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POSTSTRUCTURALISM: FROMSYSTEM TO SUBVERSION

Beginning in the late 1960s a group of theorists led by Jacques Derrida began to

challenge the very basic assumptions that had informed structuralist thought,

starting with its cornerstone, Saussurean semiotics. These attacks followed once

the initial enthusiasm for structuralism began to wane. Less a theory than an

interpretive attitude, poststructuralism in its broadest sense refers to an attention

towards those elements unexplained, excluded, or repressed by structuralism's tidy

systems, as well as a general distrust in systematicity in general. There is debate

among scholars as to whether poststructuralism should be seen as an extension of

structuralism or whether it constitutes a negation, a kind of antistructuralism.

Some argue it is not antistructural since many poststructuralists used the semiotic

terminology that informed structuralist thought. In its most general sense,

poststructuralism—linked to thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and

Jacques Lacan, to Barthes's later work, and above all to Derrida—is characterized

by a suspicion of totalizing systems and a radical skepticism towards theories which

attempt to explain human activity, such as Marxism, Christianity, and even

structuralism. If structuralism set out to erect systems of binary oppositions, for

instance, poststructuralists concerned themselves with instances in which systems

break down or are subverted.

For poststructuralists, a "text" was no longer a finished, self-contained object that

could be "explained" by the analyst, thereby rejecting the assumption under which

structuralists had operated. Rather, according to Derrida, the text—whether

literature, film, advertisement, or any cultural form—is first produced in the act of

"reading," or interpretation. Although poststructuralists still deployed semiological

terminology (sign, signifier, signified), they did so to criticize notions of stable

signifying systems (although many poststructuralists were in fact Marxists).

Poststructuralism took film studies in new and often disparate directions. Unlike

literary studies, Derridean deconstruction did not typically exert an immediate

influence; film scholars tended to apply Derrida's subversive spirit to their

interpretations, rather than organize their thoughts around any of his ideas. One

strain, found above all in French journals such as Cahiers du cinéma and Cinétique

, latched onto structuralist-Marxist Louis Althusser's concept of ideology in an

effort to "demythologize" or "denaturalize" film—that is, to reveal the hidden

cultural and ideological codes which underpin cinematic (especially Hollywood)

signification. One famous example is the 1972 collective Cahiers du cinéma on

John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), which "read" or "rescanned" the film for

moments where the director's "inscription" of a unique "writing" created spaces in

the text which escaped the dominant ideology. This brand of analysis, sometimes

referred to as a "deconstructive reading," essentially looked for what Derrida called

"play"—the space in which structure is transformed and decentered—as an

alternative approach to auteurist criticism. Another poststructuralist offshoot,

Lacanian psychoanalysis, offered a further alternative to classic structuralist film

analysis. Figures such as Christian Metz connected Lacan's reinterpretation of

Sigmund Freud's theories to structural linguistics for the way in which both deal
directly with signification. Metz called this hybrid theoretical matrix the "semio-

psychoanalysis of the cinema."

Some scholars did attempt to apply Derrida directly. Marie-Claire Ropars-

Wuilleumier's work, in particular Le Texte divisé (1981), extends to the cinema

Derrida's notion of écriture (a conception of signification based on unfixable rather

than stable signs). For Ropars-Wuilleumier, the Derridean hieroglyph (composed

of both graphic representations of speech and pictorial elements) resembles Sergei

Eisenstein's montage theory. Both make meaning based on juxtapositions which

disrupt the image itself. Peter Brunette and David Wills's Screen/Play: Derrida

and Film Theory (1989) imagines an "anagrammatical" film analysis. On facing

pages they "read" François Truffaut's La Mariéeétait en noir ( The Bride Wore

Black , 1967) and David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) in order to demonstrate textual

"undecidabilities" and "fissures," moments where the stability of the texts' meaning

breaks down. In so doing they seek to expose deconstruction as less a specific

theory that can be applied to interpret a film than a questioning attitude or

suspicion with which one approaches a text.

The support for cinema studies' "linguistic turn" has eroded in recent years. Critics

have opined that semiotic language has been abused as a jargon used to supply a

facade of scientific sophistication. For them, structuralism is essentialist, and its

focus on form obscures thematic content and ideological superstructures;

structuralism's claim that objects exist only in their relation to one another causes

its analyses to be synchronic (ahistorical) rather than diachronic (historical). This

absence of history is troubling to many. Poststructuralism, too, has come under

attack for its own contradictions. Some critics have noted that a mode supposedly

devoted to discovering moments where unities and systems break down has itself

become a totalizing system. In general, film scholars have been particularly keen to

depart from a theoretical paradigm based in linguistics; rather, film studies should

develop a vocabulary appropriate to discussing the medium on its own terms.

Despite these criticisms, however, one must acknowledge the lasting effects of

structuralism and poststructuralism on the process of interpretation in the field of

film studies. Structuralism's scientific method helped advance film studies beyond

the discourse of film appreciation. Poststructuralism, for its part, leaves behind a

critical climate which encourages long-held assumptions to be challenged,

invigorating our understanding of the medium.

SEE ALSO Film Studies ; Narrative ; Psychoanalysis ; Semiotics

Bellour, Raymond. "System of a Fragment (on The Birds ). " In The Analysis of

Film , edited by Constance Penley, 28–68. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

2000 [1972].

Brunette, Peter, and David Wills. Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory .

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Cahiers du cinéma . "John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln : A CollectiveText by the

Editors of Cahiers du cinéma . " In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film

Theory Reader , edited by Philip Rosen, 444–482. New York: Columbia University

Press, 1985 [1972].

Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human

Sciences." Writing and Difference . Translated by Alan Bass. London: Routledge,

2001 [1970].

Kitses, Jim. Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint

Eastwood . London: British Film Institute, 2004 [1969].

Ĺvi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology . London: Penguin, 1972 [1963].

Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. Luchino Visconti . London: British Film Institute, 1967.

Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folk Tale . Translated by Laurence Scott.

Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973.

Le Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire. Le Texte divisé:essaisur l'ecriture filmique .

Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics . Edited by Charles Bally

and Albert Sechehaye with the collaboration of Albert Riedlinger, translated by Roy

Harris. London: Duckworth, 1983 [1915].

Wollen, Peter. " North by Northwest : A Morphological Analysis." Readings and

Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies . London: Verso, 1982 [1976].

——. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema . Bloomington: University of Indiana Press,

1972 [1969].

Wright, Will. Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of theWestern . Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1975.

Mattias Frey

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POST-STRUCTURALISM AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

Reacting against existential and Hegelian Marxism and the ultra-left political

groups influenced by it, Louis Althusser (1918–1990) and a school of structural

Marxists developed more "scientific forms" of Marxism and ideology while

maintaining their commitment to revolutionary politics. A member of the French

Communist Party, Althusser argued in For Marx (1970) that Marxism provided

scientific perspectives on capitalism that made possible a revolutionary transition

to socialism. In Reading Capital (1997), he maintained that Marx's scientific

critique of capitalist political economy provided the foundations for a theory of

society. Althusser's "structuralist Marxism" analyzed relations between the

structures of the economy, state, ideology, and social institutions and their

grounding in capitalist relations of production—"in the last instance" the

determining force of all social life.

Althusser helped shift the discussion of "ideology" to focus on the everyday

practices and rituals organized by social institutions that he termed "ideological

state apparatuses" (schools, religion, the family, the media, and others). Their

material practices, he argued, are parts of a closed system in which individuals are

constantly "interpellated" into a social order, becoming unconsciously constituted

as subjects by dominant social institutions and discourses. His most widely read

essay, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," outlines his basic assumption

that experience, consciousness, and subjectivity are themselves effects of an

imaginary relationship between an individual and his/her real conditions of

existence—a relationship that is constructed by the ideological state apparatuses,

which reify social hierarchies and induces people to consent to systems of

oppression.

Structuralists, like members of the Frankfurt School, were soon criticized for being

too deterministic, for having an impoverished concept of subjectivity, and for

missing the complexities and vicissitudes of history. A post-structuralist turn

therefore found theorists like Roland Barthes (1915–1980) and the Tel Quel group

in France turning toward history, politics, and active and creative human subjects,

as well as developing a more complex model of textuality. The post-structuralist

turn moved away from the more ahistorical, scientific, and objectivist modes of

thought in structuralism. The post-structuralist moment was a particularly fertile

one, with important theorists like Barthes, François Lyotard, and Michel Foucault

writing groundbreaking works on culture and ideology, and younger theorists like

Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Paul Virilio entering into their productive

periods.

In Mythologies (1972, 1957), Roland Barthes critically dissected a wide range of

contemporary forms of culture, demonstrating his unique method of ideological

interpretation and critique. According to Barthes, the mythology dissected in his

essay "Operation Margarine," for example, embodies the fundamental rhetorical

and ideological operations of French bourgeois culture. Margarine, in Barthes's

account, is a highly artificial substance transfigured by advertising into a natural,

beneficial, and acceptable substitution for butter. Analyzing ads that admit

margarine's deficiencies and then trumpet its benefits, Barthes claims that such

advertising techniques provide an "inoculation" against criticism of its

imperfections. A similar operation, he claims, is typical in discourses on topics like

the military, church, and capitalism, in which their limitations are mentioned in

order to highlight their necessity and importance for the social order.

Likewise, mythologies obscure history, transforming contingent factors into natural

essences, as if it were natural that an African soldier salute the French flag, in

Barthes's famous example of a photograph that erases all of the evils of French

colonization in an idealized image. Constructing an argument that anticipates

postmodern emphasis on difference and otherness, Barthes points out how myths

erase what is different and dissimilar, assimilating otherness to nature, as when the

image of the French soldier folds the African into the French empire, or margarine

ads assimilate an artificial substance into the order of culinary appropriateness.

Barthes's method of analyzing rhetorical strategies of media culture and taking

apart the mythologies that colonize social life help to produce a critical

consciousness in his reader.

Sophisticated new theoretical approaches to the production of the works of film

and its production of ideology began emerging in the 1960s, including those

analyses published in Cahiers du cinema and the extremely influential British

journal Screen , which translated many key Cahiers texts and other works of

French film theory, including those of Roland Barthes and Christian Metz. These

generated much more sophisticated formal approaches to film (Metz, 1974; Heath,

1981). The Cahiers group moved from seeing film as the product of creative

auteurs , or authors (their politique du auteurs of the 1950s), to focusing on the

ideological and political content of film and how film transcoded dominant
ideologies. At the same time, French film theory and Screen focused on the specific

cinematic mechanisms that helped produce meaning. These theorists and others

analyzed how ideology permeated cinematic form and content, images and

narrative, symbols and spectacle (Nichols, 1981; Kellner and Ryan, 1988).

Post-structuralism stressed the text's openness and heterogeneity, its embedded in

history and desire, its political and ideological dimensions, and its excess of

meaning. The conjunction of post-structuralism in the academic world and new

social movements stressing the importance of race, gender, sexuality, and other

markers of group identity led to expansion of the concept of ideology to many new

dimensions and thematics. British cultural studies, for instance, adopted a feminist

perspective, paid greater attention to race, ethnicity, and nationality, and sexuality

in response to social struggles and movements (Kellner, 1995).

Earlier Marxist concepts of ideology presupposed a homogenous ruling class that

unambiguously and without contradiction articulates its class interests through a

monolithic ideology. Since its class interests were thought to be predominantly

economic, ideology in this model referred primarily to ideas that legitimated the

class rule of capitalists. Ideology was thus viewed as that set of ideas that promoted

the capitalist class's economic interests. During the 1960s and 1970s, however, this

model has been contested by theorists who have argued that an orthodox Marxist

concept of ideology is reductionist because it equates ideology solely with those

ideas that serve class or economic interests, leaving out such variable and

significant factors as sex and race. Reducing ideology to class interests makes it

appear that the only significant domination in society is one of class or economic
domination, whereas many theorists argue that sex and race oppression are

fundamentally important and indeed intertwined in fundamental ways with class

and economic domination

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structuralism and post-structuralism
Structuralism is a method of grasping culture as a set of rules akin to
language. It points to the relational aspects of culture: all cultural
representations gain meaning and value in relation to each other, not by
themselves. Rules (structures) govern the allocation of value within this
system. With this, structuralist thought breaks with earlier, essentialist
views which see cultural representation as reflections of reality. ‘Reality’
is no longer an issue for structuralism: all our knowledge of the world is
already embedded in the structures that enable us to understand our
lives. But whereas structuralist thinkers conceive of basic structure as
static and fixed, post-structuralism goes one step further. For thinkers
such as Jacques Derrida, not only is the world outside culture
unknowable, but also the rules and systems of knowledge exceed the
analyst’s grasp. Culture is seen as something that is constantly rewriting
itself, in flux, malleable and unstable. Film and television studies have
been widely influenced by these thought systems.

This entry will delineate the structuralist heritage of Claude Lévi-

Strauss and Vladimir Propp, and show the application of their models
to film and television. Post-structuralist thinkers such as Roland
Barthes, Derrida and Michel Foucault and their impact on the field will
be assessed in the second part of the entry.

The development of structuralism can be traced back to the French

linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. His attempt to find a structure in
language has been credited with the inception of semiotics—the study
of the sign. Three issues emerge from his system. The relationship
between a word and its referent (signifier/signified) is arbitrary. Each
utterance (parole) becomes meaningful against the backdrop of the
language system (langue; see language/langue). A language system
can only be understood in its present configuration. Any element of this
language is meaningless outside its own, historic structure: it gains
meaning in its difference to other elements. Within film theory,
Saussure’s semiotics has directly influenced a semiotics of the cinema
via Christian Metz. (This important aspect of structuralist film studies is
discussed in the semiotics entry.)

Saussure’s work influenced many other theorists to put forward

systematic theories about the structural foundations of other aspects of
culture. An emphasis on constellations of meaning meant that social
scientists had to start to think about any aspect of culture as gaining
meaning only through its construction and maintenance in language.
Historic facts were no longer ‘facts’, but points of reference within the
construction of culture.

One important theorist who acknowledges the Saussurean influence is

the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. He developed his study
Mythologiques after research into the myths of North and South
American tribal cultures. He tried to find a common meaningful structure
underlying these ‘inexplicable’ myths, and to relate this structure to the
seemingly different narratives of western Europe. Like Saussure with
language, Lévi-Strauss was interested in the binding structure of all
these myths as an expression of the state of that culture, rather than in
each single myth and its intrinsic value. In opposition to the many
developmental theories of anthropology which chart the course of
evolution from ‘primitive’ to capitalist ‘man’, LéviStrauss was interested
in a universalist approach based on a ‘mind structure’ which is shared by
all societies.

What he found in these cultural narratives was a language structure,

with each separate myth a specific utterance (parole) of the underlying
‘deep structure’ (tongue). This deep structure of myth is dynamic, and
not expressible as one single, stable content. These underlying myths
relate to contradictions in human experience, such as the tension
between individual and society, or benevolent God and cruel Nature.
New forms of the myths are constantly generated, for:

The purpose of the myth is to provide a logical model capable of

overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it
happens, the contradiction is real), a theoretically infinite number of
(versions) will be generated, each slightly different from the others.

(Lévi-Strauss 1963:229)

Myth is thus dynamic, driven to creativity because of the unsolvable

tension that it attempts to rewrite. The contradictions of the cultural
experience are repressed from the surface of society, but come back in
their stories. The anthropologist (or textual critic) has to find the
contradictory pairings, the binaries, which motivate the specific
narrative, and which are expressive of, and specific to, the originating
culture of the text.

Lévi-Strauss’ system was criticized in anthropology circles. Apart from

finding empirical faults with his database, scholars questioned whether
this binary structure of structuralism is not an ethnocentric, western
concept which might not be appropriate for the ‘mind schemes’ of other
peoples.

Lévi-Strauss’ thesis about the relationship between texts and culture has
had far-reaching influences on cultural scholars. His complex notion of
myth points to the inconsistencies and fractures of culture, which
generate constant textual production. But the method also uncovered
many problems: how far can the production of mass media texts within
an industrial framework be likened to the production of oral myth? What
is the relationship between individual expression in art texts and more
general cultural concerns?

Film studies reflected Lévi-Straussian methods of analysis from the early

1970s onwards. Scholars like Peter Wollen initially elided the questions
posed above when he used Lévi-Strauss’ concerns with cultural binaries
to investigate the meanings generated unconsciously in the æuvre of
individual filmmakers. This auteur structuralism initiated debates about
the appropriate conceptualization of the artist in film (see authorship).

Soon, though, the tenets of structuralism were adopted in genre

studies. Writers saw genres with their endless recreation of the similar
as close to myths, and Will Wright makes the single most extended use
of Lévi-Strauss in film theory in a book-length study of the Western (see
Western, the), Sixguns and Society (1975). Wright uses the
transformations of binaries to explain the changes that occurred in the
Western over its history. But instead of seeking deep structures lodged
within the universal human mind, Wright attempts to account for the
way that Westerns as myths communicated a’conceptual order’ to
American society and allowed it to make sense of its social origins. The
history of the Western film becomes a symbolical mapping of changing
American social beliefs.

Just as auteur structuralism was haunted by calls for a satisfactory

theorization of the role of individual artistic choice, genre structuralism
was criticized for its inability to account for capitalist marketing practices
in the creation of a film’s success. How far does a film’s success depend
on its stars or publicity machine, and how far on its mythic power
derived from its internal structures?

The main legacy of Lévi-Straussian analysis in film and television studies

thus moved away from ‘grand explanation’ of the entire film and
television industry as a mythical system, but important elements of his
original formulations were retained in the study of narrative and
representation. Of particular interest for film and television was the
articulation of contradictory binaries in the figure of the mythical hero.
Lévi-Strauss has shown how the hero functions as a repository of excess
meaning: he or she carries meanings of both binaries. The hero
functions as the arbiter, showing how life can go on even if the
contradiction of the binary is unsolvable. In Westerns, the hero
articulates the problematic coming together of nature and culture,
wilderness and civilization or male and female. John Fiske (1987) uses
mediated binaries as a starting point for an analysis of the television
series Miami Vice. The heroes, Crockett and Tubbs, move between the
worlds of the vice squad and drug dealers. They embody values of both
sides—which often is a source of narrative conflict, when the two are
overstepping the boundaries of straight police procedure. They enact
temporal solutions to the problems posed by the clashing of the two
social worlds, but these solutions never hold for longer than the time-
span between one episode and the next. Fiske’s analysis of a constant
rewriting of conflict also acts as an explanation for the pleasures of the
serial format in television or the genre function in film.

Other structuralists such as Tzvetan Todorov and Vladimir Propp have

found entry into the methodological canon of film narrative analysis.
Propp wrote his influential book Morphology of the Folktale forty years
before Lévi-Strauss’ work. After a detailed study of Russian folktales, he
puts forward a tentative structure of narrative, based not on binaries but
on narrative functions. He identifies positions such as the hero, villain
and princess, but sees these as spheres of action rather than fixed
identities. These character roles go through thirty-two narrative
functions, grouped under the headings: preparation, complication,
transference, struggle, return and recognition. Together, this scheme
provides a narrative structure. Propp’s work, like Lévi-Strauss’, has been
read as providing an understanding of narrative as a transformation of
the conflict between order and disorder. Since all societies experience
problems at the boundaries of order and disorder, individual and group,
so all narratives continue to work through a universal scheme to cover
these problems.

Will Wright and Peter Wollen have applied Propp’s scheme to film.
Wollen analysed North by North-West (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959) and
found that he could read its complexities satisfactorily by seeing the
protagonist shifting between the positions of seeker and victim. The
question is, though, whether this kind of approach to cinema can come
to terms with audience identification and participation with filmic
narratives. Jonathan Culler (1975) argued that although Propp’s scheme
appears so simple and obvious, each specific instance of narrative (as
parole) could still engage audience suspense. It is only at the very end
of a film experience that the deep structure of character and narrative
functions can be identified.

These questions about audiences and pleasure move away from a

universal structuring binary or conflict towards questions about the
multiplicity of possible interactions of texts with other texts. This
propelled thinkers such as Roland Barthes to move from a structuralist
position to a post-structuralist one. This shift can be seen in his
conception of the work of myth.

In Mythologies (first published in 1957) Barthes sees binaries not as

universal and independent of history, but as ideologically located
articulations. Myths are messages, they are used to structure social
relations. Their power rests on the fact that they need not be deciphered
or interpreted: their meaning is ‘natural’. Two quotes from ‘Change the
Object Itself show the shift occurring in Barthes’ work, from an earlier
(1950s) belief in the political power of myth analysis to a position which
is deeply suspicious of any centre of meaning. The analysis of myth still
yields results, but has not developed into an emancipatory methodology.

Myth consists in turning culture into nature, or, at least, the social, the
cultural, the ideological, and the historical into the ‘natural’. What is
nothing but a product of class division and its moral, cultural and
aesthetic consequence is presented (stated) as being a ‘matter of
course’.

(Barthes 1977:164)

Denunciation, demystification has itself become discourse, stock of

phrases, catechistic declara-tion; in the face of which, the science of the
signifier can only shift its place and stop (provisionally) further on—no
longer at the (analytic) dissociation of the sign but at its very hesitation:
it is no longer the myths which need to be unmasked…it is the sign itself
which must be shaken; the problem is not to reveal the (latent)
meaning of an utterance, of a trait, of a narrative, but to fissure the
very representation of meaning, is not to change or purify the symbol,
but to challenge the symbolic itself.

(Ibid.: 166–7)

Myth analysis has become the new orthodoxy. With his desire to keep
moving, to deny any fixity, Barthes aims at an understanding of
meaning as constantly in flow. This view of meaning also relates for
Barthes to the circulation of popular cultural texts: their meanings are
never fixed, but constantly rewritten, added, changed, appropriated by
their relation to other texts and reading practices. Intertextuality and
the changing politics of media icons have propelled a wide range of
studies, subsumed under the heading ‘social text approach’. Work on
the changing intertextual fields of Star Trek., Batman, James Bond or Dr
Who has charted the modifications of meanings of textual fields (see
intertextuality).

The central concern with the fluidity of meaning characterizes other

important thinkers of post-structuralism: Derrida, Lacan and Foucault.
Just as the subject is constantly denied access to meaning through the
initial loss of self-identity in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the signifier
always just refers to another signifier, the binary always to another
binary. Structuralism dissolved the human subject by showing how
subjectivity is created through discourse and structure. Post-
structuralism shows how the death of the subject (see ‘Death of the
author’ in authorship) as autonomous individuality is further
undermined: even the structures that make up subject positions are
sliding, and identity is always questionable.

Jacques Derrida is usually described as the central figure of post-

structuralism. He adds a new, crucial term to Saussure’s semiotics:
différance, which means both to defer and to differ. For Saussure,
meaning was always created in relational difference. Derrida shows that
meaning is never fully present—it is always deferred and different.
Everything always refers to something else; this intertextual flow of
meaning never stops. Traces of other meanings, referrals and
intertextuality adhere to any utterance. The one-to-one structure of the
Saussurian sign, where one signifier reliably (in convention) referred to
one signified, is no longer given. Social interaction bears the traces of
excess meanings, slippages and gaps.

Post-structuralist thought has gained entry into various fields of film and
television studies. Continual displacement and lack of stable
identification is the main theme governing Lacanian psychoanalytic film
analysis. The search for the excesses, absences and gaps addressed by
Derrida has had a less direct influence on film and television theory.
Theorists such as Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier-, Tom Conley and
Gregory Ulmer focus in different ways on the complexity of meaning,
and show the impossibility and undecidability of meaning in film. But the
destabilization of meaning and identity has had far wider impact on
media theory: historical film studies have rewritten orthodoxies by
allowing a view of film texts as open, contradictory and shifting,
exceeding any attempts to fix connotations and install ideology. New
studies of Nazi German films have focused attention on the excess of
meaning which swamp functional binaries associated with Nazi ideology.
Linda Schulte-Sasse draws on Lacan and Slavoj Zižek to address popular
Nazi cinema: its success lies in its organization of desire, instead of its
creation of fixed images of identification. The desire for meaning is
channelled into a looping chain of associations of community and
pleasure, rather than towards the resolution of a specific binary
(Aryan/Jew).

Other politics of cultural identity have equally been moved away from a
stable, fixed identity which could serve as reference point for members
of a group. All identity is negotiated and shifting. Alliances need
constant re-inscription, but the inscription is never fully enough. This
connects to Lévi-Strauss’ notion of the dynamic myth, but goes beyond
that concept: there is no one binary which needs to be written over by
all members of a culture. Now, the concept of a shared culture (and
shared binaries) is queried. Cultural products and events, such as the
London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival are now not just guarantors of
connection, but also constructors of the very notion of shared identity.
Theorists such as Judith Butler have pointed to the necessity to re-
inscribe identity and gender in her concept of performativity (see
performative). Any identity politics in a post-structuralist environment
has to work as an uncertain, reiterated positioning, a politics of position.

The uncertainty of stability, fixed causes or explanations in post-

structuralist projects of knowledge characterizes the work of Michel
Foucault. He is a historian who stresses discontinuities, local knowledges
and writes against ‘total’ history and its hierarchical, ordering effects. He
charts a genealogy of power: power is seen as productive, creating
subjectivities which are thoroughly written through by the operations of
power. Thus, culture is not a system of signs, but a shifting and open
constellation of sites of power, replete with resistances. In her thorough
feminist investigation of structuralist approaches to cinema, Alice
Doesn’t, Teresa de Lauretis reads Nicholas Roeg’s films for marks of
these localized resistances, and shows the price that has to be paid by
‘strangers’ in order to posit an ‘absolute negativity’ to the dominant
system.

Foucault’s theories have been influential in writings about the body and
visibility. He identified a ‘panoptic regime’, which is the controlling gaze
that polices aberration, and which can be internalized to supervise
correct behaviour without outer coercion. This can be applied to issues
of media influence by analysing how images of ‘ideal bodies’ on
television articulate with the shifting self-image of the watching subject.

Structuralism and post-structuralism have been major influences on the

cultural landscape and on the conceptualizations of a wide range of
disciplines. They have undermined belief in self-directed, autonomous
subjects, and propose to replace any certainty of meaning with
bewildering insights. The main challenge that faces post-structuralist
thought is the necessity to provide avenues of transformation, to
provide a politics of instability.

See also: modernism and post-modernism

References

Barthes, R. (1977) ‘Change the Object Itself. Mythology Today’ in

R.Barthes, Image Music Text, London: Fontana Press.

Barthes, R. (1993) Mythologies (first published 1957), selected by and

trans. Annette Lavers, London: Vintage.

Culler, J. (1975) Structuralist Poetics, London: Routledge.

de Lauretis, T. (1984) Alice Doesn’t. Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema,

Houndsmill: Macmillan.

Fiske, J. (1987) Television Culture, London: Routledge.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963) Structural Anthropology (first published 1958),

New York: Basic Books.
Schulte-Sasse, L. (1996) Entertaining the Third Reich. Illusions of
Wholeness in Nazi Cinema, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Wright, W. (1975) Sixguns and Society. A Structural Study of the

Western, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Further reading

Sarup, M. (1993) Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism (2nd edn),

New York, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. (This volume is a good
introduction to the variety of post-structuralist thought.)

Stam, R., Burgoyne, R. and Flitterman-Lewis, S. (1992) New

Vocabularies in Film Semiotics. Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and
Beyond, London and New York: Routledge.

PETRA KUPPERS
Althusser and Film Theory

This is a good introduction to the importance of Althusser to film theory by Rosen

1986: 156ff.

[...]

What especially links film theory to the post-structuralism of the 1970s is the great
impact of that sector of post-structuralism which claimed to be producing new
elaborations of theorics of human subjectivity. Therefore [...] it will be useful to
introduce some of the relevant aspects of what has been called the theory of the
subject.

The term subject denotes a fundamental human mental activity of interacting with
things in the world by opposing them to one's own consciousness, as in the
philosophical (epistemological) distinction between subject and object. However,
by the 1970s French post-structuralists, including such divergent thinkers as Louis
Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and
Jacques Lacan, had from varying but intertwining perspectives all proposed that
the traditional philosophical conception of the subject is misleading in important
respects. Against the strong Cartesian tradition in French intellectual history, they
argued in different ways that the self-awareness of human subjectivity is founded
on a central misrecognition by the subject—or self, or ego—that it is somehow
central to the processes of knowing the world. In general, these post-structuralists
at that time argued that the subject's knowledge of world and self is shaped by
discourse. Ultimately this could be to say that human subjectivity finds itself
through a discursive universe which produces and reproduces that subjectivity
and, often enough, its constitutive illusions. /157/

[...]

To be aware of oneself as a distinct mental entity, a consciousness, is to have

identity. Phenomenologically, of course, this is a constant, everyday experience
which enables one to confront existence and undertake activities as a "continuous"
human being; that is, I remain conscious that I am the "same" person today I was
yesterday, which is a guarantee of my identity. Such self-awareness, however, can
also be described with referencc to processes not reducible to the unique
experience by an individual of his or her own consciousness. It is possible to argue
that such consciousness is a product, or construct, rather than an irreducible a
priori. Such an argument would rest on an account of how this mode of subjectivity
is produced and how it functions.

If one attempts this kind of argument from the perspective of social theory, the
claim would be that to take the position of a self-aware subject is to participate in a
process valuable to social institutions and/or to a society. In that case one's identity
is produced as a result of ongoing social processes. Such a perspective was
advanced influentially during thc I960s and early I970s in Louis Althusser's
reformulations of Marxist theories of ideology.[1]

For Althusser ideology is a requisite component of any society. It consists in a vast

network of representational systems that provide the means with which
individuals may think of their existence. But since it operates by delimiting as well
as providing possible significations of existencc, that massive representational
network Althusser calls ideology is restrictive of thought and experience. He
argues that such restrictions are crucial components of social organization and
order: To maintain themselves over time, societies require that their multitude of
agents have a minimal commonality of "consciousness," which means that those
possibilities and limitations on thought and experience must to a significant degree
be produced as an integral part of any lasting societal organization. This perspective
leads Althusser to suggest that the category of the subject is a necessary (if not
sufficient) support for the workings of ideology.

Such a conception, if accepted, has clear theoretical and methodological

consequences for any semiotics, since it envisions representational systems as
intricately knotted with broad processes of social organization. But here we will
concentrate on the category of the subject in such a framework. For Althusser,
ideology exists in an uncountable number of signifying entities. From the
viewpoint of "consciousness," it can be said that we are "surrounded" from birth by
signifying discourses which necessarily provide the paths by which we understand
and experience. But from another perspective it is these discourses /158/which
construct individual social agents as human subjects. Insofar as any instance of
signification presumes an addressee or "listener," it aims at something which is
presumed to be able to understand—a someone. An individual is addressed in
such discursive processes as a coherent consciousness, a subject.

The mechanisms by which discourses assume and thus appeal to a purportedly

pre-existing subject—and thereby are in fact prior connditions for its production—
Althusser sums up with the term interpellation. This term can name the act
whereby a member of parliament questions a minister who is obligated to respond
and assume responsibility for the actions of his or her government. Althusser
metaphorically theorizes that all human individuals as social agents are constantly
being interpellated. The discourses which interpellate them are not simply
autonomous, but are amalgamated with social institutions, ranging from religion
(one is called to account by an overarching authority) to legal practices (one is
called to take responsibility as a legal subject for one's thoughts and actions) to
everyday activities throughout a social formation.

If it still seems puzzling that Althusser would place such emphasis on ideology as
representational processes and then focus on what can be called a "subject effect"
as a social function, then we might elaborate a bit on the centrality of this effect to
discursive practices. Every time an individual "uses" a signifying system, such as
verbal language, the very form of that system includes "places" that attest to the
existence of subjects of signification. In the fundamental, therefore privileged
system of verbal language, examples include personal pronouns and verb tense—
which always is relative to the present time of the speaker and thus assumes a
subject of language in time. This subject is ultimately posited in discourse as the
sender and/or comprehender of significations. In this context, it can be said that
Althusser focuses attention on a conflation of levels: the sender and/or
comprehender of significations, able to speak and understand, is conflated with a
social subject mandated by social institutions, able to "choose," "responsible" for his
or her acts, ultimately culpable for antisocial behavior. Since it is ideology, a kind
of discursive environment, that provides the mediations for understanding actual
existence, an individual's placement as a social subject is a placement as subject
"in" discourse.[2]

On this view, then, the human subject is a function of a social formation which
assumes and thereby continually constructs it in practices, in institutions, and
therefore through discourse, without which there cannot be social practices and
institutions, as a universal category of "lived experience." By constructing subjects
in ideology—which is, ultimately, a framework for understanding existence
beneficial to a given social order—the social formation works to maintain its own
relative stability through time (both in the lifetime of an individual's experience
and across the time of successive generations). The experience of subjectivity is
intricately interlocked with the reproduction by a social formation of itself as a
"natural" state of things. In classical accounts, of course, the production of what
exists as "natural" is the operation of ideology. /159/
Such a perspective has direct implications for film theory. If ideology consists in a
universe of discursive representationality, then insofar as cinema works as
representation and/or as a component of discursive systems of representation,
filmic signifying systems can and should be investigated as ideology. If discursive
effects are inseparable from interpellating individuals as subjects, then even film
theory conceptualizing cinema as ideology should inquire about the mechanisms
through which an individual film spectator "recognizes" himself or herself as
subject in the film viewing process. In fact, this became a question consistently
raised in film analysis during the I970s, though not always from the explicit
premise of social interpellation. Given the importance of the politicized wing of
semiotic investigators of cinema, one would expect the fundamental repetitions
identified in investigations stemming from the structuralist tendency to be related
to questions of cinema as ideology: what concepts, myths, ideas, etc. are being thus
recirculated? But such researches were further tied to a strong interest in what
came to be called the study of "the position of the subject" or "subject-positioning"
in cinema: how do dominant cinematic strategies strive to position the spectators
as subjects, and what are the possibilities for contesting this positioning? This line
of inquiry proved to be one of the strongest and most fertile in recent film theory.

However, if one examines a film for the mechanisms by which it offers a position
or positions for the spectator to recognize himself or herself as subject, one will
encounter a certain lack in the theory of ideology. A theory of ideology is not a
specific account of human subjectivity as such, but an account of the production,
circulation, and constraints of what is taken as knowledge and/or positions proper
to knowledge in a given social formation. Thus, if one agrees with Althusser that
the category of thc subject is of special importance for ideological formations, there
is a theoretical need for exploring the attraction of "subjecthood." What profit is
there for an individual human being in assuming the positionality defined by that
category? The very notions of interpellation and spectator-positioning seem to
assume individuals who already desire to recognize themselves as subjects. Hence,
an understanding of that desire is necessary even to pose those issues in the
analysis of films.

Given the linkage of ideology and this desire with discursivity, the attraction, the
appeal, of signifying processes requires a more specific theorization. This amounts
to asking for an elaborate and rigorous account of relationships among text,
meaning, pleasure, and spectatorial position. What are the processes by which
specific discursive patterns appeal to an individual as subject? Social theory alone
could not answer this question. But the ways one responds to this question will
determine how one analyzes film texts and theorizes cinema.
In cinema semiotics of the 1970S, this issue was most often met by treating
signification in terms provided by particular kinds of psychoanalytic theory. Now,
if one attributes any validity to the psychoanalytic enterprise, this move will not
seem too surprising. It is possible to view even classical psychoanalysis /160/
precisely as an account of the individual's desire for identity, for secure subjective
positionality, against forces which constantly threaten it. Freud's "discovery" of the
unconscious is inseparable from his account of human identity as being founded
on a repression which is a necessary condition for forming a sense of self.

For Freudians, primary experiences of identity are constructed against a radical

anxiety, summarized as castration anxiety. Processes of desire, sexuality, and
fantasy are intertwined with consciousness of self, which is produced to counter
that founding anxiety and is always in dialectic with it. As a result, the normal
experience of identity occurs only on condition that its basic processes are hidden
from the "I" thus constructed. This is an essential Freudian point: there is always a
fundamental misrecognition involved in the individual's desire to find—or
recognize—his or her self as stable and secure.

The thesis that the unconscious is the basis for the existence of self-consciousness
("ego") can therefore serve as an explanation of the generalized desire of individual
humans to seek secure subjective positions. Classical psychoanalytical conceptions
could therefore be of great importance to the theorization of how films appeal to
human subjects. In addition, however, the psychoanalytic theory utilized in recent
cinema semiotics has often been inflected by the work of Jacques Lacan. Much of
the conceptual apparatus for the most influential work on subject positioning in
cinema has been provided by his formulations.

[...]

Notes

[1] See esp. "Marxism and Humanism," in Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben
Brewster (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969); and, on the subject and the thesis of
interpellation (discussed below), "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
(Notes Towards an Investigation)," in Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and
Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).

[2] This link between signifying form and social institutions via the concept of the
subject is not made as explicitly by Althusser himself. However, insofar as the
category of the subject has been of interest in film theory from a sociocultural
perspective, a jump such as this seems necessary.

On the provisions made in structures of verbal language for subject effects, one
constant reference has been the work of Emile Benveniste. Sec his articles such as
"Relationships of Person in the Verb," "The Correlations of Tense in the French
Verb," "The Nature of Pronouns," and ''Subjectivity in Language" all included in
his collection Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral
Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971). For example, see p.224: "It is in and
through language that man [sic] constitutes himself as a subject. . ."
Ver los libros de Stam sobre Vocabulario, Film semiotics, etc.

Ver European film theory and cinema: a critical introduction Escrito por Ian
Aitken en Google Books. El capítulo From Structuralism to Relativism.

Ver Post-Theory, p. 322.

Ver Bordwell
On the history of film style - Página 140
Ver Dudley Andrew Concepts in film theory - Página 129