Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory: Thresholds: Thresholds

194 Pages·1991·21.277 MB·English

by  James Donald (eds.)

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CULTURAL THEORY
Psychoanalysis and Cultural
Theory: Thresholds
Edited by
JAMES DONALD
Macmillan Education
Selection and editorial matter© James Donald 1991
Individual chapters© Laura Mulvey 1989, Parveen Adams,
Homi K. Bhabha, Victor Burgin, Elizabeth Cowie, James Donald,
John Forrester, Mary Kelly, Elizabeth Wright, Robert Young 1990
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1991
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly & Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc.,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10010
First published in the United States of America in 1991
ISBN 978-0-333-46104-4 ISBN 978-1-349-21170-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21170-8
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
is available from the Library of Congress.
CIP 90-38793
Contents
Preface Vll
1 On the Threshold: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies 1
JAMES DONALD
2 Geometry and Abjection 11
VICTOR BURGIN
3 The Oedipus Myth: Beyond the Riddles ofthe Sphinx 27
LAURA MULVEY
4 Interim Part 1: Corpus, 1984-85 51
MARY KELLY
5 Re-Presenting the Body: On Interim Part I 59
MARY KELLY
6 Per Os(cillation) 68
PARVEEN ADAMS
7 A Question of Survival: Nations and Psychic States 89
HOMIK. BHABHA
8 Underworld USA: Psychoanalysis and Film Theory in the 1980s 104
ELIZABETH COWIE
9 Psychoanalysis and Political Literary Theories 139
ROBERT YOUNG
10 The Reader in Analysis 158
ELIZABETH WRIGHT
11 Psychoanalysis: Telepathy, Gossip and/or Science? 169
JOHN FORRESTER
Notes on Contributors 188
v
Preface
This volume is the fruit of a series of talks delivered at the Institute of
Contemporary Arts in London between January and March 1987. It turned
out to be an opportune moment to present work from the intersections
between psychoanalysis and cultural theory, for positions entrenched in
the 1970s were becoming more fluid and self-critical. I would therefore like
to thank all the contributors: not only those whose papers are published
here (some very much as delivered, some in more revised form) but also
the first four speakers in the series - Stephen Frosh, Stuart Hall, Mandy
Merck, and Jeffrey Weeks- whose contributions were extremely impor
tant to its continuing success.
The original idea for the project came from Lisa Appignanesi of the
ICA, Brian Finney from the Department of Extra-mural Studies at the
University of London, the co-sponsors of the event, and Steven Kennedy,
editor of Macmillan's 'Culture and Communication' series. I am grateful to
them all for trusting me to organise and chair the talks.
I would also like to thank Erica Carter and Katy Sender of the ICA's
Talks Department not only for their efficiency and intellectual input, but
also for making the series so enjoyable and unstressful.
The frame stills from Underworld USA (pp. 120-6 and 130-1) are repro
duced with the permission of Columbia Pictures.
References to Freud's works are to The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 volumes, ed. J.
Strachey (Hogarth Press, London, 1953-74), given as SE in the notes, and/
or to The Pelican Freud Library, 15 volumes, ed. A. Richards (1973-82)
and A. Dickson (1982-6) (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973-86), given as
PFL.
JAMES DONALD
Vll
1
On the Threshold:
Psychoanalysis and Cultural
Studies
James Donald
I would not say that an attempt of this kind to carry psycho-analysis
over to the cultural community was absurd or doomed to be fruitless.
But we should have to be very cautious and not forget that, after all, we
are only dealing with analogies and that it is dangerous, not only with
men but also with concepts, to tear them from the sphere in which they
have originated and been evolved.
(Freud, Civilization and its Discontents)
Well, the attempt had succeeded. Without trouble or noise, journalist
and detective had made their way into the house.
(Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, Fantomas: The Silent Executioner)
When I was invited to organise and chair a series of talks on psychoanalysis
and cultural theory at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, my
first reaction was to reach for my address book and suggest better qualified
alternatives. Then I hesitated. After all, wasn't the folk hero of this
Thatcherite age the ill-starred brickie Yosser Hughes in the television
series Boys from the Blackstuff, for whom one of life's great mysteries was
that ignorance or incompetence should be a bar to employment? 'I can do
that,' he'd have said, 'Gi'us the job'. Hastily translating that into an
academic justification, I recalled a question I had come across in Shoshana
Felman's essay on 'Psychoanalysis and education': 'How can I interpret
out of the dynamic ignorance I analytically encounter, both in others and in
myself? How can I turn ignorance into an instrument of teaching?' 1
1
2 On the Threshold: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies
So I accepted the invitation, primarily in the hope that I might learn
something, that I might finally come to grips with the issues raised by
psychoanalysis for the sorts of cultural and educational studies in which I
work. That may mean I end up here as the editor presumed to know, but,
even so, don't expect in this introduction a masterly exegesis of all the
arguments raised in the essays that follow. They, in any case, require
neither explanation nor apology from me. What you will find in them is
neither a comprehensive introduction to the often fraught engagements
between psychoanalysis and cultural theory, 2 nor a definitive new line, but
rather a 'snapshot' of a range of work in progress at a particular moment
and in a particular context - work that shares certain priorities, problems
and points of reference.
Of course, my involvement in the talks and the book has not been
altogether innocent. I had my own polemical reasons for wanting to stage
the series in the spring of 1987. Negatively, I sensed then that the perennial
suspicion endemic among the British intellectual left towards psychoanalysis
- and specifically towards the types of psychoanalysis that I find interesting
- might be erupting, as it periodically does, into overt hostility. More
positively, I also felt that this was a transitional moment, that established
ways of yoking together concepts around 'psychoanalysis' and 'culture'
were being subjected to a self-critical re-examination. (This is exemplified
here in Elizabeth Cowie's review of 1970s film theory, and in the different
estimations of the possible relations between psychoanalysis and literary
theory by Robert Young and Elizabeth Wright.) Given this starting point,
it is important to be clear about which psychoanalysis it is that we are
talking about, and so also about what claims are and are not being made
for psychoanalysis in relation to cultural theory.
However dissimilar their intellectual approaches, I was struck by the
remarkably similar way in which Stuart Hall, in his contribution to the
introductory session at the ICA, and Robert Young (p. 144) characterised
this psychoanalytic field. It is, they agreed, psychoanalysis after the
feminist rereading of Lacan's rereading of Freud.3 This is, in other words,
the psychoanalysis that emerged (in Britain at least) as part of an attempt
in the 1960s and 1970s to pose cultural and social questions in new ways, to
see things differently. This impulse clearly lay behind such projects as
Juliet Mitchell's heretical rehabilitation, or reclamation, of Freud in
Psychoanalysis and Feminism, or the journal Screen's attempt to establish
film theory in Britain with its heady cocktail of Lacanian psychoanalysis,
Althusserian Marxism, radical semiotics and a Brechtian aesthetic. Since
then, those formulations have been criticised, contested, rethought and
refined - not least by their first begetters. A feminist engagement with
psychoanalysis, drawing also on Foucauldian work in its critique of
Althusser, was a consistent and central theme in the journal mlf (of which
Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie were editors) - despite a sometimes
James Donald 3
quite hostile rejection of the claims for the importance of subjectivity for
cultural and social life in the name of a class-based feminism. 4 On the other
hand, a key figure in the development of cultural studies like Stuart Hall,
although remaining sceptical in some ways, has increasingly incorporated
psychoanalytic questions into his attempts to understand the significance of
identity, ethnicity and desire in the dynamics of political mobilisation. 5
That impulse to interrogate cultural issues in the light of psychoanalytic
insights continues to be evident in this book.
This formulation has a number of implications. It means that these
essays do not treat psychoanalysis as just another technique for reading
through the phenomenal forms of culture to unmask their 'real' meaning -
though substituting the operations of the unconscious for the determining
'reality' of economic relations proposed by some Marxist cultural theory.
In considering the visual arts, cinema, literary theory, questions of
perception and identity, and also (in John Forrester's essay) psychoanalysis
itself, the authors do not simply apply psychoanalysis to a reading of
cultural forms. The question they raise is, how do you analyse the
dynamics of culture differently once you recognise the centrality of the
unconscious?
This entails neither incorporating psychoanalysis into cultural theory,
nor claiming that either is a metadiscourse able to explain and resolve the
lacunae in the other, nor creating a new synthetic theoretical field which
might accommodate them both. Any such attempt to merge the two bodies
of theory blunts their specific insights and ignores their incompatibilities
and contradictions. What seems potentially more fruitful is the dialogue in
which, although the two discourses remain distinct - they are always to
some extent talking past each other - the questions untranslatably specific
to each can provoke new thinking and insights in the other. (It is worth
noting that this dialogue has not been limited to the conventional terms of
academic discourse, but has generated new forms of art practice. These are
exemplified by Mary Kelly's contribution to this book; Victor Burgin in his
photography-based art works and Laura Mulvey in her films similarly cross
and recross the thresholds of theory and aesthetics.)
It follows from the refusal to collapse psychoanalysis and cultural theory
into each other that the essays in this collection do not attempt a pathology
of contemporary British culture - Freud quite properly warned us off that
path. It is cultural analysis not cultural therapy that is at issue here. Nor are
they primarily concerned with individual psychological health, with the
more or less successful and more or less painful processes of psychic
maturation, nor with the scars left on the psyche by its adaptation to the
social and the cultural. Their focus on questions of culture distinguishes
them not only from psychological notions of development, but also from
sociological assumptions about the construction of individual identity
through the internalisation of social norms. They take it as axiomatic that,
4 On the Threshold: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies
as Jacqueline Rose observes, the psychoanalytic concept of the un
conscious 'constantly reveals the "failure" of identity'. By this she does not
mean a passing blip in a process of socialisation: '"failure" is something
endlessly repeated and relived moment by moment throughout our in
dividual histories. It appears not only in the symptom, but also in dreams,
in slips of the tongue and in forms of sexual pleasure which are pushed to
the sidelines of the norm.'
For Rose, it is this recognition that 'there is a resistance to identity at the
very heart of psychic life' that suggests the affinity between feminism and
psychoanalysis. 6 To me, it also suggests why it is impossible to stage the
dialogue between psychoanalysis and cultural theory in terms of what I
think of as the Polyfilla model - remember the time when we all got
terribly worried that Marxism and/or cultural studies did not have a theory
of the subject, and hoped that (following Althusser's appropriation of
Lacan) psychoanalysis might provide it? Fill that gap, ran the argument,
and we would finally have a complete picture of the complex unity of
'reality', or at least of ideology and social relations.
One reason this was never going to work is that even if cultural studies
lacked a fully developed theory of the subject, a concern with - indeed, a
commitment to - a certain conception of identity lay at its very heart. Its
original project (at least in the institutional form that began to emerge in
Britain in the post-1956 period) was, in large part, to make the experiences
of ordinary people and the texture of everyday life, previously ignored
within most academic discourse, a legitimate and necessary focus of
concern. This principle had two corollaries. One was a new attention to the
historical importance of collective subjects like 'the people' or 'the working
class'. The other was the assertion that individual consciousness is social in
the sense that it derives from the shared experiences that produce these
collective identities. E. P. Thompson spelt out his version of the link
between them in his definition of class in The Making of the English
Working Class in 1963:
Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences
(inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as
between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are
different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is
largely determined by the productiv~ relations into which men are born
- or enter involuntarily. Class consciousness is the way in which the
experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions,
value-systems, ideas and institutional forms. 7
Although Raymond Williams's conception of a 'structure of feeling'
stresses generational as well as class determinations, it shares this dual
focus. In The Long Revolution, he characterised it in terms of 'a particular
sense of life, a particular community of experience'. Later, in Marxism and