Page 98 - Decoding Culture

SITUATIN G SUBJECTS 91

what begins as a loose description of the film spectator's situation
slips into psychoanalytic language, but without it being made clear
quite what kind of connection is envisaged. Thus, the cinematic sig­
nifier is diagnosed as 'precisely Oedipal' on the least precise of
metaphorical grounds - or so it would appear to a reader not
already committed to the view that the cinematic situation some­
how recreates, feeds off, or resonates with the Oedipal in us all.
Metz, then, in The Imaginary Signifier' and in his other writing
of this period, moves from a position of (modified) semiotic for­
malism to one in which psychoanalytic terms are used to unpick
the basic cinematic situation of spectatorship. Like many who fol­
lowed post-structuralism along this road, he does so in the belief
that psychoanalysis provides privileged access to subjectivity and,
thereby, to cinema's workings as a social institution, even though
the 'social' here is understood only in very general psychoanalytic
terms, and any sense of social activity or agency is entirely lost.
Screen, too, embraced such a strategy, partly influenced by Metz'
formulation, but also arising out of the journal's commitment to a
broadly marxist orientation to social and political analysis. This
also led toward psychoanalytic concepts, but this time via the con­
cept of ideology as that had been adumbrated by the marxist
philosopher Louis Althusser.

Making Screen theory 2: ideology and the subject

Althusser's work had begun to attract attention from English schol­
ars in the late 1960s, apparently offering a systematic development
of marxist thinking which countered the then prominent traditions
of 'humanistic' marxism. The post-war era had seen marxism re­
read and recast in the light of Marx's early writings, notably the
newly translated Economic and P h ilosoPhic Manuscripts of 1 8 44.

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