The One Who Turns Around
āHow can you recognize a psychoanalyst in a party crowd? When a beautiful woman enters the room and everybody is looking at her, he is the one who turns around to look at everybody else.ā There are versions of this joke about sociologists and psychologists, but it works perfectly for film theorists as well: the film theorist would be that spectator who, as soon as the projection begins, turns away from the screen to stare at the other members of the audience.
Theory, and film theory above all theories, is often conceived at once as an act of observation and as an act of detachment. Like the psychoanalyst in the joke, then, the film theorist would seem to be somewhat removed, or wish to remove itself, from the power of attraction exerted by the spectacle. So that the desire animating the study of cinema would appear to come less from the theoristās own enjoyment of film as a spectator , than from its fascination with the otherās visual pleasure made into the object of its look. It is sometimes the case with film theorists, indeed, especially when they deal with spectatorship , that they shift their attention from the contingencies of their own involvement with film and from the significance it holds for them, to the visible signs of the involvement of everybody else. Instead of interrogating its own pleasure in watching, the theorist would rather look at the way other people make their pleasure visible. Rather than questioning the institutions and the ideological assumptions that articulate its own practice , the film theorist would be content to address film ideology only as that system of powers and discourses that sets the position of the spectator apart from its own.
āThe posture which inaugurates knowledge,ā Christian Metz argued in the first pages of Psychoanalysis and Cinema, āis defined by a backward turn and by it alone [ā¦]ā1āknowledge corresponds to the position, āthe posture,ā of the one who turns around.
It would be hard to conceive a better scene to illustrate this quintessentially disciplinary understanding of film theory , in which theory is at the same time imagined as a look and as the gesture by which the film theorist distinguishes itself from the spectator . The examples Metz gave of this gesture or posture were those of the anthropologist toward the native, of the psychoanalyst toward the self-knowledge of its patient, of the political agent toward the weapons of its adversary.2 Questionable examples, of course, as is questionable their comparison with film theory . Still, we see how in all these cases knowledge is not simply a matter of knowing or learning, not even of self-reflexion, but comes from the appropriation and transformation of forms of knowledge that belong to somebody else. The film theorist , from within the situation of spectatorship , would turn back toward and against the spectator in order to reappropriate, and redress, the look by which film experience is created.
There is a threatening element in the gesture of the theorist as Metz described it: the risk of ārelapsingā into the condition of the spectator , but also the violence of a theory that condemns itself to stand against what is keeping it alive:
āIf the effort of science is constantly threatened by a relapse into the very thing against which it is constituted,ā wrote Metz, āthat is because it is constituted as much in it as against it, and because the two prepositions are here in some sense synonymous.ā3
Existing both in and against the situation of spectatorship , film theory turns out to be for Metz a divided passion. According to him, the desire of the spectator has to split āinto two diverging and reconverging desires, one of which ālooksā at the other. This is the theoretical break,ā Metz argued, āand like all breaks it is also a link: that of theory with its object.ā4
So while Metz was affirming the intimate connection between the look of the spectator and the gaze of the film theorist , he was also affirming their radical distinction: what made of film theory a science was precisely what opposed it to spectatorship . For Metz , the analytic study of film and the film analystās characteristic activity corresponded to a mode of apprehension (visĆ©e de conscience) that was unlike that of the spectators who merely go to the cinema to enjoy themselves.5 The theorist was imagined not just as a knowledgeable viewer, then, or as a spectator engaging with film in specific ways, but very precisely as somebody else than a mere spectator .
It was thus on account of its ability to remove itself from the state of fascination and misrecognition that was seen to characterize spectatorship that the theorist was granted the right to speak and theorize about this state. In Peter Wollenās grudgingly humorous (and involuntarily funny) analogy, since serious critical work āmust involve a distance, a gap between the film and the criticism, a text and the meta-text ,ā the removal of this gap would be as absurd as a meteorologist being asked, in order to prove its science, to go walking in the rain.6 In such a scenario, theory is understood as something else than a form of knowledge and rather as a way to discriminate between two kinds of look, two kinds of subjects, two kinds of bodies, and to produce an articulation of the space of film on the basis of this distinction. Not only film theorists, and theorists in general, are not supposed to get wet, but theory is made into the guarantee of the theoristās separation from the spectacle: āthe film analyst,ā Metz stated, āby his very activity places himself [ā¦] outside of the institution.ā7
The study of film not being quite like weather forecasting, there is a sense instead in which being one with the dimension of spectatorship and with the pleasure of the text should be fundamental to the practice of film theory . We should therefore find no solution of continuity between the forms of power and knowledge that explain the spectator ās experience and the forms of power and knowledge that articulate the practice of spectatorship . Theory , I think, is not a gaze cast on a situation from its outside, but a constitutive part of the situation from its onset, and thus a critical engagement with the discourses and institutions that regulate film experience always has to include film theory itself within its scope. On the other hand, the everyday practice of spectatorship always bears with it a theoretical dimension. So that the relation between theory and spectatorship always influences our understanding and practice of both.
As Valerie Walkerdine noted, a disconnection of theory from visual pleasure within a critical discourse on spectatorship is symptomatic of a broader disconnection between āthe intellectualsā and āthe massesā8āa disconnection that is in turn inextricable from the disciplineās heterosexist and anti-egalitarian biases.
āThe crusade to save the masses from the id...