The Impossible Reduction: Film and Film Theory

Andrew Gibson

 If the term postmodernism still has any real use, it seems to me to be in designating a counter-discourse - or set of counter-discourses - which gesture towards a phantom site: Lyotard on the unpresentable, Derridean deconstruction, Vattimo on il pensiero debole, Michèle le Doeuff on incompleteness, Critchley on finitude, Connor on critical modesty, Warhol, Cage, Sarraute, etc. With Samuel Beckett as their patron saint, the counter-discourses of postmodernism raise insistent questions about limits and boundaries; in fact, precisely, about the question of impossibility. It is thus that postmodernism continues to beg the question of advanced capital and the latter's triumphalism, its faith in possibility, its rampant pride in what it takes to be its own seemingly limitless power. In that respect, insofar as the idea of the postmodern is still significant at all, its significance is ethical. Better and more precisely, in a phrase that I want to underline but not elaborate here, the significance of postmodernism is ethical in the first instance.

 In what I'm going to say in this essay, I want to bring together two of my interests: in the idea of the postmodern, and in materialism; in what the material might be said to be; in the possibility or rather the unlikelihood of a material aesthetics. Along with the strain in recent theory which has understood the postmodern in terms of a radical abstraction and the idea of limits, there has of course been a very different one which has marked out postmodern culture in terms of material differences: new media, for example, and their effects. Within this strain of thought, what distinguishes postmodern culture is its materiality. Postmodern culture is somatic culture as never before. Theory has seldom brought these two strains of thought together; seldom speculated on whether one of the most crucial limits we continually confront is not the limit to our various contemporary materialisms. In other words, the impossible theory that I am not going to be able either to allude to or produce is a kind of theory which I would love to have all ready to hand, that is, an adequate contemporary theory of the somatic. It is precisely the fact that no such theory exists - that it appears to be impossible - that had goaded me into asking one or two questions specifically about and for recent theory of film, without claiming any particular mastery of the field.

 To my mind, in its dominant manifestations, which I would loosely describe as post-Metzian - Screen and after, if you like - as compared to (say) deconstruction, recent film theory has been a resolutely modern form of theory. It has been modern in its presumptions (the possibility and desirability of knowledge-power), in its mode (critique) and in the position it has regularly produced for the theorist (transcendental or, at least, a position of classic exteriority. This is not a discourse I'm claiming to escape, here). All this has been bound up in a seventies- and eighties-style commitment - in many ways important and necessary, particularly in the cultural climate of the Cold War - to the hermeneutics of suspicion. (Let's not be fooled by the media; It's not enough to see films. We must also see through them). This has left us in a double-bind: on the one hand, the great demolition work accomplished by film theory was powerfully anti-idealist. Metz wrote specifically of putting an end to `idealist discourses' on film. Film theory involved dumping a whole range of purely notional entities: the auteur of the Cahiers critics, realism à la Bazin, the world as story (effectively pulled apart by structuralist narratology) and so on. In all the headiness of the plaisir de rompre, however, what was overlooked was that theory was quietly installing a set of idealisms all of its own: an idealism or what Derrida would call a metaphysics of the sign, for example (no innocent little concretion nestling quietly in the corner of a frame that could not be dragooned into service as a sign); secondly, a more or less subtle idealism of the subject, as in `the construction of the subject'. Who was this `subject?' (Certainly not me. I've never been `constructed' by a film in my life). It was in no sense a material subject, a description of whom, I would argue, is strictly unavailable or impossible. The subject as constructed was actually a subject constructed by theory; the other of the theorist, the imaginary dupe from whose condition the theorist was saved precisely by theory. `They go all by themselves,' wrote Stephen Heath of such dupes, `like so many automata'. Like so many others, Metz turned to Lacan for an account of the misrecognition or what he (Metz) called the `radical delusion' of the cinematic subject. As far as misrecognition was concerned, E. Ann Kaplan even argued that it is was in fact less easy for the fiction reader to believe that he/she was creating the text than for the cinema spectator to believe that he/she is producing the image on the screen.  I refer to her, here, because there could hardly be a better illustration, both of the quite extraordinary brainlessness attributed by the theorist to the subject as constructed by film, and of theory's extreme, idealist denial of the film as a thing in itself. Thirdly, ideology: what lay hidden away in the nooks and crannies of film, lurking everywhere, like the gonococcus in the folds of the prostate, was ideology. The function of theory was therefore penetration, demystification, a platonic seeing through and beyond appearances, a puritan resistance to the senses, to multiplicity and movement. This latter resistance is well demonstrated in Jameson's work on film. In a way, the resistance is perfectly captured in his lofty declaration that `I have no desire to see again a movie about which I have written well.' To produce the sufficient commentary - to attain to a sufficient systematization and abstraction - is finally to kill the film as sensual lure and material snare. This uneasiness over the dangerous temptations of film - this desire to put an end to what Jameson calls the `rapt, mindless fascination' of image and sound - is amply evident in Signatures of the Visible, for example. The mandarin theorist becomes the Red Cross Knight in cinema's Bower of Bliss. (Though this is part of what I like about Jameson: the ability to be tempted, half-seduced; unlike Eagleton, who is always Savanarola, intent on hounding the sinners and recidivists). At any rate, in its dominant forms, film theory has always seemed open to the accusation Baudrillard levels at Marxism - that it puts meaning everywhere (pins its faith wholly on what Baudrillard calls the religion of meaning) - and thereby becomes another means whereby the theological drive is actually accomplished by a modernity that claims to have overcome it. I'm not suggesting that film does not influence people, or that that influence may not be retrograde; only that, if this is the case, such effects are so wholly imbricated with the materiality of the medium as to be much more obscure to us than terms like `ideology' or `the construction of the subject' can possibly suggest. As Rosi Braidotti might say, the relevant materialism has simply not been within the scope of what Constance Penley once called the `bachelor machines' of film theory.

 Not, of course, that film theory would recognize itself in this description of its idealism. Precisely the reverse: film theory has insistently given itself out as a materialism. Semiotics as a materialism, the materialism of the signifier; historical materialism on the technological, economic and political determinations of film as commodity; in the seventies, in particular, Althusserian `materialism', insisting on the supposed materiality of ideology. Heath even described the Althusser- and Lacan-based theories of subject construction as a `materialism of the subject'. Equally, in their promotion of the avant-garde - or, at least, of a certain kind of avant-garde - Wollen, McCabe et al. wrote of one of its cardinal functions as a self-reflexive laying bare of filmic materiality. But what they meant by this was not a concern with the matter of film as, say, the work of Robert Breer or, in a different way, Stan Brakhage's Mothlight are concerned with the matter of film. (Mothlight, for anyone who doesn't know, is a remarkably beautiful film made from the wings of dead moths). For film to pay attention to its own materiality was for it to concern itself with the `processes' or `codes' underlying it. In that respect - indeed, in the case of all the supposed `materialisms' I have just itemized - theory has worked relentlessly in terms of a surface-and-depth or appearance-and-reality model - sign-and-meaning, image-and-code or syntagm, etc. The whole point about a so-called `historical materialism' of film, in Terry Lovell's account of it, for example, is that it sees beyond the film itself to determining structures and forces. Thus the theorist's eye is not the eye of the spectator. It is not the eye that sees. It is rather the severe eye of Hawthorne's puritan fathers, an eye that sees through the deceitful show, the specious, trivial masquerade, the mere physics of film to the profounder truth underlying it. Extraordinarily enough, by and large, film theory h as been less interested in the sensible than the insensible, the visible than the invisible, the audible than the inaudible. Or rather, it might be better to say, for the film theorist as for the puritan father, matter is matter insofar as it does not exist in its own right, insofar as it exhibits no resistance, has no alterity, no proper materiality of its own. Matter is matter insofar as it signifies.
I'm well aware that there are exceptions to my description of film theory. (The work of Brunette and Wills, Mary Anne Doane and Steven Shaviro comes to mind, for example). I'm also aware of the extent to which the best and most important theory of film in the past ten or fifteen years has been feminist theory; and of the postmodern pluralization that film theory underwent in the late eighties and the nineties, with its queer theorists, its postcolonialists and so forth. I know my presentation of the broad outlines of film theory may seem out of date. But I'd need to be convinced that the changes in film studies in the eighties and nineties have been accompanied by significant shifts in the intrinsic character of film theory; that the epistemology of film theory as I have described it is not still substantially in place. My own limited acquaintance with recent trends - not least, in Screen - would suggest that, in some respects, the epistemological premises of established film theory have actually secured themselves and been consolidated, not least in the case of historical and other so-called `materialisms.' But please note: that does not mean that I am a closet Wisconsinite.. Many of my doubts about post-Metzian theory can indeed be found coming from the Wisconsin school and their allies, often in more hostile. Nonetheless, in theoretical terms, their recent work is a deeply dismal affair. As in other areas in which I have worked (narrative theory, literature and ethics), the covert project of what gives itself out as `post-theory' is actually a return to a pre-theoretical naivety, as though that were now legitimized by the imminent exhaustion of pure theory. Hence essay after essay surreptitiously tries to smuggle back in one or other of a whole rack of terms that you might have thought that theory had comprehensively dispatched to oblivion: plot, character, universals, transcultural truths, rational cognition, sympathy and empathy, realism, Aristoteleanism, the supreme value of the imagination: the banal kit and caboodle of the humanist stock-in-trade.

 But what am I after, then, and where else is there to turn?  Well, I probably want the impossible, and there may therefore be nowhere else I can possibly turn. Let me give three examples: in the wonderful opening sequence to Touch of Evil, as Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh run towards the explosion, a figure runs behind them and out of frame, to their right, then reappears from the right, in the foreground, runs out of frame again, then reappears again, and runs across screen, ending up on the couple's left, in the foreground. For a very brief time, this crazy, frenetic, looming figure dominates the film - or rather, his movement does. But what is he, or it? A signifier for excitement, commotion? No doubt. But to say that does not exhaust him. And what is in excess of his semiotic value is precisely his materiality: his material force and material specificity, the fact that he is himself and not other, that his movement is what it is and nothing ot her. It is in that excess, in that materiality, that a film is what it is before it is construed in terms of codes, syntagms, ideologies or whatever and from which - in a quite remarkable askesis - film theory has chastely turned away. Or take that classic film noir, Build My Gallows High. The extraordinary redundancy of chiaroscuro in that film, of the play of light and dark, is altogether superfluous to any effects of signification (eg `moral ambivalence') to which it can be reduced. It does not naturalize the ideological, reinforce the realist delusion or lay bare the filmic device. It is, quite simply, what constitutes the film in itself, its material particularity which is also its alterity, its irreducibility to my terms. Or take David Lynch: the truly abiding obsessions in Lynch's films, from the early, partly abstract films (The Alphabet, The Grandmother and so on) onwards are, in the first instance, material obsessions: obsessions, not with objects, nor even with sounds and images, but with amorphous shapes, lines, trajectories, vectors, curves, movements, in correspondence, perhaps, with his preoccupation with the obscurity of the body, the viscera, physical processes and functions. In this respect, on might actually think in terms of a Lynchian material universe, the laws of which - self-evidently in Eraserhead, for instance - are quite particular to it.

 What I'm struggling with, here, is the impossible reduction of my title. It may be that what is crucial to film, what is most powerful in it as in so many of our contemporary cultural productions is precisely what definitively eludes theory and is truly the other of theory, material specificity. The question then becomes: must theory always construct film as a reflection of theory itself? Must film always indicate the limits to the possibilities available to theory? If so, how might theory better register the traces of its own exclusions, of the impossibility of the theoretical reduction? Perhaps what I'm arguing for is a theory scarred, like a middle-aged psyche, by the traces of its failures and negligences (but still vital). Don't get me wrong. I am not arguing in any respect for a return to formalist analysis (which is emphatically not what I mean by materialism). Nor, appearances to the contrary, am I at all suggesting that the theoretical project should be abandoned in film studies. Quite the reverse: what's crossed my mind is the thought of a sensual proliferation of theory, a multiplication of the theoretical imagination for film. I admire the work of Metz, Mulvey, Heath, Jacqueline Rose, Wollen, Bellour, others. All the same, what interests me is what might happen to theory if what they leave out of the account is worked back into it. It may be, for example, that theory needs to mark its own distance from the material, a gap, a nostalgia for the material that begins with the very instance of theory itself. It mat be that theory could attend to the manner in which that gap or distance is replicated within film, in the indeterminable non-coincidences between the signifying and the non-signifying, sense and non-sense in any given film. (I'm thinking in particular, here, of the films of Ridley Scott). At all events, I think we might return to the question that was more often raised by a phenomenologically oriented theory existing prior to Metz, as in the work of Mitry and Morin: what exactly is film? And to ask this question again, may once more be to problematize the relationship between film and theoretical discourse.

 Deleuze suggests, of course, that film is not in fact an object for theory. It is itself theory in a radically distinct, material mode. I'm returning here, finally, to my second question: where else is there to turn, outside the traditions of classic film theory? One of the most remarkable things about those traditions is the narrowness of their derivations. The enthusiasm for Althusser and Lacan, of course, sometimes Foucault, even Derrida has been accompanied by a notable indifference to theorists to whose thought the visual arts have been crucial and in whose work those arts have featured extensively: Deleuze, Lyotard and, more recently, in England, Andrew Benjamin, for instance, and Thomas Docherty. But it is actually in the work of such theorists that we may find a stimulus to new departures. And yet there are problems here, too. Deleuze's magisterial and compelling work on cinema is exemplary as a model for a wholesale redescription of what I call `the matter of film'. Yet it is hard to see how it will finally survive the charge levelled by Alain Badiou, that Deleuze's thought as a whole is finally unitary and idealist, that it is not `une pensée immanente du multiple'. Transposed to his work on film, the case would be that Deleuze does not offer us a theory of the immanent materiality of film, but rather a theory of film as an instance or, in more Deleuzean terms, a `singularization' out of a transcendent materiality. In other words, put far too crudely, film becomes Bergson - or, better, Deleuzean Bergsonism - on screen. Nonetheless, as an indicator of the possibility of new directions, Deleuze remains crucial. Similarly, there is clearly much to be made of Lyotard's insistent concern with ours as a culture in which a radically discursive aesthetics is dominant and pervasively represses what he calls the `figural': the libidinal and sensuous, the material and substantial. Indeed, Docherty has already made much of this theme in his chapter on film in Alterities. The problem for me, here, is that both Lyotard and Docherty are very close to Wollen, Heath and theorists working in the Screen tradition in opposing an avant-garde or comparatively marginal cinema to the mainstream, and privileging the first over the second, with the first as a properly material cinema, the second as one in which the material is somehow contained by the immaterial (narrative codes, signifying systems and so on). I'm not sure that both the structure and the terms of this dualism don't threaten to reintroduce the very idealist presumptions against which Lyotard and Docherty are concerned to struggle. True, the avant-garde is likely more rigorously to operate a peremptory check on any impulse to flee the materiality its films produce for us. There are many great films about which the principal point is that there may be little or nothing significant to say about them: the work of Maya Deren, Len Lye and Bruce Baillie; the abstract films of Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger and Viking Eggeling; the animation of Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowocyzk. Clearly, given my concerns, this doesn't mean that they are in the slightest negligible. But nor does it automatically privilege them over a cinema more readily accessible to an established hermeneutics. Rather, an adequate exposure to the avant-garde may possibly allow us to see cinema itself in different terms; to meditate on how far the meaning-effects in any film are likely to be epiphenomena, how far, therefore, the deep and categorical distrust of cinema and cinema lovers evident in Jameson or the Screen tradition may finally be miscalculated or, at least, disproportionate. The primary facts about all films are material facts. The secondary questions have to do with the many and complex relations that are or may be possible between those facts and our discourses. To go back to my very first observation with regard to the counter-discourses of postmodernism: I suggested that what is crucial within them is what Philippe Sollers once called `the experience of limits'. It may be that an adequate and appropriate theory of film - a postmodern theory - will not aspire to a ever-fuller appropriation of its object, but rather to an increasingly fastidious, sophisticated and subtle encounter with and expression of the horizons within which it is confined. An adequate theory of film might be concerned, not just with what is possible to it, but also what remains beyond its power to accomplish.