Page 159 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

148 MEDIA STUDIES

relations between elements and the rules governing their combination in
signifying systems themselves (Saussure’s Langue). However, ‘screen theory’
argues that, in itself, this break with empiricist theories of language is inadequate,
since (in Lévi-Strauss’s ‘myth’, Barthes’s ‘codes’ and Althusser’s theories of
ideology) the whole question of ‘the subject’ is left as an empty space. The
Cartesian subject has been displaced: but what replaces it has not been
adequately theorized.
In semiotics 2 this gap is filled by drawing extensively on the psychoanalytic
writings of Lacan. Three converging lines of argument sustain this attempt to
deploy Lacan to rectify the inadequacies of semiotics 1. First, Lévi-Strauss made
much of the ‘entry into culture’ as the founding moment of signification and
symbolic representation, but he located this outside ‘the subject’, in the cultural
and social system itself. Lacan’s work retains the structure of Lévi-Strauss’s
explanation but now locates this as the entry into the ‘symbolic’—the moment
when ‘the subject’ enters into/is constituted in language, the network of
signifiers. In Lacan the moment of the ‘symbolic’ is given a psychoanalytic
interpretation, based on a re-reading of Freud and linked with the unconscious
processes and stages through which the unformed infant becomes a ‘subject’, as
these are outlined in Freud’s work. This, however, is no longer the integral and
homogeneous ‘subject’ of Descartes, since it is constituted by unconscious
processes; it is not the unitary individual but a set of contradictory ‘positions’,
fixed by those processes in a certain relation to knowledge and language.
Second, these propositions were substantially reinforced by Althusser’s later
writing on ideology, especially where (in the ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’
essay) he argues that all ideologies ‘work’ by and through the constitution of the
subject and then gives to the process by which ideological discourses constitute
and ‘hail’ subjects the term ‘interpellation’—a concept which has an ambiguous
provenance in Lacan.
The third element is harder to pin down exactly, but it arises from the fact that
in Lacan’s reading Freud’s theory of the formation of ‘the subject’ is a highly
linguistic one, and the processes of that formation are especially linked with
visual analogues (for example, the ‘mirror phase’, narcissism, voyeurism,
Lacan’s work on the ‘look’ and the ‘gaze’, the castration complex as a ‘scenario
of vision’, founded on the presence/absence and the ‘recognition’/denial through
which it is resolved and so on). These have made it especially easy and tenable to
forge a connection between the ‘primary’ psychoanalytic processes through
which subjects-as-such are constituted and the related processes of representation
and identification in visual discourses and texts (especially those of the cinema).
Metz’s article ‘The imaginary signifier’ is a locus classicus of this move from
1
semiotics 1 to a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework, and its republication in

*This article is based on a forthcoming critique of recent theoretical developments by the
Media Group, 1977–8.