Conrad and Masculinity

Vision, Power and Homosocial Exchange 173
misunderstanding’ the form of feminist critique which regards
dominant cinema as damaging because it presents women as the
object of desire, against which Silverman argues that ‘we all function
simultaneously as subject and object’ (MS, 143–4). This may be true in
terms of the Lacanian definitions of those terms, but does not necessarily
recognize that the social consequences of a man or a woman
functioning as an object are not the same. This elision is arguably a
consequence of the logic of the same which Irigaray reveals in
Lacanian thought. 21 Lacanian concepts such as the Law of the Father
or Symbolic castration tend to subdue all psychic phenomena to transcendent
laws which are also male laws. However, Silverman’s
alternative to the ‘objectification’ critique of dominant cinema is a
suggestive and subtle one: ‘If feminist theory has reason to lament that
system of representation [dominant cinema], it is ... because the male
look both transfers its own lack to the female subject, and attempts to
pass itself off as the gaze’ (MS, 143–4). The problem here is that the
concept of ‘lack’ is closely connected to Symbolic castration and thus
to the centrality of the phallus in Lacanian theory, so that this position
has built into it a male law masquerading as a universal law.
In what follows, then, the psychoanalytically-based paradigms of
Mulvey, Neale and Silverman are used provisionally. In so far as the
centrality of the phallus in such theory reflects the existing cultural
unconscious, these paradigms aid the analysis and critique of that
cultural unconscious, of its representations and of the social practices
which it supports. However, in so far as such a critique leads us to
look, however tentatively, beyond the existing order, we need to
reject the transcendent or universal status which Lacanian theory is
inclined to attribute to male-centred concepts. Notable among feminist
film critics who have argued for such a rejection is Teresa de
Lauretis, who observes that: ‘In the psychoanalytic view of signification,
subject processes are essentially phallic ... they are subject
processes insofar as they are instituted in a fixed order of language –
the symbolic – by the function of castration.’ As a result, the female
subject ‘finds herself in the empty space between the signs, in a void
of meaning, where no demand is possible and no code available’,
while the place of the female spectator in the cinema is ‘between the
look of the camera (the masculine representation) and the image on
the screen (the specular fixity of the feminine representation), not one
or the other but both and neither’. 22 These conceptions – of a void or
an impossible site of subjectivity – find suggestive analogies in
Conrad’s fiction.