Cultural
Analysis
This is Bal's term for her interdisciplinary theory practice.
Obviously there is a play on/contradistinction from "Cultural Studies".
It may be a fine point. She contends, among other things, that cultural
studies while very significantly changing the object of study has not
developed a new methodology of study. This has led to what she describes
as a crisis in the humanities, and particularly in the university, in
times of economic restraint "the interdisciplinarity inherent to
cultural studies has given university administrators a tool with which
to enforce mergings and cancellations of departments that might turn out
to be fatal for the broad grounding of cultural studies needs." (p.
7)
"The
counterpart of any given concept is the cultural text or work of 'thing'
that constitutes the object of analysis. No concept is meaningful for
cultural analysis unless it helps us to understand the object better on
its-—the object's—own terms. Here, another background, or
root, of the current situation in the humanities comes to the fore."
8
"The qualifier 'cultural' takes the existence and importance of cultures
for granted, but it does not predicate the 'analysis' on a particular
conception of 'culture.' For, in distinction from, say, cultural anthropology,
'cultural analysis' does not study culture. "culture' is not its
object. The qualifier cultural in 'cultural analysis' indicates, instead,
a distinction from traditional disciplinary practice within the humanities,
namely, that the various objects gleaned from the cultural world for closer
scrutiny are analyzed in view of their existence in culture. This means
they are not seen as isolated jewels, but as things always-already engaged,
as interlocutors, within the larger culture from which they have emerged.
It also means that 'analysis' looks to issues of cultural relevance, and
aims to articulate how the object contributes to cultural debates. Hence
the emphasis on the object's existence in the present. It is not the artist
or the author but the objects they make and 'give' to the public domain
that are the 'speakers' in analytic discussion….The most important
consequence of this empowerment of the object is that it pleads for a
qualified return to the practice of 'close reading' that has gone out
of style. This book as a whole is that plea…That is why all the
chapters are case studies rather than systematic explanations of the concept
concerned." 10
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Subject
All quotes
from "The Subject of Semiotics." Kaja Silverman. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. 1983.
The term "subject" designates a quite different semantic and
ideological space from that indicated by the more familiar term "individual."
The second of these terms dates from the Renaissance, and it still bears
the traces of the dominant philosophical systems of that time--—systems
which afforded to consciousness the very highest premium. The concept
of subjectivity, as we shall see, marks a radical departure from this
philosophical tradition by giving a more central place to the unconscious
and to cultural overdetermination than it does to consciousness. 126
The term "subject" foregrounds the relationship between ethnology,
psychoanalysis, and semiotics. It helps us to conceive of human reality
as a construction, as the product of signifying activities which are both
culturally specific and generally unconscious. The category of the subject
thus calls into question the notions both of the private, and of a self
synonymous with consciousness. It suggests that even desire is culturally
instigated, and hence collective; and it de-centers consciousness, relegating
it (in distinction from preconscious, where cognitive activity occurs)
to a purely receptive capacity. Finally, by drawing attention to the divisions
which separate one area of psychic activity from another, the term "subject"
challenges the value of stability attributed to the individual."
130
Some elements of the Freudian model
"The Freudian subject is above all a partitioned subject, incapable
of exhaustive self-knowledge."
Freud's Model Changes Over Time
The subject as described in the early work (1900) The Interpretation of
Dreams is partitioned into "two major compartments: the unconscious
and the preconscious/conscious. The sympathies of the young Freud would
seem to be very much engaged by the unconscious, and he elaborates an
analytic model calculated to establish a flow from it to the conscious
subject. Indeed, the young Freud is at pains to circumvent the censorship
of the preconscious, to lift the bar of repression.
The Freud of The Ego and the Id (1923), or the late essays on female sexuality,
takes a very different attitude toward the subject and has recourse to
a topographical model within which Oedipal values play a much more central
role. This model also reformulates the unconscious in ways which diminish
its complexity and appeal." 132
The Id, the Ego and the Superego
"They exist in a somewhat uneasy alliance with the categories "unconscious"
and "preconscious"…"
"Id" designates that part of the psychic
apparatus which is most rudimentary: it predates the development
of both ego and superego. It is unconscious, but only portions of it are
repressed. In this respect, it differs strikingly from the unconscious
of The Interpretation of Dreams which consists exclusively of repressed
materials. …It lacks the [unconscious']signifying capacities…Freud
associates it with the passions, and he attributes to it qualities like
unruliness and lack of control. The id always obeys the dictates of the
pleasure principle, no matter what the consequence. Finally, unlike the
unconscious of The Interpretation of Dreams, the id is not a product of
the same cultural prohibitions which establish the preconscious, but is
rather a primordial category. " 133
"…the ego carries out the commands of
the reality principle. Indeed, the ego consists of what used to
be part of the id, but which under the influence of the reality principle
has been transformed into a "coherent organization of mental processes."
including the systems known as perception and preconscious in the earlier
topography, and part of the unconscious or id. It is sharply differentiated
only from that part of the id which has been repressed. Freud associates
the ego with reason and common sense and he describes its relation to
the id as one of intelligent guidance and severe restraint…"
133
The Superego
The ego is formed through a series of identifications with objects external
to it…a pattern whereby an object is first loved and then taken
inside the ego in the guise of a visual image, a voice, a set of values,
or some other key features. The introjections provides the means whereby
the id can be persuaded to renounce an object which has for one reason
or another proved inaccessible. The ego refashions itself after that object,
and offers itself to the id as a substitute…The super-ego emerges
from the first and most important of these identifications, that with
the father. By taking the image of the father into himself, the male subject
resolves both his original erotic feeling for that figure , and his subsequent
hostility and jealousy…identification with the father also sanctions
his continued, albeit diminished, affection for the mother.
However, this first identification is not a simple one' it differs quite
profoundly from those that follow…[the son] accepts that there are
ways he can never be like [the father]. In other words, the male subject
internalizes along with the image of the father an image of his own distance
from the father. That distance is expressed through the creation of a
psychic construct which stands to one side of the ego, as a kind of ideal
version of it…superego functions throughout the history of the subject
as the mirror in which the ego sees what is should be, but never can be…"
135
Lacan's Theory of the subject
"Lacan's theory of the subject reads like a classic narrative—it
begins with birth and then moves in turn through the territorialization
of the body, the mirror stage, access to language and the Oedipus compels.
The last two of these events belong to what Lacan calls the symbolic order,
and they mark the subject's coming of age within culture. …each
of these stages of this narrative is conceived in terms of some kind of
self-loss or lack…"150
to be continued…
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