[Week 10: Nov 4] B3. Representation, experience and social context

1. Different questions
1.1. Representation analysis: the pattern of textual meanings
Example: What is the hidden meaning of the advertisments about automobile? What is the cultural codes?

1.2. Study of experience: the regularities of subjectivities/identities in culture
Example: How did people live with shopping malls? How did children consume Barbie doll?

1.3. How about the relationship between subjectivity/identities and cultural text?

2. Laura Mulvey's question
2.1. " This paper intends to use psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud 1856-1939) to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations."

-What is the relationship between film and society?
-What is the relationship between cinema and society?
-The social relations within cinema <====>The social relations in human world
-The gender relations within cinema <====> The gender relations in the society

2.2. Psychoanalytical approach to culture: Culture as forms of unconscious (repressed, hidden, displaced)

3. What is unconscious?

3.1. Human mind is separated into two parts, conscious and unconscious

3.2. Rational being?
Human being is not only characterized as rational being. Instead a large part of human mind is non-rational.

3.3. Unconscious(無意識):
The aspect (or alleged aspect) of the mind of which we are not directly conscious or aware.

3.4. Libido(力比多)
The energy or drive of desire (mainly related to sex) which perpetuates the expression and movement of unconscious.
















3.5. Id, ego and superego
3.5.1. Id (本我)
-It contains the instincts which originate from the bodily organization.
-It is the realm of the illogical and inaccessible part of our personality.
-It is the unconscious part of self perpetuated by libido
-It is known by condensation, displacement, symbolizaton and hallucinatory wish fulfilment.

3.5.3. Super-ego(超我)
-Moral and external imperatives
-An ideal self

3.5.3. Ego (自我)
-The principle of pleasure (sexual): self-preservation
-The principle of avoiding pain (a defense mechanism)
-Resisting external pressures, Adapting to the rules, Postponing satisfcation

4. Feminist appropriation of psychoanalysis
4.1. Male ego and female figure
4.1.1. Male ego: phallic self and order
4.1.2. Female figure: a threat of castration (an external imperative)
4.1.3. The maintenance of the male/phallic order and pleasure:
-Castration anxiety
-maintaining male ego as subject
-making women an object (sex object) without threat

4.2. Male gaze: Scopophilia（偷窺癖）
4.2.1. Displacing self-satisfaction of desire into sexual desire for woman as sex object
4.2.2. Cinema provides an institution and cultural form for satisfying male ego's desire
4.2.3. Mirror image theory (Jacque Lacan 1901-1981)
-Pleasure from visual image and identification
-Identification through symbolic order
-The establishment of ego

4.2.3. Male as a subject: Look
4.2.4. Female as an object: to be looked at.
4.2.5. Libido is channelled into visual pleasure

4.3. Representation
4.3.1. Unconscious works like language: male's economy of libido and symbolic order
4.3.2. Male protagonists are portrayed as a figure men identify themselves with.
4.3.3. Female protagonists are portrayed as a figure to be looked at by male protagonists and male viewers.
4.3.4. Narrative movment is a process of satisfying male ego's desire.

5. Implications for cultural studies
5.1.Spectatorship
-Who are watching (or listening to)?
-Whom do the audience watch and listen to?
-What do the they watch and listen?
-In what way do they watch or listen?
Example I: Watching a movie in cinema theatre and on computer screen are different
Example II: Adult gaze

5.2. Pleasure in culture
5.2.1. Textual analysis fails to take account of pleasure
5.2.2. Most people find popular culture pleasurable.
5.2.3. How to analyze pleasure (unpleasure)?
5.2.4. Audience research
5.2.5. Example: How to read the cultural jammings against Tung?

5.3. Structures of Experience
5.3.1. How to take account of experience as structure?
5.3.2. Structure as regularities
5.3.3. Structure as unconscious operation and gender-sexual dynamics
5.3.4. Structure as identity formation
5.3.5. Example: the experience of bashing Yanyi
-Snow white (as a fantasized object of innocence for men)-->Yanyi (as a threatening subject of lack)-->Yanyi as a target (aggression object)
-Men's anxiety over the external stimuli created by women

5.4. Textual analysis and ethnography
5.4.1. The structural and institutional relationship between textual features and social experience
5.4.2.Methodological pluralism