Tarja LAINE
Shame and Desire Emotion, Intersubjectivity, Cinema
Rethinking Cinema" No.3
The publication of this book was financially supported by the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam.
Cover Illustration: Drifting Clouds. Courtesy of Sputnik Oy.
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Table of Contents Intersubjectivity in Film Studies Emotions and Intentionality Intersubjectivity in the Cinematic Experience The Course of the Argument
9 14 18 23
1. "You Want to See? Well, Take a Look at This!" What Is Intersubjectivity? The Returned Look Masochistic Intimacy 4 Violent Confrontation Voyeuristic Shame Reciprocal Intersubjectivity
29 29 33 36 45 49 54
2. Intersubjectivity and Otherness Dialectical Spectatorship Sense of Communality Triadic Communality Idiotic Communities Intersubjectivity and Solidarity
61 61 65 70 73 76
INTRODUCTION.
CHAPTER
CHAPTER
3. An Appetite for Alterity Otherness Within Images of Abjection Love and Abjection
85 85 93 101
CHAPTER
4. Intersubjectivity and Embodied Affect The Bodily Subject Carnal Perception Inside/Outside Intersubjectivity, Sexuality and Gender
109 109 114 118 126
Conclusion
139
References
143
Index
151
CHAPTER
7
INTRODUCTION
Intersubjectivity in Film Studies The Other is indispensable for my own existence, as well as to my knowledge about myself. This being so, in discovering my inner being I discover the other person at the same time, like a freedom placed in front of me which thinks and wills only for or against me. Hence, let us at once announce the discovery of a world which we shall call intersubjectivity. (Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism & Humanism)
The lack of 'identity construction' seems to lie at the heart of contemporary cinema. As a result, a new perception of cinema is coming into sight, a perception that is no longer related to visual pleasure or narrative, ego-strengthening, two-way identification, but to the concepts of affect, emotion and intersubjectivity. An example of this kind of'new perception' can be found for instance in a crucial and much-discussed scene in Matthieu Kassovitz s acclaimed Hate {La haine, 1995), which examines the lives of three teenage friends from a housing project outside Paris: Vinz (Vincent Cassel) who is Jewish, Hubert (Hubert Kound6) who is Afro-Caribbean and Said (Said Taghmaoui), who is an Arab. In this important scene, Hubert and Said are being assaulted in a Parisian police station upon being arrested. The scene opens with a medium shot of two police officers performing the act of violence directly towards the camera. In the next shot the camera has moved exactly 180 degrees, and we see a close-up of a younger officer. Later, when Hubert directs his face (that now has lost all the traces of human dignity) to the camera, the shot is followed by another close-up of the young officer, looking down in shame. The spectator comes to share the officer's shame through a very complex, triadic system of identification. On the one hand, the spectator identifies with the officer as seen by Hubert, on the other hand the spectator identifies with Hubert as the one who looks, and, finally, the spectator identifies with the 'panoptic' look of the larger social structures ('the French nation'), the discursive construction of vision that defines the subjectivity of both Hubert and 9
Shame and Desire
the young officer (and supposedly 'justifies' the police violence against migrants in France). The way in which the editing is organised in this scene epitomises Sartre's quotation cited above, which suggests that the concept of intersubjectivity deals with that dimension of the self that links the subject immediately with the relational, interpersonal world, where the 'outside' of the collective experience becomes the 'inside' of the subject's psychic life. This means that in order to fully understand subjectivity, one has to take the subject's relationship with the Other into consideration. This relationship is not merely an external one; it contributes to the core of subjectivity itself. Since subjectivity exists in the signification of others, the subject's being in the world can have meaning only through self-awareness of his or her presence in front of the others. During my research, I have come to the conclusion that this intersubjective dimension of subjectivity could be extended to the cinematic experience as well. The 'cinematic' emerges from an intersubjective 'in-between' space, since the cinematic experience is much more immediate, much more dependent on the existence of others, and much more socially conditioned than assumed in theories that operate within the ocular-specular paradigm only (such as psychoanalysis). Generally speaking, one might claim that cinema is the art of shared space, bringing before the spectators the intersubjective 'life-spaces' of the characters in the film. Cinema is not some kind of objectified external universe cut off from the spectator by an impassable barrier that separates the corporeal from the intellectual, or the private self from the public space. Rather, I have come to see cinema as a matter of affects that emerge from between the inside of the self and the outside of the world, and also from between different temporalities and spatialities, that are holding the intersubjective world together. The intersubjective perspective in film theory, then, maintains that in contemporary cinema the traditional, dialectical poles of inside and outside, subject and object, seeing and being seen no longer seem to be valid. The status of the object and the subject of the look are interchangeable: we are surrounded by images that look back at us, aggressively, seductively, provocatively, indifferently. Like the look of Hubert in the film Hate discussed above, images look back at us, simultaneously constituting and transforming the discourses (the mediations of 'reality') that define the ontological distinction between 'the self and 'the Other', engaging us in new kinds of intersubjective relationships across social communities. This is the debate around which my arguments regarding contemporary cinema revolve. But how can we theorise this new way of looking that we find not only in movies, but also in
10
Introduction. Intersubjectivity in Film Studies
installation art, photography, reality television, the city, the street, in chance encounters, and in our more private, intimate relationships? Psychoanalytic film theory, for instance, heavily epitomises the concept of look, and in particular the way in which the look and the phenomenon of cinema relates to the psyche of the individual spectator. Cinema is seen as a Kleinian 'good object', granting the spectators what they unconsciously desire and disavowing that there is any lack. For Melanie Klein, the mother's breast is the metaphor for both the 'good' (when it produces satisfaction) and the 'bad' (when it denies satisfaction) object for the infant in the pre-Oedipal stage. According to Klein, this process is replayed throughout adulthood by the unconscious defence mechanism against the lack. These mechanisms include projection (projecting the 'good' and the 'bad' aspects of the inner self onto something or someone in the 'external' world), introjection (taking the 'good' and the 'bad' from the 'external' world into the self), and projective identification (recognising the 'external' parts of the self in the other, but not as originating within the self). Similarly, cinema produces satisfaction by allowing the spectators to identify with their own vision as 'omniscient', and by inviting the spectators to project their ego ideal onto the film characters. In this way, cinema offers the spectators the illusion of pre-Oedipal (the stage in which the infant's sense of self is not yet wholly individuated), Imaginary wholeness; and cinema as Imaginary is identified as the ideological function of cinema. However, as has been argued in the context of psychoanalytic reasoning, since cinema is always already Symbolic (the order of language and the societal imperatives of 'the law of the Father'), it also introduces a rupture in these Imaginary processes and re-establishes the lack by producing the good object as lost.1 Psychoanalytic film theory, then, strives to show how cinema has the power to take advantage of the subject's basic desire to look and his or her drive for wholeness through situating the spectator at the 'omniscient' position, at the centre of vision. This idea of the so-called 'interpellation' was reframed in film theory by Jean-Pierre Oudart and JeanLouis Baudry, and it was borrowed from Louis Althusser's political reading of Jacques Lacan: just like language in Althusserian thinking, cinematic experience (the way in which the spectators experience the tension between the narrative content and cinematic texture of the film) is ideological in nature, because the spectators are blind to the fact that Klein, 1979. On cinema as a good/bad object, see especially Metz, 1982. On (earlier) psychoanalytic film theory see also Oudart, 1977/78; Dayan, 1985; Baudry, 1986; Mulvey, 1985. On criticism of this earlier psychoanalytic film theory, see, for instance, MacCabe, 1975; Heath, 1977/78; Andrew, 1984. 11
Shame and Desire
their knowledge (and their way of looking) has already been produced in a certain (ideological) discourse beforehand.2 The quest in psychoanalytic film theory is to find out how cinema works on the spectator as a subject of desire, what is the ideological function of cinema, and what might be the alternatives (e.g. a Brechtian 'deconstructionist' cinema a la Jean-Luc Godard). In this way, psychoanalysis epitomises the desire to look and the illusion of the transcendental gaze, but it does not allow the returned look that would allow one to see oneself in the Other's eyes.3 In other words, it is all about 'the subject'. Kaja Silverman has posed answers to this problem by positing a different kind of being-in-the-world as spectators. By confronting psychoanalysis with the ideas of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, Silverman inquires into a more adequate theory of intersubjectivity in cinema: The concept of [being-in-the-world] makes visible something which psychoanalysis has functioned to make invisible: what it means for the world that each of us is in it. [...] Since Lacan, those of us working within that discourse have begun to understand that subjectivity pivots around a void: that each of us is in a sense no-thing. However, we have not learned to hear the call to Being which echoes out of this void. We have not yet understood that the "no-thing9 links us inextricably to the world we inhabit, and makes its affairs ours as well.4 According to Silverman, we are world spectators insofar as we can only see from a certain position in the world: "The 'there' from which each of us looks is finally semiotic; it represents the unique language of desire through which it is given to the subject to symbolise the world."5 Furthermore, we can only appear in the world insofar as we are seen by others in it: "We can appear, and so to Be, only if others 'light' us up. To be lit up means to be seen from a vantage point from which we can never see ourselves."6 Silverman does not, however, challenge the basic Lacanian premise of the look that subscribes to the fundamental lack. The world spectator remains to be a subject divided in language, not as a subject concretely and bodily present in the world. Furthermore, in this new way of looking we are not merely spectators: we participate, we are challenged, we have to respond. This look is reflective and self-
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4 5 6
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Figure 14: If 6 Was 9 projection space. Courtesy of Crystal Eye As mentioned above, the intimacy between the self and the Other is in many ways disturbed and disturbing in Ahtila's work. In her If 6 Was 9 (Jos 6 olis 9, 1996) this is the case because the self/Other relationship is epitomised through the emotion of shame as a reaction to the estab lished and internalised cultural values of female sexuality. In this film installation she deals with sexual fantasies, habits, activities and wishes of five teenage girls during their 'metamorphosis' into adult women as sexual beings. Remarkably direct in its approach, If 6 Was 9 is based on interviews and empirical research: as a result the touch of documentary and direct cinema is apparent in the film, but the realisation and the stories told by the girls are nevertheless fictional. Like Today, If 6 Was 9 is structured as a triptych: three aurally and visually non-linear, adjacent images create an audio-visual flow on three enormous screens (fig ure 14). The non-chronological, non-linear narrative fabric unfolds in both parallel and contrasting movement across the screens. The three screens may show a different perspective on the setting, or they may converge in order to form a single screen. The sound is projected from where it appears to emerge, and the soundtrack follows the horizontal, simultaneous movement between the three screens of the triptych. In the 127
Shame and Desiw gallery screening, the screens together with a comfortable sofa, are organised so (hat the three screens and (he spectators, sitting on the sofa, form a four-cornered space (figure 15). Since the audio-visual flow on the three screens is often non-simultaneous, the spectators are again refused one privileged point of view. But through the size and the organisation of the screens the spectators are compelled to absorb the audiovisual flow not only aurally or visually, but also with their whole body.
Figure IS: Tke gallery screening. Coartesy of Crystal Eye The film begins with an empty, black screen; only lines that refer to sexual acts and that are spoken by immature voices of young girls can be heard. On the screen, nothing can be seen, not even the owners of the voices, which penetrate into the consciousness of the spectator, thereby breaking the battler of distance between the spectator and the film. The spectator is invited to share the subjective experiences of the narrator from the inside. But in a split second, the intimacy between the spectator and the film is disrupted as images of everyday Life occupy the screen, combined with voices that articulate a seemingly meaningless stream of consciousness in the following fashion: When f was not yet at school age 1 used to play a game. 1 went under ibe cover and played doctor. Alone. 1 was a patient, and the doctor examined my bottom. I had to open my anus while they stood around... the doctor nurse, and maybe some other people. The doctor cured me by sticking me in 128
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F^nre 16: if 6 Was 9. Conrtesy of Crystal Eye The following passage makes use of a documentary/interview style, inviting the spectator into yet another relationship with the film. On one screen. a young girl is sharing her masturbation fantasy/memoty with the spectator in a close-up, sitting on a cosy chair and looking directly at the camera, in the mode of a confession. Yet this familiar convention of documentary - 'safe intimacyfroma distance* - is in contradiction with the fact that it is a young girl who is sharing 'her' sexual, almost pornographic fantasy - and it is here that the emotion of shame sets in, re minding the spectators of their own sense of shame about their sexual ity. Indeed, as Leon Wurmser has noted, "shame about exposing one's sexual organs, activities, and feelings [...] is of such cardinal import that in most Western languages shame is practically synonymous with sexual exposure and the sexual organs themselves.**3 In ff6 Was P, during the 'sexual confession' two other screens 'open up1; screens that are divided into a point of view shot of the young girl» and an establishing shot of the whole setting (figure 16). The spectators occupy ait these three perspectives at once, not only on the visual level but also on the subjec tive level, through the emotion of shame. As many theorists of shame, including Sartre, have shown, in the emotion of shame there exists a consciousness of self as existing for oneself and for others: shame makes the self present as an object in the world, as an object for the
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Tlie psychoanalytic explanation of why this should be so \s thai lite development of objective self-awareness predisposes the child to integrate the parental criticism of sexual censure Through the sense of shame. Wurmser, I9J}|, p. 32. But Imking sexu ality and shame is in no way an invention of psychoanalysis: it appears in recorded i Oteckyjudaeo-Oiristian) history at least as early as Genesis in the Old Testament. la Plato and in classical G*eek {physical) sexual desire was considered shameful and degrading {in contrast to platooic love). The 17th' and I3**ceatury English Puritan ism made moral abstinence a core virtue. See Tomkhfc. 1987. And in Finland, con trolled sexuality was a direct continuation of the naye^at-roniflotic movement Siltttla, J999,p.438. 129
Shame and Desire
Other.40 Shame involves consciousness of the self that has been exposed for others to see as an object in the world from an outside, objective viewpoint which the subject can recognise as him- or herself (even though that objective dimension of oneself, the being-for-others, essentially escapes the subject). But at the same time shame is a shameful apprehension of something and this something is the subject self: "I am ashamed of what I am."41 Shame, therefore, realises an intimate relation of oneself both to oneself and to others; an exposure of oneself to others. This means that shame is not originally a phenomenon of selfreflection, but the subject's original apprehension of the two modes of his or her being (existing for oneself and for others) occurs prereflectively: It is certain that my shame is not reflective, for the presence of another in my consciousness, even as a catalyst, is incompatible with the reflective attitude; in the field of my reflection I can never meet with anything but the consciousness which is mine. But the Other is indispensable mediator between myself and me. I am ashamed as I appear to the Other.42 But a reflective consciousness can always direct itself upon emotion, upon shame. In this case, shame appears as a structure of consciousness. So whilst shame as pre-reflective consciousness is directed toward something other than itself (shame of what one is and of what one is for the Other), shame as reflective consciousness shifts its attention to itself and becomes consciousness of an act of consciousness (consciousness of shame of what one is and of what one is for the Other). Sartre has shown us that emotion (i.e. shame) is a state of consciousness of the world in a state of emotion, the subject is immediately and spontaneously connected with the social world, and it is precisely this unreflective condition that constitutes the possibility for the reflective consciousness the subject has of him- or herself. This reflection, however, is rare and necessitates special motivation, because reflective consciousness involves both a unity and a duality at the level of reflection. According to Sartre, on the one hand there must be an absolute unity of reflective consciousness with the consciousness on which it reflects, but on the other hand "the reflected-on must necessarily be the object for the reflective; and this implies a separation of being."43 In shame I am conscious of myself as an object of values for the Other, but there is a separation between me and that object, since I 40 41 42 43
See Sartre, 1956; Taylor, 1985; Lewis, 1995; Katz, 1999. Sartre, 1956. p. 301. Ibid., p. 302. /*>/
