2 - On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
Suture theory overrides the central identification concept of apparatus theory. Instead of the spectator’s primary identification with the camera, there is a primary disidentification between camera and spectator that can only be reconciled secondarily. With Oudart, suture theory can thus be reconstructed as a negative apparatus theory: the camera is an apparatus, but a phantomatic one. But in Daniel Dayan’s influential appropriation of Suture theory, the emptiness of the subject of enunciation is short-circuited with the repressed apparatus of production. Since Dayan’s reading, a false compromise has prevailed in film theory between suture theory and apparatus theory, which I try to once again separate from each other. Hitchcock remains an important aesthetic point of reference, because he stages (above all in Psycho) a free-floating subjectivity by means of acousmatic voices and unsutured glances, which spectralizes the site of enunciation as a diegetically unclosable (non-)place.
Keywords: Suture, Identification, Negativity, Spectrality, Acousmatics
Marnie concludes with an ambivalent final image, which in spite of the apparently successful working through of her initial childhood trauma rejects a direct causality of neurosis. The alien body of rear-projection displays an unease that eludes the manifest closure of the narrative. Marnie sketches out such an aetiology, which in place of a definable causa for the protagonist’s illness posits an elusive cause – the proof of which is the fact that “the trauma from which the heroin suffers is in any case over-determined and cannot be unambiguously determined or resolved.” In this sense, I would like to conceive of suture theory, the re-reading of which is central to this chapter, as an aetiological project, which in contrast to the positions of Metz and Bellour does not one-dimensionally ascribe the problematic of filmic enunciation to the causality of a concrete entity (spectator/author), but, on the contrary, seeks to think through the paradox of an enunciation without enunciator. It will be shown that suture theory radically breaks with apparatus theory, by understanding the camera itself as a (non-)place of negative causality. It proposes a theory of the camera and the gaze, which conceives of the “darkness of exclusion inside the visible itself” (Althusser) as the structural cause of visibility – that is, as that very hors-champ that was dismissed as being a placeholder for the enunciator.
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- Towards a Political Aesthetics of CinemaThe Outside of Film, pp. 55 - 88Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020