The Routledge International Handbook of Jungian Film Studies

Luke Hockley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138666962
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317213116
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Winner of the IAJS award for best edited book of 2018!

The Routledge International Handbook of Jungian Film Studies weaves together the various strands of Jungian film theory, revealing a coherent theoretical position underpinning this exciting recent area of research, while also exploring and suggesting new directions for further study.

The book maps the current state of debates within Jungian orientated film studies and sets them within a more expansive academic landscape. Taken as a whole, the collection shows how different Jungian approaches can inform and interact with a broad range of disciplines, including literature, digital media studies, clinical debates and concerns. The book also explores the life of film outside cinema - what is sometimes termed 'post-cinema' - offering a series of articles exploring Jungian approaches to cinema and social media, computer games, mobile screens, and on-line communities.

The Routledge International Handbook of Jungian Film Studies represents an essential resource for students and researchers interested in Jungian approaches to film. It will also appeal to those interested in film theory more widely, and in the application of Jung's ideas to contemporary and popular culture.

PART I

Theoretical approaches

Edited by
Catriona Miller

1

A JUNGIAN TEXTUAL TERROIR

Catriona Miller

Introduction

Andrew Samuels begins his consideration of the Jungian and post-Jungian field by pointing out how the inheritance of Jung’s work no longer rests solely upon his legacy of the twenty volumes of the Collected Works. It has, he suggested, ‘become a many stranded skein of thought, which has inspired, influenced, challenged, and, in some cases infuriated those who followed’ (Samuels, 1985/1994, p. 1). Within the more specific area of screen studies, Hockley has spoken of the ‘deep rhizomatic structures in Jungian screen theory’, a ‘deep mycological transmission of psychological ideas and concepts in ways that permeate the work at an almost chemical and subterranean manner’ (Hockley, 2015, p. 57). The metaphor that I would like to employ, however, is that of the terroir, from the French terre meaning ‘land’ or ‘soil’, and is normally used to describe the complete environment within which a vineyard sits and which contributes to and influences the flavour of the wine, including the geography, the soil and the climate for example, but in addition to such ‘natural’ characteristics, terroir can also take account of human intervention such as cultivation and farming techniques. All these elements affect the wine’s final aroma and taste.

In this chapter I will tease out some of the elements of the Jungian textual terroir to make more explicit some of the tensions within the subterranean ideas and perspectives that infuse the field, and which can make it challenging for non-Jungians to engage with. The investigation of the terroir, will begin by exploring the purpose and process of textual analysis as more routinely practised within the humanities in order to consider what the post-Jungians might be doing differently in their approach to film texts, or, indeed, where they might sit within a more familiar post-structuralist milieu, before considering a possible methodology for a post-Jungian approach to the text.

What is a text? The ground

The first issue to tackle is the ground of the terroir itself, the question of the ‘text’. In the generally understood notion of the ‘text’, film followed in the same territory as literary theory, where, alongside analysis of various elements of aesthetics and style, initially a close consideration of authorial (or directorial) intention formed the core of textual analysis. Towards the middle of the twentieth century however a fresh way of examining the workings of the text itself began to develop, but this trend of analysis which emerged through the French literary journal Tel Quel (meaning ‘such as it is’) then began to change the understanding of the object under analysis, the text itself. Between 1960 and 1982, Tel Quel published a mixture of theory, creative writing and radical critique, and its list of contributing authors was an impressive ‘who’s who’ of influential critical theorists including Lacan, Derrida and Kristeva, amongst others. There was an aspiration for the ‘theory of literature to attain some of the logical hardness and rigour of mathematics’ (ffrench, 2015, p. 108), beginning with semiotics.

Roland Barthes cogently summed up much of the discussion in a short essay From Work to Text published in 1971 (in Heath (ed.), 1978) followed up shortly afterwards with Theory of the Text in 1973 (in Young (ed.), 1990). In the first essay Barthes pointed out how the journal had engaged with a series of ‘initiatory discourses’ (semiotics, psychoanalysis and Marxism) that seemed to give rise to an epistemological break (or slide as he put it) leading away from a consideration of ‘the work’ towards a consideration of ‘the text’. The work, he wrote, ‘is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books (in a library for example), the Text is a methodological field’ (Barthes in Heath, 1978, p. 156) – one is displayed and the other demonstrated; one is an object and the other a process. Barthes went on to offer several propositions that he suggested sat at the intersection of the Text. For example, that a Text is not confined to any particular genre; that it did not rely upon the author to guarantee meaning (which Barthes called ‘filiation’) but instead the reader must collaborate with the Text to create meaning, as a musician collaborates with a score to create music.

This approach, developed through Tel Quel, came to predominate within the general discipline of cultural studies, including film and media of course, as the idea of the Text was gradually extended to include more than language per se till in contemporary academia it has come to mean anything that we can make meaning from. In fact ‘a text is anything that generates meaning through signifying practices. That is, a text is a metaphor that invokes the constitution of meaning through the organisation of signs into representations’ (Barker, 2004, p. 199). Any organised system of signs (signifiers with a generally understood signified) can be read as a Text. This extended the idea of a Text far beyond the realm of language to music, cooking, fashion, the body itself and, of course, film and media.

So far, this is a fairly straightforward version of what might be intended by Text, drawing heavily on Saussure’s basic concept that the ‘signifer + signified = a sign’; where influenced by this crucial period of largely literary focused theory, ‘text’ moves from being a work/object with a relatively stable meaning whose secrets and symbols can be uncovered with the right hermeneutic approach, towards being a ‘methodological field’. So looking at texts (such as film) is a study in a text’s sense making practice.

However, by opening up the idea of the ‘methodological field’ as Text, the question of how it comes to mean was already becoming more complex. By 1971, the supposedly stable relationship between signifier and signified posited by structuralism was already under significant scrutiny. Barthes himself pointed out that the:

logic regulating the Text is not comprehensive (define ‘what the work means’) but metonymic; the activity of associations, contiguities, carryings-over coincides with a liberation of symbolic energy; … the work … is moderately symbolic (its symbolic runs out, comes to a halt); the Text is radically symbolic; a work conceived, perceived and received in its integrally symbolic nature is a text.

(Barthes in Heath, 1978, pp. 158–9, italics as original)

With this he emphasised the plurality of meaning offered within the Text. A work, he said, has meaning that might be uncovered through hermeneutics and interpretation. From a semiotic point of view, a work is a sign with a relatively stable relationship between signifier and signified, but the Text had an ‘irreducible … plurality’ (Barthes in Heath, 1978, p. 159) which practised the infinite deferment of the signified, it was a network, reaching out to other texts. ‘The plural of the Text depends’, he pointed out, ‘not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric)’ (Barthes in Heath, 1978, p. 159). In fact, Derrida (largely responsible for unsettling the relationship between signifier and signified), writing in 1979 made this point even more robustly:

A ‘text’ is henceforth no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins, but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces. Thus the text overruns all the limits assigned to it so far (not submerging or drowning them in an undifferentiated homogeneity, but rather making them more complex, dividing and multiplying strokes and lines).

(Derrida in Bloom, 2004, p. 69)

We will return to Derrida later, while noting there that this post-structuralist perspective began to throw some interesting issues into the spotlight as the quest for ‘meaning’ moved beyond the stability of the signifier/signified relationship. In refusing to close down the possibilities of play, and insisting upon the ‘radical symbolism’ of the text, the Tel Quel approach began to reach towards another kind of ‘meaning making’ or quality being expressed within the Text. There was something more or perhaps something else happening within texts that the structuralist perspective could not adequately account for. As Barthes put it, ‘As soon as the text is conceived as a polysemic space where the paths of several possible meanings intersect, it is necessary to cast off the monological, legal status of signification, and to pluralise it’ (Barthes in Young, 1990, p. 37).

In fact, this ‘other logic’ raised the question of subjectivity: who is making sense of the Text? To tackle this question, Barthes drew upon the work of Kristeva, a member of Tel Quel’s editorial board, and used the term ‘signifiance’ in distinction with ‘signification’. He commented:

When the text is read (or written) as a mobile play of signifiers, with no possible reference to one or several fixed signifieds, it becomes necessary to distinguish very carefully between signification, which belongs to the level of the product, of the statement, of communication, and the signifying work, which belongs to the level of production, enunciation, symbolisation: it is this work that we call ‘signifiance’.

(Barthes in Young, 1990, pp. 37–8)

Kristeva had been engaging with Lacan’s radical reworking of Freud. Lacan’s importance to the development of textual analysis was central because he offered an account of how the subject came to be constituted. The subject, from this point of view, was not a pre-existing essence per se, but was in fact constituted by language, or at least, until there was language there was no way to represent whatever might have ‘gone before’. Lacan’s theory tied the creation of subjectivity, (the conscious ego) to the acquisition of language itself, where experience is mediated by language, as Kugler puts it by ‘creating a self representation in language through the use of the first person pronoun “I”’ (Kugler in Barnaby and D’Acierno (eds), 1990, p. 311). This had the effect of dividing the personality into an experiential self and a represented self, and because the experiential self is excluded from the realm of representation (i.e. no language, no representation) it leads to the appearance of the unconscious order of experience (ibid., 1990, p. 311).

Thus language was seen to be the mechanism by which consciousness is initiated and the question of the Text, and of textuality, becomes intimately connected with questions around the formation of consciousness itself. When Derrida said il n’y a pas de hors-texte – ‘there is no outside text’ (Derrida, 1976, p. 158) – it meant there is no way of understanding consciousness without language, without Text, and we come to the notion instead of the ‘dissolved’ or ‘constructed’ subject, whereby what we think of as the individual is really a product of social and linguistic forces that is, not an essence at all, merely a ‘tissue of textualities’ (Barry, 1995/2009, p. 65). This is a view of subjectivity that is inseparable from language or from indeed from Text. In this landscape, it is easy to wander away from the Text itself to consideration of how the subject is constituted, as we have just done. It is a common slippage in textual analysis because it is difficult to consider how meaning is created from the weave and texture of signs, without starting to wonder who is doing the ‘meaning making’.

Lacan devised a tripartite scheme that revolved around language; the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic orders – the Real is the place before language, and thus before subjectivity. Kristeva however chose to name that place without language the semiotic chora (a term taken from Plato). It is ‘a non-expressive (i.e. non verbal) totality underlying language, a non spatial, non temporal receptacle of energy and drives which she calls the chora’ (Smith, 1998, p. 121). The subject is expelled from the chora in a series of pulsations into the symbolic realm.

To return to signifiance, the term Barthes used to describe a different kind of meaning within the text, Kristeva described it as an excess of meaning created by the co-presence of the semiotic and the symbolic. Some confusion can arise in this instance, as Kristeva chose to reinterpret ‘semiotic’ here to refer to ‘a sort of corporeal memory, a reminiscence of the play of energy and drives experienced in the body with great intensity before the separation from the mother and the foundation of consciousness, entry into the symbolic’ (Smith, 1998, p. 16). Thus the Lacanian Real is replaced by the Kristevan semiotic chora as ‘the space of the articulation of the drives and the arrangement of instincts’ (Grossberg, 1997, p. 77).

The concept of signifiance moved beyond the Text (in any sense of a material trace) to a methodological field where language is a structuring force, in an attempt to offer an account of the relationship between the subject and the text. Kristeva postulated the idea of the ‘subject in process’ where:

signifiance is an alternative signifying process that is the result of the heterogenous workings of language which articulates both symbolic and semiotic dispositions. This double articulation of language allows a text or artwork to signify what the communicative or representational function of the work cannot say.

(Kristeva, 1980, p. 18)

Much of Kristeva’s work in textual analysis was centred around tracing signifiance within poetry. What is intriguing, is that despite the desire of Tel Quel to have the ‘theory of literature … attain some of the logical hardness and rigour of mathematics’ (ffrench, 2015, p. 108), they found themselves chasing a different kind of meaning and reaching into the unknowable depths of the psyche where/when consciousness is just potential, calling it the Real or the semiotic chora, pre-language and full of drives and positing the subject as a co-creation of the semiotic and the symbolic, an unstable subject, constantly in motion and in production.

Jung too sought to understand the unknowable depths of the psyche, full of drives and before consciousness but named it the collective unconscious, and saw the ego as a (more or less) unstable coalescence of the totality of psyche. Although Jung did not look to language per se as the catalyst for consciousness, but rather to patterning forces he called archetypal. The archetype is, he said ‘a condensation of the living process’ (1921: §749). As Rowland puts it, ‘[t]he unconscious is structured through archetypes as the potentials for images and psychic signifying. Archetypes are not inherited images but the inherited possibilities for certain sorts of meaning’ (Rowland, 1999, p. 191). The archetypes an sich cannot be directly apprehended (also true for the Real and Imaginary orders and the semiotic chora). However the archetypal images arising from the archetypes can and most Jungian textual analysis has been concerned with exploring archetypal imagery within culture.

So textual analysis as it began to emerge as a practice, recognised that there were different kinds of meaning in texts, and that whilst there were structures and organising forces at work within a text, there was also its opposite: slips ups, cracks in the facade of meaning, aporia where meaning seemed to become more than the sum of its parts. The cinematic text seems to be a category of text particularly prone to this excess of complex signification. It consists of web within web of signification: complex and interlocking systems, as meaning that ties narrative (if it exists) to the visual complexities of mise-en-scène, to sound textures, to the speed and rhythm of camera work and editing. It is a multiplicious kaleidoscope of signification and yet meaning emerges and audiences have become adept at decoding them.

The cinematic text, like literature, is variegated, ranging from mainstream narratives to avant garde audio visual ‘happenings’ but even the most experimental texts are still organised. In fact film has developed well-establi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgementsxvii
• Introduction
• PART I Theoretical approaches
• PART II Applied approaches
• PART III Transnational approaches
• PART IV Clinical approaches
• PART V Approaches post-cinema
• Title index
• Subject index