MDMD2: Suture Self

[Dave Monroe]

"'Suture Self, as the Medical Students like to say.'"
(M&D, Ch. 3, p. 20)

Not to mention yr Lacanian psychoanalytic film
theorists.  From Kaja Silverman, The Subject of
Semiotics (New York: Oxford UP, 1983), Ch. 5,
"Suture," pp. 194-236 ...

"The concept of suture attempts to account for the
means by which subjects emerge from within discourse
..." [p. 219]

"[Jacques-Alain] Miller defines suture as that moment
when the subject inserts itself into the symbolic
register in the guise of a signifier, and in so doing
gains meaning at the expense of being." [ibid.]

"A given signifier (a pronoun, a personal name) grants
the subject access into the symbolic order, but
alienates it not only from its need but from its
drives.  That signifier stands in for the absent
subject (i.e., absent in being) whose lack it can
never stop signifying." [ibid.]

"Theorists of cinematic suture agree that films are
articulated and the viewing subject spoken by means of
interlocking shots." [e.g., the shot/reverse shot; p.
220]

"Jean-Pierre Oudart refers to the spectator who
ocupies the missing fielf as the 'Absent One.'  The
Absent One, also known as the Other, has all the
attributes of the mythically potent symbolic father:
potency, knoledge, transcendental vision,
self-sufficiency, and discursive power.  It is, of
course, the speaking subject of the cinematic text
....  We shall see that this speaking subject often
finds its fictional correlative in an ideal paternal
representation." [p. 221]

"The speaking subject has everything which the viewing
subject, suddenly cognizant of the limitations on its
vision, understands to be lacking...." [ibid.]

"However, it is equally important that the presence of
the speaking subject subject be hidden from the
viewer...." [ibid.]

"The shot/reverse shot formation is ideally suited for
this dual purpose ...." [ibid.]

"The classic cinematic organization depends upon the
subject's willingnes to become absent to itself by
permitting a fictional character to 'stand in' for it,
or by allowing a particulr point of view to define
what it sees." [p. 222]

"Thus cinematic coherence and plenitude emerge through
multiple cuts and negations.  Each image is defined
through its differences from those that surround it
syntagmatically and those it paradigmatically implies
('this but not that'), a well as through its denial of
any discourse bt its own.  Each positive cinematic
asserton represents an imaginary conversion of a whole
series of negative ones.  This castrating coherence,
this definition of a discursive position for the
viewing subject which necessitates not only its loss
of being but the repudiation of alternate discourses,
is one of the chief aims of the system of suture...."
[ibid.]

As already excerpted in Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York:
Columbia UP, 1986), pp. 219-35, hence the bracketed
page numbers here (sorry, just made things easier for
me to work with an already condensed version).  See
also, e.g. ...

Heath, Stephen. "On Suture."
   Questions of Cinema.  Bloomington:
   Indiana UP, 1981.  76-112.

As well as, e.g. ...

http://www.ic.ucsc.edu/~ltmo128/sutureb.html

http://www.ic.ucsc.edu/~ltmo128/darkfunsuture.html

http://www.uta.edu/english/mal/consume/silverman.html

Were I more motivated, I might perhaps take up, say, 
Dixon's insertion of himself into the symbolic
register via those 'forms of You ... borrow[ed] from
another tongue" (M&D, Ch. 3, p. 16), or his having had
"recourse much more often to the Needle, than to the
Stars," i.e., the telescopic gaze, but ... but am an
attendant host, one that will (?) do/ To swell a
P-List, start a scene or two.  Whatever ...

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get email alerts & NEW webcam video instant messaging with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com