Abstract
This chapter is dedicated to theory as an aspect of the everyday practice of spectatorship and examines how film experience fundamentally escapes the grasp of authoritarian and pedagogical theory. More specifically, the chapter highlights the negative role of a pedagogy of emancipation in the theory of the cinematographic apparatus from the standpoint of Jacques Rancière’s critique of Althusser, and concludes by discussing some of the consequences of including the spectator’s free use of the film in our understanding of spectatorship.
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Notes
- 1.
Judith Mayne , Cinema and Spectatorship (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 32.
- 2.
Michele Aaron, Spectatorship : The Power of Looking On (London and New York: Wallflower, 2007), 2.
- 3.
Rancière defines partage du sensible as a system of perceptible features that manifest at once the existence of a common space, the partitions into which it is articulated, and how bodies and subjects are assigned to them; this distribution determines in turn the ways in which what is common can be shared and who actually takes part in the sharing. See Jacques Rancière , The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 12. In Dissensus , Rancière further notes that the expression implies a tension between a shared common and its distribution. Jacques Rancière , Dissensus : On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 36.
- 4.
Ibid., 121.
- 5.
Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 2010), 151.
- 6.
Foucault, Histoire de la Sexualité, 20. For the English translation Michel Foucault , The History of Sexuality: Volume I, An Introduction (New York: Random House, 1978), 12.
- 7.
See Slavoj Žižek , The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski Between Theory and Post-theory (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 32.
- 8.
See Rancière, Dis-agreement, 19.
- 9.
See Yuka Kanno, “Implicational Spectatorship : Hara Setsuko and the Queer Joke,” Mechademia 6 (2011): 288. “By implication, I want to address the historicity of the present viewer, whose specificity is no less important than that of the past text .”
- 10.
For a discussion of self-shattering see Leo Bersani , Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 46.
- 11.
Slavoj Žižek , The Indivisible Remainder (London: Verso, 2007), 71.
- 12.
See Jean-Bertrand Pontalis , Avant (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), 18.
- 13.
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis , Fenêtres (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 29.
- 14.
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis , L’Amour des Commencements (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 30.
- 15.
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis , En Marge des Nuits (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 74.
- 16.
Pontalis, L’Amour des Commencements, 29–30.
- 17.
Ibid., 53.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis , Après Freud (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 121.
- 20.
Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (eds.), Reading Rancière (London: Continuum, 2011), 2.
- 21.
Le langage “ne serait rien de plus qu’un code s’il n’était porté par et emporté vers ce qu’il n’est pas.” Jean-Bertrand Pontalis , La Force d’Attraction (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 99. Translation mine.
- 22.
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis , Ce Temps Qui ne Passe Pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 72.
- 23.
Ibid., 30.
- 24.
Jacques Rancière , Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 17.
- 25.
Rancière, The Nights of Labor, xii.
- 26.
Derek Jarman, Caravaggio (British Film Institute, 1986), 35 mm.
- 27.
Pontalis, Ce Temps Qui ne Passe Pas, 31.
- 28.
Ibid., 32.
- 29.
See Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994).
- 30.
Corcoran. “Editor’s Introduction”, in Rancière, Dissensus , 8.
- 31.
Ibid., 8–9.
- 32.
Jacques Rancière , La Leçon d’Althusser (Paris: Fabrique, 2011 [1974]), 8.
- 33.
Ibid., 67.
- 34.
Ibid., 68.
- 35.
Ibid., 71.
- 36.
Ibid., 64.
- 37.
Ibid., 67.
- 38.
Jacques Rancière , “Sur la Théorie de l’Idéologie: Politique d’Althusser,” in La Leçon d’Althusser (Paris: Fabrique, 2011 [1969]), 240.
- 39.
Rancière, La Leçon d’Althusser, 96.
- 40.
Ibid., 9.
- 41.
Ibid., 136.
- 42.
Ibid., 17.
- 43.
Abraham Geil, “The Spectator Without Qualities,” in Rancière and Film, ed. Paul Bowman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 73.
- 44.
Rancière, Le Maître Ignorant: Cinq Leçons sur l’Émancipation Intellectuelle (Paris: Fayard, 1987), 15.
- 45.
Rancière, La Leçon d’Althusser, 30.
- 46.
Ibid., 39–40.
- 47.
Ibid., 30–31.
- 48.
Rancière, “Sur la Théorie de l’Idéologie,” 236.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
Stephen Heath, “Film and System: Terms of Analysis,” Screen 16, no. 2 (1975): 108. Note that the verb “to show” is used in the same text to convey the idea of the function of theory . Also see Jean-Luc Comolli and Paul Narboni, “Cinema/ldeology/Criticism,” Screen 12, no. 1 (1971): 34.
- 51.
Christopher Williams, “Politics and Production: Some Pointers Through the Work of Jean-Luc Godard,” Screen 12, no. 4 (1971): 21–22.
- 52.
It is less important here to give the details of the discussion than to acknowledge its vocabulary and grasp its tones. Comolli and Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology /Criticism,” 33–34.
- 53.
See Rancière, La Leçon d’Althusser, 127.
- 54.
Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology /Criticism (2),” Screen 12, no. 2 (1971): 147.
- 55.
Ibid., 148.
- 56.
“The vehement demand—itself a wish—that we should be able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy even in fiction,” writes Elizabeth Cowie expanding the scope of this issue, “bears witness perhaps to the fear involved in apprehending the reality of fantasy .” Elizabeth Cowie , Representing the Woman : Cinema and Psychoanalysis (London: Macmillan, 1997), 141.
- 57.
Mario Bunge, Philosophy of Science: From Problem to Theory (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998), 453. Quoted in Warren Buckland, Film Theory : Rational Reconstructions (London: Routledge, 2008), 17.
- 58.
Rancière, La Leçon d’Althusser, 72.
- 59.
Ibid., 103.
- 60.
Ibid., 140.
- 61.
Jacques Rancière , The Intervals of Cinema (London: Verso, 2014), 6.
- 62.
Jacques Rancière , L’Inconscient Esthètique (Paris: Galilée, 2001), 12–14.
- 63.
Jacques Rancière , Aisthesis (Paris: Galilée, 2011), 11.
- 64.
Rancière, Dissensus , 116–117.
- 65.
Rancière, Dissensus , 116.
- 66.
Umberto Eco, Lector in Fabula: La Cooperazione Interpretativa nei Testi Narrativi (Milano: Bompiani, 2010 [1979]), 59.
- 67.
Free use is, if you like, a form of Certeausian poaching. “The autonomy of the reader depends on a transformation of the social relationships that overdetermine his relation to texts. This transformation is a necessary task. This revolution would be no more than another totalitarianism on the part of an elite claiming for itself the right to conceal different modes of conduct and substituting a new normative education for the previous one, were it not that we can count on the fact that there already exists, though it is surreptitious or even repressed, an experience other than that of passivity. A politics of reading must thus be articulated on an analysis that, describing practices that have long been in effect, makes them politicizable. Even pointing out a few aspects of the operation of reading will already indicate how it eludes the law of information.” Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 173.
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Comanducci, C. (2018). Everyday Film Theory. In: Spectatorship and Film Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96743-1_3
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