Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 9 Number 3, December 2008
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Cartwright, Lisa, Moral Spectactorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008. Pp. 287, ISBN 978-0-8223-4194-9, Price £ 48 (hardback), £ 12.99 (paperback).
Reviewed by
University of Hyderabad, India
Lisa Cartwright’s work is an important development in several disciplines: spectatorship studies, affect studies, disability studies and the psychoanalysis of film. The genre Cartwright focuses on is deaf female subjects. The basic question she raises is: how do subjects ‘form’ when the faculties of sight, hearing and speech are impaired? In order to answer this problematic question Cartwright uses a variety of theorists in cognitive psychology (Silvan Tompkins), psychoanalysis (Andre Green, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott). Cartwright’s interest is not in the production of a ‘we’, but in what she terms the ‘intersubjective coproduction of the “I” ’ (5).
Cartwright opens with the rejection of object relations theory and affect theory in film studies. Retrieving affect via Andre Green, Cartwright proposes that affect is more than an emotional state of the experience represented on the screen. Cartwright opts for empathy rather than the now-classical psychoanalytic concept of identification here. ‘Empathy’ is, for Cartwright, the reflexive experience of awareness of thoughts, emotions or concern of the other. Empathy also signals an affective relation with the subject on screen. But empathy is also knowledge, for, as Cartwright puts it, ‘my knowledge comes from the force of the object (the image or ‘you’) and my reciprocal sense that I recognize the feeling I perceive in your expression’ (24). ‘Projective identification’ – a term she adapts from Klein – is the fantasy of an object relationship where hatred against parts of the self is transferred to the mother. Here Cartwright proposes that projective identification requires more than a subject-object model of knowing in order to understand how one responds to the other’s feeling. How is this knowledge mediated? What is the process of empathetic identification? A possible answer to these questions, suggests Cartwright, lies in accepting the centrality of affect.
Affect is ‘its reproduction in a form that brings together the inward, inner movement of affect as tension and discharge in and through the subject’s body with the perception of, and also communication toward … the subject who arouses desire’ (41). This second subject is the spectator. Cartwright’s interest is in the motivated action of the spectator. How does the spectator ‘I’ respond when ‘I’ believe that I ‘know how you feel’?
In her second chapter Cartwright examines the historical representation of deaf people in post-war cinema from the USA and UK (her genres include melodrama, ‘biopics’, documentaries and feature films). She places voice as a central concern in her analysis, in keeping with her earlier stated view that voice is about agency. Cartwright argues that with the arrival of new sound technologies an augmentation of speaking, hearing and listening were components of social subjectivity in the period of hearing research and deaf war veterans. Cartwright proposes a new form of the audience-subject: the listener-spectator. The listener-spectator is a subject in an empathetic audiovisual field. In a dense analysis of these films, Cartwright suggests that these films constitute a site of public fantasy where the social issue of deafness ties in with the problematic question of the ‘woman’s voice’ (Cartwright notes the extensive use of the ‘mute woman’ metaphor signifying the repressed woman in feminist theory).
Chapter three is concerned with character identification and fantasy. Beginning with a reading of the history (and controversies) over facilitated communications (FC), Cartwright addresses questions of false memories in abuse narratives. Cartwright argues that at the foundation of the concept of ‘false memory’ is the question of the validity of women’s voices and words. In the case of children’s accounts (and memories) of abuse, the context changed radically in the 1990s, as the child began to be treated as a reliable witness. However, Cartwright notes that the issue of ‘influence’ remained paramount in discussions about child testimonies. Can there be a ‘neutral’ human mediator in the production of the child’s speech? Discussing Annie’s Coming Out (1984) Cartwright argues that the film and its controversies are about mediation, especially in the case of affective relationships (say, disabled people and caregivers). Facilitation here is not about needs or messages but feelings. For Cartwright – and this is her thesis throughout the book – facilitation is a process that ‘involves projective identification as well as empathy’ (192). Facilitators therefore become paradigms of the ethical caregiver. Facilitators make sociality for the child subject – whose communication is impaired – possible. And this involves affect and touch (here Cartwright returns to Levinas and the work of Silvan Tomkins). For Cartwright, therefore, the emphasis on speech, voice and language often involves a neglect of other affective aspects – what she terms the ‘expressive praxis’ of communication (226).
In her conclusion, Cartwright rounds off her notion of empathy – and proposes that ‘spectators may also “feel themselves into” those they can imagine not as themselves but as theirs or, rather, as their responsibility’ (235). This ethical turn in spectatorship is surely Cartwright’s major contribution.
Moral Spectatorship is a densely argued work. It is in line with more recent works on affect (notably Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, 2003), and builds a well-argued case for recognizing other modes of ‘recognition’. Cartwright’s ‘ethical turn’ in communication studies is, I believe, a significant one. Consistently informed by questions of gender and physical disability in the case of child subjects, Cartwright maps a new ‘media world’: one where the medium of touch and care are primary modes of communication. Admittedly difficult in parts (especially her account of Andre Green’s psychoanalysis) the work, however, delivers its arguments with great conviction. The close analysis of the ‘disability films’ takes us through the theory as film criticism. Moral Spectatorship is a major work not only in consciousness and affect studies but in ethical philosophy.