Battersby, Foucault, Barthes
This week's readings offer several avenues for interesting connections, including last week's essays by Atlhusser and Lacan.
Foucault's argument about reducing the power of the author can perhaps form an interesting alliance with Althusser's lamentation of the repressive qualities that the ISAs of culture provide but maybe it doesn't get us anywhere in the end. What if we just worship the same bad ideas more and the sources less?
Battersby's essay on the patriarchal heritage of our concepts of genius/creativity is amazing. Partially because I've never actually heard any of it. Value systems are of great interest to me and so to experience her genealogy of the concept of the creative act as masculine is fascinating. In the film industry this overarching concept remains dominant though not openly, of course. But any study on the numbers of women directors reveals and incredible bias. Additionally, meaningful roles for female actors have not increased in spite of a good amount of discussion about the phenomenon. Brett Easton Ellis, who is perhaps actually just a life-long trolling experiment said (paraphrasing) that women couldn't be great directors (film) because film was all about the male gaze.
Barthes comes in hot and slams down the post-modern gauntlet - that authorship is in itself a misnomer. He preaches the absurdity of assigning genius when all creative acts are ultimately only possible through the ideas and objects that came before them. Returning to filmmaking, I think of how the editor molds the cinematographers images through collision and contextualization. How the actor gives human form to the writer's ideas. How the costumer chooses every detail to help the audience perceive a character's thoughts, intentions, desires past experiences and so on. But in the end we only really discuss the director. Everyone becomes a kind of tool in the director's arsenal.
And all might best be read through Althusser's ISA lens. Foucault assigns extraordinary positions to Freud and Marx, though he doesn't discuss the validity of their ideas so much as the effect those ideas had (i.e. as the centrifuge driving new discourses). His examples are European and male and perhaps Althusser gives us reason to examine his evaluation of these figures as not unbiased but as part of the ideological state he wants us to live in. Much like Battersby's analysis aims to create a world in which female creativity is seen as vital and equal to male creativity or Barthes desire to end the deification of authorship.
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Film is a fascinating example to consider alongside these readings. As you point out, a film involves a large team of individuals working together. So to what extent can we reduce everything back to the director? To what extent does the director occupy the author-function? Isn't it more like a dispersed or distributed authorship in actuality? And how can we begin to think differently about film making so as to acknowledge that? Can we?
ReplyDeleteThe issue of the male gaze is a big one. Have you read Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and narrative Cinema"? I find the call to the haptic that several feminist film and video theorists make to be an interesting one (e.g. Fisher, "Relational Sense: Towards a Haptic Aesthetic," Marks, "Video Haptics and Erotics" and The Skin of the Film). At the same time, I wonder whether this creates another binary--optics vs haptics, gaze vs touch--that is still gendered.