problem of apparatus theory, I would contend, is not that it is too disembodied, but quite the opposite, that it is not disembodied enough.
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- Information
- Towards a Political Aesthetics of CinemaThe Outside of Film, pp. 117 - 148Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020