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Briefly, during that glorious period in the 1970s when Screen established itself as the most exciting periodical in the arts and humanities, psychoanalysis was the journal's dominant discourse. This status stemmed from the recognition that art in general, and cinema in particular, is always an event in which the happening of the work reconstitutes both work and audience. Although initially, and notoriously, suggesting that texts constituted subjects and their concomitant perspectives, Screen swiftly began to develop a more dialectical model in which there was an exchange between text and spectator. Instead of texts determining positions, textual trajectories were conceived as a series of affordances. Whether, and how, these affordances were taken up depended on the spectator. But with this new stress on spectatorial activity, weight was still ascribed to the text. Crucially it was claimed that the text brings into existence something that would not otherwise exist and which exists only if the subject becomes other. Just as music can produce a dancer in an individual, so a film can produce a spectator in a cinemagoer. The results may not always, in certain respects, be entirely happy – think of the dancing at some wedding receptions – but in both cases there is a becoming other. To adopt a more recent but largely compatible vocabulary, the cinematic spectator, in this perspective, is conceived in terms of the plasticity which Catherine Malabou persuasively argues is the defining characteristic of modern subjectivity.1 Put briefly, the spectator is at once receptive and form-giving.
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