The Ambassador's Body

The Ambassador's Body

"Screen theory" developed in the 1970s from the work of a group of French and

English film theorists including Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean-Louis

Comolli, and Stephen Heath. In the form in which it has come to influencecultural studies,

it combines elements of an eclectic range of theoretical perspectives, including the early

structuralist work of Roland Barthes which proposes that the meanings of signifiers are

determined by their position within a network of oppositions and equivalences;

Louis Althusser's conceptualization of interpellation as a process of meconnaissance

(misrecognition); and Jacques Lacan's seminal work on the mirror stage as a foundational

step in the child becoming a subject.

Screen theory treats filmic images as signifiers encoding meanings but also, thanks to the

apparatus through which the images are projected, as mirrors in which, by (mis)recognizing

themselves, viewers accede to subjectivity. One of its major strengths lies in its techniques for

uncovering ideological messages encrypted in images, messages which are taken to have a direct

constitutive impact upon their viewers. In the context of the 70s, this aspect of the theory

contributed importantly to the development of a politics of the image which critiqued the

mass media on the assumption that the images which they circulate shape the subjectivities

of their viewers. Such a view, divorced from the heady mixture of "high theory" and left

politics associated with Screen theory, remains the cornerstone of much contemporary

censorship practice as well as P.C. politics.

According to Screen theory, in addition to functioning as a vehicle for ideological meanings,

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...en it is in a highly overdetermined way, from the canvas

as a whole, rather than, as Lacan claims, from a single formal element, namely the image of the

skull.

Despite these concessions to Lacan's critics, my theoretical account of the gaze remains firmly

Lacanian. In particular, I reject Screen theory's account of the gaze as specular in favor of

Lacan's rival claim that the gaze is a site at which the Real disrupts the visual field. My

differences from Lacan reside in an attempt to historicize his work by showing the way in which

ideological factors mediate the effect of visual objects upon their viewers.

*(From Chapter Six of my forthcoming Fetish: An Erotics of Culture to appear with Cornell

UP, 1999; an earlier version of this same chapter will appear in Chapter Seven of Tom

Rosteck ed., At The Intersection to appear with Guilford, 1998).