Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies 9781350363342, 9780333647820

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks go to a large number of people who have helped through the long gestation of this book, not least the students in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, from 1991 to 1999, to whom this work was first taught. They scrutinised the material that appears in the book, offering insights, comments and personal experiences, grounding the theory in some of the individual struggles people have with the ‘fiction of autonomous selfhood’. Colleagues there, particularly Sarah Kember, Ian Hodges, Stuart Fincham and Martha Michailidou, have been a great source of support in teaching this course and more generally, as have colleagues and students at the Centre for Critical Psychology in the University of Western Sydney, especially Jane Ussher and Maria Pini. Numerous other friends, colleagues and significant others supported us in many different ways, especially Sanya Sheikh, Sonita Singh, Chris Blackman, Nigelle De Bar, Heidi Bezzant, Christopher Rudolph, Nikolas Rose, Ain Bailey and David Studdert. Thanks for support are also due to Ron Coleman and the Hearing Voices Network. The authors and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: Rex Features, London, for Figures 9.1 and 9.3; PA News for Figure 9.2. All picture research by Image Select International, London. Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

This book is dedicated to Myra Blackman, and all survivors of the psychiatric system.

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Introduction From ‘mass hysteria’ to ‘people power’

It will be remarked that among the special characteristics of crowds there are several – such as impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgements and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of the sentiments, and others beside – which are almost always observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution – women, savages and children for example. (Le Bon 1922: 223)

Le Bon, writing in the late nineteenth century and drawing on ideas prevalent at the time, introduced a way of talking about individuals in groups that, through to the twenty-first century, has become a concept used to dismiss certain behaviours and people as being inferior, irrational and degenerate. From the idea of the mob, unruly crowd behaviour, mass hysteria, savage and primitive emotions and so forth, the concept of the mass mind as more suggestible and open to influence has underpinned the ways in which certain forms of experience have been judged and evaluated. The spontaneous actions of the ‘ordinary people’ following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, for example, were initially pathologized, the intense grief and expressions of sorrow (including the laying of flowers at Kensington Palace) being dismissed by the media as signs of irrational emotion, hysteria and ‘crowd behaviour’. The idea of the mass mind as irrational has underpinned eugenics movements believing that certain peoples have been positioned lower down the evolutionary scale, being more inferior and closer to the primitive and savage. These peoples, and those experiences we find inexplicable (such as cults), are viewed as being less able to maintain self-control and more at the whim of the seductive charms of others (including charismatic leaders). The 1

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concept of the ‘masses’ is again and again invoked in order to render certain actions, thought and behaviour as irrational and pathological.

People power The British newspaper, the Guardian claimed on the 8 January 2000 that: ‘in almost every field of British life – from the games we play to the work we do, from the movies we watch to the products we buy – you can spot the greenshoots of a new kind of landscape, less centred on the self, more collective than before’. It added that ‘after years of fretting over Me, we might be on the brink of the decade of Us’ (p. 11). Later in the same article, this new collectivity is claimed to be in the power of consumption rather than production, as earlier. Instead of unions, they say: today’s consumers are uniting, demanding a new kind of collective bargaining: for lower prices and, increasingly, for good corporate behaviour. Where once workers threatened a strike, today’s mass consumers threaten an internet-organised, global boycott. They are realising that even in that most stereotypically selfish of activities – shopping.

It is this that they characterise as a ‘fearsome power to Us’ (p. 16). The other side of the coin, then, is the notion that people united in groups have a power – ‘people power’. Following a week marked by outpourings of grief in relation to Princess Diana, for example, the ‘ordinary people’ were credited with a force capable of challenging the monarchy, the stiff upper lip of British tradition and even the actions of the government. The spectre of revolution lay in the hands of the people, who, through their mourning practices, were instigating change. In a pendulum-like swing, the notion of the masses and the ‘mass mind’ is used as an example of the potential revolutionary and political force of the collectivity, united in relation to tradition, or feeling camaraderie, coming together in large groups to share a national moment (that is, football events, the watching of the eclipse in 1999 and so forth). Ever since the inception of the mass media, concepts about the masses (as being irrational and stupid) have been central to an understanding of how the media is taken to work and have its effects, as well as the manner in which the mass of people consume the media.

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The quote we began with from Le Bon writing in the late nineteenth century exemplifies the key ways in which the ‘ordinary people’ were understood in relation to the ‘mass media’ – as being more vulnerable and susceptible to media effects. The ‘psychology’ of the masses was found lacking, unable to engage critically or keep a distance, taken in hook, line and sinker by the media moguls. Although this model of mass consumption has largely been discredited in contemporary media theory, as we will see in Chapter 3, the masses are now seen to ‘lack’ the cultural rather than the psychological resources to engage with the media rationally, critically and autonomously. Their mode of consumption, is however, still found wanting and creates a vision of the rest of the audience who are able to actively engage with the media and resist its effects. This active/passive dichotomy mirrors a more foundational dichotomy viewing the individual as one entity, ideally separate and autonomous from the media, which can only ever influence in a peripheral fashion. This notion of the individual as a bounded entity existing separately and autonomously from outside influences – known as the individual/society dualism – has been criticized for the ways in which it views human subjectivity and psychology as being universal, created by deep psychological structures that can only ever be influenced by culture, history and the social. This book will examine what happens when this approach to psychology, central to media effects research, is replaced by a more radically social way of theorizing what it means to be human. What then of the media–psychology relationship and how should one understand the complexity of practices of media consumption?

The ‘making up’ of the self At the beginning of the new millennium, developments in academic theorizing tend to eschew the universalizing and essentialist approaches of those modernist disciplines such as psychology that claim to ‘know’ the individual through the application of scientific methods and techniques. Postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism and so forth, although different projects asking different questions about the nature of what makes us human, all start from the position that human subjectivity is not fixed or precultural, amenable to techniques that isolate the individual from his or her wider social, cultural and historical context. Social, cultural and historical processes are therefore viewed as central determinants in the kinds of experience and understanding we

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have of ourselves as subjects and the types of language, terms and vocabulary we use in the relationships that we construct with ourselves and others. The media, as one such process, is therefore once again accorded a role in the processes through which we come to develop particular understandings about who and what we are, and indeed are allowed to be, at this specific historical and cultural moment. This book is about the kinds of self-understanding that have proliferated over the past two decades in western cultures, the basis of these self-understandings and the role that popular culture and the media play in circulating ‘desired’ and regulatory images of what makes us human. The argument we will be exploring is how both psychology (as a body of knowledge) and the media work together to provide a way of understanding what is normal behaviour. To illustrate and develop our argument, we will be focusing on those identities or ways of understanding the supposed normality and pathology of the self that underpin media representations of criminality, madness, race and sexual difference. What we wish to illustrate in this book are the ways in which these representations have an intimate relationship with psychological knowledge and the kinds of concept used to define the normal, healthy self to which we are all invited to aspire. This self has a particular specificity, which takes its content from ideas about humanness derived in part from the biology and evolutionary theorizing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rose (1989) terms this self, so naturalized in our current conceptions of who and what we are and could become, the ‘fiction of autonomous selfhood’. It is a way of understanding selfhood that elevates and privileges certain characteristics as evidence of the self ’s ability to transcend and develop itself into a strongly bounded entity, less reliant on others and able to make and exercise choice in the decisions it makes about work, relationships, leisure and so forth. This ‘autonomous self ’ has the positive attributes of independence, autonomy, responsibility, self-control and forward thinking. It is selfreliant and able to account for the choices it makes in relation to its own biography of needs, motives, aspirations and desire for personal fulfilment and development. It is a self that is capable of understanding, judging and amending its own psychology. This self is consumed through the advertisements we watch on television and the debates and advice given to the myriad of television and radio confessionals made by those attempting to transform themselves; it underpinned Thatcher’s ideal of ‘going it alone’ and is celebrated in Blair’s Britain, where we are all invited to be entrepreneurs of our own

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selves and possible achievements and aspirations. But what if this self is fictional? What if the basis of our self-recognition and selfunderstanding is actually the endpoint of a complex process of discursive construction? What does it actually mean to say that the selves we live ‘as if ’ they are real are actually fictional? Homi Bhabha has talked about the development of colonial government and the regulation of the colonial subject as conditioned upon knowledges that claim to ‘know’ the populations of which they speak. Scientific discourses, including the psychological sciences, have, since their inception in the nineteenth century, played a prominent role in the regulation of the population (Rose 1985; Henriques et al. 1998). The discourse of ‘autonomous selfhood’ embedded within psychological theorizing and interventions has become the target and object of wider strategies for correcting and rehabilitating the population, including the welfare and social services in addition to schooling and education (Rose 1985; Walkerdine 1998a). As well as being incorporated into wider governmental strategies to administer, target and manage the population, the ‘psy’ discourses have become the basis of ways of understanding both our own and others subjectivities. We ‘look inwards’ as if there is something stable about our self-identification and make this self the object and subject of our diary keeping and of the constant judging and evaluation we make of our behaviour, thought and conduct. But what if the entities we construe as being part of the self, such as mood, emotion, personality, attitude and belief, are in fact highly historically and culturally specific ways of acting upon and relating to ourselves (Pfister and Schnog 1997)? How then do we evaluate representations of those people and behaviours constructed as ‘other’ to this self, which continually circulate in mass media representation? How is a different understanding of the place of psychology in relation to the media possible beyond these dualisms? In Chapter 1 we will begin to explore some of the different theories used to study the communication process in the social sciences and media and cultural studies. We will explore what happens when we move from a study of communication and language as simply reflecting what is already there, to more semiotic approaches that view language as producing the meanings through which we engage with and understand our social world. If language creates meaning, what is the status of those stereotypes of race, sexuality, madness and criminality that continually circulate within the media? If stereotypes are not simply misrepresentations or distortions, how can we

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understand their significance and function? Consider the following example – the criminal is often and repeatedly described as being impulsive, a loner, maladjusted, deviant, amoral, having no regard for others, irresponsible, irrational, animal-like, aggressive and violent. In relation to the ‘autonomous self ’, these characteristics signify a lack and deficiency of those characteristics taken to define the normal, adjusted, psychological subject. The criminal is ‘other’ to those conceptions of selfhood through which we define and draw boundaries around what we are willing to accept as being part of humanness. But again what if these boundaries, kept in place by images of the ‘other’, are actually part of the process through which we construct relationships with ourselves? What then is the status of media representations that stake their claim to truth and authenticity on the wider scientific and psychological knowledges they implicitly and sometimes explicitly draw on for their intelligibility? Throughout the book we will be exploring and interrogating the link between the discursive construction of the normal, rational subject in psychological literature and the construction of particular identities in popular culture. We will develop the semiotic concept of ‘intertextuality’ and explore the ways in which media meanings always contain within them reference to wider systems of meaning. In Chapter 3 we will argue that the implications of this concept mean that media consumption is simply one of the aspects through which we construct relations with ourselves and others. Through a critical engagement with audience research, we will argue that media consumption should not be studied as a separate field but as one of the places in which fictions of the human subject are produced and circulated. This approach to media production and consumption constitutes a very different link between the media and psychology, one in which psychology becomes one of the key knowledges by which the subject is defined in relation to normative models that always contain some pathologized Other. This ‘critical psychological’ approach to the status of psychological knowledge, which rejects its ‘claims to truth’ as being based in any real sense on describing and discovering ‘what we are really like’ as subjects – on locating meaning inside or within the subject, is developed in Chapters 2, 7 and 8. In Chapter 8 we will develop the rethinking of the universal subject of psychology as a textual subject, produced in and through the realm of representation and signification. The assumptions of the traditional psychological perspective that ‘critical psychology’ refuses are outlined in Chapter 2 and the critiques located within some

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of the wider interdisciplinary debates surrounding postmodernism and postmodernity that refuse ‘essentialist’ approaches to the nature of human subjectivity – of ‘what it means to be human’. Chapter 7 extends some of these debates, exploring how, although these perspectives are useful for exploring subjectivity as being created through discursive and signifying processes, they still utilize psychological assumptions in their theorizing. The crux of our challenge is to see how we can theorize subjectivity without invoking a ‘mass’ or individual psychology through the back door. Some of the tools useful to our challenge will come from arguments in European social theory and feminism, explored in Chapters 4 and 5, which began various projects to understand the production of fictional identities in the media, and the ways in which actual subjects invested and resisted them. The debates that underpinned these projects were an attempt to theorize the relations between ideology, representation and subjectivity beyond an individual/society dualism. These debates underpin developments in poststructuralism and postcolonialism that are explored in some case studies of criminality and madness in Chapter 9 and race and sexuality in Chapter 10. These chapters extend and develop the notion of the colonial stereotype central to Homi Bhabha’s account of the production of colonial subjectivity in and through the practices of the social. Bhabha (1994) has cogently shown how the colonial stereotype (the ways in which racial difference repeatedly signifies) functions to confirm and construct the west as being rational and superior. The constructed object, in this example the colonial subject, then becomes the container for a set of fantasies and fears that ‘fix’ the colonized in a particular place. These fears and fantasies do not simply describe or ‘know’ the colonized but work to construct those meanings, desires and fears through which we make sense of our own and others’ experience and behaviour. These fears, fantasies and desires circulate, as Bhabha has cogently shown, within scientific theories, as well as in those representations of, for example, the ‘essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual licence of the African’ (ibid.: 18) which tend to structure film and media representations of racial identity. Bhabha (1983) proposed an approach to the status of media representations, which we will adopt in these two chapters, that aimed to go beyond a notion of judging them for their truth-value or authenticity. This approach, which calls for more positive images or stereotypes to replace those which are considered negative, still relies upon the very principle embedded within the psychological sciences – that we can

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‘know’ different populations through the uncovering of stable and enduring sets of traits that ‘make up’ a person’s character, personality and identity. Operating according to a homogenizing impulse, media representations are judged for how accurately they reflect what it means to be black, rational, heterosexual and so forth, as Davies and Smith, analysing Hollywood representations of racial identity, argue, ‘to erect a definition of authentic blackness, against which Hollywood images could be judged’ (1997: 50). In line with traditions in cultural studies and film theory (cf. Davies and Smith 1997 for a useful overview), we will be examining the discursive and rhetorical consequences of the ways in which particular peoples, experiences and behaviours are constructed as Other in mass media representations. We will particularly be examining those discourses which mediate these constructions and their relationship to knowledges such as psychology that have continually offered up theories to describe, chart, map and ‘know’ the objects of which we speak. By analysing media representations of madness, criminality, sexuality and race, we will exemplify the ways in which we need a new critical apparatus to understand the cultural and psychological significance of these representations. Moving beyond the binary of positive/negative, we will be examining these film and media images for the way in which they help to construct what we understand as being normal, rational behaviour. We will explore the explicit and often subtle, contradictory and nuanced ways in which, for example, representations of madness and criminality help to define ‘what we are not’ and, by default, construct a norm of behaviour, thought and conduct. This norm has its credibility through the ways in which these fictional representations make claims to truth, claiming to be based upon a ‘science of the individual’. The crux of this book will focus upon what happens when such a claim appears as a discursive and historical accomplishment subject to change without notice. In the final chapter we will draw together the implications of the approach we are developing for analysing the media–psychology relationship. We will use the enduring image of Princess Diana, representing the necessity of self-invention and selftransformation in these rapidly transforming times, to highlight the importance of our approach for understanding the media and psychology as we begin the twenty-first century. Let us begin some of this questioning and laying of the groundwork for the chapters to follow by exploring some of the ways in which the mass media itself represents those who have transgressed the boundaries

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of so-called normal conduct. We will begin with some examples from some notorious events in Britain that have threatened the boundaries by which the distinctions between good and evil, mad and bad, and rational and irrational are usually drawn.

The psychology of the Other Rosemary West was, along with her husband, a notorious British murderer who killed young women in the cellar of their ordinary house in Gloucester. Mrs Ordinary as a murderer. So ordinary that you could never tell: your mum or the mother next door. A story that immediately pulls one in to know more about how she could do it. And if she could, how could we possibly be safe? We long to understand whether she was evil or mad and therefore the exception to the norm. Some of the most eminently newsworthy items of media representation circulate images of those who have transgressed the boundaries of normal conduct – those who have killed, maimed and committed horrific acts of violence. We are all familiar with the chilling accounts of these crimes depicted in newspapers, television documentaries, news programmes and the gamut of sensationalized magazines devoted to uncovering the psychological profile of these individuals, destined to remain in the public imaginary as a haunting reminder of what some are capable of doing. The audience is addressed as if they are detectives, retrospectively looking for the clues that would have led to the truth of the pathology lurking within the individual(s). One fear continually played on in such representations is the way in which pathology is no longer written on the body, existing instead in an ephemeral realm of voices, visions, emotions and private longings, desires and fantasies. In the Fred and Rosemary West case, one of the narrative devices continually drawn on in the media’s portrayal was the apparent ordinariness of the couple. The House of Horrors, as 25 Cromwell Street was continually referred to – a seemingly ordinary terraced house in Gloucester, England, which could have been any house, anywhere – was in fact harbouring terrible secrets. The socially sanctified space of the home had been transformed into a torture chamber where the couple enacted a set of sadistic and fatal desires on a series of young girls and women, including their daughter and stepdaughter. Without wishing to condone these acts, we do wish to draw attention to the way in which Fred and Rosemary West, as well as Ian Brady and Myra Hindley (the notorious Moors murderers, who

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murdered a number of children in the 1960s) and Peter Sutcliffe (the Yorkshire Ripper) to mention but a few of the most salient, have come to occupy a particular symbolic space in the way in which we establish the boundaries of normal, rational conduct. Were they evil, lacking in remorse and guilt, and therefore not to be treated as if they are ‘one of us’? Or were they mad and therefore to be excused for their actions rather than to be blamed for their wrongdoing? Either way, these parameters construct the person or persons as being so very different from us. The terrifying images with which we are presented confirm these individuals as socially marginal, Other to the normative image of personhood that we are constantly invited to see ourselves in relation to – we are not like that, are we?. The terms through which their Otherness is established draw upon sets of divisions marking out the normal from the pathological, the ‘sane’ from the ‘insane’, the ‘adjusted’ from the ‘maladjusted’, terms that are central to psychological knowledge. The media draws upon psychological knowledge in the ways in which it constructs the Other, producing a chain of associations through which we are invited to recognize their deviant nature, their difference from us. We will be arguing in this book that these representations do not simply reflect the person’s psychological state but help to construct an image of normal psychological health. Thus the terms used to represent the murderer or criminal tend to be the absence or lack of what implicitly and often explicitly is constructed as normal. During the Fred and Rosemary West trial, the following terms were used to signify their inherent psychological instability: they were described as maladjusted, duplicitous, unusually quiet as children, sexually precocious, lacking shame or remorse, embodying feelings of persecution and inferiority, aggressive, passive, lacking self-esteem, resilient, experiencing mood swings, controlling and having an abusive family history. Although it may seem a moot point to question the status of these representations as simply concerning the reflection of the psychology of the individual, we wish to draw the reader’s attention to some of the wider historical assumptions that make it possible to think about violence and crime in relation to psychology, personality, mood or any of the other entities seen to define what it means to be human. The image of shared pathology, which links representations of the bad with the mad, relies upon the premise that criminals are fundamentally different from the rest of society. Although this assertion is largely commonplace in western culture, as we will see in Chapter 9, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that it became common to judge

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criminals and their psychological make-up and motives rather than the act itself (Foucault 1977). Prior to this point it was the criminal act itself that was judged and punished according to a system of codes that were meant to function as grades of severity; that is, if you stole, your hand was cut off. The idea of the criminal as a psychological subject emerged with the rise of the human sciences and especially criminology (the science of the criminal subject) in the late nineteenth century, human nature becoming understood as essentially comprising the ability to be rational, autonomous, responsible and self-contained. Justice and legal judging became concerned with the criminal personality and criminals’ psychological make-up. This image of the rational subject, which also functions as the marker of legal subjectivity is, however, gendered, raced and classed. In the case of both Rosemary West and Myra Hindley, one of the main questions that fuelled the debate was whether these women were capable of acting in such a way or whether their male partners and protagonists corrupted them. Their actions had confounded not only normality, but also gendered expectations about femininity and whether women are capable of violence and aggression. As Foucault suggests in relation to the anxiety of judging, we bring in a psychiatrist and character witnesses, we ask the little sister if the accused was nice, we question his parents about his childhood. We judge the criminal more than the crime (1989: 164). Foucault goes on to suggest that when we cannot know the criminal, when there appear to be no motives, when we cannot infer sickness or madness within the perpetrator, the legal apparatus breaks down: When a man comes before his judges with nothing but his crimes, when he has nothing to say about himself, when he does not do the tribunal the favour of confiding to them something like the secret of his own being, then the judicial machine ceases to function. (1988: 151)

We can see then that psychology, along with criminology and psychiatry, has become central to the government of crime within the twentieth century. With the moral injunction created through the psy disciplines to understand subjectivity through the concepts of responsibility, self-regulation, independence, autonomy and so forth, difference from this image was understood as representing sickness or deviancy. The project for the human sciences, as we will see throughout the book, was to target, map and rehabilitate those who were Other to this image. If the basis of their Otherness lay

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unexplained through these discourses of cure, their difference remained more disturbing and symbolically threatening. This has been the plight of those images of the psychopathological Other that constantly remind us of the impossibility of ‘knowing’ and therefore of accomplishing an act of social security. As with the case of Myra Hindley, who maintains that Ian Brady did not corrupt her and that she is not mad, such people must remain forever removed from society, condemned to a life of exile. In the discussion to follow, we wish to unsettle the basis of these representations and to begin to ask different questions about the psychology of the individual and its place within media and cultural theorizing. Such conceptions of Otherness have become central in the drive to locate, classify and measure those individuals who are more at risk of media influence. Again those deemed more susceptible to media influence (especially with regard to violence and sex) are constructed as being Other to normality. They are more passive, dependent, emotional, hysterical, rigid and dogmatic. The terms used to describe their Otherness are remarkably similar to those very terms that the media deploys to represent the criminal or murderer. The link or intersection between the media and psychology is twofold: 1. The media relies upon an image of psychopathology to explain deleterious effects 2. It deploys the same image in its representations of those who have disturbed the boundaries through which normality is constructed. In Chapter 2 we will investigate how this image of the mass mind as being more vulnerable and susceptible to media influence, an image that is also used again and again to explain actions viewed as irrational and emotional, as with the descriptions of the crowds giving flowers following the death of Princess Diana, has a rather recent historical heritage. It is the naturalness and inevitability of these images we wish to question in order to develop different ways of understanding the link between psychology and the media, and the role that both signifying practices play in the ways in which we relate to, experience and constitute our own subjectivities and identities.

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Mass-media hysteria The media has, since its inception, been an area of concern among psychologists, sociologists, educators, broadcasters, government policy makers and the general public. It is reified as a medium of communication that has been held responsible for escalating aggression and violence in society. There are sets of fears underlying the intense scrutiny, and the medium has warranted investigation over its possible detrimental effects. The terms of such debates have naturalized a link that, within a particular set of historical circumstances, made the mass mind an object that was seen to be easily swayed, influenced and made suggestible by external forces. The mass mind was the site of psychopathology and became the key explanation deployed in wider debates concerning the possible impact of television viewing on the masses. It is no coincidence then that the main body of research on media effects within psychology and media studies alike, has investigated the effect of long-term exposure to television on adolescent boys (cf. Milavsky et al. 1982). Contemporary media and cultural theory, in an ethnographic move, have rejected the lack of agency accorded to the audience in these accounts, instead seeking to find and celebrate the creative activity and intentionality of its subjects. We are told that even the masses can resist, that they are able to reject the media message and critically engage with it – that they are not as stupid as we previously thought. Fiske (1989), for example, puts it this way: Popular culture is made by various formations of subordinated or disempowered people out of the resources, both discursive and material, that are provided in the social system that disempowers them… If the subcultural commodities or texts do not contain resources out of which people can make their own meanings of their social relations and identities, they will be rejected and will fail in the marketplace… Popular culture is made from within and below, not imposed from without and above as mass cultural theorists would have it. (p. 2)

This move hides within it a set of contradictions that throw doubt on the very terms in which these debates are constructed and contested. Within audience and reception studies, as well as many of the discursive psychologies constructed along these lines, which we will discuss in Chapter 3, the implicit normative image of the audience is one that is able to resist and to read critically. The apparent inability of some to

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read against the grain is located within their social background, which does not allow them access to the cultural resources with which they would be able to resist. The mass mind creeps back into these accounts through the back door, linked less to developmental problems and more to social experience. This problem, we are told, is the province of sociology rather than psychology (cf. Morley 1992), but what often happens is that the socially located subject has to be understood with recourse to a psychology that assumes a pregiven, rational and unitary subject (cf. Henriques et al. 1998). There is still anOther within these accounts who marks out a vision of the rest of the audience as being more autonomous and less influenced by the media. The media still has effects; the problem is providing certain groups and individuals with access to the cultural capital required to engage with the media as critical and resistant readers. This active/passive dichotomy in relation to the audience has generated the various approaches that take the link between the mass media and the masses and seek either to verify or to reject it (cf. Barker and Petley 1997). This dichotomy in itself contains a historically specific set of assumptions about the nature of the human subject and its relation to the world in which it exists. It also understands the role of the media through a traditional socialization model viewing the individual as one entity with precultural attributes (usually located within its biology), and the media or social context as a separate entity that can only ever influence the individual in a peripheral fashion (cf. Henriques et al. for a more detailed discussion of this point). There is therefore always a tension between the individual and the social, including the mass media, which may unduly influence those who lack something prior to their engagement with the media. This approach fails to engage with the social in any way other than through an understanding of the personal lack or pathology of certain groups or individuals. How then to theorize the individual in a ‘radically social way’ without simply viewing the individual as a passive effect of the media (ibid.: 21)? Throughout the chapters to follow, we hope to unpack and disturb the very terms of these debates in order to learn how to think about things differently. There are other ways of addressing these relations that do not view the media as one entity and the human subject as another in its own right. We do not believe that a move to the active audience is the way forward in this respect. It is a reaction against what were taken to be the oppressive assumptions of media effects models, and, as we will see, reactions are always made possible by the very

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concepts and terms they seek to reject. Most importantly, the idea that the media has an effect is still thoroughly ingrained within the way in which we think and debate the impact of the media. We have to look at how it is that such concepts carry so much validity and credibility. We may then begin to map out a psychology of the media that can adequately address the complex relations between the media, discursive practices such as psychology, subjectivity and the realm of the psychological. This will entail engaging with the very basis on which questions about the relation between the media and its audience are posed, as well as with their historical constitution. We need theories that do not easily reduce to a notion of the individual interacting with the media but can fully account for the shared understandings embedded within the media that make it as much part of us, as it is part of the wider cultural apparatus in which it circulates.

Chapter 1 Communication breakdown

In the contemporary field of media and communication studies, the student is often introduced to an array of concepts or communication models utilized to study the mass media and popular culture (cf. Fiske 1982). These models are diverse, ranging from ‘simple’ communication models (Shannon and Weaver 1949; Gerbner 1956) to more semiotic and discursively derived approaches (cf. Hall 1997). These broad approaches to the communication process can be differentiated in relation to the status they accord language. ‘Simple’ communication models assume that the process of communication involves the transmission of a message from the sender to the receiver. The process can be hindered by obstacles and factors that may be technical – what Shannon and Weaver (1949) term ‘noise’. The message is assumed to have an inherent meaning that, given a smooth transmission, will be accurately received by the audience. The meaning is that which the sender has intended and will be more or less accurately conveyed given the effectiveness of the symbols’ ability to capture the intended meaning. This model assumes that language is transparent, merely reflecting reality in as accurate a form as possible. It is a linear model of communication that is much more concerned with the process via which a message travels in order to reach its destination. The content of the message is given much less analytical attention. As we stated earlier, it is viewed as a problem of semantics – of the words or images the sender has chosen in order to convey his or her intended meaning. This is a common way in which we think about the nature and function of language as a device for representing our innermost thoughts and feelings. It follows that there is likely to be a mismatch between our intentions and the symbols at our disposal to represent them. Within this view language is restrictive and often 16

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redundant, leading to communication breakdown. This view is both romantic and pessimistic, seeing individuals as existing within unique, private worlds and failing to communicate with each other because of the constraints of the language at their disposal. On both an individual and a social level, language is viewed as a tool for representing a pre-existing, stable reality. This may be the unique, psychological, private realm or objects existing within the cultural sphere. Within this account of the communication process, representations of these objects or the interior realm are assessed for their more or less real depiction of reality. According to this assumption, ‘breakdown in communication’ will be the result of certain factors or obstacles that may have hindered the process of transmission and reception. Reception is usually studied in relation to errors of cognition or perception that may have prevented the person accurately receiving the message. Thus problems in interpretation are probable, but given accurate communication skills these ‘errors’ are seen to be controllable. These ideas are central to the way in which the communication process is studied within the social and psychological sciences. Within media studies the implicit basis of these more simple communication models is also used to study the media as a site of communication distortion producing stereotyped information. The media, through exaggeration or caricature, distort the meaning of objects in the social world, misrepresenting their supposed true nature. Stereotyped information is usually viewed as biased and often leading to prejudiced attitudes and beliefs. Stereotypes are therefore seen to be based on inaccurate information cultivated through ignorance and misinformation. Stereotypes are often used to refer to representations that circulate in the media of those groups in society who exist outside the mainstream. Because of their marginal status, the assumption is made that we only gain knowledge about these minority groups through the media and other forms of pedagogy. Thus more realistic representations are usually called for to counteract these distortions and provide us with informed knowledge and an accurate reflection of reality. We can see then that a stereotype involves a psychological as well as a social component. Stereotypes are distortions or misrepresentations, which have psychological effects. They create biases in information processing, constraining or distorting the ways in which people come to perceive others. It is also presumed in much of the psychological literature that particular people are more affected by stereotypes than others. Eysenck (1970) has made claims that working-class people are more influenced by stereotyped information than middle-class people.

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There are many theories that link stereotypes and prejudice with the lack of particular psychological propensities, such as security and a strong self-concept or super-ego. The work of the Frankfurt School, and especially Adorno et al. (1950), has linked particular personality types with prejudice and the susceptibility of persons to misinformation. What all these studies take for granted, as we will see throughout the book, is an assumption that the mass mind or irrational mind is more susceptible or vulnerable to media (outside) influence. We can see then that simple communication models presuppose particular ways of understanding the psychology of the individual. On the one hand stereotypes are viewed as misrepresenting the ‘psychology’ of certain groups, that is, colonial subjects, people with different sexualities and so forth, and also as creating prejudicial ways of relating to these groups in those deemed more susceptible to media influence. This way of approaching psychology per se again echoes the ‘essentialist’ approach to psychology that we discussed in the introduction. We are presumed to have a ‘self ’, a core, ‘inner-directed’ bundle of needs, motives and aspirations linked to more stable entities such as personality, attitude and belief that ‘make up’ our sense of selfhood. This ‘psychology’ is integrated into society through the action of certain ‘agents of socialization’ such as the media, our parents and schools, which attempt to inculcate particular ways of making sense of the world. Although sounding like an attempt to bridge the individual/society dualism, these accounts cannot provide a radically social way of theorizing human subjectivity. They all presuppose some conception, which easily reduces to biology, of a pregiven subject, who is then made social through encounters with significant others. The content or specificity of the kinds of subject we aspire to be is, however, never examined for its conditions of possibility. It is simply taken for granted that rationality, independence and autonomy are the naturalized building blocks of human nature, which will unfold given the appropriate influences (particular kinds of child-rearing practice, pedagogy and media forms, for example). As an example, within this model of communication and the implicit psychological assumptions it makes, social problems such as racism are made sense of in a particular way. The problem is located within certain individuals who are deemed to be irrational and more dogmatic in the ways in which they relate to certain groups. Racism is a misperception, often related to misinformation, that occurs as the result of an ‘error’ in a person’s cognitive and information-processing skills or capacities (cf. Henriques et al. 1998 for a fuller discussion). It

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is assumed that rational individuals (although we all of course potentially make mistakes) with the appropriate information and education are not the type of person who tends to be racist. Racism is therefore linked to lack and error in a person’s cognitive psychological capacity. Racist ‘types’ are construed as Other to the ideal psychological self that is constituted as the norm within psychological knowledge – the rational, democratic subject. In the next section we will contrast this model of the communication process with more discursively and semiotically derived approaches.

The semiotic production of reality We have so far considered how ‘simple’ communication models, based in the social science traditions, underlie some of the ways in which media forms are evaluated and judged according to notions of truth and falsehood (that is, that representation is stereotyped and does not reflect reality). Within media and communication studies, as well as traditions in cultural studies and ‘critical psychology’, there are more semiotically derived approaches that move beyond the binaries of positive/negative, true/false, authentic/exaggerated and so forth. These approaches also presume a very different perspective on the production of human subjectivity and its relationship to signifying apparatuses such as the media. Semiotics has a longstanding history within the development of media and cultural studies, as well as underpinning some of the work in postcolonial theory that has moved beyond viewing racial stereotypes as simply being misrepresentations (Fanon 1970; Bhabha 1994). In this section we will outline semiotics as a model of language and communication, and develop its implications for how we study and evaluate media forms. We will pay special attention to the markedly different ways in which semiotics rethinks how we might approach the stereotype. Based upon the ‘father of modern linguistics’, Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1974), radical rethinking of the nature of language and its relation to reality in the early twentieth century, semiotics rejects the notion that language is merely a transparent transmitter of information. The constructedness of experience and meaning is emphasized over the idea of the unique, private individual using language as a representational device. Sinha (1988) gives an illuminating example of how the concept of language as representation is thoroughly entrenched within a set of western dualisms, that is, the way of seeing,

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for example, media and mind as two separate things, one acting upon the other (that is, as two things rather than a single thing). These dualisms underpin more simple communication models viewing the mind as an information-processing apparatus separate from the world in which it exists. Mental processes are the interface between reality and the accurate representation of it. Sinha argues that it is very difficult to think of representation as signification, as actually creating (rather than simply reflecting) meanings and constituting our sense of selfhood. These difficulties are bound up with the very sense we have of ourselves as humans and how this humanness is thought of and differentiated from the situation in animals. The sense of being human embedded within the human sciences, especially psychology, is that the possession of language and reason enables individuals to develop morality and a sense of responsibility. This is what makes us human and distinguishes us from the animals. Language represents our mental and cognitive processes imposing a structure on an otherwise chaotic world. Semiotic approaches view language and the structures of language as creating the very possibility of representing the world to us in a particular way. In order to understand what it means to be human, we cannot look inwards but instead need to focus upon the historical and cultural processes that make our sense of self possible. Within semiotic approaches, therefore, the media is accorded a role very different from the one it plays within the communication process. In the more ‘simple’ models, the media is seen to be one site at which the object is distorted, hindering accurate reception through the transmission of stereotypical information. Within semiotic approaches the media is viewed as a site for the production of meanings – a system of signification. Instead of distorting the ‘real’ the media is seen to be one place where particular meanings are constituted, playing a part in actually producing and framing the way in which people come to understand their social world. The media is viewed as part of a wider apparatus, reproducing and producing, through the particular organization of signs embodied within the media text, wider cultural values and beliefs. Media texts are ‘intertextual’ (Hall 1997) in that the meanings created within the text always contain within them reference to wider systems of meaning. The object of media studies is not to identify a failure in communication between the sender and receiver but to examine the media text itself and the particular organization of signifiers (words and images) and signifieds (concepts) within the text. It is the relationship between the signifier and the signified, known as the sign, that creates the

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possibility of meaning. This is not simply another communication model but a radically different way of specifying the relationship between language and subjectivity. Indeed, Foucault (1982) argued that the advent of more structural and semiotic approaches to language was one of the most significant events within social theory. The model of language as signification was adopted and utilized by the French semiologist Roland Barthes to analyse the cultural significance of media and popular cultural forms. He understood the process of making meaning as involving the decoding of those relations established between signs within a media text (Hall 1980). This process would imply possessing the shared cultural resources or codes by which to understand the structuring of particular meanings. These codes could be linguistic or more formal devices directing or signposting the reader towards a particular reading of a text – what Hall termed the ‘preferred meaning’. Barthes’ (1972) popularization of this process of encoding meaning (that is, the particular organization of signs within a text) argued that those meanings structuring relationships within a media text could not be analysed by studying the media text alone. The internal relations of a text could be studied by focusing upon what Barthes termed the ‘denotative level’ of a sign, that is, the way in which particular signifiers – words or images – and signifieds – concepts or meanings – were linked together through the organization of the text (encoding). This is more similar to the concept of communication as representation or resemblance, although this resemblance is itself signification. However, we can still see that, at this stage, the practice of meaning making is still understood as rather cognitive and rational, connoting as it does the idea of the breaking of codes or cyphers. For Barthes, however, there is much more to say about the way in which media texts signify intertextually. Barthes (1972) gives an example of how washing powders signify within the realm of advertising and popular culture more generally. Taking the slogan ‘Persil whiteness’, the words themselves work as a signifier for the product – washing powder. The relation between the two is the sign, because together they signify the washing powder. The signifier stands to denote the signified, and in that sense the relationship could be called representative, although the relation itself is arbitrary – it is a construction. As we know from the world of endless consumer choice, it could have been called Daz, Bold, Lux and so on. Barthes was not particularly interested in the denotative level of a sign, whether analysing photography, newspaper articles, films and books. He introduced a second-order meaning into the equation in which the

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sign was also seen to exist within wider systems of meaning. Barthes termed this order the realm of myth and ideology. He drew upon metaphors, which invoked an idea of surface and depth, equating semiological analysis with dream analysis. The surface of the image or the text was the denotative level. This surface, however, itself existed to bring into play or signify wider cultural meanings and values. Barthes was interested in what lay beyond the signs and how they themselves were part of wider regimes of meaning. This was the level of connotation, which Barthes argued should be the object of study for semiology. If we go back to the washing powder example, we know, even on a commonsense level, that advertising works on the premise that products do not simply tell you what they are. They aim to reflect back to the consumer a specific set of cultural values that they attempt to associate with their product (cf. Miller and Rose 1997). As Barthes shows in his analysis, washing powders aim to bring into play wider imagery such as dirt and purification, enemy and friend, effort and liberation, luxury, hygiene, health and happiness. They attempt to signify these connotative meanings through fixing the sign within wider relations of signs that perform this function; white, for example, as a signifier signifies purity within Christian religious discourse. This realm of myth works, according to Barthes, because it dresses itself up as natural, thus concealing its constructed and arbitrary nature. Another example often quoted from his book Mythologies is his analysis of the French popular magazine Paris Match. He performed a semiological analysis of the front cover that bore the image of a black man giving a salute to the French flag. Beyond the denotative meaning, Barthes attends to what he feels he is being invited to understand by this sign – the reader position or subject position. This issue was produced when France was involved in a colonial war with Algeria, which it had colonized. In the context of the Algerian war and the French involvement, he argues that this image is itself bringing into play second-order meanings such as France’s democracy and liberalism. It is ideological in the sense that it is constructing a particular meaning in the face of criticism and concern over France’s nationalism and racial prejudice. One might of course argue that the bringing together of militarism, with the salute and the colonial subject, signifies France’s liberalism rather than colonialism. This is a possible reading – and indeed the preferred reading of the text – given that signifiers can have many different meanings. They are indexical and polysemic. This means that signifiers both act as an index, pointing to a particular meaning, and

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also have multiple meanings. Barthes argues that the ideological meaning that he makes is possible because this sign changes its meaning when located within a history of French imperialism. The reading Barthes himself makes of France’s colonialism, that colonial masters enforce domination, is not encouraged through the relations constructed between the image and text, that is, a negro is saluting the French flag. However, the possible meanings of this text are not literal and are of an order that is not found within the internal relations of the signs in the text itself. In response to this there has been a move within contemporary cultural studies to explore the decoding of texts rather than their encoding (the internal organization of signs within texts and their wider connotations). Hall (1980) argued that if the implications of semiology are that meaning can never be fixed, it is as important to focus upon the range of possible readings or interpretations (decodings) that audiences make of the text. This focus has underpinned the ethnographic turn in contemporary media and cultural theory. We will examine this move and its problems in Chapter 3. We would argue that one of Barthes’ greatest insights was the intertextual nature of texts – that they always contain within them wider systems of meaning. This is often referred to as a regime of representation (cf. Hall 1997) and looks at the continuities and similarities between representations across a range of social and cultural practices. In recent years Hall and others (1997) have refocused their analysis on the way in which signs are organized within regimes of meaning, such as the media, and how they function to confirm particular identities as normal and natural. The regulative role of signification and the insights of postcolonial writers are being used to understand the enduring image of Otherness within popular culture. There has been a turnback to psychoanalysis as a way of understanding how these images work at a social and psychic level. This development of semiotics and the production of fictional identities will be briefly outlined here and developed in Chapters 9 and 10. Postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha (1994) have utilized some of the insights of semiotics to explore the production of colonial subjectivity. Bhabha’s notion of the ‘colonial stereotype’ was discussed in the introduction, where we began to differentiate his approach to stereotyping from some of the more traditional social scientific approaches we have explored in this chapter so far. Bhabha (1983) argued that the colonial stereotype should be used to refer to the ways in which racial difference repeatedly signifies within cultural and scientific texts as lacking, deficient and pathological, as Other to an imagined

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norm. These representations neither simply misrepresent nor describe or ‘know’ the colonial subject in any real sense. The colonial stereotype is viewed as part of the very process through which we come to gain a sense of our own subjectivities and those of Others, creating the possibility of fear, desire, prejudice and so forth. The argument follows that part of the process through which we gain and construct a sense of selfhood lies in relation to what or who we are not. This norm is kept in place and produced as being self-evident, natural and inevitable through the way in which difference signifies as pathology and abnormality. This imagined norm then functions as a regulatory ideal, positioning certain experiences and persons outside its centre and producing them as lacking in the propensities to be accorded a fully human status. It is part of the process by which a society draws boundaries around what it is willing to conceive of as normal and natural, and is central to how we problematize, act upon and understand ourselves and others. Bhabha (1983) argued that the way in which the ‘colonial stereotype’ signifies as Other to an imagined norm (that is, white ethnicity; cf. Dyer 1999) is part of the means by which discrimination and institutional racism are kept in place at a governmental level. This is an account that moves beyond racist types to explore the kinds of knowledge, fiction and fantasy of the Other that structure colonial relations: Racist stereotypical discourse, in its colonial moment, inscribes a form of governmentality that is informed by a productive splitting in its constitution of knowledge and exercise of power. Some of its practices recognise the difference of race, culture, history as elaborated by stereotypical knowledges, racial theories, administrative colonial experience, and on that basis institutionalise a range of political and cultural ideologies that are prejudicial, discriminatory, vestigial, archaic, ‘mythical’, and, crucially, are recognised as being so. By ‘knowing’ the native population in these terms, discriminatory and authoritarian forms of political control are considered appropriate. (Bhabha 1983: 35)

We can see then that, according to these accounts, the divisions made between the normal and the pathological play a particular role in ethical and social relations. As Rose (1996a: 192) highlights when talking about subjectification – the process(es) of subject formation – to be the self one is, one must not be the self one is not, not that despised, rejected or abjected soul. This discursive and productive role accorded to regimes of meaning, such as the media and scientific theories produced within psychology, accords a profoundly and

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fundamentally different status to language within the communication process. The postcolonial development of some of the insights of semiotic analysis focuses upon which ways of being are sanctioned within media representations and views the media as one aspect in which those fictions and fantasies of what makes us human, normal, rational and so forth are constituted.

Summary Underlying those communication models studied within the social sciences and media studies are some radically different ways of understanding the role and nature of language. They also implicitly and explicitly make different assumptions about the ‘psychology of the individual’. The more simple models view language as reflecting or describing subjectivity – an essence – which is taken to be always already there prior to language. Language is merely the tool through which we describe and reflect upon our internal, subjective domain. Subjectivity is assumed to be something that is prediscursive, presocial and usually biological, the raw material through which we are socialized into culture. It is this private anterior domain that is usually believed to be the province of traditional psychology. The more semiotic and discursively derived approaches view human subjectivity as being constituted in and through signification and discourse. Language speaks us, rather than us speaking language. We are born into structures of language and discourse, which pre-exist us and turn us into particular kinds of subject. Barthes’ work, which we examined in some detail, viewed the human subject as an effect of signifying systems. Cultural and social practices were seen to provide the linguistic and symbolic resources through which people come to relate to themselves as subjects of particular kinds. These radical distinctions in how we understand the subject underlie the debates between traditional psychology and what have come to be known as discursive psychologies, which are elaborated in Chapters 2 and 8. In the next chapter we will explore some of the historical assumptions embedded within psychological and scientific theories that have become taken for granted in the ways in which we theorize media consumption. We will pay particular attention to the concept of the mass mind and its historical emergence, as well as to how it provided one of the key preconditions for the development of both social psychology and media theory.

Chapter 2 Mass psychology

There are many different ideas about human ‘psychology’ that have been incorporated into media inquiry. Psychology is not a unified discipline but has a range of models of human nature each specific to the varying theoretical approaches that characterize it. Despite the fragmentation and diversity of models, psychology as a discipline claims that it will one day reach the so-called truth about human nature. Psychology claims to be a science and constitutes itself as a form of expertise able to make truth-claims about the nature and form of human subjectivity. Part of the story underpinning the ‘psy’ disciplines is that, with more rigorous research and the application of objective, experimental methods, the general principles and laws of human nature will one day be discovered. It is these ‘modernist’ ideas about human nature that structure and dictate mainstream psychological inquiry. Psychology incorporates this presumption into the story it tells about its own emergence as a discipline, or what is called its historiography. One of the most conventional or popular stories about psychology’s emergence found in most psychology textbooks is that there was a certain event that can be identified as establishing the origins of modern scientific psychology. It is usually the founding by Wilhelm Wundt of the first psychological laboratory in 1892 in Leipzig, Germany that is viewed as the starting point of modern psychological understandings. Psychology argues that its subject matter, the individual or the self, has been around for time immemorial but has been made sense of in very different ways depending on the worldview or viewpoint popular at differing historical moments. Thus, prior to the emergence of psychology, the self or the individual was made sense of in relation to more supernatural or mystical frameworks of explanation. Psychology, however, differentiates itself from its predecessors 26

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through its appeals to truth, objectivity and reason. The past, according to this story, was trapped in values and beliefs based upon prejudice, falsehood and irrational belief. Psychology is not merely another viewpoint but one based upon the truth of the human subject. The historiography underpinning this story is one that sees psychology as a linear development from irrationality to rationality dependent upon concepts such as progress, continuity and neutrality. It is an evolutionary conception of history, which presumes that the past has been superseded and left behind in our progression towards the truth. Psychology presumes then that it is a science and that its object of study or subject matter is timeless, stable and ahistorical. Psychological explanations are invested with status and authority because of its ‘claims to truth’ and how it differentiates itself from ‘other’ explanations. We want to question and disrupt both psychology’s ‘claims to truth’ and the story it tells about itself, through recounting an alternative historiography of psychology’s emergence. Pertinent to this story are the writings of the French poststructuralist philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault suggested in his many writings that there is no ahistorical human nature that defines us for all times, in all places, as human subjects. Foucault was thoroughly sceptical of this way of thinking about the human subject that is embedded within western society. The view that Foucault rejects is what we will term a modernist approach to the human subject. It presumes that we are defined on the basis of a set of enduring, ahistorical characteristics. This is reminiscent of Descartes’ famous saying ‘I think therefore I am’, in which rationality was taken to be the key characteristic defining ‘what it means to be human’. Foucault argued that, in different times and in different places, we have been very different types of subject. His alternative historiographies of the human sciences, especially the psy disciplines, are critical of the idea of progress that underpins conventional psychology’s history telling. Conventional psychology argues that the movement from the past to the present is a steady continuous progression from falsehood to truth. Foucault disrupts this by introducing the idea of discontinuity or rupture into his history telling. He argues that we have at different times had very different ways of understanding and relating to ourselves as human subjects. These different formations of the subject are historically specific dependent upon a set of historical conditions of possibility that may be theoretical, social, philosophical and political. The different formations combine and recombine to produce present forms and are not simply superseded. According to Foucault the past is thoroughly enmeshed within the present, hence his

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call for a ‘history of the present’, a use of history that investigates how the past has mutated to produce the current situation (cf. Blackman 1994 for a more detailed discussion). Foucault rejects the idea of a universal human nature, looking instead, as we have seen, at the different ways we have come to relate to, act upon and understand ourselves as human subjects. For this reason he was interested in ‘processes of subjectification’, the processes through which humans come to develop knowledge about themselves. Foucault argued that the human sciences play a key role in this area in twentiethcentury society. He termed the psy disciplines ‘technologies of subjectification’ and argued that it is through psy terms, languages and concepts that we come to develop an understanding about ourselves and others. These writings have been developed in relation to contemporary psychology by many of the writers who were involved in the book Changing the Subject (Henriques et al. 1998). This work is important for the critical psychological project we are outlining here, and has a radical implication for how we approach the media, the communication process and the role that psychology plays in that process.

The psy complex Nikolas Rose has been one of the key writers who has developed Foucault’s use of history to investigate the emergence of psychology or the ‘psychological complex’ (Rose 1985). Lisa Blackman has also utilized Foucault’s ‘history of the present’ to investigate how present psy explanations of hearing voices are made possible (cf. Blackman 1994). We will draw on both of these accounts in the following alternative story of psychology’s emergence in the late nineteenth century. In this description it is important to have a knowledge of the socio-political context of the nineteenth century in which psychology emerged. Rose (1985) talks about debates central to this moment that were concerned with how to differentiate humans from animals, with what can and cannot be human. These debates took place within wider discussions surrounding the nature of civilization and what society was willing to accept as being part of human and hence as civilized behaviour. These discussions were pertinent at a time that was seeing a decline in religious modes of explanation and a move towards more biological and evolutionary discourses of the individual. This move is usually charted, as we saw within traditional psychology’s historiography, as a move from irrationality to rationality,

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falsehood to truth. Rose (1985), however, charts this shift in ways of specifying humanness within a broader move in governmental strategies concerned with governing and managing the population. Gordon (1992) argues that there was a change in the object of government strategies and the way in which social problems were conceptualized from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century problems such as unemployment, vice and crime were viewed as the result of ‘urban luxury and idle indifference’ (ibid.: 30). The objects or targets of government strategies, such as sanitary science and the social hygiene movement, were the vices and habits of the poor and the moral conditions seen to exacerbate and facilitate these problems of morality. However, these problems of existence increasingly came to be understood as ones of degeneracy and idle poverty. In other words social problems came to be seen as problems of biological inferiority and incapacity. Eugenic strategies that incorporated these biological and evolutionary frameworks of explanation targeted those who were seen to be ‘other’ to rationality. Charles Darwin, in On the Origin of the Species, had argued that what differentiated humans from animals was an organic core of rationality. He also argued that the white aristocratic male represented the pinnacle of the civilizing process, whereby there were ‘others’ who were seen to exist lower down the evolutionary scale, expressing more savage and primitive forms of existence. These ‘others’ – the mad, colonial subjects, women, children and the working classes – were seen to be endowed with less natural rationality and to express biological constitutions that were diseased, incapacitated or lacking in the supposedly natural psychological and moral propensities. They were ‘other’ to rationality, whereby their difference signified as disease, illness, lack and deviancy. Thus a quasi-evolutionary model underpinned how the human subject became specified, people being seen to differ along an axis that ran from the primitive and irrational to the civilized and rational. This developmental sequence positioned subjects along a hierarchical grid in which at least 75 per cent of the population were perceived to be degenerate. It was within this socio-political context that psychology emerged as a discipline. The normative image of the human subject inscribed within biological and evolutionary discourses of the individual became embedded within psychological knowledge. Psychology presumed that rationality was the key definition of ‘what it means to be human’ and became concerned with all those deviations from this supposed normality. As Rose (1985) cogently illustrates, psychology

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emerged as the key knowledge and technique for mapping, classifying, targeting and administering Otherness. Thus, the mad, the dangerous classes (cf. Blackman 1996), women, colonial subjects and children all became viewed as a threat and danger to the smooth running of the social order. In line with eugenics arguments, it was proposed that if, for example, the large mass of the urban working class were allowed to continue breeding at a differential rate compared with the middle classes, civilization would eventually be threatened. The fear was that the working classes would supposedly pass on their moral and physical decay and degeneracy to the population at large, eventually endangering the nation’s intelligence and causing the nation to revert to more primitive and savage states of existence. What we are suggesting then is that, from psychology’s inception, it became part of a wider social apparatus for governing and managing the population, the population becoming regulated in relation to a very specific normative image of what it means to be human. This regulatory ideal formed the basis of social practices such as schooling and education (cf. Walkerdine 1998a), the legal system, social work, psychiatry and the penal system. It was also in relation to this image, as we saw in the introduction, that the mass media became problematized in the early twentieth century, its supposedly bad effects influencing those with ‘irrational minds’, who were viewed as being more vulnerable and susceptible to outside forces. We have seen how, in the present, this trope is largely taken for granted, its conditions of existence and emergence being entirely naturalized. In the next chapter we will explore how this concept is replete within twentieth-century media accounts, and how psychology and media studies intersected in relation to the problem of the mass (irrational) mind.

Psychology as a science of population management The emergence of psychology as a science was intimately concerned with the development of techniques by which a newly emerging urban population in Europe and North America could be governed and managed. We have argued that, to study the relation of psychology and the media, we cannot look for some form of application of a disinterested science to the concerns of the day. History tells us that there were never any white-coated psychologists in academic ivory towers, whose pure theories and evidence were taken over by scurrilous politicians or social reformers. However, most approaches to psychology and the

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media treat psychology in this way. It is usually assumed to be an empirical science whose findings can be applied to the study of media and communication. In taking issue with such approaches, we are taking a particular position in relation to psychology, a position best described in relation to a body of theory known as poststructuralism, which has found its place in psychology in critical, poststructuralist, postmodern and discursive psychology (Potter and Wetherell 1987; Parker and Shotter 1990; Kvale 1992 and Henriques et al. 1998 for example). To understand the position we take in this book, it is necessary to have a clear understanding of the basic principles of how we are using poststructuralism in relation to psychology. The point to be made here is that the scientific study of the mass of the new urban population always contained a strong psychological element: the study and understanding of the mind and behaviour of the masses. That this was understood as a problem should not be surprising given what we have said about the place of psychology in techniques of population management. What we want to demonstrate is that the concern with the mass mind and behaviour was central to political interest with regard to the threat posed by the masses and their necessary transformation. It is our contention that such concerns were the central precondition for the emergence of traditions of study of mass media and communication in the later decades of the twentieth century.

The oversensitive masses In the decades following the French Revolution in 1789, a number of thinkers started to write about ‘the crowd’. The argument was essentially always the same: that the masses together in a crowd were too suggestible to outside influences, too easily swayed and led. The most popular of the exponents of this approach was a French Royalist called Gustave Le Bon, who wrote a treatise on the matter one hundred years after the French Revolution. His book, translated from the French as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896), became very famous and was published in several languages. His central argument was that of the oversuggestible mass in a crowd: Crowds, doubtless, are always unconscious, but this very unconscious is perhaps one of the secrets of their strength. In the natural world, beings exclusively governed by instinct accomplish acts whose marvellous complexity astounds us. Reason is an attribute of humanity of too recent

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Le Bon calls the crowd a ‘collective mind’, a ‘single being’, and as we can see above, understands it to be ruled by unconscious instincts in a manner that he takes to be animal and uncivilized. But he also suggests that the crowd is sick, with ‘contagion’. Thus the collective is opposed to the sane and rational, the civilized bourgeois individual. This in turn built upon earlier formulations about the masses, which understood them to be overly sympathetic and sensitive – too close to that which was outside reason (Foucault 1971; Blackman 1996). Rationality was a central plank of the emerging modern order. The government of reason placed reason and reasoning as naturalistic phenomena, with which upper- and middle-class white men were most endowed. This natural rationality was needed for a rational-liberal government to work. It required men of reason to do the governing, and the Others (women, children, the dangerous classes and colonial peoples) at least to be made to be reasonable even if they could not be remade into quasi-bourgeois individuals. Indeed, developmental psychology, emerging at the end of the nineteenth century, was utilized in educational practice to produce a pedagogy of natural development towards rationality (Walkerdine 1998a). So theories that explained and practices that attempted to modify, the taken-for-granted oversuggestibility and irrationality of the masses, were crucially important for liberal government, that is, government that was not overtly coercive but depended upon concepts such as free will and autonomy, through which pathologized subjects could be managed in order to remake themselves in a bourgeois image. This oversuggestibility and irrationality became a central trope in later media accounts, so we need to pay special attention to them here. Indeed, as Foucault has argued, the emergence of new systems and forms of government meant that instead of a coerced and silenced mass, there were increasingly systems of population management that sought to mould the characteristics of the human subjects so that they would accept the moral and political order, apparently of their own free will. At the same time, what was crucial for the governing classes was to produce a protorational workforce, because the greatest fear was the threat of mass irrationality. For example, as voting became more widespread from the end of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, it was first of all open only to men of property, later, and only after a

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struggle, to women of the property-owning classes and only much later to the mass of people. The issue was precisely whether or not they would be able to make rational judgements about government or might too easily be swayed by their emotions. So what can we say about the truth of the matter? Was it true that the masses were oversuggestible and irrational?

Foucault’s approach to truth In his work, Foucault attempted to go beyond the separation of science as truth and ideology and pseudoscience as false, to an understanding of the way in which scientific theories and evidence had the effect of operating as true in practices of government: they became an effect of power. Foucault saw modern forms of power operating in what he called a micro-physics, not as a possession but in the way in which techniques and practices of government defined the objects of government and produced strategies of government and regulation that were based on an intimate knowledge of the population to be governed. Now it is a moot point, and a kind of chicken and egg problem, whether this knowledge mapped an underlying ‘real’ or whether it actually produced the very qualities that it claimed to be describing. Oversuggestibility and irrationality, for example, were qualities ascribed to the masses, for which strategies of correction were devised to abate the perceived dangers. Because those qualities became inscribed, literally written, into the practices of regulation of the masses, they became the ways in which the masses were known and the data of their mind and behaviour read. Those qualities could not exist outside a set of discursive strategies through which to produce and to read them. The issue becomes not whether oversuggestibility and irrationality were real but how they were created as objects inside historically created discourses and practices, so that their place meant that they became utilized as apparatuses of social regulation, in which they became part of scientific knowledge about the masses, which could be empirically verified as ‘true’. This is what Foucault means by veridicality, and it is quite different from truth as a timeless matter. Truth, in this analysis, is never separate from the power inscribed in those ‘truths’, through which we are subjected and become subjects. In this way, Foucault’s concept of veridicality or truth effects replaces the idea of a transhistorical given and underlying truth. If the suggestible, irrational and easily swayed mind became understood as a given, it is not surprising that a number of theories

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were developed to explain it. We want to focus in particular on three bodies of work: social psychology, the psychoanalysis of groups and Marx’s theories of ideology, all of which emerged around the same historical period – the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century – and all of which emerged out of, and were made possible by, the trajectory of work on the crowd that was popularized by Le Bon.

Social psychology Le Bon popularized the ideas of other continental thinkers who presented the masses when together in a crowd as an easily swayed and oversuggestible mob. His book was enormously influential. Not only was it translated into English, being widely read and quoted, but it was also the stated basis both of what became social psychology and of Freud’s work on the psychopathology of groups. Indeed, while both claimed to take as their basis the individual in a group, their starting point was actually not any group but the masses in a crowd as the prototype of all groups. Thus group behaviour was inherently a problem and, furthermore, a problem of irrationality. What needed to be produced was the rational individual away from the swaying power of the group. In this way, individual/society dualism (Henriques et al. 1998) was enshrined in this account. There was an understanding of a pregiven human subject – the individual – less able to withstand the forces of society, imposed from the outside, because of an inherent vulnerability and oversuggestibility. Rationality, in this model, became naturalized. It was a state untainted by external forces but the basic building block of nature itself (Walkerdine 2000). Thus was produced the modernist concept of the subject. If the subject was fundamentally rational, it was the external forces that could render the subject animal and instinctual. What had to be built up was a psychological model in which the protorational subject was internally fortified against the threat of external influences and hence invulnerable to the irrational evil that they represented. It is here that we get the modern conception of the developing child who is naturally rational but whose emotional processes have to be fortified into a strongly bounded and autonomous ego so that irrational forces and processes can be viewed rationally. And it is this which Freud picked up on in particular, almost paraphrasing Le Bon and adding his own twists, attempting to demonstrate that crowds (or groups) bring out infantile

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fantasies and lay the easily swayed masses open to the power of the hypnotic suggestion of tyrants. For example, Freud (1923) wrote that if we assume that the most general features of unconscious mental life (conflicts between instinctual impulses, representations and substitutive satisfactions) are present everywhere, then we may reasonably expect that the application of psychoanalysis to the most varied spheres of human mental activity will everywhere bring to light important and hitherto unattainable results… the main motive force towards the cultural development of man has been real external exigency, which has withheld from him the easy satisfaction of his natural needs, and exposed him to immense dangers… This already involved the renunciation of a number of instinctual impulses which could not be satisfied socially. With the further advances of civilization, the demands of repression also grew. Civilization is, after, based on the renunciation of instinct. (SE Vol. XIX: 206–7)

The psychoanalysis of groups We can see that Freud, who wrote the above as a section in an encyclopaedia, takes the model of animality (although later commentators argued that Freud used the word ‘drive’ and was badly translated as ‘instinct’) and argues that civilization demands a renunciation of animality to produce a human being suited to the exigencies of civilization. In his paper, ‘Group psychology and the analysis of the ego’ (1921), he developed this argument to suggest that this process was hindered by the crowd. (Importantly, Freud used the words mass enpsychologie in German, and the translators note that they have used the term ‘group’ to refer to both ‘mass’ and ‘crowd’, making it perfectly clear that all of these writers are talking about the masses.) This paper begins with a consideration of Le Bon’s book as its starting point, agreeing that the mass provides a heightened suggestibility, a contagion and a hypnotic effect. Freud develops this idea by suggesting that it provides a basis for a group in which the collective mind produces a ‘group hypnosis, like being in love’ based entirely on sexual impulses that are inhibited in their aims and puts the object in place of the ‘ego ideal’ (SE Vol. XVIII: 143). So Freud develops the whole idea that Le Bon put forward by relating it to his theory of sexuality. Such thinking was central to the ideas that

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underpinned the notion of the masses in the twentieth century (and we can certainly see their resonance in more recent accounts of cults, for example of football hooliganism, of the banality and triviality of mass media such as docusoaps and chat shows, and more particularly, as we shall see later in the book, of the death of Princess Diana). We are trying to demonstrate that such ideas are not simply given but arise in certain historical conditions of possibility, which then have real and material effects in terms of how the masses are constituted, understood and acted upon. It is important to note that such thinking was not confined to the right or the centre of politics. Such ideas held considerable currency because they were incorporated into technologies of social regulation. Indeed, followers of the French Revolution were very supportive of the liberal and radical potential of a rationality based on science. So, for example, Thomas Payne, the author of the Rights of Man, whose writings became the basis of the American Declaration of Independence, argued that people were fundamentally rational.

Karl Marx If we move to the example of Karl Marx, it is true that he was also a man of his time. Psychology was a central component of his theories of ideology in the sense of his arguments that, in order to transform the relation of workers to the ownership of production, they had to develop a politics that constructed the Working Class as a class conscious of its own history of oppression and exploitation. For the masses to organize, they had to become that class, this requiring a shift in consciousness in which they could come to recognize their true and historic mission and not have their sight and consciousness clouded by the obfuscating mists of ideology. So, to take a recent example, the crowds surrounding the death of Princess Diana were understood by some as a hysterical mass and by others as an example of ‘people power’. For Marx too then the mass mind was a problem, one that could only be resolved through a change in consciousness. However, he of course took the crowd to be a fundamentally protosocial force, rather than a protoreactionary one. Nevertheless, the state of mind of the masses was still not considered to be acceptable to make the revolution in and of itself. The mass mind had to become the object of transformation through a vanguard of intellectuals who would help them see the way.

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Through all this we can see that the mass mind had become a heavily contested space, but in no account was that mind ever presented as anything other than being in need of transformation. It could then be argued that ‘the masses’ were created as an object with pathology and the necessity of transformation written across their bodies and minds.

Murderous children It is 1993. In Liverpool in the north west of England, a small boy, James Bulger, is murdered by two ten-year-old boys. Although there is no evidence to support it, there is much discussion about whether the two boys had watched a horror video called Child’s Play 3, which contains Chucky, a murderous and evil doll. It matters not in this particular instance whether or not the boys had watched the video. What is far more interesting for our purposes is the way in which, frightened and angry, the judiciary and others, searching for some rationale, some way of understanding this horrific crime that shatters ideas of childhood innocence, and searching for something to blame, turn to the effects of the media. Once again and oh so easily, we are transported to a set of explanations that have been in place now for so long: the over-suggestible and irrational minds of the masses make them so much more vulnerable to the effects of outside influences, so much more easily led by the media for example. What we are pointing to here is not that the James Bulger case gives us no cause for concern, for we could of course have picked many such examples from the debate about the effects of the film Natural Born Killers to the Mendez case (where two brothers in California killed their parents in the early 1990s), but the recognition that a set of discourses are already in place through which we can understand what those boys did as the result of vulnerable working-class minds. The story that we are signalling is that almost all psychological work on the media, and indeed most other work that professes to oppose the psychological models (such as cultural and media theory based in some way or other on Marxism), depends upon an understanding of the relation of a vulnerable psyche to a vulturous media. In so much of the literature that emerges, middle-class rationality as an acceptable way of viewing and responding to the media is counterposed with the stark irrationality of the dangerous classes. To be sure, there is a huge variation between the different schools of thought, from psycho-

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analysis to experimental social psychology for example. But they, nevertheless all share something, and that something begins with what we have outlined in this chapter – the relationship of the emergence of social psychology to the understanding of the masses as being oversuggestible and vulnerable. And lest the reader be thinking that the models in cultural and media studies are thankfully opposed to all this, it is perhaps useful to point out the obsession in this literature with whether the masses have been taken in by bourgeois ideology, whether the media, or particular programmes, are reactionary or progressive and thus whether, at last, ever, the masses will realize the extent of their chains and rise up rather than being taken in hook, line and sinker by the media moguls of Hollywood. Cultural studies may turn to different theories, but their central concern, the masses, the working class, and their obstinacy to change, is one and the same. It is to these approaches which have characterized the study of audiences and the mass media that we will now turn.

Chapter 3 Studying media consumption

‘Woman knifed sailor after getting idea from video killer.’ A mother lured a sailor into a Portsmouth side street and stabbed him in the stomach after getting the idea from the sex thriller, Basic Instinct. (The News, 17 August 1995)

This article, which appeared in a local evening newspaper, is an example of the common way in which the media (especially violent and sexually explicit media) are discussed, judged and evaluated. A ‘dangerous woman’ who, as the article goes on to establish, was ‘mentally unstable’ was corrupted by a sexually explicit and violent video. Psychiatrist Dr John Stone, of Knowle Hospital, Wickham, said the woman suffered from psychotic depression and that, on the night of the attack, alcohol had been a factor causing her to stab the sailor. This stabbing precipitated a discussion in the Portsmouth Evening News about ‘sex and violence’ in the media, ‘at-risk’ individuals and copycat killings. Again the parameters of the debate were discussed through some of the historically specific constructs central to psychological approaches to the mass media. The same old assumptions were made about the mass mind being psychopathological, irrational, suggestible and contagious. This assumption is largely constituted in relation to the set of fears underpinning ‘effects’ research, that the mass media is a central cause in increasing antisocial behaviour in society (particularly escalating violence and aggression). The media became an object of psychological study through its constitution as a main factor that could distort or interrupt individuals’ rational development, making them more open to forms of behaviour 39

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now considered precivilized and primitive. The media’s so-called antidemocratic tendencies could act upon those who were seen to be more vulnerable to its effects, usually women and children, especially those from poor families and different ethnic groups (Berry and MitchellKernan 1982). The concepts of vulnerability and suggestibility underpin the ways in which human development is understood within traditional psychology. The endpoint of human development is the achievement of a particular set of psychological propensities, usually, as we have seen, independence, autonomy and so forth. The ‘developing child’ has to go through a process of fortification in order to be able to control his or her behaviour and remain relatively autonomous from societal influences. Parental conditions are understood as either facilitating these capabilities or thwarting so-called ‘natural’ development (Schramm et al. 1961). In this view the media is potentially dangerous, acting upon those who ‘lack’ the moral integrity needed to conquer the effects produced through demoralizing agents such as television and other types of media. The media is seen to have its effects through a process of desensitization, whereby those skills and capacities central to civilized conduct are eroded and broken down through exposure to particular media presentations. One of the pinnacles of civilized conduct is, according to many psychologists, an individual’s capacity for selfcontrol (cf. Eysenk and Nias 1978). The breaking down of this capacity is viewed as a regression or reversion to more primitive modes of conduct and behaviour. Within these accounts violence is viewed as a pathological response, a display or expression of more primitive and savage modes of conduct. This quasi-evolutionary way of understanding human formation also contributes to the notion that there are always ‘others’ who have not acquired these modes, or whose acquisition of these particular psychological propensities is shaky and prone to error. Thus ‘errors’ in rationality and a set of fears surrounding the media were brought together in relation to a notion of the vulnerable individual.

Effects research The psychological literature documents a range of ‘media effects’ in relation to the ‘problem of the vulnerable individual’, from behavioural disturbances, including increased aggression and arousal, to a range of psychopathological symptoms. In some cases the ‘distortions’ in

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thought, feeling and conduct seen to be produced by the media are explicitly linked to a lowering of self-control or impulse control. In an article in the British women’s magazine Cosmopolitan, in the April 1996 edition, the ‘psy expert’ Sidney Crown blames the rise of chat shows for producing addictions culminating in a person losing his or her capacity for self-control, stating that although ‘most of us can control our impulses and eventually turn away – or not look at all – there is a danger that some people get addicted and start wanting it in increased doses’. He is particularly concerned that such programmes could be a risk if they helped ‘to produce people who are always watching but never doing, never interacting, never experiencing’. Within these kinds of formulation, there are of course always certain ‘types’ of person who may be more suggestible, unable to question and critically engage with the content of the media. In the psychological literature, class is directly implicated, those from working-class backgrounds being seen, because of the influence of particular parental styles (seen to differ from those of the middle class) to have lacked the child-rearing conditions appropriate for the development of rationality (Hodge and Tripp 1986). Barlow and Hill (1985) reproduce these differentiations in the following quote discussing the range of factors surrounding media influence: The indications suggest that the short-term harmful effects do not last long in normal, healthy children especially when there is wise parental support, and a secure family and home environment. Where such basic security is lacking, the harmful effects may last longer. (p. 165)

Hodge and Tripp (1986) similarly link a ‘lack’ of particular psychological capacities with those children from working-class backgrounds: These children (working class) show a lack of complexity and coherence in their paradigmatic structures. This should lead to less complex and nuanced judgements, more black and white thinking. They use passives less often. They are likely, therefore, to show more of what Witken called field-dependent thinking, or what Bernstein called object-oriented perception and a restricted language code. (p. 95)

The link between the ‘lack’ of particular psychological capacities, specific social conditions (including child rearing) and a ‘set of fears’ surrounding the media set the parameters within which the James Bulger case was debated within the public domain (see Chapter 2). The

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trial of the two ten-year-old killers revolved around two key questions – were they victims of ‘video nasties’, or could their actions be explained in terms of social/psychological factors? A central account created in the media panics surrounding the killing was that the boys were ‘evil monsters’ lacking moral integrity and responsibility (The Times, 23 November 1993). The children’s parents came under scrutiny, condemned for their inability to guard their children from the ‘darker’ instincts once again viewed as part and parcel of childhood. Both the killers’ families were discussed by Smith (1994) as having histories of poverty, deprivation and constant emotional turmoil. Within the context of these backgrounds, the watching of particular videos was also viewed as being partly morally responsible for their evil actions. We can see some of the themes we have already discussed setting the parameters within which the killing and the children’s motives were discussed. Smith (1994) identified a set of factors, discussed throughout the trial, that were viewed as being centrally causal and responsible for the violence that ensued. These included family background, poverty, emotional disturbances, the boys’ school performances, low achievement, bullying, truancy, tantrums and self-abuse. Although the videos were directly implicated as a significant cause of the children’s later brutal killings (even though nobody was certain that the boys had indeed ever watched such videos), there was a desperation to find a ‘cause’, a cause that spoke of the present, to explain why such a crime had happened now. Were they vulnerable, lacking the psychological propensity to be able to judge between fantasy and reality, good and bad, falling prey to the media’s distorting effects? Were they mad, in need of psychiatric help, or were they simply evil? The courts decided that they were guilty and therefore to be punished for their behaviour rather than given psychological or psychiatric treatment. In other words the brutal killings resulted from their badness and not their madness. Despite the outcome, the meanings given to the crimes firmly placed the media and its effects on the agenda.

The quantification of media effects Despite the dismissal of psychological ‘effects’ research by most contemporary media researchers as being methodologically and conceptually inaccurate (cf. Barker and Petley 1997; see also later in this chapter), it is this mode of explanation that, as we have seen, frames public debate and still dominates psychological approaches to the media. Thus if one were

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to enquire into the intersection of psychology and media studies, one would be exposed to a battery of experimental designs all attempting to measure the effects of the media on particular individuals. The central question guiding these studies is one of ‘how’ the media influences an individual’s thought, feeling and action, in which the ‘how’ is taken to be a quantifiable amount (cf. Eysenk and Nias 1978; Gunter and McAleer 1990, for an overview of these experimental studies). There are two methods that are utilized by researchers as measuring tools within these psychological approaches: experimental and correlational designs (cf. Liebert et al. 1973 for an example of experimental psychological approaches to the mass communication process). Both attempt to measure the effect of exposure to television and other media forms on people’s attitudes, beliefs and conduct. Within the experimental method, the television programme content is construed as the independent variable, that capable of influencing the dependent variable, in this case thought, belief and conduct. Through manipulating the independent variable and comparing any change in the dependent variable with the situation in a control group, the results are subjected to statistical analysis, and the so-called effects of the media are rendered tangible. Other researchers may adopt a ‘correlational’ method, which is favoured by those who undertake ‘field studies’ or more ‘naturalistic’ studies, that is, seeing whether the number of hours of television watched in the home varies with the degree of antisocial behaviour. Several studies in the literature have indicated that a heavy diet of television at an early age is associated with exaggerated stereotyping of sex-role beliefs among boys and girls. One of the most popularly quoted studies in both media and psychological research that explores the link between media violence and increased aggression in individuals concerned the experiments conducted by Bandura in the 1960s and 70s. These were based upon the premise that the communication process has its effect through a simple stimulus–response-type learning schedule. In the experiments the children are exposed to an actor acting aggressively towards a Bobo doll, a plastic doll that springs down and up again when it has been struck. The children are then led into another room full of the props that are at the actors’ disposal. The children’s aggressive behaviour is then measured. Bandura’s objective was to see whether children would imitate or model the aggressive behaviour that they had experienced. The conclusion of these studies was that ‘experience helps to shape the form of [a] child’s aggressive behaviour’ (Bandura 1963, 1973: 94).

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Towards a science of media consumption? Within the frameworks of explanation utilized within these experimental psychological studies, the aim is to manipulate the independent variable (that is, the exposure to or amount of time spent watching television advertisements) and quantify some aspect of behaviour (the dependent variable) by measuring attitudes using an attitude scale. A control group should also be employed, both to eliminate rival hypotheses and to act as a comparison group. Subjects are randomly assigned to one of the two groups. After the experiment, the two groups can be compared using a statistical test measuring the probability that the difference between the experimental and control group is due to chance. There are, however, many methodological problems with these approaches, which are a result of the prior theoretical and conceptual assumptions. The first is that we can locate a clear difference between those who have been exposed to television images and those who have not. This assumes that television operates in a vacuum and is not a meaning system, which is dependent upon and operates within wider systems of meanings. It also assumes that the social world can be carved up into a number of discrete units, which are easily isolated and controlled in this way. This supposes that one can identify ‘cause and effect’ relationships in which the television message is presumed to mean the same thing regardless of time, context or the person’s position in the world, and that people will act on the basis of these cultivated attitudes and beliefs. It is not merely that it is not possible to generalize from controlled, artificial experiments to the wider social context, but that the relationship of media representations to subjectivity is far more complex than presumed within these models. This last point relates to one of the most popular criticisms of the ‘effects’ model in which the image of personhood underpinning the approach presumes that the person is a blank slate, a tabula rasa waiting to be filled or injected with the media’s values and beliefs. This is often referred to as the ‘hypodermic’ model, capturing the passivity attributed to human subjectivity within the communication process. This approach within psychology is broadly described as a social learning model in which the social representations constructed by the media are internalized by the passive recipient through a stimulus–response schedule, imitation and modelling (cf. Harris 1989). Through this account of the relationship of media representations to subjectivity, television is construed as an ‘agent of socialization’ accorded a central role in moulding and shaping a person’s values and

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beliefs. It follows that television does not necessarily produce detrimental effects as it could play a beneficial and pedagogic role within the socializing process (cf. Berry and Asamen 1993). Within this model there is often a call for more positive, realistic representations and images to cultivate and teach us values that will enhance society. However, when the television message is distorted, stereotypical, violent and aggressive, it is more likely within this model that it will foster increased antisocial behaviour within society. Within this formulation there is a differentiation made between those values and beliefs which portray reality in a realistic manner, and those which distort the ‘real’ and the way in which people come to understand and act within the world (cf. Eysenk and Nias 1978; Cullingford 1984).

Opposition to effects research In November 1994 a group of media studies academics met in a hotel near London’s Heathrow Airport. Their aim was to challenge the very effects research that they felt to be responsible for the media hype surrounding the Child’s Play video and the young murderers of James Bulger. Their conference flyer stated: In June this year, we circulated a considerable number of media academics, researchers and other people with related interests, to see if they felt as we did, that the time was right – indeed urgent – for a conference to deal head-on with the issues being raised by the resurgence of a very dangerous combination: powerfully expressed fears about the possible effects of violent films and videos, especially in relation to the James Bulger trial and, on the back of that, demands for expanded controls of the media. Alongside these, of course, came the Report from Professor Newson which restated the now commonplace, but ever untrue, claim that research had overwhelmingly supported the conclusion that violence in the media can cause violence in social behaviour. Those of us who tried to combat these claims were either ignored, or denigrated for questioning the apparent ‘common sense’ of the Newson position.

Note here the reference to an easy, commonsense assumption that the media must cause antisocial behaviour. This assumption is very deep seated, as we have tried to show with respect to its history and to the way in which certain assumptions about the masses have been the bedrock of so many taken-for-granted aspects of modern forms of

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government. Certain kinds of psychological assumption are at the heart of this process. Indeed, not long afterwards, a BBC Panorama programme condemned British media theorists for not adapting American effects research seriously, adopting the commonsense position that no-one in their right mind could possibly believe that people were not affected by the media. Throughout the conference, the theme was that effects research was simplistic and unsound, and while this might indeed be the case, that is not the issue that concerns us here. We are interested instead in how, on the one hand, such research functions, in Foucault’s terms (1980: 118), as a ‘fiction which functions in truth’ and, on the other, as the stick with which to beat ‘liberal research’, while failing to examine the deep problems existing in the theoretical formulations of British cultural studies. At one level of course the Panorama programme cannot fail to be correct – everyone knows that the media affects us. But, as far as we are concerned, the answer is not a simple ‘yes’. We need to examine the taken-for-granted assumptions in our present home truths (that is, theories of the mass mind) in order to start thinking things differently. When the MP David Alton put forward a Private Member’s Bill in the British Parliament in 1994 to limit the availability of videos to children, he was operating on the assumption of vulnerable minds, which he had come to understand simply as an unquestioned given. It did not occur to him that such an understanding was a historically produced construct through which the masses had been policed and regulated, so much so that it had become, in so many ways, one of the things that we take for granted about the ‘developing child’. The Home Affairs Committee of the British House of Commons for the session 1993/94 produced a report entitled ‘Video violence and young offenders’. They concluded that: We agree that violent videos will normally corrupt only those made vulnerable by other influences, but we do not accept that, because video violence is one among the many causes of violent crime, it should be ignored. We believe that there is some evidence to support the commonsense view that videos do have some corrupting influence on the young, which may lead some vulnerable children into crime, and we support steps taken to deal with this issue. (emphasis in original)

Note how all the assumptions we have been talking about are simply taken for granted in this quote; this is what is meant by the idea of a

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fiction functioning in truth. The trouble is that what the media theorists in the London hotel tried to do was to criticize the validity of effects research, but not to question its basic psychological premises or the view of validity as timeless. In a later section of this chapter, we will see how contemporary media researchers are moving away from what is seen to be a narrow psychological perception of subjectivity, to be concerned less with media effects and more with how people actively interpret and make sense of the media. However, the ‘effects’ model, as discussed earlier, sets the parameters by which the media is debated within the public consciousness and is also central to decisions regarding the censorship of violent and sexually explicit films.

Towards a semiotics of media production This approach to media influence and its psychopathological effects is, as we have seen, one of the most controversial and hotly debated issues in the literature. We seek not to adjudicate between theories or to judge the veracity of differing experimental studies, but rather to widen the debate to consider what is being presumed about the nature of individuals and their relation to the social world in which they exist. We saw in the last chapter how traditional or mainstream psychology presumes that our sense of self is produced primarily on the basis of an underlying human nature. This human nature is defined by certain enduring characteristics, such as self-control, independence, autonomy and rationality, as we have seen with some of the assumptions made in the literature. In this respect the individual is viewed as an entity that can be influenced only by the social domain and exists as a pregiven form prior to discourse, signification and so on. The individual/society dualism (Henriques et al. 1998) that underpins this approach to the nature and form of selfhood presumes that the social domain is merely a context welded on to a pregiven individual. This split between an essential subjectivity or human nature and the social domain is in direct contrast to approaches derived from semiotics and discursively based models (see Chapter 1), which reject the notion of a pregiven individual and view the human subject as being produced and formed through signifying and discursive practices. Rather than discussing these issues in relation to the methodology and politics of ‘effects’ research, we will in this book be offering a radically different way of approaching the relationship between psychology and the media. Within traditional psychology of the

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media, psychology is merely a set of tools utilized to analyse the effects of the social context, including the media, on the ‘developing individual’. The object of psychological studies of the media is to analyse media influence, which as we have seen relies on two key concepts – the ‘vulnerable individual’ and an understanding that certain media contents in some way distort or exaggerate the ‘real’. This viewpoint does not see the media as a ‘system of signification’, actually playing a role in producing our sense of selfhood, in conjunction with wider regimes of truth and meaning. It is a ‘simple’ communication model (cf. Chapter 1), presuming that language merely reflects or misrepresents reality. The mass mind becomes the site of this mass media psychopathology. The contemporary body of critical psychological inquiry we will be exploring in this book constitutes very different relations not only between psychology and media studies, but also between the media text and its audience. The approach we advocate in this book is derived from poststructuralist views of psychology being not merely a set of techniques for analysing the effects of the media but a form of knowledge that is embedded within systems of signification such as the media. We argued in Chapter 2 that, from psychology’s emergence in the late nineteenth century, it has been part of a wider apparatus for governing and managing the population. We suggested that, from psychology’s inception, it has been concerned with targeting, detecting, classifying and administering ‘others’, those whose subjectivities were understood as being lacking and pathological. Here we will be proposing that, in contemporary media representations of sexuality, gender, race, psychopathology and criminality, the ‘other’ exists as a discursive mechanism whereby the ‘psy’ image of personhood – the fiction of the autonomous self – is maintained and produced as selfevident. We are suggesting that these representations and the way in which they continually tell and retell the same stories are part of the limits by which we come to understand ourselves and ‘others’, by which we gain a sense of our own identities. The terms and concepts central to the way in which psychology constructs the ‘normal self ’ enter into actual subjects’ desires, aims, fears and aspirations. We relate to ourselves ‘as if ’ we are selves of a particular kind, and representations of the ‘other’ confirm this form of selfhood as ideal, normal and natural. In Foucault’s terms it is a regime of truth that forms the basis of regimes of meaning such as the media, underpinning how it chooses to represent those who transgress the boundaries of normal conduct.

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This approach views psychology and the media as playing a part in producing the human subject rather than merely reflecting or distorting a pregiven subjectivity.

Uses and gratifications Curran (1996) charts the uptake of ‘uses and gratifications’ research in the 1970s and 80s in media studies as being characteristic of a more general trend to go beyond the simple idea of ‘effects’ in order to explore the function that the media plays in people’s lives. As he suggests, underpinning this shift was ‘the largely unspoken assumption that, even if the media do not shape people’s thinking, they occupy a lot of their time’ (ibid.: 127). These shifts also emerged out of the use of qualitative research methods to explore people’s relationships to the media (that is, focus groups and interview methods) rather than the quantitative (statistical) modes of analysis favoured by effects researchers. As Curran notes ‘effects’ research, as we have seen, viewed the media as ‘a powerful generator of influence in discrete behavioural terms’ (ibid.: 128). Through the use of qualitative methods, researchers found that the media seemed to serve several ‘psychological’ functions and was ‘used’ by the audience in different ways depending upon their pre-existing needs. Here we can see a very different approach from the ‘psychology of the individual’ being proposed as a way of understanding the role of the media in social life. A behaviourist approach to subjectivity was replaced with a model of psychology viewing the individual as a collection of needs, wishes and desires that might or might not be gratified by particular media. McQuail (1972) outlined four domains, which corresponded to the range of individual needs that the media could gratify. The first was the use of the media as a form of diversion or escapism, and the second its employment as a form of companionship for those who are socially isolated. The third is related to the use of the media to understand and evaluate one’s own personal identity. It is used as a reality or reference point to work through emotional issues and conflicts in an individual’s life. This is remarkably similar to the way in which an idea of social fantasy has been used to explain how audiences consume the media and how different forms of media can gratify different needs in an audience. In these approaches the audience is viewed less as a homogenous mass but is beginning to be socially differentiated according to their gender, for example (cf. Geraghty 1991, 1996).

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Within these approaches particular genres, such as soap opera and women’s detective narratives, provide fantasy spaces that are seen to meet or reflect the reality of women’s lives. Women’s consumption of these media is linked to the role that these fantasies play in satisfying women’s desires, needs and wishes, as Geraghty outlines a move from focusing upon ‘what an image did to women to what women could do with women’s images’ (1996: 318). According to this work women had particular needs, wishes and desires linked to their social roles as mothers, wives, daughters and housewives – the realm of the personal and domestic – creating specific competencies or skills. These competencies are seen to be valued rather than denigrated in the ‘women’s genre’. The fourth area McQuail terms surveillance; this refers to the way in which the media are used to provide a ‘window on the world’, providing people with information about the social world in which they exist. Although there is a move towards a notion that audiences are more active in how they use and negotiate the media, there are numerous problems with this account. The needs and desires of the audience are discussed in a narrow, psychological way. The media are discussed either as opposing the expression and satisfaction of these needs, or as providing a space in which they can be met and gratified. The needs, desires and wishes that the audience may have are not seen to be socially produced or derived (it is here that work on female genres discussed above does attempt to examine subjectivity as socially learnt, albeit drawing on a traditional social learning model; see Chapter 6 for further exposition). Primarily in ‘uses and gratifications’ research, a notion of ‘psychopathology’ underpins the way in which these needs are conceptualized. Implicit within all of the domains discussed is an idea that the media compensates for something lacking in the person’s life. This could be a lack of social contact, a lack of the means to deal with stress and emotional conflicts, or a lack of other ways in which to understand one’s own life and identity. This account of the media has resonances with what Curran terms liberal-functionalist approaches that view the media as taking up a central ritualized role in society, replacing concrete group contact. The media are again seen to compensate for a lack of close group contact playing a cohesive role in society by fostering a sense of collective identity. Thus through the televising of ‘media events’ such as sporting events, state occasions (for example, the funeral of Princess Diana) and so forth, the media create a ‘we-feeling’ (Curran 1996: 127). This ‘wefeeling’ is taken to be normative, shaping and integrating people into

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the moral standards of society. As we have seen, however, ‘uses and grats’ research is more individualistic, focusing upon narrow psychological dispositions as a way of charting the various uses to which the media can be put. The use of the media to gratify needs (implicitly understood as a lack) constructs an Other, maintaining a normative ideal of persons who are self-contained, autonomous and independent, choosing not to use the media in this compensatory way. This is especially pertinent if we consider how television and the mass media have been seen to have an effect on those who are less autonomous and independent of its supposed influences. Although these two approaches seem at first sight to be opposed, the concept of the ‘mass, vulnerable mind’ makes them both intelligible and possible. This model, although individualistic, had begun to posit a relationship between ‘need’ and social/psychological circumstances such as life position, lifestyle and personality (Bryant and Zillman 1994). Indeed, McQuail’s (1997) recent work on audiences is very similar to the work pioneered by Morley (1992) in British cultural studies, examining the relationship of patterns of media use to subcultural identity and ‘lifestyle concepts’ such as social class, age, gender and ethnicity. Behaviourist approaches underpinning ‘effects’ research had failed to consider the ‘psychological interiority’ of individuals, their minds and experiences (Wober and Gunter 1988), and how this shapes their interaction with the media. The pendulum-like swing from psychological effects to an account of media cognition, of what the audience bring to media texts, was a key condition for the emergence of audience research committed to an idea of the ‘socially located subject’ bringing to bear on the media text a range of possible readings or interpretations (Morley 1992).

Further moves to the active audience The narrow view of psychological desires and needs studied within ‘uses and gratifications’ research has been superseded within media and cultural studies by a move towards studying an audience who are viewed as actively negotiating the media in relation to interpretative resources – expectations, knowledge, attitudes, values and beliefs – which are then often linked to their developmental age, gender, social class and so forth. This has been an important area of debate, which, rather than assuming that the audience passively and unquestioningly receives the media message, explores the meanings that the audience

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differentially understand of, for example, representations of race (Wetherell and Potter 1993), madness (Philo 1994) and sexuality and AIDS (Kitzinger 1993). This research has argued that the importance of negotiating the meaning of the televisual text is dependent upon a person’s access to cultural resources, which may be constrained by their class, gender and ethnic background. Morley (1992), one of the leading British audience researchers, has argued that, in order to understand the meaning of a media text, it is important to analyse the cultural background of the viewer. He argues that an understanding of a person’s identity is integral to understanding the meaning-making process, but that this should be studied sociologically. ‘Uses and gratifications’ research and psychological approaches more generally are rejected as being individualistic and reductionist. Although we would agree with this statement, Morley seems less clear about the similarities between audience research and more social psychological approaches such as the work of Livingstone (1990). Indeed, as Curran (1997) has argued, audience research presents a caricature of its own history of emergence that selectively omits to discuss its affinities with work in psychology since at least the 1940s, which has always been concerned with the mass communication process and how groups differ in the ways in which they make sense of the televisual text. As we have already argued, ‘effects’ research was concerned with the ‘vulnerable individual’, marking out large sectors of the population as being capable of withstanding media influence, able to reject the media message and negotiate the media content in relation to their own social/psychological circumstances (see Curran 1996 for a further discussion and references to early psychological studies that have affinities with audience research). As we have already seen with work on audiences and soap opera (Geraghty 1991, 1996), the approach taken is remarkably similar to ‘uses and gratifications’ research in exploring the ways in which particular genres meet or reflect ‘women’s concerns’, providing a space through which their needs, wishes and desires can be met. As Geraghty argues (1996: 315), ‘Women characters on television were not merely signs of male desires and fear; there was the possibility (by no means always realized) of characters representing women viewers’ desires and fears.’ Although Geraghty is committed to approaching the subjectivity of the spectator in terms of its being socially located, the approach is firmly based within a narrow psychological social-learning model, despite the rejection of more psychological and psychoanalytic models. Indeed, McQuail’s (1997) recent work on audiences reviews the more

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sociological work of Bourdieu (1984) on cultural taste, as well as on subcultural identity (Hebdidge 1978), as a way of exploring what he terms the ‘social and psychological origins of media-use’. He cogently illustrates the similarities between the psychological ideas about lifestyle underpinning advertising and marketing and the ‘social positional variables’ currently drawn on in audience research (ibid.: 95–8). As we have seen, however, audience research generally rejects psychology. This is rather premature because, if we examine audience approaches more closely, different ‘psychological’ ideas about the nature of subjectivity are implicitly assumed. It is taken for granted in the literature that ‘effects’ research relies upon behaviourist models of personhood. With the rejection of effects research and ‘uses and gratifications’ approaches, it is often assumed, as we have seen, that we have left psychology behind. However, the image of personhood implicitly assumed within audience research is remarkably similar to cognitive or information-processing models of the person popular in psychology following the demise of behaviourism in the 1960s. Cognitive psychology draws upon particular explanatory concepts that understand the mind as a system processing, storing and coding information (Johnson-Laird 1993). This structure is viewed much like the hardware of a computer that has particular components to order and process the software – information – in relation to these cognitive processes. Within this conception of the relationship between the perceiver and reality, or the audience and the media, it is the media or reality that is viewed as a passive object to be actively represented by the audience. People are seen to generate their own sets of meanings and ways of understanding the world through which they actively negotiate the media. Contrary to the situation in effects research, the media are seen to have a limited role in people’s understandings. The audience are rational and consciously aware, generating meaning in relation to their own pre-existing ‘cultural competencies’ (Morley 1992). This is very similar to socio-cognitive approaches within the discipline of psychology (Fiske and Taylor 1991; Resnick et al. 1991), which assume a particular ‘psychology of the individual’ – one who is self-aware, self-reflexive and self-directing. Although committed to an idea of the ‘social subject’, a subject who is formed through the social, the problem becomes one of explaining how the ‘outside’ gets in. Morley and many other audience researchers have drawn on the work of Bourdieu to theorize this link, arguing that the discourses or linguistic resources available to persons are linked to their structural positioning, which enables or constrains their negotia-

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tion with the content of the media. As Morley (1992) argues, the key concern is to explore: how members of different groups and classes, sharing different cultural codes, will interpret a given message differently, not just at the personal, idiosyncratic level, but in a way systematically linked to their socioeconomic position. (p. 88)

Problems with identity As Hall and du Gay (1996) suggest, despite the discursive explosion that has surrounded the concept of identity in recent years, it has, as an analytical concept, also increasingly become subjected to a searching critique. The concept of identity first emerged in social psychology in the 1970s, concerned with the influence of significant others on the formation of self-identity. Tajfel (1981), a proponent of what is known as a socio-cognitive approach to identity, explored how group membership involved the categorization of oneself as having certain characteristics as well as the projection of certain other characteristics onto groups outside one’s affiliation. These categorizations have been understood as being biased, responsible for prejudice and stereotyping (Wilder 1986, quoted in Potter and Wetherell 1987). The key argument of these approaches is that the social world is ‘fuzzy’ and that only through the imposition of certain categories does the reception of the world become meaningful. To those working in the socio-cognitive tradition, the perceptual mechanisms underpinning such attributions are of interest and are often cast in evolutionary terms. It is not such a great leap to want to understand how the categories that people impose on their environments are socially derived (Eiser 1991; Fiske and Taylor 1991). As Potter and Wetherell (1987: 116) suggest, this has been one of the main aims of ethnomethodology and discourse analytical methods: to explore how ‘categories are constituted in everyday discourse and the various functions they satisfy’. In other words what is of importance is the linguistic resources at people’s disposal and the ways in which certain resources are utilized in order to make sense of the world. This trajectory is not so different from the moves in cultural studies to study decoding and to link patterns of decoding to competencies derived from one’s social positioning. However, the use of the concept of identity to study individuals through

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their attachment to social groups and hence shared cultural resources is entirely problematic. Social psychologists have long recognized that people are not consistent beings and cannot be defined on the basis of any fixed, shared characteristics (Potter and Wetherell 1987). Even if the psychological landscape is viewed as being socially formed, it is still problematic to view groups of people as homogenous, defined on the basis of their shared affiliation and access to particular cultural codes. As Hall and Du Gay (1996: 6) suggest, ‘identities are [thus] points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us’. These are positions constructed within practices that invite or incite persons to relate to themselves ‘as if ’ they are persons of a particular kind. Hall and Du Gay argue that the key question for media theorists is to explain audience investment, why it invests in or takes up one particular subject position rather than others, in order to construct ‘a theory of what the mechanisms are by which individuals as subjects identify (or do not identify) with the positions to which they are summoned (ibid.: 13). This formulation has resonances with the ‘critical psychology’ approach we are developing in this book. We are suggesting that we need a theory that can account for investment, for the production of desire and hence for a subjective commitment to certain discursive positionings (cf. Changing the Subject, Henriques et al. 1998). We are arguing that fictions and fantasies of the Other play a key role in the processes through which people relate to themselves and others. We are suggesting that fantasies within media products may re-enact and reproduce subject-positions created across a range of discursive practices such as schooling, education, practices of consumption, leisure, advertising and so forth. We are arguing that central to a critical psychological project is the development of methods that enable us to explore how the ‘fiction of the autonomous self ’ is translated into media and cultural fantasies. If, for example, we are produced as subjects who desire autonomy and choice, how do fantasy relations in cultural objects such as women’s magazines map onto the production of these desires? As an example, central to youth culture are the following sets of resolutions to conflict that revolve around the individual’s selfdetermination – it’s down to you, keep on struggling, keep on trying, focus upon yourself, keep up the hard work, be resilient, strive to be independent (see Blackman 1999 for a discussion of these in relation to magazines). We need to focus upon the practices of self-production in which people engage across various practices and how media products map onto these desires. We are arguing that the conflicts produced

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through the various ways in which the subject is addressed may differ depending upon how one is positioned in relation to the norm (cf. Chapters 9 and 10). With the contemporary focus in British cultural studies upon the active audience and the patterns of decoding made by a socially differentiated audience, many studies have attempted to characterize the range of readings of a media text that emerge from reception of the media (Moores 1993). These readings in some studies are seen to emerge from particular ‘reader positions’ related to a person’s class, race, gender and age. The implicit reader norm within these accounts is that readers should be able to resist or read against the dominant message or ‘preferred meaning’. Although there is a notion of the active reader, there is also a ‘scale of difference’ incorporating the possibility of ‘readers’ receiving certain messages uncritically and unquestioningly. There are some readers then who may yield to media influence by accepting the dominant message of the media text. These differences in reception have been incorporated into scales that are used to judge and classify readers according to their relation to media influence. In many cases, such as that described by Parkin (1971), these readings are related to a person’s social positioning in relation to the dominant ideology. There are problems with these accounts and the notion of ‘structural positioning’ seen to underlie readers’ ability actively to negotiate the media. These problems will be directly addressed in Chapter 8 where we look at attempts within discursive and critical psychologies since the 1980s to provide an account of subjectivity in which there is no split between the individual and the social. Despite their attempt to move beyond the individual/social dichotomy, we will see the way in which these still rely upon a pregiven subject – a ‘discourse user’. At this point we do not want to get into a debate over whether the audience is active or passive, and the degree to which this process is circumscribed by ‘structural positioning’. Instead, we want to think about the very terms that structure the debate – the active/passive dichotomy. As we have seen, broadly speaking within media studies, people are seen to be either active or passive depending upon the perspective. These terms accord a very different role to the media in relation to its ability to influence its audience. In both of the media accounts already discussed, the human subject is construed as a pregiven entity. Although the perspectives differ in how they specify this human nature, they nonetheless credit individuals with certain presocial attributes prior to their immersion within their social worlds. Broadly speaking, the human subject is either

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viewed as a blank slate entirely shaped and written upon through cultural processes including media influence or are credited with certain attributes such as agency, intentionality and particular cognitive capacities with respect to information-processing models of human nature. Other accounts draw on more psychoanalytic models of human nature presuming that persons are born with basic drives or instincts such as sex and aggression that need to be channelled and moulded through a civilizing process. In fact, despite their differences, we will argue that all these ideas underlie the way in which media and cultural studies investigate the relationship between the media text and its audience. They all presuppose a ‘psychology’ of the human subject prior to media influence that is embedded within the ‘scale of difference’ used to differentiate differing reader positions or interpretations. Parkin (1971), for example, distinguishes between those who are more autonomous, able to reject and resist dominant media messages, as opposed to those who may yield to the message uncritically and unquestioningly. This scale or administering of subjects both builds on the idea of the ‘mass mind’ or ‘irrational mind’, those who are more susceptible to media influence because they lack rational powers of mind, and retains as a normative image the idea of the self-contained, atomized individual who does not yield to outside, external forces. This image, much like that of the warrior, is a reproduction of the very normative image embedded within psychological knowledge. As we will see later in this chapter, it is this very image of the human subject which is entirely historically and culturally specific, emerging in a particular sociopolitical context. These divisions made in media and cultural studies between those who are influenced and those who are not is contingent upon a particular ‘psychology’ or subjectivity despite audience research’s rejection of psychology as reductionist (Morley 1992). It is apparent then that the media and cultural studies move towards the ‘active audience’ is very much a reaction against the idea that the media have the power to manipulate the ‘masses’. This opens up a space for media studies to consider the media as more than just a powerful tool of the élite, and as potentially creating spaces for audience resistance and the subversion of dominant media messages. A discourse of empowerment, of giving the audience ‘a voice’, underpins some of the more humanist aims of audience research (cf. Geraghty 1996). This reaction and rejection of the ‘manipulationist’ thesis has also been charted in relation to the way in which media and cultural studies approach the realm of popular culture (Lunt and Livingstone 1992;

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Walkerdine 1997). Lunt and Livingstone (1992) consider post-Fordist arguments examining the way in which late capitalism has alienated the worker from mass consumption to the point at which the current cultural logic could be described or even celebrated as an opportunity for choice and freedom for the consumer. Cultural products are now bestowed with a diversity of meanings that can be appropriated and reappropriated by consumers in the construction of their own personal identities. The monetary value of goods is inextricably bound up with the construction of identity and social meaning. These arguments are central to contemporary theories of consumption, especially in the context of postmodernist arguments (Crook et al. 1992; Shields 1992; Polhemus 1994), and view the individual as one bound by everincreasing choice and new-found freedom. The consuming practices of the ‘ordinary individual’ and the ‘sense-making’ practices of the ‘masses’ have the potential to subvert, resist, contest and challenge the orthodoxies of the culture industries. Although we are sympathetic to these moves, we feel that they overlook the historical basis of the constitution of the masses as an object of media, psychology and cultural studies. We will develop this thesis in the next chapter, but suffice it to say that if the very parameters with which contemporary cultural theory approaches the audience are a reaction against the ‘manipulationist’ thesis, simply replacing passivity with agency does not avoid the historical basis of this questioning. It is still firmly trapped within an active/passive dualism made possible by a particular set of historical and social conditions. It is a reaction against what were taken to be the oppressive assumptions of media effects models, and, as we will see, reactions are always made possible by the very concepts and terms they seek to reject. We have also seen the way in which this reaction against psychology actually replaces one particular account of ‘psychology’ with another, avoiding the question of how it is we actually come to experience and view ourselves as particular kinds of subject, and what role the ‘popular’ plays in this process of subject formation. We will argue throughout the book that a redefining of the very way in which the questions we ask, and the assumptions made about the nature of the human subject, is crucial to a move beyond an active/passive dualism. This redefinition will involve examining the very historical basis of the parameters of contemporary media, psychology and cultural theory. In the next chapter we will examine some of the developments in social theory that implied a theory of the mass mind and became influential in media and cultural studies.

Chapter 4 Subjectivity, ideology and representation

We have argued so far that psychological issues have been a central component of all approaches to the study of media and culture, even when the proponents of those theories have stated their critical distance from psychology. That is, they always implicate the nature and form of the subject in their work. Morley (1992), for example, presents an audience theory resolutely set against what he sees as ‘psychology’ or, more particularly, a universalistic reading of psychoanalysis. While it is important and admirable that he attempts to understand the production of meaning as a dynamic process, he nevertheless invokes a pregiven psychological subject in a given social position, one who is being ‘active’. In other words, like many media theorists who refuse the terrain of the psychological on the grounds of universalism or essentialism, those very features in fact return by the back door. Morley argues, for example: If we are to theorize the subject of television, it has to be theorised in its cultural and historical specificity, an area where psychoanalytic theory is obviously weak. It is only thus that we can move beyond a theory of the subject which has reference only to universal, primary psychoanalytic processes, and only thus that we can allow a space in which one can recognise that the struggle over ideology also takes place at the moment of the encounter of text and subject and is not always already predetermined at the psychoanalytic level. (Morley 1992: 71)

But who is this subject who encounters the text? For Morley, who is well aware of the problems of replacing psychologism by sociologism, the subject is in fact, a social one, situated in a class location, one who 59

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decodes television messages in a particular way related to her or his social location. This position, however, quite simply not only fails to solve Morley’s original problem, but also adds to it. Indeed, he not only has a sociologism, but also relies implicitly on concepts that derive from a universalistic psychology. The psychologically pregiven decoding subject is a stock-in-trade of cognitive psychology; the affective emotional dimension has gone, leaving us with an account that may appear more situated but fails to solve any of the psychological problems, simply replacing them by sociology. Morley is very far from being alone in this position. In arguing for the central importance of psychological issues to media and cultural studies, we are not therefore implying that we seek a return to the very assumptions we criticized in the last chapter. Instead, we want to explore those psychological assumptions which are made, even where they are not overtly cast as psychological assumptions, and to start to think about how to do things differently. To begin with, we must address the issue of the mass mind. In Chapter 2, we argued that the discourses of vulnerability do not unproblematically describe a real object. The issue of the regulation and management of the masses makes it virtually impossible to disentangle the idea of vulnerability from those discourses which read it as a problem. Nevertheless, we must address the issue that while the discourses and practices themselves constitute the object that they claim to be describing, there is still a process of reading going on. What we aim to demonstrate is that there is no simple pregiven object that can be more or less fairly represented, but that what the object is and is taken to be depends on how it is constituted discursively, which is of course itself a profoundly social act. Let us take an example. It is well documented in the psychiatric literature that working-class people are more susceptible to those forms of psychopathology considered both less amenable to treatment and more dangerous and difficult. These are usually described as the psychoses (of which schizophrenia is an example). One aspect of a diagnosis of schizophrenia is auditory and visual hallucinations (Blackman 1994, 1996, 1998a). However, at a very different historical moment, St Theresa of Avila, a thirteenth-century mystic, was famous for her visions. Not only was she not considered to be mad, but she was also greatly revered for the beauty of her writings and her spiritual insight and teachings. St Theresa has been the subject of some deliberation on the part of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose work we will consider in the next chapter.

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But visions in thirteenth-century and in twentieth-century Britain are simply not the same thing. It could, of course, be argued that St Theresa was actually really mad, a fact that, with the benefit of psychiatric knowledge, we can see more clearly. This is the way in which mainstream psychology rewrites its own history, with a kind of timeless ahistoricity. The following example from a traditional psychiatric textbook illustrates how psychiatry records its own history of emergence as one of progress, truth and certainty: The ‘evolution of psychiatry has been a central part of the evolution of the evolution of civilization itself ’ (Alexander and Selesnick 1966: 3). As we have pointed out with reference to Foucault, however, such an interpretation assumes that truth is a timeless matter and that everything we know now is progress and better than we knew before. The re-evaluation of mysticism at the end of a twentieth century in the throes of self-destruction might at least give us pause for thought. In addition to this, the designation of psychosis is far more likely to be given to working-class than middle-class people even though they may demonstrate similar symptoms (Hollingshead and Redlich 1958; Myers 1959). Indeed, for some of those very people, learning to understand their hallucinations as being benign visions has helped them to stay off the very medication that psychiatry uses to suppress them in order to make sufferers more ‘normal’ (Blackman 1998a). In other words, there is a different relationship to the self and one’s experience set out here. Let us examine then how developments in the 1960s and 70s in media studies and later cultural studies paved the way for a change in thinking about media studies and psychology. We will again be interrogating the psychological assumptions made in these formulations even when they are not cast as overtly psychological ones. We will begin by describing the way in which the study of ideology and consciousness came together in Freudo-Marxism.

The Frankfurt School In an essay in 1927, called ‘The future of an illusion’, Freud wrote that: the masses are lazy and unintelligent; they have no love for instinctual renunciation, and they are not to be convinced by argument of its inevitability; and the individuals composing them support one another in giving free rein to their indiscipline. It is only through the influence of individuals who can set an example and whom masses recognise as their leaders that they can be induced to perform the work and undergo the

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Fascism was already on the agenda in Europe, and Freud felt that the masses would succumb too easily to dictatorship. For Freud, as for many others at that time, there were the leaders and the led, each having their own particular problems. It was the need for strong but fair and democratic leadership that, Freud argued, was important in taking the masses away from the easy pleasures afforded by dictators. To understand this, Freud posited his by now familiar model of infantile wishes and fantasies, and the move from the gratification of the maternal breast to the production of a strong ego. For Freud, infantile fantasies were inevitable and certainly not differentiated by class. However, Freud stated clearly that the masses did not want to make the move to renounce the easy pleasures (the oral, sexual gratifications that harkened back to early infantile wishes) and sublimate these in favour of higher pleasures. It is not difficult to see how this prefigures both later work on the masses in terms of their greater vulnerability, because they have been maternally deprived (cf. remarks about the vulnerability of the James Bulger murderers), that is, that they have not received enough early gratification, as well as the media’s view of this as easy pleasure and gratification, pandering to early wishes that should be surpassed. The figure of the infantile working class reappears in countless places, and we will certainly return to it in relation to the emergence of cultural and media theory in the 1970s. However, a group of sociologists and social psychologists, all of them Jewish, who had been working in the University of Frankfurt before the Second World War, and who fled to the USA at the onset of war, took up this work in an important and influential way. They had been especially concerned with Freud’s ideas about the masses and easy gratification, taking up the idea that the gullible masses had been easily swayed by corrupt leadership in the form of the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini. Having moved to the USA, they turned their attention after the Second World War to the rise of the mass market, including the availability of both consumer goods and cheap entertainment in film and television. Using the same arguments, they attempted to use various means to produce for social psychology an empirical verification of what became known as Freudo-Marxism.

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Adorno, for example, produced a measure designed to test authoritarianism as a personality type. The ‘authoritarian personality’ was presented as a threat to the ‘individualistic and democratic type prevalent in the past century and a half of our civilization’ (Adorno et al. 1950: 256). The authoritarian personality was defined on the basis of a set of traits (enduring features) that distinguished him from his civilized counterpart. These traits, to include political conservatism, anti-Semitism, rigidity, conformity, prejudice, acquiescence, subservience and so forth, were measured by psychometric tests – tests constructed on the basis of a series of statements attempting to differentiate the authoritarian from the democratic. The following statements, for example, were devised to measure rigidity: 4 Science has its place, but there are many important things that can never be understood by the human mind. 26 Some people can be divided into two distinct classes: the weak and the strong. 29 Some day it will probably be shown that astrology can explain a lot of things. (ibid.: 256)

The test Adorno constructed was termed the F Scale and was used to ‘produce a sound estimate of the relative amounts of fascist potential in different sections of the population’ (ibid.: 265). This work in particular was important in preparing the ground for two of the theoretical and empirical orientations in research on mass media and communication already discussed in the last chapter: effects research and uses and gratifications. In their way, each of these traditions has drawn upon the same underlying assumptions about the mass mind and its gullibility. Understood as liberal, if not radical, this work certainly did not hold the media to be an unqualified good, but what was always far more important was the understanding of the problem of the masses and the way in which their very irrationality served as the fertile ground upon which the seeds of capitalism, Fascism and other evils could take hold. This work has also been important for the development of personality theory and social psychology, creating a range of theories and tests into the late twentieth century concerned with measuring those traits which define individuals as less able to think for themselves and therefore as more subservient to others (including the media). These terms include the measurement of ‘voting trends’ (Campbell et al. 1960), the ‘inner-directed’ versus ‘outer-directed’ personality (Rokeach

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1968) and the anti-authoritarian versus authoritarian personality (Kreml 1977). The traits are more often than not couched in biological and evolutionary terms (Eysenck 1967).

Marxism, ideology and consciousness Marx developed his theories about capitalism and the oppression and exploitation of the working classes around the same time as the emergence of psychology as a science, that is, the end of the nineteenth century. This means that his work belongs to the same moment of modernity, the same search for grand theories and narratives, that would, for example, explain the universal workings of capital, the struggles of capital and labour. Central to Marx’s theory was that the masses had to become the Working Class, an historical class conscious of its own historical mission. Class had first been proposed as a system of classification in Britain by liberal social reformers such as Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, who were part of the movement to map and classify areas of cities as part of an attempt to chart both the spread of disease and degeneracy, and as part of the emerging strategy of population management. For Marx, however, class was not simply an occupational category but a form of consciousness: the realization of oppression and exploitation, and the role of the masses in making the revolution, was what was necessary to understand oneself as part of this universal political movement and hence become Working Class. It follows therefore that one of Marx’s central concerns was the fact that many working-class people did not appear to either want or be able to take part in the revolutionary struggle that he envisaged. His political project, however, required that they did so, and he thus had to construct an account both of why workers were not revolutionaries and how they could become so. It is not difficult to see that the psychology, the mind and behaviour, of the masses was a crucial and essential feature of Marx’s account of working-class political action. To understand this, Marx put forward an account both of ideology and of consciousness. He used two different analogies to explain ideology: the first was the idea of a camera obscura, which blocks vision, thus implying that ideology, the ideas and beliefs of the ruling class, was something which got in the way of the workers’ ability to see and recognize the true conditions of their own exploitation. The model of ideology that we have given here is, of course, necessarily crude and was refined by many left of centre intellectuals after Marx, as we will discuss later in this chapter.

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Nevertheless, Marx posits bourgeois ideology as blocking the vision of the workers. Later he proposed a second account of ideology in which the issue was not so much sight and perception but consciousness. Bourgeois ideology gave workers a false consciousness of themselves and their condition. What was necessary was the production of a true or revolutionary consciousness. It is not difficult to see that Marx’s model of the psychological problems of the masses, while apparently originating with the bourgeoisie, in practice certainly meant a reluctance and recalcitrance on the part of workers. It is easy to slip from this notion to the one of an already existent psychopathology among the masses. This is why we argue that, at a fundamental level, there is less difference than meets the eye between effects theorists and Marxists. If Marx posited that bourgeois ideology obscured the workers’ vision and true consciousness of their situation, a necessary precursor to their political action, there was a twin problem – the ideology and their consciousness, another form of individual/society dualism. It is not difficult to recognize therefore that cultural and media theorists might turn to a synthesis of a Marxist analysis of ideology, together with an understanding of vulnerable working-class minds too easily swayed by the easy gratifications of the mass media and mass consumption. In other words, what the Frankfurt School took from Freud and which they adapted to fit into empirical social psychology, cultural and media theorists later also adapted and adopted, especially in variants of Screen theory, using the work of Althusser and Lacan (see Chapter 5) and the work of Gramsci. We are arguing therefore that mainstream media theory and politically left media and cultural studies, while claiming to be poles apart, actually share similar assumptions about the mind and behaviour, that is, the psychology, of the masses. In order both to critique and to go beyond both approaches, we need to approach that psychology in a different way. We will now discuss the way in which developments in the study of ideology and the take-up of European social theory in Britain in the 1970s produced a new and different understanding of the media in which subjectivity held a central place. We use the term ‘subjectivity’ because it signals a body of work, from structuralism to poststructuralism, that understands the subject not as a pregiven psychological entity, shaped by social forces, but as constituted in and through the discursive processes of signification itself, as we will go on to explain. While this work was antithetical to mainstream psychology, there were of course significant psychological assumptions being made, and this work certainly had an important impact on critical directions in psychology.

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Louis Althusser The late 1960s were years of radical ferment all over the world. On the one hand there were the civil rights and black power movements in the USA, and on the other there was the Vietnam War, which produced protests on university campuses both in the USA and elsewhere. This led to a wave of radicality and an upsurge of new ideas within the social sciences, particularly social theory and psychology, because of the way in which students turned to particular radical thinkers to understand what was happening to them and, increasingly, to criticize their education and the old-style politics of the left. In France, at the same time, there was a massive student revolt, which led to a huge wave of strikes in France and nearly brought down the government. However, one of the aspects that so troubled the French students, who were not straightforward supporters of the French Communist Party, was that the workers did not respond as well as they had hoped, and certainly not enough to produce the political change that they had imagined. It was this sense of failure that fuelled the turn to the work of the French philosopher and social theorist, Louis Althusser. The students and others on the left were looking for some way to understand why the workers had not taken up arms in what they had seen as a revolutionary moment. After all, we have seen in the last chapter that Marx had assumed that a psychological problem, a failure of consciousness, lay behind the failure to become the Working Class. While the blame was ultimately laid on the bourgeoisie and on the working of capital, there was nevertheless, as we have indicated, also taken to be something wrong with the masses. Althusser’s work was attractive because it united the study of ideology, an explanation of the ‘ruling ideas’, with a theory of consciousness, in a Freudo-Marxist tradition but going a long way beyond existing accounts. Because it presented a psychological explanation, presenting subjectivity as produced in and through ideology, it was seen as very important, especially because it critiqued the idea of a pregiven psychological subject, separate from a sociological account of society and a theory of socialization that brought them together. We will briefly describe Althusser’s approach to ideology, which is contained in a paper called ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’ (1977), commonly referred to as the ISAs essay. Althusser sought to go beyond Marx’s conceptions of ideology described in the last chapter, arguing that ideologies were systems or apparatuses that did not simply prevent people from seeing, but instead created subjects, that is, the very

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ways of understanding themselves and their relation to the world in which they lived. The state, he said, possessed a number of apparatuses, like the school, which was not just a sausage machine producing factory fodder, as various leftist economics approaches had suggested, but had the primary purpose of producing ideological subjects through a process of subjectification or interpellation. Althusser talked of interpellation as being like a kind of ‘hailing’, the means through which any ideological subject is known and recognized inside the apparatus. So for example, pupils are not simply known by their names, John Smith or Mary Brown, but by any number of practices through which they are designated as bright, stupid, fast, slow, well or badly behaved and so forth. These apparatuses were thus taken to create subjects, identities rather than just ways of seeing or false kinds of consciousness. Indeed, Althusser posited that this process of subjectification worked both at a conscious and an unconscious level, and to explain the latter he invoked the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. This was very important because it presented the media and culture as ideologies that did not simply get in the way of seeing, for example, or create stereotypes but actually created identities. The process through which this was achieved Althusser took to be a profoundly psychological one, one which acted not only on consciousness but on the unconscious as well.

The unconscious structured like a language The profound effect of this work for Anglo-American radical and feminist criticism cannot be overstated. The reason for this is that, in bringing together the study of ideology as the production of identity, itself assured through a psychoanalysis that understands semiotic processes as constituting the unconscious, the split between the individual and the social is dissolved. For the study of ideology is at one and the same time the study of the subject, the way in which subjectivity is created, rather than a process that from the outside acts upon already preformed subjects. Althusser utilized the work of Lacan to underpin his approach to ideology. Jacques Lacan was the French psychoanalyst who signalled ‘a return to Freud’ by arguing that his utilization of structuralism in the form of Lévi-Strauss and de Saussure rescued Freud from charges of essentialist biologism and represented an undertaking more faithful to Freud than the work of other post-Freudians. What is important is that Lacan’s antiessentialism provided a way of understanding the social and

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cultural as being profoundly carried within the conscious and the unconscious, not as some essentialist baseline, but rather what Lacan called desire actually being created in symbolic systems. This was just what Althusser needed to demonstrate how interpellation might produce the identity of the subject in a profound yet fictional way. The importance of this work for the time cannot be overestimated. Adlam et al. wrote in the first issue of the journal Ideology and Consciousness in 1977 that: In this account, the category of the subject is regarded as constitutive of all ideology, insofar as ideology is defined by the function of constituting concrete individuals as subjects. This process of constitution is discussed in terms of two notions. The first ‘interpellation’, refers to the condition of ideology that it constantly calls upon, ‘hails, concrete individuals as concrete subjects’. That is to say that the place of the individual within concrete practices of ideology is always that of subject – individuals are always-already subjects within the practices that constitute them. The process of constitution has, for Althusser, a duplicate mirror structure, it is doubly speculary. The subject recognises itself as a subject only on the condition that it subjects itself to a Subject which provides both the possibility of this recognition and the guarantee of the efficacy of the forms of subjection in which the subject is constituted. These forms of subjection are accepted by the subject, who takes such acceptance as freedom – so that the subject makes the gestures and actions of his subjection ‘all by himself ’. (Adlam et al. 1977: 24)

In other words, we have here the sense that liberal democracy operates through processes that produce subjects in ideology, who accept the moral and political order because they believe themselves to be free and the autonomous author of their own actions. The French social psychologist Michel Pecheux described this process as the forgetting of the constructed nature of consciousness, as Woods (1977) put it, ‘a forgetting of the source and determination of meaning and the maintenance of the illusion of freedom’ (p. 64). Such a position was profoundly important to an emerging critical psychology as well as to social theory because of the way in which the dualism of individual and society was critiqued. In other words, it does not replace a pregiven psychological subject with a pregiven society but attempts to understand the social and discursive processes through which our understanding of both the social world and the subject are constituted (see Henriques et al. 1998 for a more detailed analysis).

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To support his notion of interpellation, Althusser borrowed Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage. For Lacan there is a point in the development of the infant when it begins to look at its image in a mirror or have its image ‘mirrored’ by its caregiver. It is this mirroring which provides the infant with a fragile sense of its own unitariness. However, because Lacan is criticizing the notion of an essential pregiven set of drives or biological instincts, he prefers to think of this sense of unity as an illusion, one fuelled by a symbolic system that understands the ‘I’ as unitary, original, rather than fictional and illusory. It is not difficult to see the way in which Althusser felt that Lacan’s idea of the mirror provided a psychoanalytic underpinning to his theory of interpellation, where the mirroring of the ISA provides an identity for the subject that is fictional and illusory. For Althusser then, ideology works through the creation of fictional subject identities at a very deep level – the level of the unconscious – which is also the level of the symbolic system, since ideology and unconscious processes, the processes that constitute both culture and the subject, are produced through signs, semiotic activity. For Althusser this approach meant that he envisaged a subject created through ideological processes, and it was these rather than economic causality that were important on a day-to-day level. While Althusser retained the importance of Marx’s conception of the economy, he opposed a notion of a simple economic causality. He argued that the economy determines ‘in the last instance’, but that ‘the last instance never comes’. This was profoundly shocking to traditional Marxism, but it was also incredibly important for media and cultural theorists because it gave pride of place to ideological and therefore cultural processes in the production of subjectivity itself. If ideology was not either something that obscured the vision or formed a false consciousness of the working class, but actually penetrated down to the very unconscious itself, what was to constitute the political way forward in producing the Working Class? To understand the answer to this, we have to examine developments in European Marxism in the 1970s and 80s, as we will do in Chapter 6. In the next chapter we will examine in more detail the concepts used by Lacan in his approach to psychoanalysis and their importance for feminism as well as screen theory in media studies in the 1970s.

Chapter 5 Feminism, psychoanalysis and the media

In this chapter we will outline in more detail some of the assumptions that Lacan was making in his theorizing of the unconscious and examine their uptake in feminism and media studies in the 1970s. We will also explore some of the critiques of this work that led to its rejection by audience research.

Basic concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis Lacan’s work was used to critique the idea of individual/society dualism, that is, a pregiven psychological subject made social. The subject, said Lacan, is fundamentally split, and we can never ever know the whole truth about the subject because the unconscious constantly eludes us. The Cartesian idea of the subject – the cognitive and rational self who knows that ‘he’ exists because he can think – is, according to the Lacanian view, an elaborate fiction, or, as Pecheux would have it, a forgetting. What Lacan is interested in is in how this fiction of an autonomous self is accomplished. That notion was of course centrally important to Althusser, who wished to show the fictional nature of interpellated identities. To do this he utilized the work of two structuralists, the anthropologist LéviStrauss and the linguist de Saussure. From Lévi-Strauss he took as central universals of kinship structure, which argued that ‘the law of the father’ was a structure, fundamental to all cultures. This structure was expressed in what was called ‘the law of exogamy’, the exchange of women by men. This is best expressed in our own culture as the giving away of the women in marriage by the father to the future husband. For Lacan, this law of the father was founded upon a fundamental 70

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fantasy, the fantasy of patriarchy, of the symbolic power of the penis as phallus, invested as law, authority. To take this notion further, he used the structural linguistics of de Saussure, which argued for an arbitrary relation between the signifier and signified. However, where de Saussure asserted the primary of the signified (s) over the signifier (S), usually represented as a fraction, s S Lacan inverted the relation, stressing the primacy of the signifier. Thom (1981) argues that the formula is inverted because Lacan holds that the signifier has priority over the signified and that the meaning is constituted through the relation between signifiers (Thom 1981). While Lacan argues that this accords with de Saussure’s rejection of language as a name-giving system, or a theory of labelling assuming that the signified was a thing in itself rather than a concept, he also modifies de Saussure by positing that meaning does not inhere in representation but is produced through the relations between signifiers and the way in which those signifiers relate to each other in the unconscious. To understand how this works in further detail, we need to understand something more about the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious and how Lacan modifies it. Lacan argued that signification carried the universal fantasies that lie at the heart of culture, such that culture is composed of symbolic systems of patriarchy, the law of the father, that have cultural reality but are founded upon the fantasies through which the human subject is constituted. In this way Lacan claimed to have an account of the constitution of subjectivity that was also an account of the production of culture. It was therefore profoundly antidualist. In order to explain how Lacan achieved this, it is necessary to explain how he reworked some of Freud’s basic concepts and how he opposed other psychoanalytic work since Freud that had sought to find psychological underpinnings for the concept of the autonomous subject. Freud posited the concept of psychical reality as being central to the way in which we are formed in and through the world around us. He argued that everything from birth is shot through with fantasy, not in the sense of fantasy as opposed to reality, but in terms of a necessary fantasizing by the infant from the moment of birth. In simple terms Freud argued that the infant cannot be attended to, fed, held, for twenty-four hours a day. Inevitably, therefore, the infant experiences,

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albeit in its body, the distress of absence, of loss. Since comforting the infant for all of this time is impossible, Freud posits this sense of loss as an essential part of the human condition. To fill in the gap created by this loss, Freud proposes that the infant itself fantasizes the object of absence. He describes this as the hallucination of the absent breast. It is in this sense that he develops the concept of wish fulfilment and psychical reality, for if the infant is able to create in its own mind the satisfaction of the breast, this fantasy defends against the experienced loss. In that sense, he proposes that all subsequent experiences of presence and absence are lived through that defensive organization. So psychical reality becomes the way in which we understand the world through the lens of our defences. If fantasy is inaugurated as a defensive structure, it follows that the idea of unconscious defences against pain, anxiety, loss and so forth are part and parcel of the necessary way in which the human subject has to operate. Later Freud posits that the child, as it grows up, tries to master in fantasy the presence and and absence of the mother. He gives an example of a child playing with a cotton reel, rolling the reel away and saying ‘gone’, then rolling it back saying ‘here’. Freud understands this as an attempt in fantasy to control the presence and absence of the mother, who can after all come and go apparently at will. But in addition to this there is the issue of where she goes to. It is the sense that there is another, the father who takes away the mother’s attention that inaugurates, especially for the boy, a sense of rivalry that ends in the castration and Oedipus complexes (see, for example, Mitchell 1974 for a fuller introduction). Lacan reworks these concepts in a number of important ways. To begin with, using structural linguistics, he reintreprets Freud’s ideas of manifest and latent content. What Freud (1990) argued was that dreams present ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ and that the dream thoughts we remember on waking are the surface or manifest content, the latent content, or deeper unconscious meaning, lurking beneath. Lacan reworked this using the linguistic idea of two poles of language, synchronic and diachronic, arguing that metaphor and metonomy provided the basis for a linguistic interpretation of the unconscious. Material was held in the unconscious in chains of associated signifiers instead of chains of association, which is the idea that Freud had used. Let us explore this by looking at an example of dream interpretation. Thom (1981) cites the example of a dream that he argues supports Lacan’s idea that the unconscious is structured like a language. It is a complicated analysis and not one that can easily be presented here, but

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what is important is that the analysis pieces together fragment held in the unconscious through their phonological relations. The dreamer, Philippe, tells the following account of his dream to his analyst: The deserted square of a small town; it is unfamiliar, I am looking for something. Liliane appears, barefoot – I don’t know her – she says to me: it’s such a long time since I’ve seen such fine sand. We are in a forest and the trees seem curiously coloured, with bright and simple colours. I think to myself that there must be plenty of animals in this forest, and just as I am about to say it, a unicorn crosses our path; all three of us walk towards a clearing that is visible down below. (Thom 1981: 448)

To understand this dream, which was recounted in French, we need to examine the French phonological relations between some of the words Philippe splits up. For example, he recalls his aunt, who was called Lili by her husband, licorne, the French for unicorn, place, the French for square or place, and plage, the French for beach. What Philippe the dreamer recalls is a complex web of relations between the fact that he was thirsty when going to bed before his dream, childhood memories of relations with his aunt Lili and her jokes about his childish ‘Lili, j’ai soif ’ (‘Lili, I’m thirsty’) on a beach and so forth. Lili is phonologically close to the French for lolo, a childish name for breast/milk. It is these relations, Thom argues, that make the links in the unconscious through which the relations of desire are constituted. It is through the phonological relations – Lili and Lolo, for example – that layers of meaning are uncovered. It is this kind of analysis (which is developed by Thom in enormous detail) that allows Lacan to argue that the building blocks of the unconscious processes are, in fact, relations of signification. In addition to this, Lacan reworks Freud’s basic idea about wish fulfilment and hallucination. He proposes that because the infant has to experience satisfaction (the mother comes, the breast and food are there), but this is always followed by loss, satisfaction contains loss, producing a desire that exceeds the demand for satisfaction. Because loss is inevitable, so is desire. It is desire which, for Lacan, is the motor of culture, that which drives it along and leads to the inevitable production of the law of the father in patriarchy. This idea of the unfulfillability of desire has been understood by many as part of Lacan’s basic pessimism about the human condition. This is partly because it so strongly opposes humanist readings of Freud in which satisfaction is possible if, in Winnicot’s terms, the mother is ‘good enough’, leading to the sense of the bolstering of the ego against loss and a strong, bounded, autonomous subject.

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Lacan proposes that the infant deals with wish-fulfilment fantasies by means of a mechanism that he calls the Imaginary. It is this which was invoked by Althusser, because Lacan uses the image of a mirror that the mother metaphorically holds up to the child and in which he senses control and a feeling of his own bodily unity, that he is a bounded, whole person. This mirror, which the mother helps to create, is an illusion, the Cartesian illusion of the rational unitary subject. Althusser and those following him made much of the mirror stage and the Imaginary Order because it was here, it could be argued, that Imaginary identities were created inside ideology. Hollywood films, for example, became understood as prime examples of the Imaginary in that they constructed enticing identities. We will return to this later. For Lacan, however, this Imaginary was the realm of wish fulfilment in which the infant could imagine that he (sic) had the mother all to himself and was, in Lacan’s terms, the object of his mother’s desire. But this cosy dyad was a wish-fulfilment fantasy. There was always something that took the mother’s attention away. Lacan posited that this something was the third term, the paternal metaphor. By this he meant that we are not necessarily talking literally about the child’s father but about that which, in culture, is paternal, patriarchal. It is this which takes the mother’s attention, which is destined to break the intimacy of the fantasy couple, a fantasy that must be broken in order for the child to be able to fully enter culture, the Symbolic Order. It is easy to see that cultural and media theorists made much of ideology as the Imaginary Order, with its creation of fantasy identities. In this scenario, the post-1968 workers were trapped in the Imaginary and saw the world around them only through the infantile fantasies of bourgeois ideology. To succeed they had to progress to the Symbolic Order, where they could see the fantasies of culture for the fictional constructions that they were. This approach was central to much of what then followed as media education, in which children and students were taught to deconstruct films and advertisements, for example. This idea was both supremely rational, seeming to forget the underpinning of desire that was central to Lacan, that is, that while it might be possible to deconstruct, this did not stop the longing for the loss to be made good. On the other hand materiality and economic exploitation have for workers disappeared. Reality, in Lacan’s account, remains only through that which resists signification, so the workers trapped in the Imaginary begin to resemble the familiar masses caught in infantile gratification that characterized, for example, the Frankfurt School’s earlier take-up of Freud.

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To enter the Symbolic Order was for Lacan to enter the law of the father, which is how he explained the castration complex. The law of the father is what creates patriarchal culture, itself running on the motor of desire. As we shall see later, Lacan believed this patriarchy to be inevitable, so this was not a very revolutionary theory. He also argued that since all of this rested on a fantasy of power over the mother, the phallus was the inevitable fantasy, the signifier of signifiers. Woman then was the central fantasy of all. Lacan was fond of expounding how the phallus was in fact only the signifier of the symbolic power invested in the law of the father; the phallus is a fraud, he said. So the apparently solid power of patriarchy rests upon the little boy’s defence against the inevitable loss of his mother and his unfulfillable, taboo, incestuous desire to be the object of her desire. But Lacan’s critique of patriarchal power is double edged, for the moment he announces it to be a fraud, he also declares its inevitability. Because he argues that signification is produced in a patriarchal mode, with the phallus as the signifier of signifiers, he takes the signifier, woman, to be constituted only as the object of that fantasy, hence his infamous proclamation that ‘woman does not exist’ except as symptom and myth of male fantasy, accompanied by his crossing out of the signifier woman. We will go into this in more detail in due course. In some ways the masses appear in this approach to be even more trapped in infantile wish fulfilment (cf. Walkerdine 1997). And indeed, as in Freud, only a move to rationality will save them. For Lacan this means a move to the Symbolic Order, that is, the symbolic system, a pre-established linguistic order in which all sociality operates. This idea develops the work of Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist who understood all social relations as being contained within laws that govern all societies and are symbolic in nature. Although of course Lacan was certainly no Marxist, and Althusser adapted his theory to fit his needs, the Working Class remains a shadowy figure in this analysis. For Lacan, all human subjects, and not simply the working class, had to make the move to the Symbolic Order, but the fact remains that Althusser’s reworking leaves a strong sense that, as with Freud, the working class are trapped inside infantile pleasures and desires (codified as symbolic laws and systems operating as both ideological systems and unconscious processes) and unwilling to give them up. Around this time two important developments occurred in the approach to media studies: screen theory and media education.

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Screen theory What came to be known as screen theory was the use of psychoanalysis to interpret films, which was made famous by the British film journal Screen in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Taking seriously Althusser’s take on the media and popular culture meant that there was a concerted attempt to understand how particular specular identities were constructed in films, especially of course Hollywood movies. Typically, writers would construct Oedipal analyses of movies, demonstrating how the film produced modes of identification allowing Imaginary scenarios of wish fulfilment to take place. Cowie (1997) explains how this is taken to work: specific to the cinema as visual performance is that all the spectators see from the same position – everyone sees Garbo’s face as a profile – but the point of view will be continually changing: now close-up, now long shot, now from this character’s position, now from another’s. In other words, the spectators look is aligned and made identical to another look, the camera’s which has gone before it, and already organized the scene. The spectator thus identifies with the look of the camera and becomes the punctual source of that look which brings into existence the film itself, as if it was one’s own look that the film unfolds before one in the cinema. (p. 100)

Metz (1982) adds: And it is true that as he identifies with himself as look, the spectator can do no other than identify with the camera, too, which has looked before him at what he is now looking at and whose stationing (= framing) determines the vanishing point. (p. 149)

Cowie argues that, with this statement, Metz locks it all together by arguing that the misrecognition of the mirror phase is allied directly to the cinematic signifier in the identification with the camera – hence the same illusion of control and mastery that presents the cinema as an apparatus of the Imaginary. In this sense then what people were talking about here was what was described as ‘a theory of the subject’. Because what was being implied was a psychological as well as a social process, the underlying structure of subjectivity was taken to be universal. It was common to describe the subject as being constituted or produced in the text. This was to make a strong distinction between this version of the subject

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and the one assuming that a pregiven psychological subject was made social and that films and texts simply described that subject in a truthful or stereotyped or distorted fashion. It became clear, however, that such an account also presented a subject, which was passive and so deeply determined that there was very little movement outside the bounds of the text. The masses were still not making the revolution but this time because they were trapped in the identities created in the Dream Factory, identities that tied into their deepest infantile desires and refused to let them grow up. Deconstructing the media texts, however, still showed little way out except by a process of deconstructive intellectualization.

Media education In media education, often represented by the journal Screen Education, a view emerged arguing that media education should teach students the workings of the media so that they would no longer be caught up in the desire of identification (what Laura Mulvey, 1975, called a politics of passionate detachment). Such approaches, however, often introduced mass psychopathology by the back door, implying that students who liked mainstream media must be at fault, a problem which Judith Williamson (1978) encountered when she was teaching media studies to a class of further education students. She argued that although they could deconstruct an advert at five paces, being very clear about how the particular images, subject positions and so forth were produced, the students actually liked the advertisements and identified strongly with them, even though they knew them to be fiction. How then to explain this? Many cultural theorists began profoundly to oppose screen theory, as we have seen earlier with the views of Morley. Others wanted to find the positive aspects of enjoyment and pleasure rather than understanding the theory as some kind of central ideological problem that should be overcome, though even here they usually wanted to understand such media and interpretations as progressive and therefore potentially radical for the masses (see Fiske 1982; Walkerdine 1997). However, as we have been at pains to point out, this ideological problem revolved around a question of psychology – indeed a social depth psychology – which allowed the bringing onto the stage of certain important issues concerning unconscious processes, but which certainly did not move in any way away from the problem first articu-

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lated in psychology and the social sciences at the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of the suggestible working class. British cultural studies deeply opposed the idea of the passive subject. While this had originally taken as its target effects, as well as uses and gratification, theories in media studies, Althusser, Lacan and screen theory also came to be understood as producing this overgeneral passive subject. Psychoanalysis was being taken up in a big way by some and came to be an important strand in cultural feminism, to which we will turn in the next chapter, even if it became strongly opposed in cultural studies itself.

Chapter 5 Feminism, psychoanalysis and the media

In this chapter we will outline in more detail some of the assumptions that Lacan was making in his theorizing of the unconscious and examine their uptake in feminism and media studies in the 1970s. We will also explore some of the critiques of this work that led to its rejection by audience research.

Basic concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis Lacan’s work was used to critique the idea of individual/society dualism, that is, a pregiven psychological subject made social. The subject, said Lacan, is fundamentally split, and we can never ever know the whole truth about the subject because the unconscious constantly eludes us. The Cartesian idea of the subject – the cognitive and rational self who knows that ‘he’ exists because he can think – is, according to the Lacanian view, an elaborate fiction, or, as Pecheux would have it, a forgetting. What Lacan is interested in is in how this fiction of an autonomous self is accomplished. That notion was of course centrally important to Althusser, who wished to show the fictional nature of interpellated identities. To do this he utilized the work of two structuralists, the anthropologist LéviStrauss and the linguist de Saussure. From Lévi-Strauss he took as central universals of kinship structure, which argued that ‘the law of the father’ was a structure, fundamental to all cultures. This structure was expressed in what was called ‘the law of exogamy’, the exchange of women by men. This is best expressed in our own culture as the giving away of the women in marriage by the father to the future husband. For Lacan, this law of the father was founded upon a fundamental 70

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fantasy, the fantasy of patriarchy, of the symbolic power of the penis as phallus, invested as law, authority. To take this notion further, he used the structural linguistics of de Saussure, which argued for an arbitrary relation between the signifier and signified. However, where de Saussure asserted the primary of the signified (s) over the signifier (S), usually represented as a fraction, s S Lacan inverted the relation, stressing the primacy of the signifier. Thom (1981) argues that the formula is inverted because Lacan holds that the signifier has priority over the signified and that the meaning is constituted through the relation between signifiers (Thom 1981). While Lacan argues that this accords with de Saussure’s rejection of language as a name-giving system, or a theory of labelling assuming that the signified was a thing in itself rather than a concept, he also modifies de Saussure by positing that meaning does not inhere in representation but is produced through the relations between signifiers and the way in which those signifiers relate to each other in the unconscious. To understand how this works in further detail, we need to understand something more about the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious and how Lacan modifies it. Lacan argued that signification carried the universal fantasies that lie at the heart of culture, such that culture is composed of symbolic systems of patriarchy, the law of the father, that have cultural reality but are founded upon the fantasies through which the human subject is constituted. In this way Lacan claimed to have an account of the constitution of subjectivity that was also an account of the production of culture. It was therefore profoundly antidualist. In order to explain how Lacan achieved this, it is necessary to explain how he reworked some of Freud’s basic concepts and how he opposed other psychoanalytic work since Freud that had sought to find psychological underpinnings for the concept of the autonomous subject. Freud posited the concept of psychical reality as being central to the way in which we are formed in and through the world around us. He argued that everything from birth is shot through with fantasy, not in the sense of fantasy as opposed to reality, but in terms of a necessary fantasizing by the infant from the moment of birth. In simple terms Freud argued that the infant cannot be attended to, fed, held, for twenty-four hours a day. Inevitably, therefore, the infant experiences,

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albeit in its body, the distress of absence, of loss. Since comforting the infant for all of this time is impossible, Freud posits this sense of loss as an essential part of the human condition. To fill in the gap created by this loss, Freud proposes that the infant itself fantasizes the object of absence. He describes this as the hallucination of the absent breast. It is in this sense that he develops the concept of wish fulfilment and psychical reality, for if the infant is able to create in its own mind the satisfaction of the breast, this fantasy defends against the experienced loss. In that sense, he proposes that all subsequent experiences of presence and absence are lived through that defensive organization. So psychical reality becomes the way in which we understand the world through the lens of our defences. If fantasy is inaugurated as a defensive structure, it follows that the idea of unconscious defences against pain, anxiety, loss and so forth are part and parcel of the necessary way in which the human subject has to operate. Later Freud posits that the child, as it grows up, tries to master in fantasy the presence and and absence of the mother. He gives an example of a child playing with a cotton reel, rolling the reel away and saying ‘gone’, then rolling it back saying ‘here’. Freud understands this as an attempt in fantasy to control the presence and absence of the mother, who can after all come and go apparently at will. But in addition to this there is the issue of where she goes to. It is the sense that there is another, the father who takes away the mother’s attention that inaugurates, especially for the boy, a sense of rivalry that ends in the castration and Oedipus complexes (see, for example, Mitchell 1974 for a fuller introduction). Lacan reworks these concepts in a number of important ways. To begin with, using structural linguistics, he reintreprets Freud’s ideas of manifest and latent content. What Freud (1990) argued was that dreams present ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ and that the dream thoughts we remember on waking are the surface or manifest content, the latent content, or deeper unconscious meaning, lurking beneath. Lacan reworked this using the linguistic idea of two poles of language, synchronic and diachronic, arguing that metaphor and metonomy provided the basis for a linguistic interpretation of the unconscious. Material was held in the unconscious in chains of associated signifiers instead of chains of association, which is the idea that Freud had used. Let us explore this by looking at an example of dream interpretation. Thom (1981) cites the example of a dream that he argues supports Lacan’s idea that the unconscious is structured like a language. It is a complicated analysis and not one that can easily be presented here, but

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what is important is that the analysis pieces together fragment held in the unconscious through their phonological relations. The dreamer, Philippe, tells the following account of his dream to his analyst: The deserted square of a small town; it is unfamiliar, I am looking for something. Liliane appears, barefoot – I don’t know her – she says to me: it’s such a long time since I’ve seen such fine sand. We are in a forest and the trees seem curiously coloured, with bright and simple colours. I think to myself that there must be plenty of animals in this forest, and just as I am about to say it, a unicorn crosses our path; all three of us walk towards a clearing that is visible down below. (Thom 1981: 448)

To understand this dream, which was recounted in French, we need to examine the French phonological relations between some of the words Philippe splits up. For example, he recalls his aunt, who was called Lili by her husband, licorne, the French for unicorn, place, the French for square or place, and plage, the French for beach. What Philippe the dreamer recalls is a complex web of relations between the fact that he was thirsty when going to bed before his dream, childhood memories of relations with his aunt Lili and her jokes about his childish ‘Lili, j’ai soif ’ (‘Lili, I’m thirsty’) on a beach and so forth. Lili is phonologically close to the French for lolo, a childish name for breast/milk. It is these relations, Thom argues, that make the links in the unconscious through which the relations of desire are constituted. It is through the phonological relations – Lili and Lolo, for example – that layers of meaning are uncovered. It is this kind of analysis (which is developed by Thom in enormous detail) that allows Lacan to argue that the building blocks of the unconscious processes are, in fact, relations of signification. In addition to this, Lacan reworks Freud’s basic idea about wish fulfilment and hallucination. He proposes that because the infant has to experience satisfaction (the mother comes, the breast and food are there), but this is always followed by loss, satisfaction contains loss, producing a desire that exceeds the demand for satisfaction. Because loss is inevitable, so is desire. It is desire which, for Lacan, is the motor of culture, that which drives it along and leads to the inevitable production of the law of the father in patriarchy. This idea of the unfulfillability of desire has been understood by many as part of Lacan’s basic pessimism about the human condition. This is partly because it so strongly opposes humanist readings of Freud in which satisfaction is possible if, in Winnicot’s terms, the mother is ‘good enough’, leading to the sense of the bolstering of the ego against loss and a strong, bounded, autonomous subject.

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Lacan proposes that the infant deals with wish-fulfilment fantasies by means of a mechanism that he calls the Imaginary. It is this which was invoked by Althusser, because Lacan uses the image of a mirror that the mother metaphorically holds up to the child and in which he senses control and a feeling of his own bodily unity, that he is a bounded, whole person. This mirror, which the mother helps to create, is an illusion, the Cartesian illusion of the rational unitary subject. Althusser and those following him made much of the mirror stage and the Imaginary Order because it was here, it could be argued, that Imaginary identities were created inside ideology. Hollywood films, for example, became understood as prime examples of the Imaginary in that they constructed enticing identities. We will return to this later. For Lacan, however, this Imaginary was the realm of wish fulfilment in which the infant could imagine that he (sic) had the mother all to himself and was, in Lacan’s terms, the object of his mother’s desire. But this cosy dyad was a wish-fulfilment fantasy. There was always something that took the mother’s attention away. Lacan posited that this something was the third term, the paternal metaphor. By this he meant that we are not necessarily talking literally about the child’s father but about that which, in culture, is paternal, patriarchal. It is this which takes the mother’s attention, which is destined to break the intimacy of the fantasy couple, a fantasy that must be broken in order for the child to be able to fully enter culture, the Symbolic Order. It is easy to see that cultural and media theorists made much of ideology as the Imaginary Order, with its creation of fantasy identities. In this scenario, the post-1968 workers were trapped in the Imaginary and saw the world around them only through the infantile fantasies of bourgeois ideology. To succeed they had to progress to the Symbolic Order, where they could see the fantasies of culture for the fictional constructions that they were. This approach was central to much of what then followed as media education, in which children and students were taught to deconstruct films and advertisements, for example. This idea was both supremely rational, seeming to forget the underpinning of desire that was central to Lacan, that is, that while it might be possible to deconstruct, this did not stop the longing for the loss to be made good. On the other hand materiality and economic exploitation have for workers disappeared. Reality, in Lacan’s account, remains only through that which resists signification, so the workers trapped in the Imaginary begin to resemble the familiar masses caught in infantile gratification that characterized, for example, the Frankfurt School’s earlier take-up of Freud.

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To enter the Symbolic Order was for Lacan to enter the law of the father, which is how he explained the castration complex. The law of the father is what creates patriarchal culture, itself running on the motor of desire. As we shall see later, Lacan believed this patriarchy to be inevitable, so this was not a very revolutionary theory. He also argued that since all of this rested on a fantasy of power over the mother, the phallus was the inevitable fantasy, the signifier of signifiers. Woman then was the central fantasy of all. Lacan was fond of expounding how the phallus was in fact only the signifier of the symbolic power invested in the law of the father; the phallus is a fraud, he said. So the apparently solid power of patriarchy rests upon the little boy’s defence against the inevitable loss of his mother and his unfulfillable, taboo, incestuous desire to be the object of her desire. But Lacan’s critique of patriarchal power is double edged, for the moment he announces it to be a fraud, he also declares its inevitability. Because he argues that signification is produced in a patriarchal mode, with the phallus as the signifier of signifiers, he takes the signifier, woman, to be constituted only as the object of that fantasy, hence his infamous proclamation that ‘woman does not exist’ except as symptom and myth of male fantasy, accompanied by his crossing out of the signifier woman. We will go into this in more detail in due course. In some ways the masses appear in this approach to be even more trapped in infantile wish fulfilment (cf. Walkerdine 1997). And indeed, as in Freud, only a move to rationality will save them. For Lacan this means a move to the Symbolic Order, that is, the symbolic system, a pre-established linguistic order in which all sociality operates. This idea develops the work of Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist who understood all social relations as being contained within laws that govern all societies and are symbolic in nature. Although of course Lacan was certainly no Marxist, and Althusser adapted his theory to fit his needs, the Working Class remains a shadowy figure in this analysis. For Lacan, all human subjects, and not simply the working class, had to make the move to the Symbolic Order, but the fact remains that Althusser’s reworking leaves a strong sense that, as with Freud, the working class are trapped inside infantile pleasures and desires (codified as symbolic laws and systems operating as both ideological systems and unconscious processes) and unwilling to give them up. Around this time two important developments occurred in the approach to media studies: screen theory and media education.

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Screen theory What came to be known as screen theory was the use of psychoanalysis to interpret films, which was made famous by the British film journal Screen in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Taking seriously Althusser’s take on the media and popular culture meant that there was a concerted attempt to understand how particular specular identities were constructed in films, especially of course Hollywood movies. Typically, writers would construct Oedipal analyses of movies, demonstrating how the film produced modes of identification allowing Imaginary scenarios of wish fulfilment to take place. Cowie (1997) explains how this is taken to work: specific to the cinema as visual performance is that all the spectators see from the same position – everyone sees Garbo’s face as a profile – but the point of view will be continually changing: now close-up, now long shot, now from this character’s position, now from another’s. In other words, the spectators look is aligned and made identical to another look, the camera’s which has gone before it, and already organized the scene. The spectator thus identifies with the look of the camera and becomes the punctual source of that look which brings into existence the film itself, as if it was one’s own look that the film unfolds before one in the cinema. (p. 100)

Metz (1982) adds: And it is true that as he identifies with himself as look, the spectator can do no other than identify with the camera, too, which has looked before him at what he is now looking at and whose stationing (= framing) determines the vanishing point. (p. 149)

Cowie argues that, with this statement, Metz locks it all together by arguing that the misrecognition of the mirror phase is allied directly to the cinematic signifier in the identification with the camera – hence the same illusion of control and mastery that presents the cinema as an apparatus of the Imaginary. In this sense then what people were talking about here was what was described as ‘a theory of the subject’. Because what was being implied was a psychological as well as a social process, the underlying structure of subjectivity was taken to be universal. It was common to describe the subject as being constituted or produced in the text. This was to make a strong distinction between this version of the subject

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and the one assuming that a pregiven psychological subject was made social and that films and texts simply described that subject in a truthful or stereotyped or distorted fashion. It became clear, however, that such an account also presented a subject, which was passive and so deeply determined that there was very little movement outside the bounds of the text. The masses were still not making the revolution but this time because they were trapped in the identities created in the Dream Factory, identities that tied into their deepest infantile desires and refused to let them grow up. Deconstructing the media texts, however, still showed little way out except by a process of deconstructive intellectualization.

Media education In media education, often represented by the journal Screen Education, a view emerged arguing that media education should teach students the workings of the media so that they would no longer be caught up in the desire of identification (what Laura Mulvey, 1975, called a politics of passionate detachment). Such approaches, however, often introduced mass psychopathology by the back door, implying that students who liked mainstream media must be at fault, a problem which Judith Williamson (1978) encountered when she was teaching media studies to a class of further education students. She argued that although they could deconstruct an advert at five paces, being very clear about how the particular images, subject positions and so forth were produced, the students actually liked the advertisements and identified strongly with them, even though they knew them to be fiction. How then to explain this? Many cultural theorists began profoundly to oppose screen theory, as we have seen earlier with the views of Morley. Others wanted to find the positive aspects of enjoyment and pleasure rather than understanding the theory as some kind of central ideological problem that should be overcome, though even here they usually wanted to understand such media and interpretations as progressive and therefore potentially radical for the masses (see Fiske 1982; Walkerdine 1997). However, as we have been at pains to point out, this ideological problem revolved around a question of psychology – indeed a social depth psychology – which allowed the bringing onto the stage of certain important issues concerning unconscious processes, but which certainly did not move in any way away from the problem first articu-

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lated in psychology and the social sciences at the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of the suggestible working class. British cultural studies deeply opposed the idea of the passive subject. While this had originally taken as its target effects, as well as uses and gratification, theories in media studies, Althusser, Lacan and screen theory also came to be understood as producing this overgeneral passive subject. Psychoanalysis was being taken up in a big way by some and came to be an important strand in cultural feminism, to which we will turn in the next chapter, even if it became strongly opposed in cultural studies itself.

Chapter 6 Psychoanalysis and feminism

Psychoanalysis is one of the few places in which it is not simply assumed that women fit automatically into place. (Rose 1983: 19)

In the last chapter we discussed the importance of the work of Jacques Lacan in the development of work on ideology. In the same period, second-wave feminism began with American women taking a leaf out of the civil rights movement, arguing not for a mass movement led by a revolutionary party, as in Marxism, but for a wide-based political movement without any clear organization or structure. This form of political action was crucial to new ways of thinking because it was one of the first breaks with traditional left, male-dominated party politics. Central to this early feminism was the concept of consciousness raising. Groups formed in which women would discuss their situation and ‘raise their consciousness’ about the oppression they, as women, were suffering. It is interesting therefore to note the way in which, once more, psychological transformation was understood as lying at the heart of the political process. The idea of a raised consciousness was of course not a million miles away from a true or revolutionary one, but in placing the consciousness of one’s own situation at the heart of political change, the recalcitrance of the mass mind once again appears. It is not that we are questioning here the goals of exploring the personal effectivity of oppression, but rather that we are inviting the reader to think about the way in which the key to political transformation is still understood as a problem of psychological transformation, of recognition as the key to change, although being, of course, far from the only key. Without it change would nevertheless not be taken as being able to happen. Ernst and Goodison (1981) put it this way: 79

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The debate soon, however, extended not only to conscious processes, but also to the unconscious: the place of unconscious defences, fantasies and desires in the making of the feminine. Femininity had traditionally been understood psychologically in terms of the concepts of role and stereotype. Such work usually assumed that the achievement of femininity occurred through the imitation of significant women in the lives of little girls; so girls became women through copying their mothers, and such roles were susceptible to stereotyping, understood as biased and distorted judgements about what women were really like (similar to the discussion in Geraghty 1996, see Chapter 3). It would be easy to see why such accounts could be taken as blaming women, but, more than this, they did not fit at all with the new work on texts or discourse, which put forward the idea of the inscription of subjects, in which ‘reality’ became a problematic concept. In addition, it is clear that femininity is not a simple matter of imitation, nor indeed an area from which emotional processes are absent. In 1974 Juliet Mitchell wrote a book entitled Psychoanalysis and Feminism. The importance of this step cannot be overemphasized, because Mitchell used Freud and Lacan to examine the place of unconscious processes in the making of the feminine. This is especially significant because feminists such as Shulamith Firestone had been fiercely critical of Freud as patriarchal, rounding on concepts like penis envy. So here was a feminist actually proposing that Freud should be taken seriously and was moreover centrally important for

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feminism. Indeed, Mitchell’s account stressed that what Freud was arguing was what feminists had argued all along: namely, that if the penis is the symbol of male power, women are denied access to this and are offered, and both have to accept and come to desire, a baby as a substitute. She argued that woman is restricted by society, neurosis becoming the symptom of that restriction. In this way then, Mitchell proposed psychoanalysis as a reading of women’s oppression, or, as Jacqueline Rose (1983: 19) later argued, ‘psychoanalysis is one of the few places in which it is not simply assumed that women fit automatically into place’. In the same year, at of course the time at which screen theory was in its heyday, another feminist, Laura Mulvey, wrote a hugely important piece on feminism and film theory – Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Her work both developed and critiqued existing screen theory because she was critical of the masculinist assumptions of a simple Oedipal analysis of a film. Mulvey argued that women were not well or badly represented in Hollywood film, but rather that film was a site of fantasy, a place in which woman as a sign was created and read. To understand this fully, it is necessary to recall Lacan’s proposal that woman does not exist except as symptom and myth of male fantasy. This does not mean that women do not exist but that we can only ever know ‘woman’ through the signs and discourses through which she is created as an object. For Lacan those discourses are shot through with fantasy, the fantasy in question belonging with masculinity. It is the fantasy of the phallic order, the defence against the pain of the loss of the mother, which surfaces as a fantasy that the phallus is omnipotent, self-created: the fantasy of the law of the father. As part of that fantasy, the woman is envisaged not as being powerful, having the ability to come and go at will, leaving the dependent baby, but as herself dependent on the all-powerful man. This is, in psychoanalytic terms, a clear defence, because it inverts what is actually happening and turns it into something defending against the pain of the loss. Mulvey argued that ‘woman’ in Hollywood movies was presented as just such a figure: defenceless, longing to get her man, the powerful woman usually being understood as evil and being killed off. Following Lacan, what Mulvey was doing was to suggest that it was not ever a question of Hollywood movies simply being a place on which stereotyped versions of femininity, which did not accord with the reality of what women were really like, were presented. Instead, such movies were some of the ideological places in which the

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Imaginary femininity was created. However, because all subjectivity was created through the medium of signs, there was no place in the social world in which there existed a reality that escaped those fantasies. What followed was that, even for women themselves, there was no way out of the femininity as a fiction, created through male fantasy. For Lacan this was the effect of the law of the father, the inevitable and universal, which meant that there was no essential feminine, no fantasies specific to women themselves, because such a concept was unthinkable. Mulvey was actually not as pessimistic. She opted for a different solution in which the pleasure that women experienced in these oppressive fantasies could be replaced with what she called ‘a politics of passionate detachment’. Mulvey saw that avant-garde film-making, typical of the 1970s, the kind of film technique that showed how films were made, made the edits clear for example, would reveal to women the constructed nature of these fantasies so that they would be able passionately to detach themselves from the filmic identities so oppressively created. Interesting as Mulvey’s idea certainly was, such a notion was clearly idealist since for one thing it depended upon an educated audience who could read such signs, it assumed that the process of watching tied into emotional and unconscious processes but that somehow the act of passionate detachment was a fully conscious process, not invested with fantasies, desires and defences. It is not surprising then that even though her paper was so incredibly important in raising this issue in a very new way, it was nevertheless open to all kinds of criticism. The critiques were of basically two kinds. On the one hand there were those, mostly French, psychoanalytic feminists who argued that Lacan was completely wrong about the possibility of fantasies essential to women, and therefore wrong about femininity. On the other there were those who wanted to criticize Mulvey’s ideas about the pleasure of the female spectator or viewer, arguing that such pleasure was not wrong or to be surpassed. It is to those two critiques that we will now turn.

French psychoanalytic feminisms Lucia Irigaray is a French analyst whose work was first translated into English in the pages of Ideology and Consciousness. In the light of the above argument, it is her objections to Freud’s account of feminine sexuality that are most illuminating. In her two volumes, Speculum of

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the Other Woman (1985a) and This Sex which is not One (1985b), Irigaray famously opposed Lacan’s use of semiotics to understand the primacy of the phallus as the signifier of signifiers. She proposed an entirely Other semiotic, based not on the single phallus or the single male orgasm but on a multiplicity of orgasms, lips and sexual organs. Some of Irigaray’s comments are clearly tongue in cheek, but in terms of a swingeing critique of phallocentrism, they are deadly serious. Indeed, if Lacan can propose that the whole of language is founded upon the phallus, from which woman is excluded and can be only the object rather than origin of discourse, why should Irigaray not posit an entirely other feminine language based on the duality of the lips of the labia. Women, she says, have sex organs just about everywhere. For women then, language and pleasure are not contained or understood singularly, in terms of one zone. Instead, language and pleasure are multiple and fluid, fluid like mother’s milk and menstrual blood. Women’s pleasures and fantasies are thus not described by an Oedipal analysis or by a singular linguistics. In this analysis women can have fantasies of their own, and it is this which breaks the patriarchal law of the father because it constructs those fantasies in anOther, forbidden language, a language that we barely know how to speak yet which is written over the body of woman. The feminine in this analysis is not simply a matter of deconstruction to reveal the constructed nature of the fantasies through which femininity is formed; it is the potential construction of anOther way of thinking: a different metaphysic. It is this that Irigaray discusses at some length. Her opposition to Lacan was to propose not that women were trapped within the patriarchal Symbolic Order but that there was another possible basis to signification, that of multiplicity and fluids rather than the single phallus and single orgasm upon which Lacan bases his entire theory of both language and the unconscious. This approach sounds very attractive because it presents women with a way out of the conundrum that Lacan presents. It was, however, strongly opposed by many women, who understood it as being essentialist (Plaza, 1978), not solving the problem but simply substituting one body for another. This move towards an account favouring women’s bodies and attempting to problematize the masculine has characterized the work of many, but by no means all, women within psychoanalysis (see Mitchell and Rose 1982 for a very partial review.) However, the theme of women’s bodies was continued by other French work, which we will discuss below.

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Catherine Clement and Helene Cixous Clement and Cixous together wrote a book called The Newly Born Woman (1986), in which they develop the concept of écriture feminine, or feminine writing. It can again be seen how this acts as a critique of Lacan’s assertions about the phallocentrism of language. Clement and Cixous base their analysis on the idea of the girl’s experience of her mother’s body as a positive force, allowing the possibility of ‘writing woman’ and therefore of a different account of representation. The debates about this work surfaced most forcefully in relation not to film but to fine art. While Lacanian-inspired artists such as Mary Kelly (1983), for example, argued that, because of the male gaze, it was possible for feminist artists not to present women as objects of art but only to portray them as the fetishes of ‘woman’, others, such as Nancy Spero (1989), were hailed as producing an artistic version of feminine writing – feminine painting. Spero did not desist from presenting images of women and indeed, in one piece of work, she copied figures from Greek friezes in which women carried huge phalluses, as if to make a clear statement about what she thought of Lacan and all his talk of the phallus. Thus, the debate came to consider whether it was possible to present women’s bodies in a way that could not be recuperated through a patriarchal gaze. Some artists and film makers, for example, argued very strongly that women’s bodies were so fetishized that it was impossible to show them, while others tried precisely to invent new ways of writing, presenting. Again and again these women try to specify a difference from Lacan in terms of the issue of the possibility of femininity. And in each case, they conclude that femininity is multiple, dispersed and non-unitary. It does not take long to recognize that these characteristics are the very ones ascribed to subjectivity in postmodernity. Such concepts of femininity then blow open the phallocentrism of European rationality. They offer a profound challenge to a Lacan who, while claiming that the phallus was the biggest fraud and fiction of all, could not countenance that there could be anything other than the law of the father, even given its profoundly fictional and defensive status.

Women’s pleasure It is not surprising that, even given Mulvey’s intentions in producing passionate detachment for women, many women in media studies

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wanted to find another way to talk about women’s pleasure, one that did not understand it as a reactionary force that had to be gone beyond. Such was the antipathy to psychoanalysis that developed in response to Mulvey and Lacan that some women wanted a return to sociology, to clear ethnographically based empirical work, which related to textual analyses of film and televisual texts. To look at women’s pleasure, they argued, it was necessary to examine what women actually did, what they watched and the meanings that they created, actively, through interaction with the texts. In this work then, there was a rejection of the idea that subjects were created in textual relations themselves, and a movement towards a critique of the idea that such overdeterminism could actually describe what happened to all women when watching. This view has a lot in common with the position of Morley, which we described in Chapters 3 and 4, and, more generally, with the anti-psychologism of cultural studies. It is, however, important to note that this work attempted to engage with specificity in that it tried to read off the subjectivities of actual viewers from the film or television text. In that sense it was very important. In addition to this it attempted to counteract the pessimism of the pro-Lacanian position that all representations of women were necessarily a problem for women. In that sense it could also be argued that it moved away from a grand totalizing theory of femininity towards the idea of specific gendered subjectivities within cultural locations. This move is extremely important and cannot be overestimated in its critique of overgeneral theories. However, as we have been at pains to point out, the rejection of screen theory does not mean either that psychological issues become redundant or that psychological theorizing is absent from the assumptions made by these writers. They are at pains to construct a social subject, but they are in danger of bringing back the pregiven psychological subject by the back door. The work is both important and voluminous, and cannot be adequately covered in a volume such as this. Nor would it be fair to suggest that all of the writers neglect the realm of the psychological. It important to point out that screen theory allowed the crucial exploration of socially and culturally located subjectivities, a necessary step, but that the hopes of these writers cannot be accomplished without an understanding of the psychological discourses and practices within which psychology is inscribed, which aid the production of those situated subjectivities. It is this baby that these writers tend to have thrown out with the bathwater of screen theory. We are at pains to begin to point towards a way in which that psychological work might be accomplished.

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It might, however, be useful to summarize the different positions that have been adopted since the concerns over Mulvey’s. Geraghty (1996) provides a very useful summary, and it is on this that we will rely. The pro-psychoanalytic work tended to concentrate on different ways in which the problem of the male gaze could be overcome. So, for example, Mary-Ann Doane et al. (1984) concentrated on the fact that, for a girl or woman, there was no point in denying the reality of her lack of penis, so that the need for voyeurism was absent. The female spectator’s desire, they suggested, could be characterized by narcissism and overidentification. The female spectator wants both to become the image and weep in identification with the predicament of the women in the narrative (Geraghty 1996: 314). Alternative work in particular wanted to place in the frame a number of other extra-cinematic factors. In other words, what these writers were trying to bring to the debate was an understanding of what female viewers brought to the practice of viewing as well as the domestic location of the practices themselves. There is now a great deal of work of this kind that uses various theoretical frameworks to understand these issues, for example Geraghty, (1991) on soap opera, Gray (1992) on video, Stacey (1994) on female fans, Hobson (1990) on office viewing and Ang (1985) on Dallas fans, as well as work focusing on other media, such as Radway’s (1987) study of women readers of Harlequin novels (the US equivalent of the British Mills and Boon books). This body of work is important in being able to specify the particularity of viewing practices and therefore in moving away from a monolithic and overarching subject produced solely within one (film) text. However, all the same criticisms we made earlier about audience research can be lodged at the door of this work. There was another body of work that began to emerge which also questioned this monolithic view of psychoanalysis, and it is to this that we will now turn.

Postmodernity and femininity Another critique of the psychoanalytic work relates to a postmodern rejection of depth explanations. It is necessary in this context briefly to review the work of a number of writers, notably Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway and Judith Butler. Both Braidotti and Butler use psychoanalysis but in a completely different way from the early work. In their own way each of these writers attempts to rework an understanding of femininity in a manner that goes beyond grand

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metanarratives of modernity. By this we mean that femininity is to be understood not as a transcultural and transhistorical concept but as a mode of subjectivity or embodiment that is created in very specific situations and very specific ways. Judith Butler (1990, 1993) develops the concept of performativity, which views gender as a performance created in discourse. In attempting to understand this, Butler uses a blend of poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, specifically reworking concepts of identity and identification, which, as we have seen, have been so influential in screen theory. She particularly discusses the relationship between the identity woman as a phantasmatic site, that is, one that invests a great deal in the possibility that all women are exemplars of woman and that while this may indeed be a fantasy, it is a necessary one in terms of a unity necessary for feminist struggle. For the Lacanians too, of course, woman was a fantasy, and a patriarchal one at that. But for Butler the issue is more about how fantasy operates in particular ways. She refers to the work of Zizek (1989) on ideology. He utilizes Lacan but is interested in understanding how the masses can follow a leader or an ideology while cynically recognizing that this is not the truth. While Butler is not interested in the masses, we can see that the role of consciousness within a political movement, feminism, has been displaced by a more complex psychological project. No longer will the raising of consciousness be enough to recognize one’s oppression as a woman; the category woman itself has to be open to scrutiny. We need therefore to understand how fantasy operates within her schema. The position Butler articulates blends psychoanalysis with poststructuralism and has some affinities with the position taken by Henriques et al. in Changing the Subject (1998). Butler is keen to point out that psychoanalysis as metatheory reproduces that false coherence in the form of story line about infant development where it ought to investigate genealogically exclusionary practices conditioning that particular narrative of identity formation (Butler 1990: 334). She argues that identification is defensive: we take up identifications not only to receive love, but also to deflect it and its dangers; we also take up identifications to facilitate or prohibit our own desires. In each case there is an interpretation at work, a wish and/or fear as well, the effect of a prohibition and a strategy for resolution (1990). Butler adds that one does not have fantasies, and neither is there one who lives them, but instead the fantasies condition and construct the specificity of the gendered subject with the enormously important qualification that

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these fantasies are themselves disciplinary productions of grounding cultural sanctions and taboos. If gender is constituted by identification, and identification is invariably a fantasy within a fantasy, a double figuration, gender is precisely the fantasy enacted by and through corporeal styles that constitute bodily significations. It is here that Butler blends psychoanalysis with Foucault, suggesting that psychical processes are not about originary stories of development but about fantasies embodied within particular discursive formations. It is in this sense that Butler is able to understand gender as being performed through corporeal styles and bodily significations. While this has some affinities with earlier psychoanalytic work on femininity as a masquerade, there is sometimes a temptation, within ‘performative’ work, to understand gender as only surface performance and to ignore the complexity of the psychical, body and cultural relation that Butler proposes. Indeed, there is also sometimes the view that, because gender contains performative elements, we can be whatever we want, that gender is something you can choose to take on and off, much like the choice of clothes one makes in the morning. Such voluntarism misreads the complexity of what Butler is saying. She makes it clear that, following Foucault, fantasies are not internalized but incorporated. Here the use of Foucault connects the fantasies with discipline and regulation, through which the subject is constituted. There is no central psychical process that presents the underlying psychical core of the subject. It is instead the complex fashioning of desire through regulatory processes, which produce subjects, that is at stake here. Butler exemplifies this by reference to work on drag, arguing that drag fully subverts the disjunction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks the expressive model of gender and the notion of true gender identity. Female impersonators appear to be saying on the one hand that while their appearance is feminine, they are masculine underneath, whereas they can also be understood as making the opposite statement – that they appear underneath to be masculine while being feminine inside.

The nomad, the hybrid and the cyborg There are a number of concepts used by Butler, Braidotti and Haraway that are an attempt to move away from essentialism: the idea of a natural and essential femininity as well as a fixity of place.

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Haraway (1991) uses the concept of the cyborg in opposition to the idea of woman as goddess. She wants to draw our attention to the constructedness and monstrousness of femininity, making this a virtue, by arguing that it is only by being a hybrid, a mutant, that we can begin to think up other possible ways of being. Braidotti uses the concept of the nomad to understand the metaphorical placing of women, as in the writing of Virginia Wolf, of having no country. It is by recognizing the impossibility of roots, of fixity, of belonging in a culture riven by movement and migration, that something new can be built on the basis of that absence. In addition to this Haraway understands the possibility of producing knowledges that are situated, local and counter to the metanarratives of patriarchal modernity. It is the local, the specific, the subject created in distinct practices which these writers all favour. We take this to be an important direction in terms of how a different kind of critical psychological media work might be undertaken. In the next chapter we will begin to explore the impact that some of these wider debates had on the academic discipline of psychology. We will also review the theorizings of postmodern writers who, although useful to our argument, still make psychological assumptions in their theorizings.

Chapter 7 Postmodernity and the psychological

While these developments were happening in social theory and cultural and media studies, what was happening in academic psychology? It might seem that we have been describing developments in psychology all along, but it is important to note that academic psychology, in the Anglo-American tradition at least, had taken a very antipsychoanalytic path, as we shall see later. Therefore, the developments we discussed in the last chapter, for example, happened largely outside the framework of psychology and indeed had more impact on sociology departments than on psychology. However, like everything else, psychology was not immune from the politics of the time. During the 1960s, and during the civil rights movement, there were debates about intelligence-opposition to right-wing views that intelligence was inherited and that black children’s intelligence was inferior, there were debates about mental illness, with RD Laing’s classic work on schizophrenia, and there were radical psychologies, typified by David Ingleby’s chapter in Trevor Pateman’s Counter Course in 1972. There were in particular different versions of what ‘radical’ meant, ranging from making psychology more in line with basic and essential human needs (humanism), which were liberationist in inspiration in the sense that they wanted to liberate the ‘real and essential’ psychological subject. Counter to this were the antihumanisms, which sought to explain psychology as being the product of social forces. Marxist psychologies were often of both varieties. A common theme was to understand psychology as a pseudo or false science, to suggest that its pronouncements were ideological and not scientific, and thus the aim of a radical psychology was to expose such falsehoods and work for a true and revolutionary science. 90

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Althusser’s work on ideology, however, made this position much more problematic because he was arguing that ideology was not simply a set of falsehoods but a system of meanings through which human subjects were created. If we compare the implications for psychology with, for example, Martin Richard’s volume The Integration of a Child into a Social World (1974), the differences become obvious. This is how Henriques et al. (1998) characterize them: Given the virtual impossibility of thinking outside the terms generated by dualism, clearly the relation between the two – how society socialises the individual – is a crucial theoretical and practical question. The two terms are mutually indispensable to each other. The individual, as a concept could not exist without its opposite number, society. In the social sciences their relation is almost universally theorized as some sort of interaction. Given that one of its major areas of study involves newborn infants, developmental psychology is particularly sensitive to the problem of how to think about the starting point of development. For Richards, the infant is not fully social, as he is not yet a competent member of a social community. He is, rather, a biological organism with biological propensities and organisation who becomes social through his encounters with social adults. So throughout development there is an essential tension between the biological and the social (p. 1). This extract illustrates well how, once the terms individual and social are brought into play, the two entities are necessarily thought of as antithetical, as exclusive, (although interacting), as separable and even pulling in opposite directions. It also demonstrates how the individual reduces inevitably to the biological essence once its opposite number, the social, has been posed to explain the rest. (pp. 14–15)

Turning to Foucault’s work, the differences are even more profound because Foucault was arguing that there was no simple division between science and ideology as scientific statements themselves were ‘fictions which function in truth’ (1980: 118). As we shall see, this paved the way for the variety of discursive psychologies that followed. The developments proposed by Althusser seemed particularly important to a group of young psychologists and sociologists who began to produce a journal called, appropriately enough, Ideology and Consciousness. This was a moment in Britain in which the new ideas sweeping the left and feminism were being taken up in self-published journals by young academics in a way that seems almost unthinkable today (although publishing on the Internet may in fact be taking up

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this previous idea of self-publication). Around at the same time journals such as Radical Philosophy, Critique of Anthropology, Economy and Society, m/f, Feminist Review and Working Papers in Cultural Studies (from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) sprang up. Almost all of these journals were published and paid for by the editorial groups themselves, being distributed by a radical publishing and distribution network, Radical Publishing Group and Publications Distribution Co-operative. Ideology and Consciousness was one such journal. We would like to quote here from the first issue of that journal to give a clear sense of the critique of both mainstream and radical psychologies that was being proposed. In a section in the first issue on contemporary psychology, the editors end with the following conclusion: A psychology that stresses man cannot be countered, in the name of Marxism, with a sociology that stresses society, a sociology which places the human subject, untheorised as a simple effect. It is for this reason that we would suggest that the issue for a Marxist intervention in this area, for a materialist intervention in this area, is the development of theory, which recognises that the relations between the subject and social formation are those of absolute interiority. Such a theoretical recognition might avoid the twin pitfalls of a psychologism grounded in speculative humanism and an anti-humanism grounded in a form of neo-Kantian idealism. (Adlam et al. 1977: 34)

This comment is important in relation to the points that we are making also about media and cultural theorists’ opposition to Althusser and screen theory. We are arguing that their rejection of psychoanalysis cannot be countered by ‘a sociologism (or culturalism for that matter) that places the human subject as a simple effect’. Failing to theorize the ‘interiority’ of the relations between the social and the subject is what we are countering, whether it is found in psychology or equally in sociology or media and cultural studies. This work signalled a profound criticism of the critical work in psychology that had gone on before, and as time went on the Ideology and Consciousness group moved away from Althusser and towards Foucault, being in fact the first publication in Britain to publish Foucauldian work. So what did this love affair with French theory have to tell us about the state of radical politics and psychology in Britain? And how did such work have any impact on academic psychology?

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French theory was very important to the British left but, in this case, particularly to psychology because, among other things, it stressed the importance of theoretical work. Critical psychology in the AngloSaxon tradition had struggled with the consequences of a strong equation between scientificity and empiricism, and a scepticism in relation to theoretical work. This work was profoundly theoretical (and could indeed be criticized for its lack of attention to empirical detail) and, what is more, took theoretical debate seriously. At that time it was simply not possible to publish a theoretical discussion in a mainstream psychology journal. It is important to note therefore that one of the impacts of this work was that, fifteen years later, journals such as Theory and Psychology actually make theoretical work the object of psychological work, which is itself a huge advance. However, the continental tradition also challenged the enormous Cartesian influence, the dualism of which we spoke earlier. The impact of psychoanalysis was perhaps equally spectacular. Unlike the case in France and indeed the USA, psychoanalysis was not a strong influence in Britain, and it was certainly not taught on psychology courses, except only very marginally. Yet Althusser’s use of Lacan produced a huge burgeoning of interest in psychoanalysis, which not only led to screen theory, but also related to feminist interest following Juliet Mitchell’s famous Psychoanalysis and Feminism in 1974. Sociology and social theory courses started to teach psychoanalysis, and there was an unprecedented interest in psychoanalytic training among left and feminist academics. Latterly, many postgraduate degrees in psychoanalysis have been set up, and psychoanalysis is now taught on at least some undergraduate psychology courses. This is of more than academic interest because it has meant taking very seriously the kinds of critique of the rational unitary subject that were mounted in the 1970s, and it means that the sorts of question we are addressing find a wider and more informed discussion. Before we move on to consider the relationship between postmodernity and psychology, we will explore some of the more general assumptions made by postmodern theorists, who on the surface appear to take issue with traditional psychology.

Psychological concepts in postmodernist cultural theory In this section we want to demonstrate that postmodern cultural theory has, in some cases, not moved as far away from a modernist

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psychology as it likes to claim, examining the use of psychological concepts in the writings of Baudrillard, Lyotard and Jameson. In his well-known work on postmodernity and capitalism, Frederick Jameson utilizes some psychological concepts that come straight out of modernity. He argues, in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), that we can understand postmodern culture and aesthetics in terms of a concept of schizophrenia. It is interesting to note that, although this term is derived from psychiatry, Jameson uses a definition taken from Lacan, which refers to the breakdown of chains of signification, so that signifiers are linked only to others in the present and not to those of the past, the memory. He makes it clear that he does not want to psychologize postmodern culture, yet his use of a psychiatric term disavows the fact that this is precisely what he is doing. He wants to argue that postmodern culture throws us into a sense of a heightened, perpetual present: This present of the world or material signifier comes before the subject with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious charge of affect, here described in the negative terms of anxiety and loss of reality, but which one could just as well imagine in the positive terms of euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity. (Jameson 1991: 27–8)

So, while Jameson disavows psychology, he certainly presents the reader with some pretty psychological experiences. And while he stops short of saying that subjects in the postmodern culture are clinically schizophrenic, we can see here how easy it is to bring in psychology by the back door while at the same time criticizing psychologism. This, as we have seen, is a trope commonly adopted by cultural theorists. The effect of this is to wildly overgeneralize and to prohibit the serious study of precisely what subjectivities are formed within any specific historical and cultural location. As we demonstrated at the beginning of this chapter, hearing voices or seeing visions is itself understood through different discourses depending on historical circumstances. Schizophrenia is a psychiatric concept and indeed implies that, historically in modernity, people were psychologically whole, coherent and integrated (Hacking 1995). This clearly makes a mockery of any critical approach to psychology in which such concepts themselves are produced inside the practices of regulation through which subjects are produced. Even within a mainstream framework, it would be ridiculous to imagine that all subjects were whole and coherent during modernity and are now

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schizophrenic during postmodernity. Jameson’s antidote to schizophrenia is cognitive mapping, which he links to the development of the Internet and cybernetics more generally. This concept again derives from mainstream cognitive science, and to posit a cognitive process as an antidote to a severe psychotic condition, never mind its generalist psychological assumptions, seems little short of absurd. Such pronouncements are, however, not atypical and demonstrate how very few media and cultural theorists are prepared to look at the overgeneralizations they are willing to make, while at the same time roundly criticizing psychology. For example, Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway have their own favourite terms for the new type of postmodern subject (see Chapter 6). At the same time, many cultural theorists dismiss psychology without a second glance. As we saw in Chapter 3, it is unfortunately all too common for cultural theorists to equate psychology with behaviourism, a tradition of work within psychology that has had its radical moments but has not been in favour for rather a long time, and there is an unwillingness to look further. What we are saying here then is that cultural theorists are all too ready to dismiss psychology, while on the one hand making completely questionable psychological assumptions in their own work and displaying a wearisome disinterest in the critical work that has been going on in psychology for a long time, as well as freely adapting terms from psychology to give their work a spurious authenticity. Indeed, since all media and cultural theory deals with subjects and subjectivity, and, as we have said, tends to move towards a sociologism that solves none of the problems of subjectivity, it certainly needs to take the new psychological work seriously.

Baudrillard, Lyotard and postmodernity Although we have argued that psychoanalysis, as it emerged in its postAlthusserian form, was profoundly important to the critique of psychology and social theory that was put forward in the early 1970s, such work can nevertheless be criticized from within a number of newly emerging traditions. Of course, while psychoanalysis challenges the centrality of the rational unitary subject, it remains an approach assuming universals based on a clear sequence of development. Historically, it is possible to chart the emergence and possibility of psychoanalysis, using poststructuralism, just as it is with psychology

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(Armstrong 1983; Rose 1987). These accounts stress the importance of the post-World War One context and how specific events, such as war neuroses (male hysteria), allowed the concept of the mind as a psychic apparatus to re-enter the clinical domain. It is not so much that the ‘unconscious’ was rediscovered by clinical medicine following Freud (1900) but that at different historical times, at different historical moments, the idea of an ethereal space beyond corporeality was specified in different ways. Questions concerning whether there is a meaningful and enhancing (psychological) space beyond the body have been constituted in different ways through different practices, in different spaces and places, that is, as twilight states, stupor, trances, delirium, inspiration, ecstasy and so forth. These practices do not simply describe the objects of which they speak but constitute the meaning of such objects through specific concepts that then become available for public articulation and self-production (cf. Blackman 1994). Theorists of postmodernity have also proposed a number of critiques of the psychological subject of modernity that need to be taken seriously. We will outline those below and go on to discuss the work of Baudrillard in particular. Postmodernity forms the basis of a critique of all grand metanarratives, including those which present masculinity in the form of a rational phallogocentrism as a timeless universal rather than the product of a historically specific European culture. Thus, within this critique, the conception of the subject as knowable, fixed and quantifiable disappears in favour of a subject created inside the very discourses that claim to know ‘him’. Inside modernist discourses there is an important conception of depth. Structuralism, for example, assumes that there is an underlying structure that is the true and underlying reality structuring the surface appearance. Notions of representation as opposed to signification fall within this category, as do psychoanalysis with its manifest and latent content, and Marxism with concepts such as essence and appearance. All of these models imply that surface appearance tells us something that is in fact misleading or distorting, not being the underlying cause of the phenomenon. Such concepts were a central component of, for example, both Marxism and psychoanalysis, as well as structural anthropology, linguistics, structuralist psychology, such as the work of Piaget and so forth. An approach that contends that there is no depth, only surface, clearly represents a huge challenge to a number of disciplines and the underpinnings of many radical approaches. Such is a central claim of postmodernist thinkers, including Baudrillard and

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Lyotard. A summary of the kinds of critique made by these writers is outlined below. 1. The culture of the image dominates, so that all is surface and there is no depth. Indeed, for Baudrillard, all images are simulated and are not representations of actual objects; that relationship has been eroded by methods of electronic imaging that can create works that are not dependent on copying some pregiven real but construct hyperreality within the culture, for example. He calls this ‘the simulacrum’. 2. There is a weakening of historicity and the distinction between public and private space. 3. A fragmentation of subjects occurs, with no sense of continuity and a lack of origin or home since so many people are hybrids. Space takes on a different sense, and since people can be at other ends of the earth within twenty-four hours, there is a sense of dislocation, the concepts of home and community being broken down. 4. The classical bases of theories of ideology, criticized by Althusser, are taken further by the removal of any pretence to an underlying cause ‘in the last instance’. What is created in signification is all that there is. Distinctions between authenticity and inauthenticity no longer have any significance because there is no underlying real or authentic person or concept. 5. The distinction between signifier and signified: they do not simply reflect each other; we are in the logic of the signifier, first proposed by Lacan (see Chapter 5). All is surface. 6. There is no authentic person to be liberated, no self to be uncovered, but instead other narratives who write subjects differently. If we examine in particular the work of Baudrillard, we can see that he builds directly upon the work of the Frankfurt School, especially in his critique of the concept of an alienated self, which was proposed by Marcuse in 1964, and in his notions of the masses, which became the groups of social psychological theory. So, in postmodernity, for Baudrillard, there is no self to be alienated. The concept of alienation implies a pregiven subject, who can, for example, be alienated from their labour so that they cannot take pride in the products of their work. Baudrillard’s pessimism is in fact such that the subject is now

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understood as autistic, marked by silence and a lack of speech; things have gone much further than alienation. It is difficult to know whether Baudrillard means his use of the concept of autism to be literal for, as with Jameson, he has taken a psychiatric concept that refers to a particular form of psychosis. Once again we meet the overgeneralized use of a psychological category in a debate that has apparently moved beyond such generalizations. If Baudrillard means to use the term ‘autism’ metaphorically to signal a profound silence and a lack of speech, there is still a problem over his choice of term. We can, however, also understand this usage as being an allusion to Althusser’s use of Lacan, in which the working class was trapped inside the Imaginary, which is, as we explained in Chapter 4, a wish-fulfilment fantasy of having one’s mother all to oneself. Baudrillard is using an altogether earlier concept: an autistic child is one trapped inside its own silence, unable to get out and form any kind of relationship at all, certainly not with its mother. It is in psychoanalytic terms a psychotic defence and belongs to very early infancy. So we have moved from an image in Marx of a class conscious of itself to one of a class trapped in ideology, the Imaginary, and on to a mass (Baudrillard no longer uses the term ‘class’ precisely because it implies that self-consciousness), but a silent and frozen mass. For him then, the society of the spectacle (Debord 1983) produces a mass that is neither subject nor object, neither Marx’s protoheroic mass nor Le Bon’s threatening mob. For Baudrillard, unlike Foucault, power is not a strategy because there is no object there, yet the masses are endlessly created as objects because their resistance is the autistic silence. In modern forms of regulation, in the Foucauldian sense, the injunction to speak, self-expression, is an important form of government from child-centred pedagogy (Walkerdine 1990, 1998a) to therapy and counselling, for example (Rose 1989). In this sense silence, the refusal to speak, is a clear resistance to such strategies. There are no duped or mystified masses who can be released through an enlightenment project (as, for example in the pedagogic strategies of media education) because they are refusing to participate in the first place. Simulation has neither subject nor object so cannot become alienated or indeed a political subject in the traditional sense because that political project depends upon both consciousness and rationality. There is no meaning to the mass except the meanings ascribed to it constantly by sociologists, always attempting to find meaning. So, for example, we could understand Baudrillard’s remarks as being a critique both of mainstream media theory and of cultural studies, particularly

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audience research and the study of popular culture, which constantly asks what meanings the masses are making of the media and popular culture and very often tries to understand those meanings in terms of an enlightenment project. The masses, he remarks, are said to hold opinions, which are polled constantly from politics to advertising, but the system of polls converges with entertainment, the very entertainment that constructs the masses as its audience. Sociology always searches for ways in which the masses are manipulated by the media, but the masses are stronger, sensing no liberation or transcendence. Baudrillard puts forward strategies of and two types of resistant subjectivity. These are that the masses are silent, cool, frozen into a kind of cool Fascism, a melancholy that something has been lost. He argues: We are face to face with this system, in a double-bind situation, an insoluble double-bind, exactly like children face to face with the adult universe. They are simultaneously summoned to behave like autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious; and as submissive objects, inert, obedient and conforming. The child resists on all levels, and to a contradictory demand he also responds with a double strategy. To the demand to be an object, he opposes all the practices, disobedience, revolt, emancipation, in short a total claim to subjecthood. To the demand to be a subject, he opposes just as stubbornly and efficaciously with an object’s resistance, that is to say, in exactly the opposite manner: infantilism, hyperconformism, a total dependency, passivity, and idiocy. Neither of these two strategies has more objective value than the other. (Baudrillard 1983: 107)

Note the way in which Baudrillard develops the idea of the masses as having certain characteristics, a mass psychology, in fact. While his work takes the Frankfurt School’s blend of psychoanalysis and Marxism to a particular conclusion – autism not alienation, cool not hot Fascism – the account mirrors accounts made in the early decades of the twentieth century by showing the same fascination with what the masses will and will not do, guided by their psychological state. It is very interesting to note precisely how much Baudrillard depends upon psychology, using terms such as ‘autism’ and ‘melancholy’ (melancholy being a term used by Freud in his discussion of failure to mourn, this leaving the subject trapped inside a fantasized longing for things to be as they were without emotionally working through the pain and anger at the loss and moving on). For a person who claims that there is no depth, he certainly uses terminology that

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relates to depth psychology. On the other hand he talks of resistance, yet resistance implies a conscious subject who is capable of doing something active, even if that activity is to say nothing. Catatonia cannot be resistance in the usual or accepted sense: there is nobody home to resist. What Baudrillard proposes simply cannot be understood as an emotional reality, otherwise the majority of the population of northern cities would be zombies. It is both important therefore to explore the social theoretical trajectory that Baudrillard takes and to examine what it might mean for an understanding of psychology and of the constitution of subjectivity in the present. It is important to note just how far Baudrillard is prepared to take his pessimism and disappointment with the masses, who after all, in this account, have virtually gone to sleep and turned to what Gane (1991) describes as a popular negative Fascism, not because of their love of easy gratification, as in Freudo-Marxism, but because they are silenced, atomized with no basis, or psyche, for political action. Fascism then, in this analysis, is no less psychologically caused, but what is envisaged is a different psychology. On the other hand, it is possible through all this pessimism to read Baudrillard as saying that the masses can no longer be co-opted either for a postenlightenment projector or for a left-wing political one, that the strategies employed by both liberals and the left will no longer work, because the masses are engaging in a refusal to participate. Dick Hebdige (1978) has critiqued Baudrillard’s conception of the masses as being autistic and in terms of waning their affect, puts forward instead the notion of communities of affect drawn together by mass cultural products, such as soap operas, bringing a desire for connection, roots, a past. Hebdige’s subject then is filled with longing for a lost connection, for the certainties of modernity. Such a subject is still pathologized, as for Baudrillard, but is not as profoundly sick. We stress this point in order to make clear just how entrenched the notion of mass psychopathology has become. No doubt Hebdige would not necessarily want to subscribe to a model of mass pathology, yet this does not prevent him using concepts derived from this discourse. He needs access to some different psychological theories and assumptions, and it is to this work that we now turn.

Chapter 8 Critical psychology

Like Marxism, psychology is one of the grand metanarratives of modernity, often claiming for itself universal generalizations. However, while the response of psychologists to the issues raised by Ideology and Consciousness was slower than that in the rest of the social sciences, many psychologists nevertheless took seriously the issues raised, resulting in a wide variety of critical psychologies that draw upon various attempts to work on discourse. We have already established the way in which psychology has traditionally entered debates on media studies. Psychology accords itself a status as an empirical science best placed to examine the media, which, as we have seen, has become an object of concern in relation to its deleterious effects. The media is seen to influence and shape the way people come to see, evaluate and make sense of the world in which they live. This account of the role of the media in shaping and framing popular opinion derives its currency in part from concerns in the early part of the twentieth century with the media’s role in producing and disseminating propaganda. Within these accounts the media were seen, through the mechanisms of persuasion inherent in the structuring of their messages, to shape attitudes in line with particular ideological interests. What is most interesting about these accounts is not so much the role accorded to the media but, as we have described, the way in which certain individuals were seen to be more vulnerable to and manipulated by the content of the messages. These fears resurfaced in the post-war McCarthyism of 1950s America in relation to the perceived threat of Communism to the stability of democratic thinking. A link was made between particular personality types, the influence of the media and outward expressions of violence and aggres101

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sion (Adorno et al. 1950; cf. Chapter 2). It is this triad that, as we have discovered throughout the book, has set the parameters within which the relationship of the media to subjectivity is understood. Let us now unravel some of the assumptions made about the ‘psychology of the individual’ by outlining in more detail the moves within critical psychology that seek to displace and challenge the claims of psychology to be a ‘science of the individual’. This will allow us radically to rethink the relationship between the media and subjectivity, and to signal a new project for examining this relationship. Some of the tools and concepts central to poststructuralist thinking that we will utilize have been discussed in previous chapters. We will show in this chapter how they share both continuity with and retain a significant difference with respect to the more postmodern psychologies reviewed here. We will discuss various debates about discourse within social psychology and examine their implications for a study of the media. We will then be equipped to think through some of these important theoretical and epistemological issues in relation to studies of criminality, madness, race and sexuality in Chapters 9 and 10.

Critical psychology – the negation of a realist perspective Many writers have over the past decade problematized the assumptions surrounding the nature of knowledge and social reality embedded within traditional psychology. There are certain concepts – truth, objectivity and progress – that psychology uses to warrant its privileged position in making claims about the nature of subjectivity. Psychology’s perspective on the nature of knowledge and social reality is realist – it assumes that there are stable, enduring psychological capacities waiting to be discovered through the application of the scientific method. These capacities are ahistorical, untainted by culture, and lie beyond language and signifying activities. One good example for our purposes is psychology’s reliance on the concept of human nature, which broadly encompasses, depending upon the perspective, all those essences taken to define the human subject. These essences are taken to be presocial and prediscursive, existing prior to the ways in which we give them meaning in our sense-making activities. Psychology adopts a particular historiography or version of history telling when talking about its own emergence as a discipline (cf. Chapter 2). The historical tale that psychology tells about itself is one of an emerging scientific discipline progressing towards the truth.

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The history psychology tells is a linear movement from the prejudice and ignorance seen to characterize the beliefs of the premodernist world to the open eye of its own disciplinary gaze – one circumscribed by neutrality, objectivity and reason (cf. Blackman 1994 for a fuller discussion). We saw in Chapters 2 and 3 how this approach to history and the emergence of psychology operates as a way of dismissing and excluding certain explanations of the social world as being irrational, irrelevant or distorted. In the contemporary present, for example, the phenomenon of hearing voices is largely taken to signify that a person has lost certain capacities of social existence. The voices signify disease and illness, and have come to be seen, within psychiatric discourse, to be first-rank symptoms of a discrete disease entity, schizophrenia. This mode of explanation existing within the ‘psy’ discourses is viewed as one based upon truth. It is a fiction-functioning-in-truth, claiming the status to describe the human subject in all its complexity. It is not merely a particular cultural-historical perspective on the meaning of hearing voices but is one grounded in truth, objectivity and reason. Although there are many different discursive explanations circulating in relation to hearing voices, such as the telepathic and the spiritual/esoteric (cf. Blackman 1995, 1998a), the psy explanation is one that is embedded in and organizes a range of social practices. These social practices are bound up with the government and regulation of a specific form of personhood. They include the legal system, schooling, psychiatric practice, the penal institution and so forth, providing techniques and understandings through which behaviours, conduct and thought are classified, administered and surveyed in relation to this regulative ideal or image of a desired self. In this sense the psy discourses produce truth-effects, claiming to provide an account of the real, the normal individual, the normal mind and so on, by focusing upon all those exceptions to so-called normality and rationality. Paradoxically, through their exclusion and pathologization, they provide the means by which psy truths are confirmed and maintained. To draw on a popular example circulating in self-help books and the subject of many chatshows, co-dependency has become a concept through which people problematize, judge and act upon their own thought, behaviour and conduct. The co-dependant is defined by a set of behaviours and characteristics emphasizing their inability to be responsible for themselves. Instead, they are compelled to feel responsible for others, living through others and attempting to control and anticipate another’s needs as a defence against the independence and

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autonomy that terrifies us. Dependency, irrationality, immaturity and irresponsibility mark out the co-dependant as someone who needs help in order to live his or her own life. This example may seem banal but it becomes peculiar when we consider that it only makes sense in relation to a very historically specific way of thinking about what makes up human subjectivity. These self-help practices, which in some cases advocate a series of steps in order to reach a state of independence, actually function as practices of the self. They are the techniques, understandings and means through which people can actively shape and transform their own subjectivities. They are part of the very process through which psychology’s truths become the very basis of a person’s self-forming activity. These practices are potent because they present the difficulties of living the ‘fiction of the autonomous self ’ as signs of personal inadequacy and failure, which ironically become the basis of change or transformation (cf. Blackman 1999a, 1999b). They seem more curious when we consider that there are other concepts – passion, honour, duty, modesty, harmony and balance, for example – that also form the basis of practices of the self. In the present set of historical circumstances, however, choice, freedom, responsibility and independence are promoted as desirable and normative (cf. Rose 1996a). The project becomes then one of explaining why persons have a subjective commitment to certain truths at certain historical moments and what role the popular plays in the circulation and maintenance of these fictions and fantasies. If we start to trouble psychology’s claims by exposing the contingent nature of the form of subjectivity underpinning psychological discourse, those phenomena, experiences and conducts constituted as irrational and abnormal come to be seen as mechanisms through which psychology’s subject matter is maintained and operated. This opens up the investigation to consider how psychology functions within actual processes of subject formation – as techniques of selfproduction and self-understanding. How is it that we have come to relate to ourselves as if we were persons of a particular type? What role does psy play in the very ways we come to understand ourselves and others within the social world? How is it that we have come to recognize ourselves within the terms, languages, images and vocabularies created within the psy discourses? How do these circulate within practices of signification such as the media? We will address these issues further in the final three chapters. This critical approach to the nature and form of subjectivity embedded within psy discourse has its continuities with a range of

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critical psychological perspectives that have been exposing traditional psychology’s claims since the crisis within social psychology in the 1970s. The debates underpinning the crisis will be discussed in the next section. They are important for understanding the heritage of what have come to be known since the 1990s as discursive or postmodern psychologies. These psychologies work against the very assumptions embedded within traditional psychology, often reversing them or totally rejecting them. They relativize psychology’s claims, imbricating them within the ideological maintenance and reproduction of a certain social order.

The crisis Parker (1989) argues that the crisis produced a significant disjuncture within psychology in the 1970s. The debates centred on the extent to which the experimental method could capture the complexities of human behaviour (Armistead 1974). The scientific or positivist framework of explanation was considered to be mechanistic and dehumanizing, reducing human beings to mere automatons. In other words how could the meanings that human beings develop about themselves and the social world in which they exist be reduced to statistics and laws of probability? The experimental method incorporating these techniques is based upon a set of assumptions about the nature of social reality. It is assumed that it is relatively easy and unproblematic to divide the social world up into clear, controlled variables and measure the effect that these have on human behaviour, conduct and experience. Although not considered to be truths, it is claimed that if the results reach a certain level of statistical significance (usually 0.5), we can be fairly certain they do not arise from chance. We have seen in Chapter 3 the way in which this causal relationship is embedded within media effects research, where the effects of television are isolated from their social context and measured according to a pre-established variable. For example, the amount of television watched may be correlated with how children later act towards a Bobo doll (cf. Bandura 1963). In this example, the media are seen to have quantifiable effects on the expression and manifestation of particular thoughts and actions. Debates within the crisis problematized the assumptions underpinning the experimental method. In order to understand human behaviour, it was argued that one needed to study how subjects make

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sense of and understand the world in which they live. This process of sense making was dependent upon the very language(s) subjects had at their disposal. The use of language was a key definition of being a social being, and language itself was considered to be a human and cultural product. The argument hinged upon the insight that subjects could only come to know their worlds through social action and negotiation; there was nothing innate or predetermined about human sense-making activity. This reinterpretation of the nature of psychological inquiry involved the development of research methods enabling the study of human sense making. These methods were interpretative rather than statistical, qualitative rather than quantitative. These more ethnogenic approaches (Harré and Secord 1972) prided themselves on their basis in an image of human life that revered and reflected the diversity, subtlety and complexity of human behaviour (Fox 1985). The research process no longer relied upon the illusion of the objective, detached, neutral observer. Instead, the relationship between the researched and the researcher was viewed as dialectic, a process of mutual construction, between the subjects’ or co-researchers’ own understanding and meaning(s) of their own and others’ experience. This research became known as new paradigm research, encompassing a range of interpretative methods such as hermeneutics, participant observation, dialectical methods, feminist methodologies and so on (cf. Reason and Rowan 1981). Research was done with rather than on people. The image of human life underpinning those approaches to emerge from the crisis was therefore based on a particular understanding of subjectivity, which rather than viewing subjects as automatons now saw them as having a sense of responsibility for their actions (Shotter 1974). This was viewed as a much richer conception (ibid.: 54), which drew upon microsociology and the philosophy of social action. The underlying principle was that, first, human activity is always social activity, which is, second, bounded by shared cultural resources. Therefore the knowledge that the human subject develops about himor herself is a product of the social and historical background (Harré 1974). Harré argued that the human subject is a competent manager and interpreter of the social world, and the theories that he or she develops should be the object of psychological study. He termed these the plans or rules of human life, arguing that these provide the field of potential open to the subject (ibid.: 245). An account of social action should therefore take account of why one particular cultural option rather than another was played out. Harré equated the role of the social scientist to that of a grammarian, studying the rules of language that

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exist within the social world. He argued that this level of analysis should reside at the level of semantics or meaning, and not form or syntax. Experience was seen to be an effect of prewritten cultural plots or narratives that individuals utilize to make sense of themselves and others. However, despite Harré’s apparent commitment to the conditions that make individual experience possible, his approach is still firmly grounded in the meanings that individuals give to social activity. He does not explain how these meanings come to exist in the first place and the conditions of possibility of their emergence. The individual is the central analytic unit to which new paradigm research retreats to explain the existence of the social world. The aim was to make psychology more social and not to examine how individuals are constituted through the social domain (cf. Henriques et al. 1998). Although the new paradigm was considered to be a progressive reinterpretation of the general mores of psychological inquiry, it was still trapped within the individual/society dualism. Rather than individuals being assumed to be automatons, they were now credited with specific pre-existing or prediscursive psychological capacities. A more sophisticated form of subjectivity was introduced without explaining how individuals come to relate to themselves as if they were selves of a particular type. The psychology or subjectivity underpinning new paradigm research was based upon an image of life to include agency, intentionality and responsibility. This psychology is remarkably similar to the image of life embedded within audience perspectives, which we explored in Chapter 3. New paradigm research relied upon a pregiven subject or psychology without explaining the process(es) through which subjects were formed and form themselves in relation to particular images and regulatory ideals. The social world existed as a function of the way(s) in which individuals represented or made sense of it. The approach therefore assumed an implicit voluntarism, focusing upon the fluidity and flexibility of sense-making activity rather than the processes through which subjects come to see themselves as if they are selves of a particular kind. Because this research was formed in opposition to realist or positivist psychology, it failed adequately or radically to rethink the relationship of the human subject to the discursive field in which he or she exists. Morss (1990) has termed new paradigm research one of the first waves of criticism of orthodox psychology. More recent critiques have evolved from these debates and have come to be known as discursive or postmodern psychologies. Despite their differences they all share a commitment to the central role of language in constructing human

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understanding. As the preface to Texts of Identity (Shotter and Gergen 1989), a key text in these critiques, highlights, ‘central to the emerging dialogue is a recognition of the critical role played by linguistic constructions in social life’ (p. x). Within these critiques language is seen as having subjectifying force – it creates and forms individual understanding. Culture is seen to be made up of a series of texts or narratives that are available as resources through which the individual makes sense of the social world. These cultural narratives are studied or accessed through individual talk, which is symptomatic of these wider discourses. These forms of discursive psychology are rather different from the approach we are taking in the book, so in the next section we will draw out their implications, continuities and differences, especially in relation to a study of the media.

The turn to language A central focus of discursive and postmodern psychologies is upon individual understandings and the process through which individuals come to have these particular understandings (Gergen and McNamee 1992; Shotter 1993). These processes are, however, usually taken to function as an effect or consequence of the particular use to which language is put in specific contexts. It is what Edwards and Potter (1992) term a functionally oriented approach to talk and text. Individuals are seen to develop particular understandings depending on what they are trying to achieve in specific conversational contexts. Language is viewed as being action oriented and rhetorical rather than being a transparent reflector of communication (Potter and Wetherell 1987). Talk embodies a version of the social world that is put to use in specific contexts as a form of situated action. The talk is studied as a rhetorical resource exploring the ways in which language can be used to different ends: to blame, excuse, persuade or accomplish other forms of social action (Edwards and Potter 1992). Some writers adopting these ideas have argued that the very concepts, such as truth and objectivity, that traditional psychology uses to warrant its claims are merely rhetorical devices that it employs to maintain its privileged status, that is, to produce its accounts or versions of the world as factual (Kitzinger 1987). Thus truth is seen to function as a form of legitimation masking claims that are arbitrary and value laden. Psychological knowledge is not objective, but partial, maintaining and reproducing particular ways of seeing the world that

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are perspectival, contingent and culturally specific. It maintains its privileged or illusionary position, according to these accounts, through the very terms and strategies it uses to warrant its claims. These discursive psychologies adopt a particular approach to the nature of knowledge (epistemology) and social reality that could be termed anti-realist. There is seen to be no knowledge or reality that exists outside the very languages we use to describe it. It is through the symbolic realm of human signs, language and discourse that our notions of reality are constructed. Psychological knowledge, according to this anti-realist perspective, is then as much a human construction as a lay discourse, the main difference between the two being the justificatory base that enables psychology to obscure its claims to know within an authoritative discourse. To study psychology is therefore to study the very texts and cultural narratives through which our notions of ourselves and our relations with others are constituted. They share many commonalities with those approaches to emerge from the crisis, despite their commitment to broader interdisciplinary moves such as poststructuralism, semiotics and the postmodern (Potter and Wetherell 1987). Although the approach we develop to psychological knowledge within this book shares a continuity with some of these discursive approaches, that is, the commitment to the study of signs, language and discourse, it also has fundamental differences. We do not view truth as being merely a rhetorical device; indeed, as we illustrated in Chapter 2, Foucault argues that truth is historical and regulative. Every society or epoch has its own regime of truth – those discourses which function-in-truth – and have the status to divide up the social world in particular ways – to pronounce the good from the bad, the normal from the abnormal, the rational from the irrational. As Foucault (1980) highlights: Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regulatory effects of power. Each society has its own regime of truth, its general politics of truth: that is the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true, the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisitions of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (p. 131)

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These knowledges and the discursive relations that are embedded within them also organize social practices and ethical relations. They are contained within a diverse range of technologies of subjectification and enter into the very ways we see ourselves and others. Within the contemporary present, we are also suggesting that they circulate within popular culture in specific ways. They cannot merely be dismissed as forms of rhetoric as they play a central role in the making up of modern forms of subjectivity. It is our contention that regimes of meaning existing within the social formation are replete with psy discourse. Psychology is not merely a story or narrative but organizes a diverse range of technologies of subjectification that make up our social world. What we are arguing then is that the image of the human subject at the heart of psychological theorizing – the autonomous subject – is not simply one version of ourselves that we can choose to take on or discard at will. Instead, we live and embody this image, through the relations we take up to ourselves, in a complex way, one that cannot be reduced simply to the function of an individual’s talk and accomplished social action. We are tied to this image of subjectivity through its immersion within and across a range of social and cultural practices that continually address us as if we are persons of a particular kind. Although it is important strategically to reject and refuse this image as a natural reflection of human nature, it is equally important not to view language as the only site of subjectification. If we are to address the role of psychology in processes of subject formation, we need to investigate, first, how a desired psy image is embedded across a range of social and discursive practices, and second, how this image is lived or embodied by subjects in their own techniques of self-understanding and transformation. We will explore the ramifications of this argument in more detail below and in Chapters 9 and 10. As we have seen in Chapter 4, screen theory was an important development in media and cultural theory, in which an account of subject formation was proposed, according the media, especially film, a prominent role in this process. We say this because, outside psychology, there was a concern with subject formation and its relation to wider social and cultural processes. The problem, however, was that this theory of the subject relied upon a universal model of psychic processes. As critics have argued, this merely locked the constitution of subjects into the signifiers that made up media texts. These texts were seen to be organized in relation to ideological processes and primary processes of unconscious formation. Subjects or spectators were seen to come to texts with pre-existing fantasies and desires that were played

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out or re-enacted through the fantasies of control, omnipotence and mastery created on the screen. Screen seemed to provide little escape for the masses trapped within these processes, and as Walkerdine (1995, 1996) has previously argued, has led to a rejection of psychology and psychoanalysis within media and cultural studies and a shift of focus to audience studies celebrating the agency and creative intentionality of the spectator. We have already seen in Chapter 7 how social and cultural theory generally, despite its postmodernist and poststructuralist predilections, relies upon a particular psychology or subjectivity when talking about the human subject. All the writers we have discussed dismiss psychology on the one hand, yet simultaneously deploy a particular form of subjectivity in their theorizations, often strangely rooted in psychopathological terms, that is, schizophrenia, autism, melancholy and so on, as we will see later in this chapter. Even feminist writers such as Haraway and Braidotti, despite using concepts more strategically, still rely upon Utopian configurations such as the cyborg or nomadic subjectivity. Without adequately accounting for technologies of subjectification, we maintain that these analyses fail to provide an adequate account of how particular types of subjectivity are produced and the role the symbolic plays in this process. It is these questions which are important if we want to address the possibility of change and transformation. In this general trend of suspicion and refusal of psychology, cultural studies also rely upon a particular way of specifying psychology or subjectivity. Psychology is on the one hand viewed as reductionist (Morley 1992), yet a psychology is assumed within these writings that makes the theories a possibility. It would seem that there is a lack of awareness within cultural and social theory of the body of critical work within psychology produced within the last twenty years. We would suggest that it is this work which is relevant to contemporary debates about the relationship between subjectivity and social and cultural processes. To illustrate these rather abstract and difficult epistemological arguments, we will concentrate on the way in which many discursive psychologies approach the nature and form of subjectivity in light of their critiques of orthodox psychology. This will provide an exemplar for some of the aforementioned discussion, and prove a point of comparison between some discursive psychologies and current audience research within contemporary cultural studies (Morley 1992).

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The decentring of the individual Discursive psychologies have problematized the particular form of subjectivity within psychological discourse. As we have seen it is assumed within traditional psychological discourse that there exists a particular form of human nature, one in which we are viewed as integrated, autonomous, clearly bounded and in control. We have referred to this previously as a modernist approach to subjectivity, where it is presumed to be prediscursive and presocial. The realm of the symbolic only mediates subjectivity in a peripheral fashion, distorting or disrupting what is already in existence. Discursive approaches view subjectivity as being entirely constituted through the realm of signs. They seek to collapse the individual/social dualism and to understand subjectivity as contingent, dynamic, flexible and often contradictory. Within many of these discursive approaches, the form of subjectivity presumed within orthodox psychology becomes one of the textual resources through which subjects construct versions of themselves. Questions within the psychological domain that have traditionally been seen as existing within the psyche or interior realm, that is, memory, attitudes, cognition and so on, are located within the very languages one uses to describe them. Potter and Wetherell (1987) discuss the range of self-discourses embedded within psychology that one can use to make sense of oneself and others. Thus psychological discourse becomes a set of textual resources or linguistic repertoires providing a range of possibilities for self-expression. Self-expression is no longer considered to be the expression of one’s internal psychological essence but a form of accounting located within the strategic and functional use of language (Michael, in Kvale 1992). The self is a form of narration – dialogic – constructed through a range of possible models or ways of accounting for subjectivity. As Potter and Wetherell (1987: 102) argue, these language-based approaches call from a move from the ‘self-as-entity and focus [it] on the methods of constructing the self ’. They give as examples some of the popular theories about the self embedded within psychological discourse, all of which claim to be describing the true nature and form of subjectivity, that is, trait theory, role theory and more humanist conceptions of the self. As they claim: It is suggested that methods of making sense are the key to any kind of explanation of the self, as people’s sense of themselves is in fact a conglomerate of these methods, produced through talk and theorising. There is not

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one self waiting to be discovered or uncovered but a multitude of selves found in the different kinds of linguistic practices articulated now, in the past, historically and cross-culturally. (p. 102)

We can see from the above quotation that this particular discursive approach to psychological knowledge relativizes these theories of the self, seeing them as possible linguistic practices. One consequence of this analysis is that if the ways in which people talk about phenomena, including their own relation to self, can be changed, new forms of social relation and ways of being can be created (cf. Shotter 1993). Potter and Wetherell (1987: 104) argue that cultural analysis that approaches subjectivity in this way has important ethical and political consequences, that is, that each method of constructing the self positions the self and others in specific ways, producing subjectivities that may be negative, destructive and oppressive as well as liberating. This is a rather idealist position rooted in the prioritization of language as the primary site of subjectification. As we have already discussed, regulatory ideals and images of personhood organize social practices and are bound up with governance and regulation. We need to talk about discursive practices that are both linguistic and technical (cf. Rose 1996a), material and discursive (Walkerdine 1997). Other writers also sought to expose the autonomous self as false and to show how this concept was actually seen to function as a way of reproducing particular social arrangements as natural and inevitable. It is viewed as culturally specific (Gergen 1985) and bound up with the maintenance of capitalism and Protestantism (Sampson 1971). Despite its emergence within certain historical events, it has become part and parcel of what Shotter (1990) terms liberal humanist thought and is constructed, sustained and managed through commonsense conversational practice (Shotter 1993). Harré similarly argues that we have inherited this way of speaking about ourselves from JudaeoChristian civilization, which has become reified through its rootedness in the language-games we use to account for ourselves and others. All these writers share a commitment to language as a textual resource used by the human subject to position him- or herself and others in specific ways. Much of this work has its ancestry in the theories to emerge from the crisis, as well as from the seminal ideas of Potter and Wetherell (1987) and their particular strand of discourse analysis. It is worth going into this work here in more detail as it has had a significant impact on the development of discursive and critical psychologies.

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Discourse and the psychological One of the main assumptions underpinning discourse analysis is that those solid units of analysis previously located within the internal psychological realm of the individual, such as the psyche, mind or self, are actually viewed as existing within the very languages one uses to describe oneself. The implications of this argument are that there can be no access to internal mental states as these are constructed through language (Ryle 1949; Wittgenstein 1963). What was previously located within the inside has been folded outside into the realm of linguistic and social practices. The intra/psychic is located within language. Thus what people say is not treated in any way as a window on the world or into their minds. Instead, people’s accounts are studied for the ways they vary across conversational contexts according to the different functions that talk is performing within and across differing contexts. This view is one that views meaning as a social accomplishment, tied to particular ends, mediated by culturally available narratives or interpretive repertoires. Stenner (1993) has developed some of these constructionist arguments in relation to jealousy. Commonsense practice tells us that jealousy is a property of the individual: there are jealous types who cannot control their feelings in relation to another. Stenner troubles this view in which jealousy is regarded as a property of mind, approaching it instead as a subject position produced through the deploying of particular cultural stories about jealousy. These stories are examined for their consequences in the relations between a couple, Jim and May. Jealousy can, for example, be used to position somebody as being unaware and unenlightened or as being emotionally weak and insecure. Both of these strategic uses of jealousy have particular implications for the person positioning and being positioned according to these narratives or stories. Thus Jim positions himself as enlightened and progressive and May as fragile, unstable and weak. Because of this relational positioning, he sees himself as having to walk on eggshells, thus crediting himself with the power to hurt or protect May according to his actions. Stenner argues that this account cannot be viewed as being about the relationship, reflective of emotions or expressive of May’s or Jim’s personality – as if a reality existed independently beneath the discourse – but rather as constructive of the relationship, productive of contradictory and non-essential identities and generative of emotional experience. Stenner views it as a jealousy story available as one of the cultural narratives through which people can account for their own and others’ experience.

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One problem with these kinds of discursive account is the refusal to engage with the psychological other than through its locatedness within language. The human subject becomes a discourse-user producing meanings of the social formation in his or her local, specific accounting practices. We are suggesting a very different approach to subjectivity and the discursive that looks at how people struggle with and live the fiction of the autonomous self. We are, of course not suggesting that the subject does not have a range of cultural options open to him or her. As Foucault (1980) highlighted, power only works on and through a person’s actions where the subject is confronted with a range of possible actions. We are, however, suggesting that the psy image of personhood – the autonomous self – plays a particular role in the relations people take up to themselves and others. As we will show in Chapter 9, it produces its own emotional economy, which is ironically contained and produced within this discourse of the individual as psychopathology (cf. Blackman 1999a, 1999b). We are suggesting that it plays a particular role in the way in which people experience and make sense of the contradictions and gaps produced through the heterogeneous practices that address the subject in different ways. We are suggesting that the normal/pathological distinction underpinning the construction of Otherness plays a specific role in the ways we relate to, understand and act upon ourselves as subjects of particular kinds. The psy image of personhood is not simply located within language but is embedded within techniques, practices and institutions. Language is part of the assemblage but is what Foucault (1972) termed the endpoint of discourse or what’s given to the speaking subject. In order to understand the subjectifying force of language, we need to go beyond the text or individual account and explore how particular terms and concepts are linked within specific material and discursive practices. As Foucault highlights: The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the first line and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, it is anode within a network. (p. 23)

This focus on the conditions of making sense, which go beyond speaking subjects, has been developed within discursive psychology by a set of approaches that are united under the mantle of critical polytextualism (Curt 1994).

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Going critical These approaches recognize that texts or accounts are located in particular historical and cultural contexts. They also draw attention to the way in which certain accounts or stories have relative dominance in particular discursive arenas. The object of study is therefore the textual resources variously producing the possibilities for individual experience. It is these stories which are viewed as creating spaces for the subject to inhabit and occupy. However, the range of stories identified, usually through the use of Q-sort methodology (cf. Stephenson 1953; Curt 1994) are granted epistemological equivalence. This implies that persons make sense of their worlds through dipping in and out of discourses at will. We do not grant discourses epistemological equivalence as we are suggesting that those discourses such as the psy complex, governed by norms of health and pathology, play a specific role in the ways in which we transform and govern our lives. It is not simply that cultural narratives or stories compete for legitimacy but that those which function in truth are linked to wider moral, social and political objectives. Dollimore (1991) suggests, when discussing sexual dissidence, that if everything is viewed as a story, the Other loses its power to signify, to negate, to establish its own institutional and oppositional discourse.

Institutions, power and ideology In this section we will review some of the discursive approaches that are more concerned with the materiality of language (Burman 1990), and its embeddedness within wider power–knowledge relations. These approaches draw their inspiration more from poststructuralism, feminism and Marxism rather than from the Anglo-American approaches characterizing discourse analysis. Parker and Spears (1995) distinguish their critical discourse analysis from the approaches already reviewed through their analytic focus on the way in which forms of talk serve social, ideological and political interests. As Parker highlights, certain discourses define certain kinds of experience as abnormal – as madness, for example (Parker et al. 1995) – thereby reproducing certain institutions and societal relations as being natural and inevitable. He aligns his work more with the intellectual ancestry drawn upon in the work of the authors of Changing the Subject (Henriques et al. 1998) and especially with the writings of Michel Foucault. Along with the authors

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of this book and the writings of Nikolas Rose, he views the psy complex as being part of a particular regime of truth that governs and regulates individuals in modern society. This work argues that it is important to historically locate talk by identifying the historical conditions that make individual discursive activity possible. Discourse analysts such as Wetherell and Potter (1993) do recognize this dilemma, and in a post hoc fashion have linked individuals’ use of language with their reproduction or repudiation of wider social structures. In their work on racial discourse, for example, they link a racial account (racist) to changing social, economic and political relations. As Wetherell and Potter suggest, we can see history as having, from this perspective, a direction of domination, that direction being intimately linked to the fortunes and interests of a certain group. In this manner the analysis examines subjects’ ways of talking and how these reinforce and perpetuate dominant discourses, those discourses which are viewed as ideological and linked to the interests of certain dominant groups within society. The analysis that we are developing in this book allows us to consider the relationship between truth, power and subjectivity other than by relying on analytical concepts such as ideology, social control and social interests. Discourses are not discrete entities that function for certain interests. They are made up of shifting networks of associations, bodies of knowledge, expertise, agencies and problems. Discourses do not merely legitimate and perpetuate particular realities but constitute ways of thinking and acting – inciting and inducing desire – and a subjective commitment to particular ways of understanding and acting upon ourselves and others. Power does not merely repress or marginalize certain modes of existence but comes to structure those very existences and the resistances against them. It produces our desires and subjective commitment to certain discourses by aligning our wishes and fears with the objectives embodied within discursive practices. It acts on and through our actions within a discursive field of possible actions and choices (cf. Blackman 1994, for a fuller discussion; Rose 1989; Burchell et al. 1991).

The positivity of power We need to examine the complex relationship between modes of subjectification, desires, resistances and the psy image of personhood within these relations. The relations between regimes of truth such as

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the psy complex, regimes of meaning such as the media and popular culture and subjective realities cannot be reduced to ideological interests. Rather than decentring the subject and replacing it with a more sophisticated discursive actor, we need to examine how popular cultural representations invite us to reflect upon ourselves in certain ways and how these addresses or subject positions relate to those embedded within wider discursive practices. We need to develop a materiality of semiotics (Haraway 1997) in which we explore how certain objects of knowledge-practices, such as the psy disciplines, circulate within regimes of meaning such as the media. This goes beyond the idea of semiotic analysis as being concerned merely with symbolic systems of signs and begins to explore the way in which signs are embedded in and articulated with technologies, institutional and technical practices. The argument we are making relies upon a particular approach to the nature of experience, which we will elaborate here and distinguish from more postmodern approaches to the nature and form of subjectivity.

Being-in-relation We define experience as a relational concept, following the later work of Foucault (1979, 1987, 1989, 1990), which explores the relationship between knowledge/practices, types of normativity or desired images of self organizing these practices, and the ways in which we reflect and act upon ourselves as human subjects. We are suggesting therefore that subjectivity is not simply grounded in how we speak about ourselves, where, within the postmodern era of flux and flexibility, we can be as many forms of identity as we choose. Young draws analogies of this postmodern self with the figure of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, who in what is known as the onion scene, strips himself of all of his identities and roles to find nothing – an empty space. Young (1992) suggests: He acts out the anxiety of our age; a schizophrenic self lost in a labyrinth of imagined impulsive identities… The historical unity of the human self is liquefied and lost in an ethereal play of possibilities and momentary selves. (p. 141)

Foucault, in his later writings, became interested in the processes through which people develop understandings about themselves and others. Rather than positing any notion of a pregiven subject, which as

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we have seen still underpins audience work in media and cultural theory, and many forms of critical psychology, he argued that this process was discursive, bound up with particular knowledge/practices. As we have already seen in previous chapters, the human sciences, especially the psy discourses, are seen to play a central role in this process of subject formation. According to Foucault, the psy disciplines are not sciences of individuals and their universal human nature but the adjudicators and creators of the very knowledges that come to define the individual in his or her historical specificity. They become key practices through which we understand our own subjectivity. The governmental role of the psy discourses has not been adequately considered either in media and cultural theory or in the discursive psychologies we explored in Chapter 7. To accord the psy discourses a governmental role does not simply mean that they are ideological in the sense in which this term is usually deployed. Ideology is usually used to designate a set of ideas or beliefs as being false and arbitrary, bound up with the reproduction and maintenance of a particular way of seeing the world. It is assumed that, although ideology is part of the process through which we ‘live’ the world, its veil can be lifted and we will be set free. Studies of ideology are usually studies of the realm of signification and discourse as distorting rather than formative of the very ways in which we come to see ourselves as human subjects. This was the plight of Althusser who, as we saw in Chapter 4, despite positing the formative role of what he termed the ideological state apparatuses, still saw their role inevitably as distorting a person’s relation to the real or the economic (cf. Adlam et al. 1977, Gordon 1980, Henriques et al. 1998 for a more detailed discussion). The idea of the ‘other’ has become integral to many writings on the nature of the postmodern and postcolonial orders. Homi Bhabha (1983) argued that the ‘other’ is central to processes of subjectification and explored this premise in relation to colonial discourse. He argued that racial divisions are articulated in relation to a conception of Otherness, in which blackness is constituted as degenerate, lower and primitive. Blackness is other to the whiteness, which, in its so-called pathology, it confirms as natural and normal. Bhabha interestingly argues that Otherness, as an articulation of difference, can come to signify in diverse ways on the basis of its operation as a limit or ritual of exclusion. Blackness or race can also be the site of erotic and exotic fantasies and dreams, such as the sexual potency or prowess of the black man (cf. Mercer 1992) and the ‘wild, highly sexed, emotionality’ of the black woman (cf. Stoler 1995: 32). Otherness is thus a structuring

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device in representations of race, which imbricate particular social fictions and fantasies embedded across a wide range of practices of signification. These fantasies operate as defences covering over a set of fears created through the regulative ideal they maintain. In other words, through the creation of a normative image of the human subject as being for example in control, there are a range of behaviours and experiences, such as losing control, that are feared and become located within the realm of Otherness. Thus Otherness contains our fears, locates them in the other and becomes a defence against those behaviours, experiences and people who threaten our fragile sense of ourselves. As we have seen many writers on the nature of the postmodern order (Jameson 1984; Lyotard 1984; Appignanesi and Lawson 1989) have argued that, with the collapse of grand metanarratives (the idea of universal theories for example), the periphery has finally come to the centre. The centre is used as a metaphor for the normative image(s) that the articulation of difference as ‘Otherness’ (pathologized and marginalized subjectivities, such as colonial peoples and non-heterosexual sexualities) has maintained and produced. The argument is that the centre is now unstable, no longer maintaining its privileged role in explaining and defining the social world, which of course stemmed from the periods in which the colonial project was to define and govern those peripheral others by means of grand European metanarratives. The centre is based upon the supposed truth of subjectivity, which in the postmodern order has been exposed as historically contingent and culturally specific. There are now simply difference(s) in identity no longer anchored by traditional conceptions of sexuality, race, gender and class. Identities or subjectivities are viewed as the outcome of the choices one makes about relationships, diet, lifestyle and so on (cf. Rose 1996a). We are ‘free to choose’ from the supermarket of style shown to characterize the postmodern order. The process of identity or subject formation is seen to be generated by the consumption seen to structure popular culture (cf. Mort 1996). Postmodernization, in the guise of market diversification, has been seen to provide more flexibility and choice, reflected in concomitant forms of identity. In this argument identity is not something that relates to our structural location (gender, class and race for example) but something that we are free to choose because we are the supreme autonomous subject, whose position comes down to personal preference rather than oppression. If we take seriously this argument about flexibility and diversity in relation to the symbolic realm, we should assume that practices of signification no longer articulate difference as Otherness. Our argu-

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ment, however, is that psy is central to practices of signification and has not simply been superseded by a move into a postmodern order. The very process of speaking about oneself, problematizing oneself and one’s conduct and experience, entails locating oneself within particular languages and discursive relations. We argue that, although there are a diverse range of ways of constituting oneself as a subject, there is a continuity in the limits through which the normal subject is produced. These limits relate to those capacities which are taken to define the human subject within the psy discourses, such as the ability to selfregulate, act autonomously, have a clear boundary between the self and other and be in control. The terms and vocabularies operating on the basis of these limits very much invoke a notion of the other in the fictions and fantasies that they construct. It is the content of the other, the way in which it is articulated and made to signify, that is important to analyse if we are to understand how we are constituted in all our diversity and complexity as human subjects. We are arguing that ‘fictions that function in truth’ and the discursive relations structuring these discourses are productive, acting upon subjects such that they want or desire certain ways of being. We need to explore how these wishes, desires and aspirations are re-enacted through the way in which the Other circulates within cultural representations. Although we are not suggesting that this is a deterministic relationship, we are arguing that the Other plays a pivotal role in the maintenance of the image of the autonomous self. The important point to highlight at this stage in relation to discourse-analytical methods is that, although language plays a role, it is but a component or dimension of the apparatus. What we are suggesting then is that psychology is neither merely a raconteur that can be refused or rejected, nor ideological – reproducing a particular set of societal relations. We are instead proposing that it plays a much more significant role in a society moving into the twentyfirst century. It is a normalizing apparatus playing a part in structuring how we think about and act upon ourselves and others. We are arguing that it is through a specific conception of the individual that we are integrated and shaped into society accordingly. It is this regulative ideal and the distinctions governing its existence that produce the very possibility of the Other in all its multiple and varied forms. In the next two chapters we will explore, through a number of key examples, how these ideas can be deployed in the study of media representations.

Chapter 9 Criminality and psychopathology

Did Peter Sutcliffe have a diseased mind at the time of each of his killings, or was he a ‘sadistic, calculated, cold-blooded murderer who loved his job? (The Times, 20 May 1981)

We discussed in the introduction the way in which we are driven to understand the ‘psychology of individuals’ who transgress the boundaries of normal conduct. We need to establish their ‘Otherness’, their difference from us, in order to establish our own innocence and normality. Peter Sutcliffe (known as the Yorkshire Ripper) claimed that he heard voices that drove him to violently rape and kill women, mainly prostitutes. The fact that he heard voices (or made claims that he did), ironically, offers us a calm reassurance. In western societies voice hearing is mainly taken to be a sign of a disease process. Sutcliffe killed, he alleged, because he lacked the biological, or even biochemical, means to control his own behaviour. Sutcliffe was ill or sick, and therefore the answer to why he killed women was located within his psychological make-up. His motives were explained by his biological ill health. This explanation is a familiar story. Again and again events that disturb the public imaginary, such as the Dunblane and Hungerford shootings, the Fred and Rosemary West case and so forth, are discussed through familiar terminology. Were they mad or bad? Can these events be located within a disease process, or are they more socially disturbing and symbolically threatening because the person can be held responsible for them? In a recent Guardian article (22 October 1996) the headline ‘Madness or badness? Can the way you are be treated?’ plays on the distinction between disease and/or maladjustment as a way of explaining social pathology. 122

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Let us examine some of the assumptions this article makes. The writer makes a clear link between criminality and madness, arguing that ‘the HORROR of Dunblane infers some sort of “madness” in the perpetrator’. He adds that ‘deprived of interviewing him, we could never fully know “who” or “what”, diagnostically, Hamilton was’. Further on in the article we get a clear idea of the role he thinks that psychology can have in attempting to understand these crimes, in particular the need to understand the motivation in terms of a psychological pathology. The author cites an enquiry into the massacre headed by a law lord, Lord Cullen, saying that it was ‘assisted by “reconstructive” evidence from two forensic psychiatric and psychological experts who combed through all the information available’; Cullen, he adds, also addressed the nature of the man (our emphasis) and concluded that ‘Hamilton’s paedophilia was “coincidental” with his other disorder – a personality disorder as distinct from a mental illness’. Interestingly, the writer asserts that ‘the distinction between “mental illness” and “personality disorder” is simple’. He then goes on to give us what he sees as a clear definition of this difference. It is that ‘leaving aside genetic disorders, an “illness” (bodily or mental) involves a change in the sufferer from both population normality and his/her own previous normality’. He contrasts this with a ‘personality disorder’, which he claims is developmental. He quotes one of Lord Cullen’s experts, Dr Baird, who said it involved ‘enduring features [which] often appear to originate from upbringing and early formative experiences’. Such people, he claims, ‘are inherently abnormal in the way they think, feel and act’. In this chapter we will be examining how the idea that it is the ‘type of person’ who commits such acts that is of importance has become the key way of explaining social pathology. What is given less attention is how these images of the Other work to maintain a particular image of human life and morality as being natural and inevitable. We will look at how the media deploys an image of psychopathology to represent those who disturb the boundaries within which an image of normality is constructed. It is through these images of the psychopathogical ‘other’ that the fiction of the autonomous self is upheld and confirmed as both normative and desirable. We will be arguing that those characteristics ascribed to the other are those behaviours, thoughts and experiences which we are not willing to recognize about human life other than as pathology. Images of the other play a key role in marking out the supposed essences of what kinds of human being we are, and indeed are allowed to be.

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Systems of exclusion Until now, it seems to me that historians of our own society, of our own civilisation, have sought especially to get at the inner secret of our own civilisation, its spirit, the way it establishes its identity, the things it values. On the other hand, there has been much less study of what has been rejected from our own civilisation in terms of its systems of exclusion, of rejection, of refusal, in terms of what it does not want, its limits, the way it is obliged to suppress a certain number of things, people, processes, what it must let fall into oblivion, its repression-suppression system. (Foucault 1989: 65)

The above quotation is a good starting place for exploring what modern societies fail to acknowledge, ignore, silence and would rather forget – what we will term the costs or consequences of modern forms of subjectification. In this chapter we will be drawing together some of the theoretical arguments we developed in the last chapter by exploring how the truth about Otherness is presented in media portrayals of criminality and psychopathology. These representations will act as exemplars for our argument that psychology is central to modern forms of subjectification. This approach to the nature and role of the ‘psy’ discourses radically changes the relationship between the media and psychology. Psychology is neither a method for analysing the effects of the media nor a set of textual resources which a person draws on to make sense of themselves. Psy is central to practices of signification and structures those very concepts of normality and resistances against it. Psy organizes the discursive relations through which we are defined and articulates these limits with respect to the Other. We will explore the content of some of these specifications in this chapter and begin to consider how we live the materiality of Otherness in our own lives.

Mad, bad and dangerous to know In media portrayals of criminality and psychopathology, the mad and the bad are repeatedly represented according to notions of risk, danger, disease, illness and death. Those fictions and fantasies circulating within the media constantly tell and retell stories of the danger and risk of the mentally distressed to themselves and others. These fears are heightened and intensified in relation to the mad who kill and the criminally

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insane. The mad, we are told, are disturbing, threatening, a risk, a timebomb waiting to go off. The tabloid headlines remind us of how we choose to recognize the mentally distressed, as ‘Patients Who Kill’ or ‘Insane Killers’. They are rapists, evil, dirty, dangerous, sick and immoral. As with the symbolic imagery surrounding representations of AIDS in the media (cf. Boffin and Gupta 1990), the danger of the mentally distressed is that you cannot necessarily see it; it evades bodily identification until it is too late. Madness inheres within an ethereal realm of voices, delusions and private imaginings. It is no longer written on the body. Madness is not simply ‘other’ but an alien other defying identification except perhaps by an expert eye. Philo (1994), in a content analysis of media representations of madness, found that the most significant theme or mode of explanation structuring them was ‘violence to others’. The mad were most often linked to or aligned with danger, risk and often death, playing on the underlying assumption that insanity is a disease or illness, something beyond you which cannot be controlled. The connotations of this representation play on ideas reminiscent of the nineteenth century, when madness was viewed as an expression of degeneracy, the mark of an inferior and more primitive mode of biological existence. As we saw in Chapter 2, it was in the wake of biological and evolutionary discourses of the individual that the psy disciplines emerged. Traditional historiographies of psychiatry tell a particular story about the emergence of psychiatry at this time. Psychiatry represents the pinnacle of civilized thought, leaving more savage and primitive explanations behind. Whitwell (1936), a conventional historian, relies upon this evolutionary trope when discussing the status of psychiatric knowledge in the following quote: it is only necessary to move through a few degrees of longitude or latitude in order to find some community, small or large, at a different stage of evolution, which holds today, the same views concerning mental disorder as those current in this country only a few centuries ago. (p. 1)

This claim to a universal truth of madness that excludes other cultures and past historical explanations as being more primitive, is part of psychiatry’s ethnocentrism or inherent racism. It is not so much that psychiatry’s knowledge is true but that it claims to be based upon the truth of the human subject. As we have seen in previous chapters, the claims of the psy disciplines are based upon a very specific image of life and morality – what Rose (1989) terms an ‘ethic of autonomous

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selfhood’. This image creates anOther where difference from this desired image signifies as pathology, abnormality and lack. We have seen in previous chapters how these discourses of the individual produced the mad, colonial subjects, women, children and the working classes as being degenerate, posing a threat to the self-assured progress of civilization (cf. Blackman 1996). The mad and the bad were to embody these fears and, despite existing on the margins, were symbolically to play a central discursive role in confirming and reconfirming an image of autonomous self-regulation as normal, natural and inevitable.

Fear on the streets The psy discourses form the basis of contemporary representations of madness, mental distress continually signifying as lack, deficiency and maladjustment. The basis of these significations is that something has gone wrong with the normal course of development in order to produce such experiences. The hearing of voices, or what are usually termed hallucinations, signify within many media representations as an indication that the person has lost the ability to control his or her own behaviour. The voices signify that the person is a risk, having lost the ability to distinguish between self and other, and is consequently viewed as a danger to both him- or herself and the public at large. The hearing of voices has become synonymous with danger, violence and death, a triad that structures many media portrayals. These discursive concepts underlie the following text, which appeared in the Guardian on 5 February 1992, and is representative of the many articles that have appeared as fears have escalated in relation to the perceived failure of care in the community: Findley was diagnosed as ‘extremely dangerous’ and confined by a Sunderland hospital under section 2 of the Mental Health Act. A week later he was transferred to Garlands hospital, Cumbria, and placed on antipsychotic drugs… The psychiatrist made an unusually early appraisal, which caused some surprise among fellow psychiatrists at a subsequent enquiry… he concluded that Findley was not a risk to others… At home he received a 45-minute visit by a community nurse, who came away suspecting that Findley might be dangerous but took no further action, intending to see him again after Christmas.

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By then it was too late. On the morning of December 23rd, Findley took a bus to Carlisle. The streets were bulging with people with that presenthunting look in their eyes. Findley also appeared frantic, but his hunt was of a different nature. Voices were telling him to kill someone – anyone. As it happened he selected a 67-year-old pensioner, walked up to him and stabbed him 32 times.

Voices thus signify that people are out of control, outside of the normal bounds of ethical conduct. They are no longer responsible to themselves and others, and are unable to maintain the requirements of citizenship. They are other to those capacities taken within the psy disciplines to define normality. Within the psychiatric nosography the hearing of voices is taken to be a first-rank indicator of a discrete disease entity – schizophrenia. It is a sign of illness, disease and abnormality, the voices being presumed to be symptomatic of the person’s internal pathology, usually located within a biochemical imbalance or structural disease of the brain. Within this approach to the nature and form of subjectivity, a normal/pathological distinction operates to understand, problematize and administer experiences and forms of conduct. Those which are located within the sphere of pathology and abnormality are taken to be signs that normal functioning, that is, that taken to circumscribe human nature, has been interrupted, distorted or thwarted. Psychiatry intervenes on the basis of this clinical discourse by calculating risk and danger – the degree to which the patient has succumbed to disease – and administering to individuals accordingly. The administration of risk is, however, less linked to the so-called disease process and more to the imputation of danger or the threat that the individual may pose of expressing violent and unpredictable action. In the same article, entitled ‘Fear on the Streets’, the psychiatrist Victor Schwartz has argued for a ‘scale of dangerousness’ against which to gauge potential risks according to agreed criteria (Guardian, 5 February 1992). To adopt a term deployed by the psychiatric user movement, the person is ‘psychiatrized’, deemed to be constitutionally lacking in the propensities that enable people to live and react to life within the realm of the normal and natural. Thus the ability to cope with the stresses of everyday life is seen to be a function of a person’s biology. Rose (1996b) describes how the idea of coping has changed the way in which madness figures and is acted upon. He argues that:

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Where madness is inability to cope, cure reciprocally becomes restoration of the capacity to cope, and the role of therapeutic professionals undergoes a parallel transformation. Professionals now are required not so much to cure, as to teach the skills of coping, to inculcate the responsibility to cope, to identify failures of coping, to restore to the individual the capacity to cope, and to return the individual to a life with which he or she can cope. (p.12)

Ordinary madness However, although within psychiatry there is now a distinction made between differing abilities to cope that may be caused more by maladaptive or ‘badly learnt’ behaviour, and those which are simply the result of biology, the discipline operates on the fundamental assumption – that there are those who are ‘other’, who cannot simply be restored to normal functioning through life-skills training. These ‘others’ are the target of pharmaceutical advertisements contained in many of the medical and psychiatric journals, all claiming to restore the capacities of control and responsibility through their particular ‘drug of choice’. These two themes detailing madness as an inability to cope, which is in some cases seen to be a direct function of biological malfunction, were central to how ‘manic depression’ was discussed in a 1997 newspaper article. This article, which highlighted the fate of such celebrities as Spike Milligan and Kate Millett to bipolar disorder (as it is termed within the contemporary nosography), advocates ‘drug-based self-management’ as the curative process. This approach requires the subject to recognize impending signs of disintegration and to administer drugs as a prophylactic. It requires them to recognize fundamentally that they are unwell. The Guardian, in an article on Nicola Pagett (the actress well known for her role in the television drama Upstairs Downstairs) stressed, ‘only since January has she recognized that she will only get better if she accepts that she would never be well’ (Guardian, 27 August 1997). Pagett is thus required to inscribe herself within a discourse in which her experiences signify as disease and illness. This discursive positioning ironically provides her with the means of controlling these experiences through self-regulation and self-management. It is interesting that success or failure in self-regulation within these discourses appears to be circumscribed by the relation one adopts towards one’s experiences, that is, whether or not one believes one is suffering from an illness.

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Those such as Pagett and Redfield Jamieson (an American psychiatrist), who have both written autobiographies about their experiences and support lithium therapy, are able to live fairly ‘ordinary lives’. These successes are, however, bounded by those who cannot control their behaviour. It is these ‘others’ who are far more likely to be newsworthy. They embody sets of fears surrounding the mentally distressed who are deemed a threat to others, their distress being manifested in outward acts of violence and hostility. They are usually classed as ‘mentally disordered individuals’ or the ‘criminally insane’. Those positioned in this way have usually killed or maimed, the horror or atrocity of their crimes silencing their own stories, which merely act as ciphers of the disease and illness they were carrying. The trial (in May 1981), of Peter Sutcliffe or the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ as he became known, highlights the way in which distinctions between the mad and the bad converge in the adjudication of the ‘criminal personality’. This trial is a good example of the role that psy knowledge plays in the government of crime. It shows how the basis of legal differentiation deploys distinctions embedded within the psy discourses. The trial focused upon Sutcliffe’s claims that his motivation for the horrific killings he undertook came from the voices he heard, commanding him to kill, in most cases a number of female prostitutes. As an article in The Times (12 May 1981, quoted in Hollway 1981) reported: Asked why he had attacked the prostitute in Manningham Lane, Mr Sutcliffe replied: I was attempting to kill her. Mr Chadwin: Why? – Because it was what I had to do. It was my mission. Mr Chadwin: Why? – Because I had been told they were the scum of the earth and had to be got rid of. Mr Chadwin: Who told you that? Mr Sutcliffe: God. Mr Chadwin: How did the message come to you? Mr Sutcliffe: Exactly as I just said. The same voice that I had been hearing for a matter of years.

The trial focused upon whether Sutcliffe was bad, and therefore culpable for his actions, or mad, and hence not responsible. If he were deemed mad, his actions would be located in the disease process seen to

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be responsible for his voices. The consequences of the mad/bad distinction have a very different ethical implication. If Sutcliffe were constituted as a ‘criminal personality’, he would be deemed guilty, madness within this adjudication therefore becoming a form of mitigating circumstance. Throughout the trial the hearing of voices became the central pivot upon which the mad/bad distinction was put to the test. The trial centred upon whether Sutcliffe might be deceiving the jury, pretending to hear the voices and their supposed relation to a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia in order to avoid a murder conviction. This is known within the legal system as a plea for diminished responsibility and implies that the act of violence was involuntary, beyond the control of the perpetrator. Most of the reporting at the time focused upon Sutcliffe’s apparent faking and simulation of voice hearing in order to be absolved for the killings. Again, the report in The Times was concerned with Sutcliffe’s integrity with respect to his voice hearing: You were telling your wife on January 8th that you were expected to get 30 years in prison but if you could convince people you were mad, then it would be 10 years in a loony bin. (13 May 1981, quoted in Hollway 1981)

All men are rapists… Hollway (1981) examines within the trial of Peter Sutcliffe how certain explanations of Sutcliffe’s motives were ignored or silenced. As we stated earlier the trial focused upon whether Sutcliffe actually heard voices or was pretending to in order to absolve himself of responsibility for the horrific killings. Within this context, the hearing of voices signified that Sutcliffe was out of control and could not be held responsible for his actions. Hollway explores other discourses circumscribing the discussion of Sutcliffe’s motivations that were simply taken for granted and not accorded any significance in making sense of his actions. Sutcliffe killed female prostitutes, and it was this act which was made sense of through assumptions concerning the nature of masculine sexuality. Hollway highlights those patriarchal discourses deployed throughout the trial that assume that men have a naturally aggressive sexuality that is provoked by women. Implicitly, and often explicitly, throughout the trial, a split was made between good women (madonnas) and bad women (whores), who provoke men’s natural arousal and subsequent gratification. It was never explained why the voices that Sutcliffe heard told him to kill women (prostitutes). As Hollway argues

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the trial did not focus upon the ‘problem of masculinity’ but placed some of the blame squarely on the unfortunate victims, who had in some cases mocked Sutcliffe’s sexual potency. Interestingly, Sutcliffe’s wife was also presented as a domineering woman who overwhelmed him and drove him to the crimes he committed (Hollway 1981: 38). Because voice hearing and male sexuality were both presented as a problem of biology, there was no discussion of the content of the voices and Sutcliffe’s apparent misogynistic relation towards women. Hollway offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of Sutcliffe’s motivations, exploring how Sutcliffe divided women into those who were ‘guilty’ of sexuality and those who were innocent. Sutcliffe both needed women and hated them, ‘splitting off ’ his hostile feelings towards women and projecting them onto prostitutes, whom he could then seek revenge on and punish. As Hollway highlights the discursive production of women as sex-objects is reproduced culturally through advertising and pornography. The relations between masculinity and femininity are constructed as predatory, women arousing men’s naturally aggressive sexuality. In this sense, as Hollway argues, we can offer explanations of Sutcliffe’s actions that are produced by those gendered discourses when taken to their extreme. The voice then that Sutcliffe obeyed ‘was the voice, not of God or delusion, but of the hoardings on the streets, of newspaper stands, of porn displays and of films. It is the voice which addresses every man in our society and to that extent, as the feminist slogan claims, “all men are potential rapists”’(Hollway 1981: 39).

The voice of reason We can thus see how certain discursive categories work to define a particular image of the social world that excludes or silences other explanations. These categories underpin the way in which the media represent objects and form the basis of those fictions and fantasies circulating within popular culture. The communicative space of an event such as the trial of Peter Sutcliffe and its reporting was itself discursively produced by particular frameworks of explanation. Sutcliffe had to be seen as ‘different’ from other men – the exception – so that his actions did not disturb or threaten men’s sense of their own sexuality and selfhood. Sutcliffe’s crimes were symbolically threatening because they were also making these very processes visible. We have started to explore the relationship between certain knowledges and discourses as well as the sense that individuals have of

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their own and others’ selfhood and subjectivity. The examples we have discussed all examine the relationship between psy truths, media representation and the way in which people experience and live in the social world. As we discussed in the previous chapter, it is this relational aspect of a subject’s sense of self in which Foucault became interested in his later work. It is not so much then that psy truths are historically specific but also that they are regulative. They are central in shaping how people judge, problematize and enact their own behaviour and actions. We saw earlier the way in which psy truths had become techniques of self-understanding in how people were making sense of and acting upon their own distress. We want to explore in this section the way in which these ‘truths’ are also producing their own reverse discourses or spaces of resistance by focusing on voice hearers who are managing their own experiences outside institutions of psychology and psychiatry.

The Hearing Voices Network We have seen how the mad are continually represented in the media as a danger and threat – an object of fear and loathing. The Hearing Voices Network (Hvn) is a national and international group of voice hearers whose aims are to challenge not only the status of psy explanations of voices, but also media representations in which the mad are continually portrayed as being ‘dangerous to know’. Psy modes of explanation construct a particular relation to voices in which the voice hearer is required to deny their existence and view them as meaningless epiphenomena, having no other function than as signifiers of disease and illness. The Hvn rejects this assumption and instead encourages voice hearers to accept the voices, focus on them, recount what they are saying, record them, document them and integrate them into their lives. In short, the techniques and practices of the Hvn transform the person’s relationship to their voices such that the voices signify not as signs of disease but as a normal variant of behaviour, much like lefthandedness (cf. Blackman 1998a for a fuller discussion). What is interesting for our discussion is that this transformational process produces very different affective and emotional experiences of the voices. The psy relation to the voices creates feelings of shame, fear, guilt, anxiety, terror and confusion, the voices being viewed as random, uninvited and raging an uncontrollable assault on a person’s psychological functioning. Through taking up very different relations to the

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voices, people experience feelings of joy, revelation, control, less abusive voices, faith, trust and inspiration rather than merely painful, isolated experiences. The different practices (psy and Hvn) encourage voice hearers to enact their identity as voice hearers according to very different criteria and concepts. We could argue that Hvn encourages integration, while psy encourages disintegration and alienation from the body and its potentialities. The psy complex is, however, potent because it ‘functions in truth’ and has a certain status and authority in making claims about the nature of the voice-hearing experience. This changes the question from whether the body is socially constructed to how our experience of the body and its biological potentialities is always mediated through cultural signs and activity (cf. Blackman 1998a for fuller discussion and examples). Consider the following extract from a voice hearer who believes that the voices she hears are a sign of her telepathic ability. Whether or not one believes in the concept of telepathy, the interesting point following our argument is that this ‘framework of explanation’ constructs a very different relation to the voices, one in which the gift or sensitivity can be managed through more meditative and visualization practices: I’ve tried – I mean I’ve always tended to go for the telepathic explanations so I tend to kind of direct what I listen to and I’ll listen in certain directions to try and hear certain people and sometimes I try and speak to my Grandmother who’s dead and usually – it doesn’t always work, but usually, if I direct, if I get something from that direction like I can usually get my Grandmother’s voice, and I can sort of get to know things about people I want to know things about even if I can’t actually speak to those people so it’s – I must admit though it’s not nearly as good as it used to be. I mean when I was off depixol and on next to no medication I mean I could well I could almost go anywhere in my mind and hear almost anyone and you know, have no problem contacting anyone whatsoever. Now it’s all a bit hit and miss and sometimes I just get tired of listening and fall asleep. (Hearing Voices Conference, September 1991)

This shows that even an experience such as hearing voices, which is considered within psychiatry to be evidence of a chemical imbalance (that is, it is reduced to biology to attribute causation), can be experienced by the voice hearer as an expansive state. The cultural and social meanings attributed to the experience shape and frame the affective experience that a voice hearer may have. This example not only shows the transformational potential of cultural signs and discourses, such as

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telepathy, but also reminds us of the authority of the psy discourses in constructing the experience of hearing voices as primarily one of illness, shaping a set of emotional responses, such as fear, terror, confusion and anxiety, that most voice hearers are likely to have.

The materiality of signs As we can see from the above example, and despite the fact that, within the cultural space, there are heterogeneous practices through which people enact, judge and problematize themselves, producing the possibility of very different emotional experiences, psy truths are still central to modern subjectivities. One of the arguments we have been exploring in this chapter is how the fiction of the ‘autonomous self ’ is upheld through the way in which difference signifies as ‘Otherness’ within media portrayals. This fictional identity is regulative because it organizes social practices such as the legal system and is promoted as a ‘desired image of self ’. In this section we want to explore some of these arguments further by examining a CD-ROM by the artist Graham Harwood, who has collaborated with a group of ‘mentally disordered offenders’ at Ashworth Hospital. The CD Rehearsal of Memory aims to problematize and critique modern psychiatric and cultural understandings of mental distress. Many of those who have taken part in the artwork have killed or maimed, being represented in the media imaginary as ‘Insane Killers’, ‘other’ to those values most exalted in western culture. The artwork is based upon an interactive computer program, which visually represents a body that is the embodiment of the skins, the physical traces, of the six inmates involved. The body is covered in tattoos and other images, which, as the user navigates around, can be ‘clicked on’. Once this is done, the user may be confronted with text – a hidden story – relating to one of the inmate’s lives. These are stories of sexual abuse, emotional abuse, torture, humiliation and accompanying feelings of hate, anger, frustration, guilt and depression. These stories, which usually function as ciphers for illness, disease and deviancy, embody the burden of pain that has accompanied these lives. As one man says: When I was younger I didn’t like myself and I still don’t. The reasons for this were because in some way I blamed myself for what had happened to me and my sister. My Father was, and is, a monster.

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My Dad’s always been handy with his fists… And if he couldn’t get his own way by talking, the fists start coming.

Although these men are marked in the public imagination by outward acts of hostility and violence, there is also a return to their own bodies through ‘self-harm’ and cutting. We will consider in the last chapter how these acts may alert us to the impossibility of living out the fiction of the autonomous self and fantasy of control when the exigencies of one’s life have produced feelings of persecution, powerlessness, humiliation and shame. These stories, as we have seen, are silenced in the ways in which the ‘criminal’ and the ‘mad’ are treated within the legal system. The legal system is founded on the belief that responsibility is a capacity of citizenship and a psychological propensity. Thus the legal system and psychiatry are concerned with assessing one’s psychological fitness in order to adjudicate culpability. The ‘criminal personality’ is one whose actions are seen to be voluntary, although the reasons for this so-called deviant behaviour may be the conditions of life or environment surrounding the individual. Much of the psychological literature surrounding deviancy therefore focuses upon unemployment, housing, poverty and family dynamics to explain the individual’s internal pathology. Although this may seem less individualistic than the more biological approaches that attempt to explain criminality in relation to an extra gene, they still presume that differences from the normative image they circumscribe are pathological – signs that something has gone wrong with the normal course of development. Within this particular discursive framework, certain persons are handicapped from the outset because they are seen to differ in the amount of natural rationality with which they are endowed. We have seen how this trope underpins traditional media accounts in which the mass media are bad and make the masses (those outside rationality) worse. The problem of the mass mind and the mass media is a familiar relation that is made possible by the quasi-evolutionary model, which is implicit and never questioned. Thus, in many media representations of crime, especially violent crime, animal-like characteristics are ascribed to those involved in order to connote their primitiveness and savageness, their expression of uncivilized lower forms of evolutionary life. They are made ‘other’ in the way in which they signify because they disturb those limits by which we are defined and define each other within a social order that is reliant on our self-regulation (Walkerdine 1990). The following quotes from the Mirror and the Sun (23

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November 1995), reporting the Fred and Rosemary West case, deploy these concepts when discussing the trial: The court heard tapes of Fred West talking in a very glib fashion about things that would seem to ordinary people utterly disgusting, yet he was able to do that. Rose West was caged forever yesterday. The merciless monster poured out a series of grisly confessions, before hanging himself in jail last New Year’s Day. The marriage of Fred and Rosemary West was described as a ‘marriage made in hell’ – a union so intense that all restraint and decency were overwhelmed. In the warped enclosed world of No. 25 they fed on each other’s fantasies. She [Rosemary West] wanted to spend her retirement ‘indulging in sexual activity’. HAND IN HAND WITH HINDLEY Rose West and Myra Hindley have formed a macabre friendship in jail it was revealed last night.

In the last quote we can see the way in which West has become symbolically aligned with Hindley, another evil monster existing on the social periphery yet symbolically central in how she confirms through her own Otherness a particular image of normality. Hindley, involved in the horrific child killings known as the ‘Moors Murders’, carried out with Ian Brady in the north of England in the 1960s, has become synonymous with evil and sadism. She is usually represented with her ‘cold, staring eyes’ as a sign of her lack of the so-called normal femininity that made her compassionless and evil. Femininity is aligned with nurturing and caring, so Hindley, by disturbing these limits, has to be excluded and contained, a repository of those fears which are defended against through believing ourselves to be a certain type of person. We are not commending these horrific crimes but simply stating that the way in which they are understood and made sense of, the meanings ascribed to them, is made possible by a particular ‘psychological complex’ (Rose 1985, 1989) or way of making sense of the human subject. In the above alignment with Hindley, we can see that the normative image underpinning these representations is also gendered.

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Myra Hindley

In other words it is hard to accept women’s violence except as madness. Femininity, as we will see, has historically always been linked with emotion, passion, desire, irrationality and madness. Therefore women are more prone to outside influences. But, as with the Hindley case, if their violence cannot be linked to madness, if these were rational, calculated killings, this discursive relation is threatened and becomes more symbolically disturbing. We will go on to consider this in more detail in the next section. What we want to underscore at this point is that it is simply taken for granted that self-control and responsibility define normality and are simultaneously essential for mental health. Blackman (1996) has elaborated elsewhere on how these capacities are also associated with the middle classes. Within the psychological literature, differences in parental style, speech style, cognitive style and problem-solving skills are taken to describe the working classes. These differences are not, however, simply different but signify as other – as abnormality and

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pathology. They are linked to a greater incidence of mental health problems and deviance, and are seen to result in educational underachievement. The middle-class norm is never explained, taken for granted, seen to exist and function as a result of the greater rationality taken to define the middle classes (Walkerdine and Lucey 1989). Thus we can already see a number of divisions operating in relation to the maintenance and reproduction of this normative image. On the side of rationality and responsibility lie the middle classes and, as we shall see with the next example, men; on the other side are experiences such as irrationality and losing control, which are linked to the working classes and women. These divisions are not merely articulated around difference but signify as other, located in a realm of lack, disease and social inadequacy.

Do violent women exist? On 12 March 1991 the Guardian headlined the puzzle over women’s violence saying that ‘Society’s reluctance to acknowledge that violent women do exist leads to the view that they are not responsible for their actions.’ This headline elucidates some of the contradictions and gendered divisions that operate in relation to the constitution of rationality. We have already stated that the ‘problem of mind’ became a central concern in the nineteenth century in relation to the threat and fear of the mass. These governmental concerns understood rationality and reason as a naturalistic phenomenon – part of human nature – which became the means to set and differentiate ‘others’ along an axis understanding difference in rationality in biological and evolutionary terms. Women, as with colonial peoples and the working classes, were seen to be less endowed with natural rationality, making them less able to be responsible for their own behaviour. Rationality and reason were demarcated along gendered divisions in which irrationality and oversuggestibility were produced as peculiarly feminine properties. Women were firmly positioned on the side of the emotions – the plane of irrationality – and would be easily swayed by their unsettling influence (Walkerdine 1998b). At this time women were seen to be plagued by forms of madness or psychopathology that were the result of their oversensitive feminine constitutions. Blackman (1996) has remarked elsewhere the way in which gendered divisions operated in relation to the constitution of madness. What is important for our analysis of contemporary media

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representations is that certain divisions and modes of explanation have become sedimented within the present. Maudsley (1879), a psychiatrist of the time, typified how femininity was considered to be degenerate, lower down the evolutionary scale and further from the natural rationality seen to characterize middle-class men. He argued that women’s psychopathology was different from men’s, as a result of their evolutionary and biological inheritance, which rendered women’s constitution more prone to the unsettling forces of passion and desire. Women’s madness was considered more simple because of their intrinsic make-up, whereas men were seen to suffer from more complex madness due to stresses and strains stretching the fine-tuning of their reasoning apparatus. These stresses and strains were located within conditions of life seen to be peculiarly masculine, including work, wealth and family responsibilities, whereas women were seen to lack this natural propensity in the first place. As Maudsley (1879) argued in a key psychiatric text of the time: It must not be supposed that it is because of anything in the constitution of men which renders them more liable to such derangement; on the contrary there are obviously disturbing conditions peculiar to the female constitution which are more fitted to be occasions of mental disorder. (p. 166)

Women, the working classes and colonial peoples were seen to be more ‘at risk’ because of their supposed hereditary taint or character, which predisposed them to irrationality, oversuggestibility and madness (Kraft-Ebing 1904). With the idea of rationality naturalized, a particular way of specifying the human subject became a regulatory ideal, administering, judging and calculating differences between subjects along an evolutionary axis. Thus gender, class and race became key discursive mechanisms through which a particular historically specific form of sociality was managed, governed and administered. Those lower down this axis were seen to be more primitive, suggestible, fascist, dependent, irresponsible and childlike. The following example highlights the way in which these limits on how we understand the human subject are disturbed and unsettled when they are symbolically threatened. The example focuses upon the way in which violent women are understood, in particular ways that foreclose the possibility of explaining violence as being the result of rational, premeditated or calculated planning. These issues in relation to women have become central to debates surrounding domestic violence and women who kill violent partners. The debate has threat-

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ened and challenged the public imagination in relation to particular cases of women who have received long sentences, being found guilty of murder in relation to the killing of their longstanding abusive partners. These women, despite making a plea of ‘self-defence’, have not been found guilty of manslaughter, the lesser charge that recognizes the circumstances surrounding the violent act. The Guardian article we will discuss argues that because women are not viewed as being inherently rational and responsible, they are seen to be incapable of premeditated violence. The article discusses how women’s violence is ‘excused’ within the legal system if it is associated with an outburst of passion, irrationality or even madness. Thus premenstrual syndrome has become an almost acceptable legal plea, women’s hormones being viewed as the agents behind the violent act, that is, women being seen to be at the mercy of their hormones (cf. Ussher 1989). Similarly, women are often offered psychiatric help or given a psychiatric diagnosis to explain or excuse their violence, that at the time the woman was unstable or psychologically unfit. As the article suggests the assumption underpinning these explanations is that ‘no real woman could commit such a violent act’. Women are the carers and nurturers within society, their special emotional sensitivity equipping them for this role. However, as we have seen with the spate of films such as The Hand that Rocks the Cradle and Misery, there is also a set of fears that accompanies these fictions. Women’s ‘special emotional sensitivity’ also renders them prone to irrationality and madness. Both the lead female characters in these films – Peyton, the nanny in The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, and Annie, the surrogate mother who takes care of the writer Paul after a car crash in Misery – both eventually fall prey to madness and violence. The resolution of the narrative in both films is the killing of the violent female characters so that calm and peace can be restored. In both films the fears centre around the women’s apparent instability and threat of loss of control. They are other to rationality and reason and are therefore more easily swayed by passion, desire and emotion than by any appeal to reason. These fears surrounding women’s Otherness can also be the very basis of women’s successful legal bargaining. If they plead instability and temporary loss of control because of emotion, passion and so on, they are more likely to receive a shorter sentence and a charge of manslaughter rather than murder. However, if they are found to have calculated and planned the murder, especially over a period of time, they are more likely to be found guilty of murder. In January 1989 Joel

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Steinberg, an American lawyer, was convicted of beating his illegally adopted daughter to death. His female lover was originally also accused but was later acquitted and referred for psychiatric treatment, viewed as being a passive victim rather than a violent perpetrator. Lloyd, writing in the Guardian on 12 March 1991, argued that Steinberg and Nussbaum were treated in markedly different ways in the legal system, suggesting that ‘what the case brought into the light of public scrutiny was female violence; could a women, especially a white, educated, middle-class woman have taken part in the abuse and killing of a child?’ Lloyd argued that most feminists said ‘no’, that women were not violent but were instead the ‘world’s carers, the nurturers. You’ve told us we’re not creative, not resourceful, not intelligent – leave us our caring’. Lloyd went on to argue that, to be an acceptable woman, Nussbaum had to be seen as ‘not responsible for her actions’, ‘a victim to be pitied, not a perpetrator to be blamed’. We can see then that there are certain divisions and discursive mechanisms that structure these representations of violent women. The contradictions, gaps and silences within these gendered divisions between rationality and irrationality create a set of fears in relation to premeditated violence. The fantasy of women being naturally nurturing and caring, based upon a specific fiction of femininity, acts as a defence against the fact that women can and indeed are violent. However, because of these very divisions and their deployment within the legal system, women’s violence is understood and treated very differently to male violence. Jacqueline Rose (1988) discusses the case of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain for a ‘crime of passion’, as another example of a woman who threatened the limits within which rationality is discursively constituted. The events leading up to the killing of her lover are portrayed in the film Dance with a Stranger. During her trial the press reported her as cold and emotionless. When asked why she killed him, she announced that she had ‘a peculiar feeling I wanted to kill him’ (Rose 1988: 9). She showed no remorse, fear or hysteria in relation to her killing. Indeed, she was described as committing the crime in a cold, rational and calculated manner. She did not plead temporary loss of control as a result of passion or hysteria; she simply wanted to kill him. Rose (1988: 9) argued that Ellis was hanged because ‘she was a woman who knew too much’. She expressed supreme rationality throughout the trial, showing no emotion or hysteria that could possibly have led to her acquittal. She failed to represent herself as an irrational, out-of-control female unseated by passion and desire, the

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very definition behind a ‘crime of passion’. She symbolically threatened the very gendered divisions between rationality and irrationality central to the constitution of psychopathology and criminality in the nineteenth century. As Rose (1988) argued: Only if she had been out of control – the subject of such emotional disturbance operating upon her mind so as for the time being to unseat her judgement to inhibit and cut off those censors which normally control our conduct – might she have been found not guilty of the charge. Premeditation therefore signifies here the rationality of a subject who knows her own mind, Ruth Ellis is a woman who knows too much. (p. 9, emphasis added)

Rose discusses the way in which Ellis and Margaret Thatcher are two women who symbolically threaten those discursive limits by which the social world is defined and regulated. Margaret Thatcher, the ‘Iron Lady’, represented supreme rationality. She was ‘more than a woman’, a superwoman. In interviews with Thatcher it was repeatedly established that she only needed three hours sleep a night. She made light of her femininity, equating her role as a woman with keeping the purse strings of the nation intact. As Rose argues the two women ‘present the image alternatively of an acceptable and threatening form of reason in excess’ (1988: 17). They are both socially disturbing and symbolically threatening because they not only challenge the discursive limits secured around the relationship between femininity and irrationality, but also make these processes more visible. They challenge what we are willing to accept about ourselves with respect to the basis of those very divisions and relations through which we come into being.

Rosemary West and Princess Diana At the end of November 1995 Rosemary West and Princess Diana simultaneously became the focus of a torrent of media activity. In this section we want to consider the way in which both women’s lives were represented differentially as being Other to normal femininity, the ‘Wicked Witch of the West’ and the ‘Queen of Hearts’. Both have, historically and culturally, transgressed specific boundaries of so-called normal femininity and represent ‘perversity’, albeit in different ways with different consequences:

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Systematic projection of denied characteristics onto another group results in the production of fantasized characteristics. If the power of knowledge production and associated practices is in the hands of one group… the attributions can contribute to the production of the Other’s subjectivity. (Henriques et al. 1998: 89)

The media representations of both Rosemary West and Princess Diana drew upon certain fictional similarities between them, constructing in the process an image of shared pathology. The headline ‘Sex and madness: it could only be one house’ (Daily Mail, 24 November 1995) actually referred to Princess Diana but assumes our shared cultural understanding of the signification of Rosemary West and the ‘house of horrors’. Both were constructed as lying beyond the bounds of normal femininity, drawing upon a psychological discourse of ‘dysfunction’ that positioned them both as suffering from an internal pathology caused by men. The real villains in both these women’s stories were the men in their lives, who had failed to rescue and save them. Prince Charles and Fred West were both duplicitous – Charles through his longstanding romantic liaisons with Camilla Parker-Bowles and Fred through his suicide – leaving them both unchaperoned, in the gaze of the public, to tell their stories in defence. Rosemary West, while testifying, pleaded not guilty to the crimes of which she was accused. The case for the defence began on Monday 30 October; Richard Ferguson QC, defending Rosemary West, ‘pointed out that it was a fact that Fred West had murdered and disposed of the bodies without assistance, adding that: She [Rosemary] neither knew of nor participated in any of the murders, nor did anything to hide or conceal those murders’ (Murder in Mind 1: 36). Rosemary’s tears in the dock became one of the key signifiers for her apparent faking and duplicity, the Sun headline focusing that day on the tears and their signification of her wilful deceit: ‘White hanky, tears and tales of beheadings and butchery’ (Sun, 7 October 1995). In stark contrast Princess Diana’s tears came to signify her distress and emotion at how she was being continually interrogated in the public eye. Diana’s tears were part of a chain of signifiers producing her pathology on the basis of an emotional frailty that could be understood, because of the discourses already in place, as a sign of her weakness and psychological wounding as a result of how the media and public had objectified and fetishized her as an object of desire and fascination. We will elaborate below the discourses through which Princess Diana was constructed as the ‘Queen of Hearts’ but will now

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continue with the fate of Rosemary West and her transformation within the media into ‘Britain’s Most Evil Woman’ (Sun, 24 November 1995). Rosemary West was convicted of the murder of ten young women and girls, including her own daughter and stepdaughter. As we outlined at the very beginning of the book, one of the fears and narrative devices continually deployed in the media portrayals was the apparent ordinariness of the Wests, especially Rosemary West. This fear was continually drawn on in the media and also formed a point of comparison and convergence with Britain’s other female child murderer, Myra Hindley. This fear is part of a twentieth-century concern with madness and badness, and how it is no longer seen to be easily identifiable. Even the trained expert can miss it, the risk and danger lurking within the internal pathology of the individual. Rosemary West was represented in this way, her evilness more disturbing because it was hidden by the hair and glasses of a ‘normal, everyday mother and wife’: Other murderers have been called evil. Rose West is different from all of them. Even from Myra Hindley. Unlike Hindley she did not dye her hair blonde and wear blood red lipstick. She did not present herself as a femme fatale. She was obsessed with sex but did not flaunt herself. She was anywoman, anywife, anymother. Mrs Ordinary. (Daily Mirror, 23 November 1995, emphasis added).

The representation of her ‘ordinariness’ through the signifiers such as the hair and glasses set the parameters for the intense scrutiny of West’s childhood by the media. What had gone wrong in Rosemary’s early years to produce such a female aberration? They grew into monsters, why? (Sunday Times, 26 January 1995) Rose: born into a household of violence and insanity, she abused her brother and had sex with lorry drivers at just 15. (Daily Mirror, 23 November 1995) Rose: the bright-faced girl who grew up to be an evil killer. (Daily Express, 23 November 1995) Both Fred and Rosemary West were the damaged products of dysfunctional families. They became a couple evil beyond imagination. (Independent, 23 November 1995)

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The face of a killer – Rosemary West

Rosemary West had transgressed an image of femininity that, as with Myra Hindley, aligns women with passivity and gentleness. This transgression was linked to her experience of violence and abuse in the family and the way in which this had interrupted her normal development. Within the psychological literature this is often referred to as a ‘cycle of abuse’, the abused in turn taking up the position of the abuser. The interruption of intimacy and its exchange for sadistic, cruel acts against her children was part of the way in which her murderous behaviour towards her children was understood. The invectives through which she was represented in the media as, for example, a ‘Monster of a Mum’ (Sun, 24 November 1995) (and the kind of image parodied in the Hollywood movie Serial Mom)

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combined discourses of ‘perverse sexuality’ in which her lesbian relationships were brought to the knowledge of the jury through their dismissal as solid grounds for making judgements. However, the linking of lesbian sexuality with her disturbance of the caring and nurturing qualities of mothering connotes discourses from the nineteenth century in which ‘inverts’ were differentiated from other women because of their ‘masculine aggressive form’ (Hart 1994). The fate of West is her disturbing of the contradictory discourses that define women as, on the one hand inherently violent because of their closer links with nature and sexuality, and on the other incapable of it as a result of their passivity and gentleness. West’s badness, as it came to be represented, was signified through terms that were used to connote her inhumanness and bestiality. As with the fate of violent women generally, we can see that representations of West were made upon the basis of her transgressions of regulatory images of femininity and the contradictions of these images that she brought symbolically to the foreground. It is for this reason that representations of violent women often masculinize or even lesbianize their femininity.

The ordinary killer Alongside the violent female, ‘serial killers’ present another disturbing force in the public imagination. These are individuals who are considered to be disturbing because their violence and killings seem to be rational and motiveless. They are almost the epitome of the psy individual, one who is autonomous, rational, integrated and in control. Their acts are not simply acts of irrationality and madness. They are too rational, too autonomous, too calculating, too selfdetermined. In other words they seem unwilling or unable to consider others in relation to their own conduct and behaviour. Their ordinariness is again usually constituted as one of the most disturbing telltale signs. These fears have recently surfaced in media accounts, including those we have already analysed, that is, the case of the Wests, the Dunblane massacre and so on, as well as in film representations. Serial killers or ‘psychopathic individuals’ are seen to be swayed less by their emotions and more by their rationality. Thus they usually are men, who in most cases are seen to lack the emotion that may make them more sensitive and sympathetic to others. This is why, as we have seen,

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women serial killers are doubly disturbing because they transgress femininity as well. This, it would seem, is the ‘other’ side of the gendered constitution of rationality and irrationality. Hannibal Lecter, in the film Silence of the Lambs, was the guardian of reason, the psychiatrist, whose killings conformed to his own delusional universe. They may be unreasonable in the public imagination, but the killings were not random occurrences; they were indeed established according to preexisting rules and conditions of which the perpetrator was entirely aware of and would reason accordingly. This is a reasoning madness, one dependent upon a reasoning apparatus that has lost its links and connections to others within the social world. Similarly, women who are figured in this way represent the limit of what a society is willing to accept and acknowledge. We have already discussed the way in which Myra Hindley has come to personify evil incarnate through her cold-blooded killings of children with Ian Brady. They both engaged in the sadistic, calculated torture, abuse and eventual killing of young children. Most of the media coverage of the case speculated on whether Brady had corrupted Hindley, or whether, because of her female vulnerability and susceptibility, she had been ‘under his influence’. What became most repulsive and fearful with respect to their actions was, however, her admissions that she had actively taken part in these atrocities. During Hindley’s recent requests for parole and release from prison, the media have circulated photographs of her ‘ordinariness’ as opposed to the mythological photograph that has become the iconography of evil. Hindley, along with a catalogue of ‘others’, will remain a killer who will never be released from prison. As Hindley herself expressed, she is ‘held hostage by public opinion’ to remain a haunting reminder of the unthinkable and unknowable (cf. Guardian, 19 December 1997).

Fascination, fear, loathing and ambivalence In this chapter we have so far concentrated upon how the Other signifies as lack, danger and fear. We want to underscore and illustrate, however, the way in which the Other is also ambivalent, the site simultaneously of desire, fascination, excess and eroticization. We will give some examples of these desirous, romantic fantasies and finish by drawing out the role of ambivalence in identification that we will develop in the next chapter. We started the last section by discussing Princess Diana alongside Rosemary West and the way in which the

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Figure 9.3

Princess Diana

media portrayals of both women constructed an image of shared pathology. Diana, however, was always fetishized by the media, who continually focused upon her clothes, hairstyle, looks and body shape. She was an object of desire and, despite her attempts to rerepresent herself as the ‘Queen of Hearts’ (Panorama interview, 21 November 1995), was still represented in terms of her body: The Public remains as fickle as ever. Love of Di may last no longer than her looks and age catches up with everybody. (Observer, 26 November 1995)

Diana represented her own reading of her constructed pathology, which ran alongside these other representations, in television’s Panorama interview in which she ‘confessed’ to postnatal depression, bulimia and an extramarital affair. These were confessed by Diana as the costs to her of continually being scrutinized and subjected by the public eye. The following question and answer occurred in the interview and illustrate

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how Diana viewed these experiences as functional in her strivings to cope. They were failings to be worked upon and transformed: MmB: ‘And so you subjected yourself to this phase of bingeing and vomiting?’ Diana: ‘You could say the word subjected but it was my escape mechanism and it worked for me at the time.’

Diana’s confession of suffering was constituted within a discourse of self-help and coping. In the contemporary cultural sphere, transformations in the way in which psychopathology signifiers are occurring (Rose 1996b). From the confessional spaces of chat shows to the pages of women’s magazines, ‘failures of personal existence’ are presented as stimuli for change and self-transformation. However, as we argued earlier, ‘failure’ is, throughout media representations, usually located and contained within Others and is made to signify as abnormality and pathology. This may account for the polarized response to Diana’s confessions, which in some media accounts were represented as evidence of Diana’s instability rather than a process of change. An interview by Suzanne Moore in the Guardian (22 November 1995) punctuated her response to the interview with the words from ‘I Will Survive’ and entitled it ‘The New Model Goddess’. Other representations relocated Diana within a world of pathology with the headlines ‘Diana’s no woman of the world’ (Daily Mirror, 25 November 1995) and ‘Paranoia and Psychobabble’ (Guardian, 22 November 1995). In a more hostile and invective manner, the Daily Express (23 November 1995) marked her out as neurotic and far from saintly: Princess Diana was neither magnificent, nor manipulative… She was pathetic. And anyone who thinks otherwise is as disturbed as she is.

We can see from the contradictory representations of Diana that the signification of Otherness is ambivalent and contains elements that are in opposition, often based upon fantasies of desire and fascination, as well as lack and danger. As we will see in Chapter 11, this ambivalence also structured the media coverage of Diana following her tragic death in September 1997. What was most interesting about the coverage was the way in which Diana became constructed through a fantasy of ordinary suffering, providing a point of identification based upon her more fragile, vulnerable and in some cases even ‘unstable’ nature. It was this point of identification (the overwhelming feeling that she ‘was one

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of us’) that channelled the outpourings of grief people felt and touched people’s psychical realities at this time. This was reflected in her saintly representation as the ‘Queen of People’s Hearts’ (cf. Chapter 11). She was extraordinary because she was so ordinary. Many writers have begun to explore the role of ambivalence within the way in which we identify with those people and experiences marked out as ‘other’ within the symbolic. We will explore these in more detail in the next chapter when we look at representations of race and sexuality. Here we just wish to signal the role of ambivalence in constructions of madness, and how ‘we’ may identify with these images. In an article entitled ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, written by Julia Casterton (1997), who has worked in a psychiatric day hospital running a writing workshop, the author explores the way in which the staff ’s fantasies of the patients involve an identification with the patients’ suffering while simultaneously disavowing it. Casterton talks about the way in which ‘the mad’ can also signify a romantic ‘letting go’, a loss of social constraint and the responsibility and struggle that accompany it. This construction involves a certain envy and desire of the ‘mad’, who are seen to be cushioned from the world and who cannot be shouted at or punished. As she comments, ‘Wouldn’t we all like to be wrapped in such cotton wool?’ (ibid.: 502). This mode of identification allows one to acknowledge certain desires and wishes within oneself while at the same time banishing them or fixing them in the place of the Other. In other words ‘we’ can identify with a desire to ‘let go’, lose control and so on contained within the ambivalent images of the mad as Other, while maintaining the normal/Other distinction through the way in which we can also deny it; that is, it will only happen to the Other, not me. This allows the identification with those experiences constituted as Other without the penalties. Thus we can through fantasy take the place of the Other and gain transgressive pleasure, while leaving the other fixed in what Fuss (1995) terms a murderous and violent gaze. To complicate matters further, if the person positioned as Other identifies with their Otherness – that is, my madness is a disease, there is nothing I can do, I am not responsible – and celebrates it, are they being objectified or actively understanding their experiences in a way that allows them to place the other outside of themselves? That is in the hands of the ‘experts’. We will finish with a quote from Casterton’s (1997) article, which highlights the ethical consequences of the different meanings attached to the Other, depending upon whether it is the self or other appropriating the image:

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Once, when we had all watched a television programme about depression, which argued that chemicals in the brain were responsible for prolonged feelings of despair, John appeared exultant, triumphant even. He almost crowed, ‘So that’s it. It’s physical, it’s in the genes. There’s nothing I can do about it,’ and I replied ‘OK why don’t we all just slit our wrists and bleed to death now then, if there’s nothing to be done?’ (p. 506)

In the next chapter we will develop and elaborate these arguments, taking race and sexuality as our objects.

Chapter 10 Post-identities: sexuality and the colonial subject

Negro – his race becomes the ineradicable sign of negative difference in colonial discourses. (Bhabha 1994: 75)

In the last chapter we began to explore how the ‘Other’ forms the basis of media representations of psychopathology and criminality. The way in which we analysed these representations is similar to Bhabha’s concept of the ‘colonial stereotype’. The ‘stereotype’ does not denote a misrepresentation or distortion of a pregiven reality. Instead, it is given a semiotic and productive role in which the ‘Other’ as a sign repeatedly signifies in a particular way. The same old stories about racial difference as pathological are endlessly told and retold… We feel that how Bhabha uses the concept of the stereotype is useful when thinking about the status of representations of psychopathology and criminality, especially within the mass media. If we consider psychopathology and criminality as signs, we can start to explore the relations between signifiers and signifieds, and the conditions that govern these relations. If we take the signifier – criminality – there is a semiotic chain of associated concepts that give the signifier its meaning as a sign. As we have seen, the following meanings are usually associated with the signifier ‘criminality’ constantly underpinning media representations. It is significant that these meanings are usually characteristics taken to define the criminal as a character or personality type: impulsive, loner, maladjusted, deviant, immoral, no regard for others, irresponsible, irrational, animal-like, aggressive, violent. The relations between the signifier and the signifieds is the sign. Bhabha (1993) approaches the signs governing the ‘colonial stereotype’ as ‘Other’ and explores the role that the Other plays in processes 152

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of subjectification He shares a commitment to processes of subject formation similar to that of Foucault, rejecting the universal subject and instead focusing upon how a particular normative image of the human subject is maintained and confirmed. Bhabha’s focus is the ‘colonial stereotype’ and the way in which racial difference and its signification as ‘Other’ confirms western rationality as normal, natural and inevitable. Within this account Bhabha (1994: 75) explores how western forms of governmentality construct the ‘nation state’ in such a way that colonial subjects become objects of these normalizing processes, judged, administered and managed in relation to a regulatory ideal. This regulatory ideal construes skin colour as a sign of degeneracy and impurity, as the ineradicable sign of negative difference. Bhabha suggests that this signification is also the site of a set of defences and fantasies. The fantasy is of the myth of a unified, original civilized human subject; the defence is the disavowal of any difference(s) from this normative image. The location of difference within Otherness thus guards against the possibility of the fantasy being threatened, as any difference is always a pathological difference. In this chapter we wish to continue exploring the role of the ‘Other’ in representations of sexuality and racial difference. We will begin to investigate the implications of postcolonial writers and critical writings on sexual identity for the regulation and management of the individual. This will lead us to consider an important question that has so far been missing from our account – how do we, as actual subjects, engage with those images of normality and pathology which make up the social world in which we exist? We will start to determine whether psychoanalysis can be used in a way different from its deployment within screen theory (cf. Chapter 4) to explore the question of the relation between processes of subjectification and subjectivity. This is an important question, one that we must raise at this point as we do not want to replace biological essentialism (the universal subject) with a form of social or discourse determinism. We will consider the legacy of Fanon’s writings and whether his deployment of psychoanalysis, and its development by Bhabha, offers a way forward for media and cultural theory (cf. Read 1996).

The age of normalization We have looked in some detail at the socio-political context in which psychology emerged as a discipline in the late nineteenth century. This

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context also created racial and sexual difference as being ‘Other’ to normality. Writing in 1892, Galton, who has had a significant influence on contemporary debates within psychology on the relation between race and intelligence, argued that the white, aristocratic male was the pinnacle of civilized thought and behaviour. He proposed that whites had superior mental powers and that other races differed in a developmental hierarchy from the primitive to the savage. He placed blacks at the lowest end of the scale, where they were seen to lack natural ability and rational powers of mind. This scale of merit saw the white, English, middle-class male as having a superior innate potential as a result of his pure inherited stock or constitution. Those who were created as ‘Other’ also contained a ‘set of fears’ concerning their threat to the nation’s intelligence and its possible decline. As Galton iterates in the opening pages of his treatise on Hereditary Genius (1892): The range of mental powers between the highest Caucasian and the lowest savage – but between the greatest and least of English intellects is enormous. There is a continuity of natural ability reaching from one knows what height, and descending to one can hardly say what depth. I propose in this chapter to range men according to their natural ability, putting them into classes separated by equal degrees of merit, and to show the relative number of individuals in the several classes. (p. i)

It is significant that Galton uses the term ‘merit’ which also implies or connotes social worth. Those who were placed lower down this developmental sequence were viewed as being more primitive and savage, expressing a degenerate constitution. They were constituted as a threat because of the fear that their supposed moral and physical disorders would be passed on to the population at large. The species of the world were portrayed and differentiated according to a set of arguments placing western rationality at the pinnacle of human behaviour. People were seen to differ in their innate potential, which was seen to determine the development of rationality and morality. Galton proposed eugenics strategies as a measure to protect the nation’s intelligence. These governmental strategies involved the detection and identification of ‘Otherness’ in order to prevent further destruction. The working classes and colonial subjects were seen to breed differentially and were targeted by strategies of sterilization and segregation to curb their supposed inherent threat. The ‘Other’ within this account functions in the various ways in which Bhabha discusses the ‘colonial stereotype’. First, it is based on a

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fantasy of a fixed, universal rationality that unifies and defines the civilized human subject. It also acts as a defence through its recognition and constitution of difference as pathology and abnormality. The ‘Other’ also contains a ‘set of fears’ regarding its apparent threat to the stability and smooth running of the social order. Its productive role lies in its function to confirm and maintain a particular normative image of the human subject. We can see then that, in the context of the emergence of psychology, racial difference and its signification became central to its practice(s). One of psychology’s roles was to function as the knowledge to identify and classify ‘Others’ in order that the threat could be contained, excluded or transformed (Rose 1985).

Race and intelligence These ideas and the quasi-evolutionary view of the human subject that underpinned them are still central to contemporary debates and practices within psychology. Sir Cyril Burt, first writing in the 1940s, constituted intelligence to be an innate, inborn potential that differed according to class and race (1966). Burt was highly influenced by Galton, but more than that, he reproduced the biological and evolutionary discourses so central to psychology’s approach to the nature and form of subjectivity. Burt became a media celebrity in the 1970s when he was accused of scientific fraud. The twin studies on which he had based his conclusions on class, race and intelligence were found to have been invented. This did not lead to a questioning of the very premises on which these relations were based but fuelled further research and investigation. The ways in which intelligence was framed remained the same, its discursive constitution gaining its currency and plausibility from the wider discourses of the individual already historically in place. Hans Eysenck, who until his death was a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, has again told the same stories about the relation between class, race and intelligence. He made an interpretation of a finding by an American psychologist, Arthur Jenson, in 1969, reproducing the same nineteenth-century discourses. Jenson found that American blacks scored on average fifteen IQ points lower than American whites on what was taken to be a standard IQ test. IQ tests purport to measure and quantify innate intelligence through a series of questions. Eysenck argued again that this was evidence of blacks’ lower innate potential for intelligence. As recently as 1996 a psychology

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lecturer, Chris Brand, made a similar claim that blacks have a lower IQ than whites. The book was withdrawn by publishers, but this shows how these discourses are still very much in place over a century later (cf. Guardian, 9 November 1996). Since the 1970s, with the entrance of more black psychologists into the discipline, there has been a huge resistance to the assumptions of IQ testing and their apparent racist discriminations. This resistance argues that IQ tests do not measure innate potential at all but acquired knowledge. The questions measure knowledge gleaned via particular cultural, social and educational backgrounds and are therefore unfair, biased and culture bound. They simply reflect the beliefs, values and knowledge of the test constructor and cannot be used as measures of any claim to a universal rationality or intelligence. The following questions are typical of IQ tests that would be described as culture bound and therefore discriminating against those disadvantaged through educational background. They also show the absolute cultural relativity and specificity of IQ tests claiming to measure a universal definition of intelligence: 1. Odysseus is to Penelope as Menelaus is to Circe / Helen / Nausian / Artemis / Eros? 2. Carmen is to Boheme as Bizet is to Verdi / Puccini / Massenet / Wagner-Strauss? The racist and discriminatory assumptions and practices of IQ testing have become widely discussed in the media in recent years. A Guardian article on 21 October 1994 carried the headline ‘Are whites really smarter than blacks or are there sinister political agendas at work?’ The responses from psychologists are still trapped within the very terms of the debate, the assumption that there is a universal core of intelligence that can be measured and quantified not being questioned. The aim now is to produce more culture-fair tests that are based less upon acquired knowledge relative to specific socio-cultural and educational backgrounds. Thus contemporary tests are based more on the manipulation of symbols and shapes taken to be a measure of visual–spatial intelligence. The taken-for-granted assumption that remains the foundation of these debates is the notion that intelligence is a biological substrate fixed at birth, one which can be isolated and measured with scientific tests. The idea that rationality is one of the key characteristics defining us as human subjects is hard to question. We know Descartes’ famous

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saying ‘I think therefore I am’ and see this as capturing the essence of human existence. However, the idea that rationality is a universal, unchanging structure is itself ethnocentric and historically contingent. This presumption has been borne out on an empirical level, where it has been found that rationality and reasoning mean different things depending on the context and wider social-historical background (Cole and Scribner 1974). The very meaning of concepts such as reason and rationality are produced differently as signs if we examine their specificity in educational and domestic practices (Walkerdine 1988). This examination of reasoning and cognition cogently shows how there is no one true universal definition of rationality, or a unitary category that can be uncovered by science. Reason itself is always historically and culturally produced (Sahlins 1976; Hollis and Lukes 1982; Rabinow 1996). Hacking (1982) illustrates this view, focusing upon the different ‘styles of reason’ specific to other cultures that cannot be easily translated or judged for their truth/falsehood or irrationality. It has also been demonstrated by one of the authors that the way in which rationality is specified and constituted in the present differentially positions and judges girls and boys. Walkerdine (1988) for example, argues that it is the gendered constitution of what counts as rationality within mathematics, education discourses and practices that defines girls’ good performance within school mathematics as inadequate and boys’ poor performance as no indication of lack of ability. We can see this clearly in the following examples of teachers’ comments about two ten-year-olds: very, very hard worker. Not a particularly bright girl… her hard work gets her to her standards (this is of a girl who did very well in class).

Compare this with the following comment about a boy: can just about write his own name… not because he’s not clever, because he’s not capable, but he just can’t stay still, he’s got no concentration… very disruptive… but quite bright. (pp. 97–102)

It is the gendering of rationality that allows the girl to be understood as being outside rationality, as lacking, even though performing well, and the boy as not lacking, even though performing poorly. What we have demonstrated so far is that the concept of rationality as a timeless, enduring, stable characteristic defining the human

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subject has become part of those ‘truths’ that organize the present. This concept acts as a regulatory ideal organizing social practices such as schooling and education, in which our behaviour and action are judged in relation to the supposed truth of the human subject. This regulatory image is cross-cut by class, gendered and racial differences, which act as markers of the limits of this supposed natural rationality.

The colonial subject The way in which racial difference functions as ‘Other’ within debates surrounding the relation between race and intelligence is a specific example of how colonial subjects are positioned, conceptualized and administered within psychological practice. The main assumption inscribed within psychological theories is that racial difference stands as a marker of ‘Otherness’ whereby colonial subjects are construed as being more childlike, lacking in ego development, more dependent, innocent, vulnerable, stupid, primitive and aggressive. They are seen to lack the normal psychological characteristics taken to define the mature and psychological healthy subject. Their difference confirms the psy normative image as natural and inevitable. This difference is itself historically produced from a set of differentiations already in place, which created the colonial subject as more being primitive and lower down the evolutionary scale.

Black psychology The primitive/civilized dichotomy that underpins the concepts governing racial difference have been resisted within the discipline by the emergence of a ‘black psychology’ (cf. Jones 1991). This psychology is an attempt to resignify the meaning of ‘black experience’ through a re-evaluation of those concepts taken to define colonial subjects. These psychologies are what we might term ‘reformist’, taking the very concepts embedded within mainstream definitions and reclaiming them simply as signs of difference rather than lack and deficiency. In other words those historical divisions through which race was differentiated and defined as ‘Other’ remain unchanged. What has changed is the evaluation we give to these divisions where they are viewed as simply different and not a sign of abnormality. The following quotation from a collection of writings mainly by black psychologists

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illustrates the way in which ‘Otherness’ is collapsed into difference, obscuring and denying the actual role that the ‘colonial stereotype’ plays in processes of subjectification: rather than argue that black people are totally psychologically unique, it would seem that our experience with – and management of – key psychological concepts, as they pertain to the handling of contradictions, role of the hero, language systems, the meaning of work, and a healthy sense of suspiciousness differ profoundly as we compare the black experience with the white anglo experience. (Jones 1991: 8)

This assumes first that there is a homogenous ‘black experience’ that can be distinguished from a homogenous ‘white experience’. This is an essentialist argument that quickly reduces to biological or social determinism. It assumes that the ‘black psyche’ is defined by a unique set of psychological characteristics distinct from those of the ‘white psyche’. Bhabha suggests that rather than grounding difference within an authentic experience, we should instead be focusing on unsettling those very social and historical divisions through which racial difference has been defined and regulated as ‘Other’. We need critically to examine those very ‘truths’ which have played a part in the production of the colonial experience. We then need to explore the complex relation between those historical divisions which produce the human subject in all its complexity and the way in which ‘we’ live out these divisions in relation to our own subjectivities.

Fear, phobia and fetish Frantz Fanon (1967, 1990) produced a body of intellectual ideas in relation to the role of representations of race in producing particular forms of colonial subjectivity. He was committed to a radical psychiatric practice that recognized so-called pathological symptoms as being produced through the colonial experience. His work was inspired by psychoanalysis and was especially focused upon the unconscious and conscious mechanisms that reproduced and produced racism and colonialism. At the heart of Fanon’s writings lay the idea of ‘projective fantasy’, whereby racial difference became the location and embodiment of the colonizers’ fantasies. Thus certain fantasies are ‘split off ’ and located within the Other, playing a role in confirming and maintaining the unity and coherence of the colonizer. These fantasies

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become part of the way in which racial difference is then lived and experienced by both the colonizer and the colonized. The following extract taken from Fanon’s writings illustrates how fantasies about the Other shape social relations and forms of ethical conduct: My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recoloured, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The negro is an animal, the negro is bad, the negro is mean, the negro is ugly: look a nigger, it’s cold, the nigger is shivering, the nigger is shivering because he is cold, the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy throws himself into his Mother’s arms: Mama, the Nigger’s going to eat me up. (Fanon 1967, quoted in Bhabha 1994: 34)

The above quotation, from Fanon’s text Black Skins, White Masks, illustrates how the colonial subject is lived through the colonizer’s fantasies. These fantasies construct the colonial subject as the object of fear, hate and derision. The Other is to be feared, to be hated, constantly threatening to take the colonizer’s place. The latter fantasy is what Fanon termed the ‘paranoid fantasy of primordial dispossession’, which structures the white ‘man’s’ encounter with the black ‘man’ (quoted in Read 1996: 15). We can see then that, for Fanon, there is never any one way direct perception of difference or indeed another person. This relation is always lived through a complex set of what Fanon termed ‘fears, phobias and fetishes’, which structure and set the parameters by which experience is located and embodied. In line with poststructuralist thinking, these ‘fears, phobias and fetishes’ are themselves discursively produced through the way in which the Other is made to signify. In other words, symbols and images of difference lie at the centre of colonial experience and form the basis of fantasies of Otherness (Bhabha 1983; Butler 1993; Walkerdine 1997). The negro is, for Fanon, fixed by the way in which racial difference becomes an object not only of fear, but also of desire. The look of the colonizers, or the place or location from where they look, is structured also by more erotic, desiring fantasies. This is the ambivalence of the look that Bhabha develops in his writings on the contradictory images of the other that circulate within the cultural sphere and that we started to explore at the end of the last chapter in relation to madness. The colonizer is thought through a chain of significations that link together certain signifieds to construct the meaning(s) of racial difference. The

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erotic fantasies of the other include the way in which the skin of the black man can not only signify degeneracy but a rampant, potent sexuality. This is where, as Fanon argues, the black man becomes a penis, is penis. As Fanon argues in Black Skins, White Masks when exploring some of the fantasies of his white psychiatric patients, ‘One is no longer aware of the Negro, but only of a penis: the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis. He is a penis’ (quoted in Mercer 1992: 5). As Hall and Du Gay (1996: 16) argue, this is reminiscent of the way in which the scopic drive was seen to underpin the gaze that fixed certain people as objects of that look. We have seen how this scopic drive was seen to be part of the way in which Hollywood film functioned to objectify women as the passive objects of an active, controlling male gaze. This is the main way in which psychoanalytic concepts have been deployed within screen theory to analyse the role the gaze of the cinema plays in processes of subject formation. As we have seen in Chapter 5, women were seen to be objectified and eroticized on the screen, where they are noted to be marked by either lack or excess. The excess of the feminine identity is usually one that fetishizes the female body to cover up for its lack in relation to masculinity. We saw how this fetishization is actually seen to be a defence against a deep psychic fear in the masculine subject that he too could be castrated, as the woman already is. Within screen theory the look or gaze is structured according to binary oppositions between the male/female, active/passive, which are argued actually to structure the spectating or reading positions available to actual viewers or subjects. The female spectator can take up either a masochistic or sadistic subject position within the film text, which is seen to tap into earlier psychic processes of subject formation. As we discussed in Chapter 5, this is where psychoanalysis is used to analyse the relations within the filmic text whereby the spectator is seen to be inserted into the text according to a desire for scopophilia or voyeurism.Within Fanon’s work the binary oppositions are structured in relation to black/white, colonizer/colonized, resulting in similar problems when we try to address the complexity of the relationship between the colonial experience and actual subjectivities. Fanon’s work also engaged with the way in which the colonial subject internalizes how racial difference signifies as Other, that is, as a sign of degeneracy, which results in a certain inevitability and passivity when addressing the relation between discursive divisions or positions and actual subjectivities.

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This problem has become central to current debates on the relationship between the symbolic, fantasies of the ‘Other’ and actual processes of subject formation. Koebena Mercer has taken up this question in a reassessment of some of his earlier critiques of the photographic work of Robert Mapplethorpe. In his article ‘Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary’, he considers the role of the reader in relation to the visual representations of the black male nude in Mapplethorpe’s work. He talks about how these representations circulated within a gay scene in the early 1980s as a problematic and illicit object of desire. These representations could be seen to fix the black man within those erotic and exotic fantasies that construct the colonial subject as Other. Within Mapplethorpe’s photographic images the black man is represented by his penis, signifying his potent and rampant sexuality – his excess. As Mercer underlines: We were shocked, of course, and disturbed by the racial discourse of the imagery. Above all we were angered by the aesthetic equation that reduced these black male bodies to abstract visual ‘things’, silenced in their right as subjects, serving only to enhance the name and reputation of the author in the rarefied world of art photography. (Mercer 1992: 1)

In this article, however, Mercer introduces the ambivalence that he experiences as a reader in relation to these images: his fascination and desire as well as shock and anger. He highlights the emotional economy or ‘structure of feeling’ that is generated by these images, which goes beyond the very rationalist approach to the audience and differential readings that are currently the focus of audience work (Morley 1992). In its rejection of psychology and psychoanalytically inspired work, we have seen how audience approaches entirely sidestep the issues of ‘projective identification’ elicited through processes that may not be entirely conscious. Mercer goes beyond the idea of the text as being ‘hermetically sealed’ and focuses upon the interrelation across the text, the author and the reader, in, as he states, ‘relations that are always contingent, context-bound, and historically specific’ (ibid.: 1). This is similar to Walkerdine’s use of psychoanalysis to explore the relations between the text and the reader. In this focus Mercer wishes to highlight the role of the reader and the role of context in generating differential readings. We wish to explore in detail this work as it is important for the critical psychological project we are developing.

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The active audience In Chapters 3 and 8 we explored the way in which audience and reception studies, as well as more discursive psychologies, approach the relation of subjectivity or identity to the issue of textual interpretation. Identity is seen to be circumscribed by ‘structural positioning’, which enables differential access to cultural resources through which a person is seen to engage with a text. So, for example, race, gender and class are viewed as homogenous and fixed social differences that limit access to particular ways of making sense of the world. This conception of identity is one that Mercer is critical of in his more psychoanalytically inspired conception of subjectivity or identity. Mercer, along with many postcolonial and poststructuralist thinkers, views the Other as being central to modern processes of subject formation. He explores the way in which the ‘splitting off ’ of particular fantasies and their projection onto the Other is constitutive of white identity. Thus the ambivalence and contradictory nature of images and symbols of racial discourse is part of the process through which white identity is formed and constituted. As Mercer argues these contradictory images and fantasies of the Other tell us more about ‘the political unconscious of white ethnicity’. In this sense the Other is central to the process through which identities are constructed. If we relate this to some of Foucault’s later writings on the ‘self ’, he argued that the relation of the self to the self is constituted through what the self is not – the Other. We constitute our own identities or subjectivities always in relation to anOther – our identities are always located and embodied. However, as Walkerdine (1990: 200) has proposed, ‘we are each Other’s Other – but not on equal terms’. Mercer then accords the Other a central role both in the historical divisions through which the human subject is constituted, and at the level of those psychic processes which maintain and produce particular identifications with the Other. On the basis of racial difference as ‘always-already’ signifying as Other, there are a range of ambivalent images of the colonial subject that signify on this basis. As Mercer (1994) argues we are continually confronted with symbols of the black man as both an object of fear – the mugger, the savage and so forth – and an object of desire – the (sexual) athlete, the dancer, the entertainer. The Other at both an asocial and a psychic level plays a role in maintaining a particular conception of the relation of the self to the self as being normal, desirable and natural. As we have seen this

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relation of the self to the self is cross-cut by racial, gendered and classed divisions that produce certain subjectivities as abject and pathological. In relation to the above argument, Mercer argues that Mapplethorpe’s photographic images of the black male nude embody and confront the spectator with the ambivalence that lies at the heart of processes of subjectification. He describes the ‘doubling effect’ produced through these images, which confront the spectator with the ‘fears, phobias and fetishes’ that circumscribe white ethnicity. He focuses upon a specific image, ‘Man in a Polyester Suit’, which shows a flaccid but enlarged black penis protruding through the fly of a suit, as an example of the ‘shock-effect’ produced through being confronted by this ambivalence. He argues that this image of a black man (penis) in a suit embodies and disturbs those erotic and abject fantasies at the heart of colonial fantasies. We are confronted with a fear of the threat of the black man’s sexual prowess to the white master and civilization itself, alongside a desire for the black man whereby his skin becomes the object of an erotic and exotic gaze. Mercer argues that these images have a homoerotic dimension amplified through the look or gaze, which puts the spectator into an active and controlling position in relation to them. This gaze is one usually reserved for women within western cultural practices. It is at this point that Mercer underlines the importance of the biographical and autobiographical in the range of differential readings made possible by the text.

The overdetermination of identity Mercer highlights the way in which identities or subjectivities are always overdetermined and contradictory. We exist in the nexus of practices that differentially read or define our subjectivities. Within these practices race, class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity intersect in the production and construction of our own lived experience. These discursive positionings also simultaneously produce our own fantasies, desires and investments, which are again ambivalent and contradictory. In relation to ‘Man in a Polyester Suit’, Mercer explores and is confronted by the ambivalent erotic fantasies and investments produced through his ‘reader-position’ as a black gay male. This creates his anger at their fixing and exclusion as ‘Other’, alongside his erotic desire and envy of the black male nude. He argues that this

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ambivalence calls the reader’s own subjectivity into question, creating uncertainty and undecidability. This account of the relationship of the text to the reader gives us a very different way of considering textual readings and interpretations. If these readings carry a psychic dimension through their embodiment of subjective fantasies, desires and investments, then they function in particular way. We have seen the way in which the Other functions to ‘split off ’ particular experiences and locate them along a plane of excess and lack. These projective mechanisms function to defend against anxiety, ambivalence and contradiction. We would therefore expect that certain images of the Other or textual readings, that is, those which maintain the psy image as being normal and natural, would be preferred and reproduced. We could relate this to the fixity of the colonial stereotype that Fanon continually highlights in his writings. As we saw in the last chapter in relation to madness and criminality, these significations function to draw limits around ‘who we take ourselves to be’ and what we are willing to accept as being human. They are part of a movement that anchors the signification within historical relations and regimes of truth bound up with how we are governed and managed as a population. Our engagement with these images may, however, depend upon our own ambivalent fantasies, desires and investments produced through our multiple and contradictory positionings as a subject (cf. Henriques et al. 1998). This is what Walkerdine (1990) has explored as a more backwards movement, the way in which a signification becomes linked into a chain of associations and relations produced through the specificity and materiality of a particular life or subjectivity. It is this semiotic chain of associations which, she argues, has an unconscious dimension. We thus need to understand the complex relation of fictional fantasies of Otherness in producing us as subjects and producing the positions, multiple and contradictory, that we embody.

A politics of transformation Hollway, in Changing the Subject (Henriques et al. 1988), explores the tensions and anxieties created through one’s multiple and contradictory positioning as a subject. She is interested not so much in the fluidity and flexibility of subjectivity, one of the main focuses of postmodern debates (cf. Chapters 6 and 7), but with why people are so

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resistant to change, why they continually invest and reinvest themselves in particular discursive positionings. Hollway explores this in relation to heterosexual relations and the way in which gendered divisions function to ‘split off ’ certain experiences and emotions and locate them in the ‘Other’. She argues that one effect or consequence of these ‘projective identifications’ is that gendered identities are maintained and confirmed. This may be especially pertinent given that the psy image is one whereby we are constantly invited to see and relate to ourselves as unitary, whole, coherent, non-contradictory and autonomous. As we have seen, these identifications and defensive mechanisms may function, at a psychic level, to keep this fragile relationship of the self to the self intact. We will explore this in the last chapter, where we look at recent attempts to develop a ‘psychology of survival’ (Walkerdine 1997). This psychology recognizes that the psy normative image produces not only desires and investments, but also fears, feelings of persecution, hostility, anger, guilt and denial. This psychology recognizes that particular subjects may find it difficult to maintain the psy relation of the self to the self because of how they are positioned in relation to it in different practices. This relation is not viewed as a pathological relation but rather as an experience bound up with the living out of oppression and powerlessness. Walkerdine (1995) has already begun to explore this with workingclass women who have entered higher education. These women talk of how the contradictions between particular normative images or regulatory ideals and the exigencies of their own lives produce their own psychopathology. What it is important to recognize is that the anxieties and conflicts they experience are related to the very ways in which their subjectivities have been discursively produced within the nexus of practices that make up their lives. In order to understand this, it is, as Mercer has highlighted, again important to understand how a person’s biography has created particular investments and desires that are interrelated and mutually dependent upon those historical divisions through which they have been positioned. On a symbolic level this may explain why, as we have seen, certain images of the Other constantly return and are told and retold within the cultural sphere. These may be at times when the ‘invisible’ normative image is threatened or, as Mercer suggests, recounting Voloshinov (1973), at times of flux, resistance, change and upheaval. This is where efforts are made to ‘fix’ the multiple connotations of a sign in relation to a wider regime of truth and meaning – the forward movement we have

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already described. We will explore this in the next section, where we consider different sexualities and contemporary writings on gay and lesbian identity. What needs to be explored, as Mercer cogently argues, is what happens in the spaces between textual images and representations and the reader’s own subjectivities. This space is a phantasmatic space itself created through the multiple historical divisions that make up the social space in which we exist as subjects. This allows us to go beyond seeing the reader or spectator as being passively determined, fixed by the text or preformed, to an account of the struggle and resistance created at the intersection between textual fantasies and images and the spectator’s own ‘already-constituted’ fears, fantasies, investments and desires.

Different sexualities What is the secret of my desire?, Perhaps it would be better to ask oneself, What relations, through homosexuality, can be established, invented, multiplied and modulated? The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of sex but rather to use sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships. And no doubt that’s the real reason why homosexuality is not a form of desire but something desirable… To imagine a sexual act that doesn’t conform to law or nature is not what disturbs people. But that individuals are beginning to love one another – there’s the problem. (Foucault 1989: 204–5)

In this section we want to start by focusing upon mainstream media representations of different sexualities and the concepts that govern these representations. We will begin by describing a scene in a film directed by D Bogart (1988), The Torch Song Trilogy, which highlights at an affective level the way in which some relationships are viewed as having more status and validity than others. The scene is one in which the main character, a gay Jewish man, is reciting the Kaddish at the graveside of his murdered lover, alongside his mother who is doing the same for her dead husband. The mother finds this enunciation and action intolerable, obscene and disgusting. It is one thing for her son to be gay, to have sexual relations with men, but quite another for her universe to encompass the possibility of relationships that disturb the gendered nature of sexuality. The scene is poignant for our discussion because it highlights how gender and sexuality function to maintain

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and confirm particular sexual and social relations as being normative and natural. This scene above all makes visible the fear and hatred that are created when this image of normality is threatened. Homosexuality may be socially tolerated but only within very narrow limits. Foucault (1989) highlights the way in which culturally, the sanctioned signifiers of the homosexual experience are the casual encounter, the anonymous sexual act, the immediate albeit illicit pleasure. He argues that the more disturbing aspects of the homosexual experience are the new alliances that may be forged and invented: the cameraderie, affection, friendship, passion, solidarity, companionship and tenderness. It is the ‘mode of life’ that constitutes a threat to the inevitability and necessity of particular heterosexual relations. It is because the idea of the Other again thoroughly saturates the way in which modern conceptions of sexuality have been historically constituted.

The age of repression Foucault (1979) illuminates this process in his History of Sexuality, Volume One, in which he engages with the traditional historiography of sexuality – what he terms the repression hypothesis. This story or historical narrative traces the emergence of our modern conception of sexuality through a process of increasing repression. It is one whereby we only recognize certain sexual relations and object choices as being natural because we are repressed. This is the opposite of being liberal and tolerant, and is usually located within the colonization of the meaning of sexuality by the Church or medicine. The flipside of this is the call for a liberation of sex, as Foucault argues, a call for one to free oneself from sexual restraint. Foucault is critical of this narrative, instead viewing the late nineteenth century as being an age of normalization rather than repression. He disturbs the story that, in Victorian society, secrecy and silence surrounded sex. We recognize this story in the myths that circulate within the present where sex was in the past confined to the conjugal bedroom, the bourgeois family home. It was hidden away in a private realm, never discussed, unless in confessional spaces where the darker side could be exposed within the safe confines of the pastoral relationship. Foucault argues that, rather than secrecy and silence surrounding sex, there was a veritable ‘discursive explosion’ in the late nineteenth century. He suggests that there was an eruption of discourses on sex;

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the sex act was scrutinized, compared, judged and administered, but in specific spaces and sites, such as the doctor’s consulting room. A semiotics of sex was established that was structured according to medical and psychological distinctions claiming to be based on the ‘truth’ of sex. Sex had become an object of a medical–clinical discourse functioning as the true discourse on pleasure (1979: 71). Sex had been put into discourse through divisions made between the normal and the abnormal confessed to authoritative figures such as the psychiatrist, sexologist and doctor. Within these regimes of truth, there was seen to be a range of peripheral sex acts, which were taken to be deviations from reproductive sex – the invisible norm. These deviations or perversions became the object and target of discourses such as sexology, which, as Foucault highlights, was a ‘science of aberrations, perversions, exceptional oddities, pathological abatements and morbid aggravations’ (1979: 53). What was particularly interesting was the transformation in ethical and social relations that emerged from these discourses. Sexual acts became linked to the truth of one’s being or destiny, particular acts and choices acting as markers of pathology, of the deviant character type. Sexuality thus became linked into a chain of associated concepts that marked out particular groups of people as Other, expressing degenerate constitutions. Their sexuality was governed by the concepts of risk, danger and, above all, disease and illness. These groups were taken to be marginal yet in their marginality functioned to confirm reproductive sexual relations (heterosexuality) as being normative and natural. The target of sexologists was thus the ‘sex of children, madmen, women and criminals’ (Foucault 1979: 38). It is difficult then, given the wider socio-political context that we have already interrogated, to see the constitution of sexuality separately from the wider government and management of the population. As with race, madness and criminality, the ‘Othering’ of sexuality became part of wider processes of subjectification concerned with confirming, producing and maintaining a particular image of the human subject as normative. This supposed unified subject – the universal subject – was, as we have seen throughout the book, sexed, raced, gendered and classed. As with the processes we explored in relation to the colonial subject, any difference from this normative image is disavowed and located within the Other. This is a violent denial of difference that we have shown produces ambivalence at both a psychic and a social level. It would seem then that, as with the black man in relation to the white man, the heterosexual is defined in relation to the

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homosexual – to what he or she is not. Because of the relational nature of identity that we have already explored, this would seem to illuminate the fear and hatred evoked by the homosexual ‘mode of life’, which Foucault describes and is captured in our exemplar from The Torch Song Trilogy.

The homosexual stereotype The ambivalence evoked in fantasy through how sexual difference is made to signify is made visible in recent critical writings on the way in which HIV and Aids have been made to signify symbolically (cf. Boffin and Gupta 1990). Although sexual difference can signify in ambivalent ways and come to stand as a symbol for alienation, isolation, freedom, liberation, marginality, the ‘freedom to choose’ and even coolness, particular significations return in relation to the threat of Aids. We could term these ‘significations’, invoking Bhabha, the homosexual stereotype. They fix the homosexual within particular regimes of truth and meaning that signify sexual difference as Other – as an object of fear, hatred and derision. Thus, within 1980s British Health Education Authority Campaigns for safer sex, the homosexual is targeted in particular ways. These campaigns, as McGrath (1990) highlights, presume that homosexuality is inherently unsafe. In other words it is assumed that it is ‘who you are’ and not ‘what you do’, that matters. McGrath illustrates this by comparing a similar health education campaign, which went out differentially targeting heterosexual and homosexual groups. Each advertisement showed either a heterosexual or a gay coupling. The text of the adverts remained the same apart from a startling absence in the advert targeting gay audiences. The clause – Aids, you’re as safe as you want to be – had been dropped. The connotations of this absence resignify the historical contingency of sexuality in which the homosexual was marked as being unsafe, dangerous, a risk and ill, but now with a new twentieth-century twist – the threat of death. A semiotic chain is produced that metonymically links together certain concepts or signifieds metonymically to produce the meaning of sexual difference. These concepts gain their intelligibility from the wider discursive regimes in which they exist and circulate as Other. These historical relations and the metonymic associations they have produced have been explored by many critical writers on sexuality and gay and lesbian identity (cf. Mort 1987; Weeks 1989; Watney 1994).

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Mort, for example, has established how, in the nineteenth century, homosexuality became differentiated from heterosexuality according to particular binary oppositions in which heterosexuality was constituted as good and healthy, homosexuality being its diseased, dangerous and evil Other. We have not simply left these semiotic relations behind as it is these very relations and divisions which have resurfaced in the twentieth century’s fear of Aids. Myer (1991) explores how these historical divisions underpin the way in which Rock Hudson’s death from Aids was signified within the media. Prior to the coming out, or ‘leaking out’, of Hudson’s gayness, he was symbolically represented within Hollywood films in the 1950s, as wholesome, reliable, hygienic and healthy. He was the ideal model of healthy, heterosexual masculinity – to be looked at – by women, with his sanitized looks and larger-than-life physique. His representation, as Myer argues, was structured according to a fantasy of sanitization. This image or representation is in stark contrast to what Myer terms his ‘anti-body’, which structured representations of Hudson in the mid1980s when it was ‘discovered’ that he was dying of Aids. Myer concentrates on a representation that appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1985. There were two photo stills alongside each other – the first a sanitized image of Hudson, the second his ‘anti-body’. This was an image of the ravages of Aids on his body, a body that had fallen prey to psychic and physical deterioration. Myer asks what we are supposed to be recognizing in this before and after comparison? We are of course supposed to be recognizing the deviant sexuality that is responsible for the killer disease, the leaking out of Hudson’s inner secret, the truth of his desire now written on his body for all to see. These before-and-after representations embodied a set of fears about the threat of homosexuality to the sanctity of heterosexual relations. Time magazine represented this textually in the following commentary: To moviegoers of the 1950s and 60s no star better represented the oldfashioned American virtues than Rock Hudson. [But] last week as Hudson lay gravely ill with Aids in a Paris hospital; it became clear that throughout those years the all-American boy had another life, kept secret from the public… he was almost ardently homosexual. (quoted in Myer 1991: 275)

It would seem then that Aids and the way in which it had been made to signify embodied a set of fears about the threat of the homosexual ‘mode of life’ to the sacredness of heterosexual relations. Hudson had disturbed the fantasies of hetero-masculinity – the fantasy of the man

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who could offer the woman wardship and protection. This had been particularly identified as a fantasy of masculinity by women who had invested Hudson’s images with a set of wishings and longings for someone to look after them and protect them – somewhere where they could be safe in the gaze of a man. As Ruth Wertheimer told Playboy magazine: I feel sad for all the thousands of women who fantasized about being in Rock Hudson’s arms, who now have to realize he never really cared for them. (ibid.: 279)

This fantasy had been shattered by the leaking out of the truth of Hudson’s desire, the new terror of homosexuality and its metonymic link with Aids, that is, you cannot necessarily tell whether someone is gay (just as you cannot, as we have already discovered, tell whether a housewife is a murderer). This covered over an image of the family threatened and made vulnerable by the homosexual ‘mode of life’. Aids and homosexuality had become constituted as an alien Other. The new terror of Aids was the way in which it would remain invisible, undetectable until the final inscription of its fatal secret, when the body would turn in on and attack itself. It is this chain of associations, played out in a set of Health Education Authority advertisements for Aids, which McGrath (1990) considers. One of the advertisements presents the face of a woman and asks readers to consider how they would be able to tell her HIV status. The reader is then presented with the identical image to underline its inherent invisibility. Marshall (1990) describes how that, prior to the Aids ravages, there had been a scarcity of images of gay men in the media. There had always been the usual gamut of representations signifying perversity, illness and disease, such as the image of the gay man as a child molester. There were also occasional images of the gay man as spy, not to be trusted with national security. Alongside these of course there had always been the Other ambivalent images of gayness – the outsider, alienated, sometimes even creative and insurgent, that is, literary representations such as Oscar Wilde and Jean Genet. With the Aids crisis, homosexuality and a killer disease have, as Marshall argues, become inseparable in the public imagination. In the symbolic representations of Aids, sexual undesirables and social undesirables have become thrown together. In an article in the Guardian on 20 August 1994, debating the rights and wrongs of supplying heroin users with methadone, there is an implicit judgement that drug users, cigarette smokers (lung cancer

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sufferers) and Aids sufferers have brought about their own suffering. There is a guilty/innocent dichotomy that structures moral judgements made in relation to the ethics of medical care. Although this division is, in this article, rejected on humanitarian grounds, it nevertheless remains as the division that gives the article its intelligibility. Why, asks the article, ‘should we care about a few chronic heroin addicts with selfinflicted problems?’ The article answers its own question with the assertion that ‘there are good reasons for caring, and caring passionately, even on elementary humanitarian grounds. To not care is the equivalent of denying treatment to an Aids sufferer or a smoker with lung cancer.’ As we know from the range of media representations of Aids sufferers, there is a sliding from the sufferer as innocent victim – an object of pity – to the sufferer as being guilty – an object of contempt, fear and scorn. Marshall considers the cost of these representations, especially for the gay man who positions himself in relation to them. We have seen recent examples of confessions by gay men talking about the price paid for sexual freedom. The lauding of Oscar Moore, the British gay man who regularly wrote for the British newspaper the Weekend Guardian about the day-to-day inevitabilities of living with Aids, and his nostalgia for the pre-Aids days of sexual freedom, were documented until his death at the end of 1996. Although we can see a gay man becoming a subject rather than an object of these representations, there is still the danger that they reproduce and tap into those regimes of meaning and truth which have historically constituted the meaning and reality of Aids (cf. Watney 1994).

The politics of representation Although the Aids crisis and critical analyses of its symbolic function have highlighted the fixity of these stereotypes, the responses from the gay community have highlighted the struggle and resistance at the level of signification to these meanings. This alternative politics of representation has attempted, through arts, photographic and alternative media projects, to resignify the meaning and reality of HIV/Aids. The Quilt Project is perhaps one of the most startling in the Aids imaginary. This quilt contains panels representing the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who have died with Aids. Friends, family and lovers are invited to contribute a panel that personalizes and individualizes the reality of the life lost. The examples below show

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Figure 10.1 Panels of the Aids Quilt commemorating loved ones who have died

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some of the ways in which people have been chosen to be represented by their loved ones. The quilt does not represent the meaning of Aids according to those divisions so sedimented within the mainstream media. Instead it aims to signify the sheer love and loss created through the Aids crisis. The divisions that structure these representations are constituted according to the political and personal effects of Aids. In some ways they signify what is suppressed or covered over by mainstream media representations of Aids. They give voice to the myriad of lives that have been taken by this ravaging disease. They are not objects of pity, scorn or contempt but celebrations of people’s lives – their passions, desires, energy and individuality – albeit always framed within a scale of loss which is unimaginable and terrifying. It is no coincidence that the quilt is now so big it can no longer be exhibited as a whole for people to reflect on. There are also film projects, such as Silverlake directed by Tom Joslin and P Friedman (1992), that document the reality of Aids for those living with it. This project was begun by a film lecturer with the help of his long-term partner, who chose to produce a video diary of his eventual demise and death from Aids. We, as viewers, are confronted with pain, misery, silence, mortality, bitterness, sadness and anger as well as happiness, hope, optimism and love. This is not a sentimental story of a person coming to terms with death but one of someone struggling and surviving daily with a disease that produces eventual psychic and physical obliteration. This is a radically different representation from the recently acclaimed Philadelphia, directed by J Demme (1993), Hollywood’s attempt at a sympathetic rendering of the reality of Aids. The representations within the textual relations of the film are ambivalent, perhaps creating the range of differential readings that have been made of the film (see Davies and Smith 1997 for a discussion). We have in it images of the way in which the familiar representations of Aids and homosexuality are based upon fear and ignorance, but this is almost inevitable when they are represented alongside the safety and sanctity of the family unit. Within the film the binary oppositions of black and white and their usual connotations of evil/good and so on are reversed, the black lawyer, played by Denzil Washington, coming to signify safety and the white lawyer, played by Tom Hanks, embodying the threat of homosexual relations towards the vulnerability of the family. The fear of the black lawyer being presumed to be homosexual is highlighted in one scene in a chemist when he is

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applauded for his humanitarian ethics and simultaneously cruised by an adoring black gay fan. The response is one of shame, disgust, fear and hatred, reminding the viewer of the ambivalent fantasies constructing the homosexual as Other. The ambivalent and contradictory nature of the images and fantasies of the Other within the film create a range of possible readings and interpretations, which will depend upon the viewer’s ‘alreadyconstituted’ fears, desires, fantasies and investments. One of the authors of this volume felt an overwhelmingly angry reaction to the film. As a ‘lesbian reader’ of the film, one of the points of identification was the injustice of being the object of anOther’s gaze not in the terms of one’s making, that is, the experience of powerlessness and oppression created through the constitution of sexual difference as Other. This fantasy of the Other was continually reinforced through the simultaneous defence of the family as a place of safety and protection from the danger(s) of the outside world – of marginality. This fantasy of the Other also existed alongside a ‘desire for the Other’, a much more romanticized and exoticized image of the Other. There are two scenes that we might explore in relation to these fantasies. The first is a scene in which Washington visits Hanks, who is dying from Aids, to go over his case, which will go before the courts the following morning. Washington is privy to a scene in which Tom Hanks moves into an ecstatic union and moment of rapture with the opera recital he is listening to in his apartment. This comes to stand for his marginality and alienation from Others – his sorrow and pain. The second is the scene of the party given to celebrate the winning of the case. This scene is again marked by excess, by drag queens, eccentricity, carnival and exotic difference. In both scenes Washington is on the margins looking from a place of knowledge, certainty and, above all, safety. It is obvious that this film can be discussed neither as ‘hermetically sealed’ nor as being entirely dependent upon the way in which audiences make differential interpretations. If we take the notion of a ‘forwards movement’, there are fantasies and discursive relations embedded within the film that are bound up with how sexual difference has been constituted as Other within regimes of truth and meaning such as sexology, psychology and psychiatry. There are also more ambivalent and contradictory fantasies that signify on the basis of this Otherness, similar to those which have been explored in relation to the colonial stereotype. They operate as both fantasies of and a desire for the Other, which becomes a location and embodiment of difference. As we have already explored, these fantasies also operate, on a psychic and

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social level, as defences and disavowals of difference. In a filmic text we would therefore expect that they function as points of identification that allow pleasure through disavowal. We would thus suggest that they are ‘preferred meanings’ (Hall 1997: 228), which play a particular role in many of the audience’s own investments, desires, anxieties and fantasies. They are bound up with modern processes of subjectification and are embedded in and organize many of those social practices that make up the social space(s) in which we exist. The relationship between fantasies within a film and the audience’s own fantasies and investments is, however, never fixed. These relations are also points of struggle and resistance. We are not simply suggesting that we can account for differential readings through an idea of social difference circumscribing interpretations. This would be returning to an idea that race, class, gender and sexuality, for example, are structural positionings that limit, constrain or even enable access to particular cultural resources through which we make sense of the social world. Instead, people are positioned differentially in relation to social practices in which their subjectivities are ‘read’ differently depending upon their gender or class, for example. They are also positioned in relation to Other practices, such as domestic practices, practices of consumption, lifestyle, popular culture and ‘subcultural groups’, in multiple and often contradictory ways. It is at the nexus of these practices that a person’s subjectivity is formed and reformed. We are therefore arguing that biography and autobiography are important in understanding ‘how’ a person engages with those fantasies inscribed within film. This is not an understanding of autobiography that sees a person’s subjectivity as being personal, isolated and purely subjective. Instead, it is an understanding that views the psychic or subjective as itself being discursively produced at the intersection of those practices through which a person is defined, and which simultaneously produce their desires, investments and wishes – what they come to want, who they take themselves to be. It is this point of dynamic intersection that needs exploring via empirical study (cf. Walkerdine 1990, 1997) through a recognition of both a forwards and a backwards movement (cf. Chapter 4). It is this relation which cannot be adequately encompassed by an idea of ‘queer spectatorship’ (cf. Burston and Richardson 1995) or gendered pleasures (cf. Geraghty 1996), which simply fixes the production and creation of meaning at the level of consumption, relative to homogenous social differences. What we have argued in this chapter then is that a ‘critical psychology’ of the media needs to engage with the complexity of the

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relationship between subjectification and subjectivity. This relationship is phantasmatic and fictional, functioning across a range of social and cultural practices. It is, however, never fixed: there are always points of resistance and struggle, both psychically and socially. We need a ‘psychology’ that engages with the way in which people struggle with those contradictory positionings that inscribe them in specific ways. It is here that we are recognizing the importance and significance of the Other, both discursively and in terms of how people relate to themselves and Others at a psychical and ethical level. It also places cultural practices, such as film, art, photography and literature, at the centre of practices of resistance to and struggle against the way in which the Other is continually made to signify. In our concluding chapter we will sum up the implications of our argument and make some tentative steps towards the development of a ‘critical psychology’ of the media–psychology relationship.

Chapter 11 Conclusion: Princess Diana and practices of subjectification

We have in this book presented the basis of a different way of looking at the relationship between critical psychology and the media. In this chapter we will review the arguments made in previous ones and go on to discuss the implications of our argument for an understanding of the death of Princess Diana, an event that was characterized by accusations of mass hysteria on the one hand and ‘people power’ on the other. In the Introduction we began to explore the concept of Otherness, focusing, through the example of Rosemary West, on the issue of the role of the ‘psy’ disciplines in promoting an understanding of subjectivity through concepts of self-regulation and autonomy, which, we argued, underpin the subject needed for the smooth running of a liberal democracy. These concepts contain within them notions of normality and pathology, and, ever since the inception of the mass media, concepts about the nature of the mass subject have been central to an understanding of how the media are taken to work and have their effects, as well as the manner in which the mass of people consume the media. It is this concept of the subject which underpins much of the work we sought to trouble. We proposed that the concept of the active meaning-making audience did not overcome the problems of accounts that assumed a passive and duped audience. This is because, in one kind of account, the consumer does not have an active and autonomous mind and is therefore unable to consume rationally and critically, whereas in the other he or she lacks the social and cultural resources and capital through which to produce critical and resistant readings. Although one may be presented as a problem of psychology and the other of sociology and social forces, the two poles of the 179

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argument actually share many of the same assumptions about the difficulties inherent in particular subject practices of consumption, even if they differ in terms of their cause. This split reinforces the individual/society dualism implicit within this kind of foundationalist account (Henriques et al. 1998). The active/passive dichotomy mirrors the dichotomy of individual/society and leaves us nowhere to go in a seesaw of claim and counter-claim with respect to the relative merits of different notions of the cause of failure to consume rationally, critically and autonomously. We asked how a different understanding of the place of psychology, and indeed of the subject (beyond these dualisms), in relation to the media was possible. In the chapters that followed, we sought to examine approaches to the subject and media within psychology, social and cultural theory which had attempted to find a way out of this dilemma. We began in Chapter 1 by looking at models of communication, criticizing on two counts the idea that the media caricatures or distorts information by providing stereotypes. First we made reference to the work of the Caribbean psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, who argued that stereotypes draw on wider cultural stories and should be viewed as part of a cultural and social process through which we come to construct our subjectivities, and those of others, by producing accounts of difference, Otherness and normality. We discuss this and writers who use his work in more detail in Chapters 9 and 10. We developed this point by referring to the use of semiotics within structuralist and poststructuralist theory, in which the media is understood as productive rather than reflective of meanings, therefore playing a part in constituting the ways in which people come to understand their social worlds. Specific reference was made to the work of the French semiologist Roland Barthes concerning intertextuality, that is, the way in which meanings (in this case media meanings) always contain within them reference to other and wider systems of meaning. Moving on from ways of understanding media and communication processes, we turned in Chapter 2 to the object of psychology, arguing that psychology claims to tell the truth about itself and to offer timeless truths about human beings. We made reference to Foucault’s theories to understand not human nature but the processes of subjectification through which humans come to develop knowledge about themselves and others. In that sense, linking back to the previous argument, subjects came to be defined in relation to normative models that always contained some pathologized Other. We discussed how psychology became, along with other human and social sciences, part of the

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apparatuses for managing and governing the population. Specifically, we pointed to the emergence of modes of regulation of the masses that defined them as being other to those very characteristics of autonomy, rationality and criticality which were discussed earlier. Thus the masses became the object of a regulation that understood them as irrational, oversuggestible and lacking in critical judgement. It is these characteristics of the masses which became so central to an understanding of the masses as object and unreliable recipient of the mass media. We argued that this very notion was built into the government of liberal democracy and became the basis of social psychology. As we have seen, it also became the taken-for-granted basis of studies of media effects. In other words the problem of the media became the vulnerability of certain individuals who were not able to approach the media rationally and critically distance themselves. In some examples these vulnerable individuals were led to violence, for example, in response to media portrayals of violence. Similar kinds of assumption are made with respect to studies in the tradition called ‘uses and gratifications’, in which the media is understood as acting as a compensation for perceived lacks within the subject’s life, recalling Freud’s arguments about the stupidity of the masses in reaching only for the most immediate of gratifications. If, however, we turn to audience research, with its apparent rejection of a psychological subject, we still find that subject allowed in through the back door. The use of concepts such as the ‘active audience’ designates a subject who is actively making meanings rather than passively consuming. However, subjects’ capacity to make resistant readings is directly related to their structural location, and reference is then made to theories of ideology that imply psychological failure to recognize or to understand on the part of the masses. So while structural location is meant to remove blame from the individual and lay it at the door of society, a pregiven psychological subject is actually assumed, one which either is or is not capable of autonomous thought. We argue that this approach cannot provide the break with notions of the duped and passive subject that it wants without going beyond the sociologism and psychologism that lies embedded within it. If we turn to the Frankfurt School, the use of a combination of Freud and Marx paves the way for an understanding of the mass as the gullible consumers of the mass media. It was the use of Marx’s work on ideology to understand the power of the media as an ideological form that became increasingly important to a left wing struggling to

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understand the power of the mass media in the context of a perceived increasingly rightward-leaning and embourgeoisified proletariat. It was this issue which we dealt with in more depth in Chapter 4, by examining developments in European social theory from the 1960s and 70s onwards. We concentrated in particular, on the work of the French social theorist Louis Althusser, describing his famous account of ideological state apparatuses as being formative of subjects through the process of interpellation. In his formulation, which took what was then a considerable risk for a Marxist in placing ideology above the economy and placing the economy as the cause only in ‘the last instance, but the last instance never comes’, Althusser places as central the formation of subject identities in the ideological practices of the state. It is this formulation which helped to pave the way for an understanding of media and culture in terms of the production of subjects in ideology. Althusser’s use of works by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to bolster his account of the ideological subject was crucial. As we explained Lacan made reference to semiotics and structural linguistics to understand the ‘unconscious as structured as a language’ and a fictional subject whose very unconscious is created in the fictions of the social and cultural world, the Imaginary and the Symbolic Order. It was the type of film analysis that came to be known as screen theory, after the journal Screen, that was particularly important for bringing this ideological/psychoanalytical axis into the study of the media. It became common to talk of a ‘theory of the subject’. In this analysis there was a subject produced in ideology, but the problem later identified by audience research was the complete overdetermination of this subject by particular filmic texts and the loss of any sense of intertextuality. The Screen subject was fixed and pinioned by particular film texts. The political response to this tended to be the same old rationalist one: a version of the creation of the autonomous, critical and rational subject, one who could critically distance him- or herself from the seductive ideological identifications of the film text. In this account the masses remained as irrational and oversuggestible as ever. In Chapters 7 and 8 we examined what was happening to critical debates in psychology during the move to European social theory and psychoanalysis. Certain elements of critical work turned towards that very tradition of European social theory of which we have just spoken, especially in the form of the journal Ideology and Consciousness and the book Changing the Subject (Henriques et al. 1998). However, as we point out, many psychologists have problematized the nature of knowledge and social reality embedded in psychology, making use of

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theorists different from the French structuralists and poststructuralists such as Foucault. In particular there was in the 1970s what was described as a crisis in social psychology in which the idea of a positivist social psychology as presenting a descriptive truth was challenged by a move towards a radical humanism, which offered a prediscursive pre-ideological self that had to learn to relate to others as selves of a particular type, principally through the medium of language. This wave of criticism prefigured a second wave of critical work that came to be known as discursive or postmodern psychologies. These moves are outlined in more detail in Chapter 8. In a move that in some ways parallels Lacan’s turn to structural linguistics, these theorists turn to language as having a subjectifying force, as creating individuals’ understanding. However, owing more to micro-sociology than social theory, these approaches tend to view talk as the place where identities are constructed. Narrative frameworks produce accounts that have force as truth in the social world. But unlike the approach taken by the authors of this volume, truth is understood as a rhetorical device, as being produced as an effect of language, whereas we would want to focus on the central importance of the historically specific production of truth and its effectiveness in the production of power, in producing modes of regulation. So we do not think that the autonomous rational subject is one script or version of ourselves that we can accept or choose to reject but a historically specific form of the subject, which is specifically produced in the regulation of the population. As we argued, the psy image of personhood is not simply located within language, instead being produced inside the techniques, practices and institutions through which the social world is governed. Barthes’ concept of intertextuality is extended to understand interdiscursivity – the way in which discursive practices link together to provide the ensemble of practices through which subjects are governed. This takes us way beyond an emphasis solely on the text as a constructive device. Discourses are not discrete entities that function for certain interests, nor does power simply repress or marginalize certain modes of existence: indeed, it comes to structure those very existences and resistances. It produces too our wishes and desires in relation to the ways of being that are sanctioned within those practices by which we are governed. It is hard, for example, in the present not to want to become autonomous, capable of critical judgement. Being irrational or uncritical is not a form of resistance that would be easy, for just as that is pathologized, so is it governed and managed.

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We want therefore to understand the complex relation of modes of subjectification (ways of being a subject), the place of the psy complex and the regimes of meaning contained within popular culture and the media. It is, we argue, the way in which the Other circulates within cultural representations, that tells about the practices through which the normal and pathological are constituted. It is in this way that we might begin to explore the relations of subjectification both within and for those who consume the media. Of course, several theorists of the postmodern criticize a universal and depth model of the human psyche, arguing instead for a move towards a postfoundationalist position rather than some assumption of a universal underlying structure. It might be thought that such work would be helpful to the project that we are outlining, but one of the major problems in this body of work is the utilization of models of depth psychological processes at the very moment that these are understood as part of modernity. We cited Jameson’s use of the term ‘schizophrenia’ and Baudrillard’s ‘autism’. The use of such terms, in fact, has to be understood in relation to the earlier use of psychological concepts within leftist thinking, such as alienation within the Frankfurt School discourse. These writers want to signal how much more difficult things have become and refer to more profound notions of mental distress – psychoses rather than neuroses. In many ways, however, we are back in the familiar territory of the use of pathological concepts to describe the masses, who in terms of postmodernity are not just understood as irrational but as profoundly sick (cf. Chapter 7). It was feminism that first used the idea that ‘the personal is political’, understanding personal transformation as a key part of political change on the one hand and indicating that the arena of the personal was just as much a political arena as the economic on the other. While the nature of the feminine subject was much debated, we focused on the way in which feminism entered the terrain of media studies. In particular we highlighted the turn to psychoanalysis and the intervention by Laura Mulvey into screen theory in the 1970s, pointing out the male fantasies that formed the basis of Hollywood constructions of ‘woman’. In a Lacanian analysis woman was indeed a fiction created in the male imaginary, but a fiction that circulated in the Symbolic Order, which was profoundly phallocentric and therefore could never be gone beyond. This position was opposed by other psychoanalytical feminists, and we briefly explored the work of Irigaray, with her conception of the possibility of anOther language, and Cixous and Clement, with their notion of ‘feminine writing’.

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However, it was the subject of women’s pleasure that caused most disagreement among feminists engaged in the study of the media. Basically, the positions that we outlined earlier of those who supported a passive versus an active audience were rehearsed within the feminist debates, with the same kinds of attendant problem. Also, as in relation to debates about postmodernity, feminists have argued for new postmodern forms of the feminine subject, interestingly ones that are far more positive than those of the male postmodern writers concentrating on the masses. Haraway’s cyborg and Braidotti’s nomad both suggest a subject who was already Other and who had to come to terms with being outside the rationality of modernity and, rather than seeing it as a lack, understanding it as an important political state that could signal a major difference and a way forward for women. However, as with other accounts discussed earlier, this figure is not grounded in the practices and technologies of the social, and therefore the figures tend towards idealism. Judith Butler attempts much more clearly to ground her work in a politics in which the gendered subject is both performed and highly regulated within the plays of power. If we turn more clearly to focus on the production of Otherness, we can extend the range of our analysis by examining two case studies: criminality and pathology, and race and sexuality. It was these analyses which formed the basis of Chapters 9 and 10. In Chapter 9 we explored the way in which criminality, in the form of the psychological make-up of the criminal, has become the major way of understanding crime as a social phenomenon. We argued that psy discourses define the human subject within regulative practices and represent difference as Otherness. Differences are often viewed as pathologies or abnormalities and can become the site of dreams, fantasies and exoticizations of that Other. This idea has, as we argued, become central to postcolonial writing, as in, for example, Homi Bhabha’s extension of Fanon, and the work of Koebena Mercer on sexuality and blackness. We explored these ideas in detail in relation to the media portrayal of criminality and psychopathology, with its emphasis on risk, danger, disease and death. We argued that the mad and the bad play a central discursive role in reconfirming the image of autonomous self-regulation as both normal and inevitable. In the examples we used, we aimed to demonstrate that, in neoliberalism, the discursive categories work to define a particular image of the social world, one that excludes or silences other possible explanations. It is these categories which underpin the way in which the media represents objects and forms the basis of those fictions and fantasies

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circulating within popular culture. It is inevitable then that the struggles of Others for self-determination should focus on how their psychology is defined and on different ways of constituting their experiences, as with the Hearing Voices Network, for example. It was, however, the figure of Princess Diana, who became twinned in the media with Rosemary West, who produced the most ambivalent response to her presentation as breaking the bounds of rationality: she was both feared and desired. We will return to her later in this chapter. In Chapter 10 we develop the discussion with respect to sexuality, especially that sexuality associated with Otherness, that of black and gay men. By exploring the portrayal of Other sexualities within a number of films, we were able to examine the fantasies and discursive relations embedded within a film and bound up in the way in which sexual difference has been constituted as Other within regimes of truth such as psychology and psychiatry. We are, however, still left with the issue of the contradictory practices in which subjects are located within the ensemble of practices in which a film may play a part. Instead of attempting to account for differential readings of a media text, we need to understand precisely how that text functions as part of a complex set of practices through which particular subjects are constituted. To attempt to conclude this book, we will turn to the example of the death of Princess Diana as one way of examining this relation:

The crowd in the age of Diana The public response to the death of Diana is not a fabrication of the media. It is a revelation of the country we have become. The Princess of Wales will be remembered as someone whose circumstances imposed the necessity of self-invention. Her frail and maimed spirit became strong by surviving the breakdown of an archaic marriage. Her death disclosed a country which is already more modern than its politicians have understood. (Guardian, 3 September 1997, quoted in Blackman 1999a: 124) It will be remarked that among the special characteristics of crowds there are several – such as impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of the sentiments, and others besides – which are almost always observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution – women, savages and children, for instance. (Le Bon 1922: 17)

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A mob is by definition fickle. It lacks political nous or political sophistication and is always dominated and motivated by emotional considerations. That’s what distinguishes it from political protestor political expression. (Guardian, 12 August 1998, quoted in Walkerdine 1999: 123)

Hysterical masses and revolutionary crowds In the week that followed the death of the Princess of Wales, commentators were at first obsessed by the idea of ‘mass hysteria’. Few observers, it seemed, could understand just how people in their right minds could grieve so openly and volubly for a woman they had never met. Echoing the words of Le Bon, some reports condemned this ‘mob behaviour’ as Americanization, leaving behind the stiff upper lip seen to characterize the British character. The London newspaper, the Evening Standard, reported on 4 September 1997 that ‘public demonstrativeness is unseemly and unproductive: like any mob emotion, it threatens to turn nasty’. It railed against the ‘unelected guardians of our heartstrings’, who can ‘use their emotions as a club to beat the rest of us – or encourage us to feel an unearned superiority with others’. By the end of the week, Martin Jacques, former editor of Marxism Today, was ushering in the ‘Floral Revolution’. People Power was on the agenda. Indeed, the tide against mass hysteria began to turn when television commentators spoke to the crowds leaving flowers and queuing to sign the books of condolence, discovering that they were not mindless zombies but could actually make coherent, even rational arguments about the importance of the princess and the importance of their presence and mourning. As we were at pains to point out in the earlier chapters of this book, however, this othering of the crowds, the masses, is one of the bases of the technology of the social through which they are governed. And it is one more way in which psychology and the media work together to provide a way of understanding what is normal behaviour in such circumstances and provide a grid against which that behaviour might be evaluated. It is interesting, as we remarked in Chapter 9, that Diana was herself understood not only as an ‘overly sympathetic and sensitive’ person, but also as a deeply ‘psychological’ one, in the sense that she was able to express and discuss her emotions in a way that was to be seen to be completely foreign to an emotionally remote royal family.

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We can use our framework to explore the place of Diana in the psychological and political project of civilizing the masses and the role of the latter in understanding the relation of her to the ‘ordinary’ people who mourned her. The other side of the ‘mass hysteria’ and its evocation of those restless antisocial crowds is the spectre of revolution and people power. As in debates about active and passive audiences, we can argue that they are two sides of the same coin. One invokes the people to behave like rational subjects; the other demands that they rebel and invokes a discourse assuming that they must, at last, have had the ideological blindfolds removed from their eyes or their consciousness in order to see things as they really are. The attempt to understand and control the masses, whether by left, right or centre, has had at its heart a problem with understanding ordinary people as being anything other than psychologically lacking, be it by virtue of their irrationality or their inappropriate consciousness. The psychological project that was marshalled to make them into appropriate citizens or revolutionary foot-soldiers indeed produced the very people who rebelled in such an unexpected way and whose very mourning and protests were still to shake and worry the chattering classes. If the people were doing it all on their own, how could it possibly be all right? This ‘revolution’ embodied pain, love and loss rather than rage and was not, in the main, perpetrated by angry young men – not by the traditional agents of revolution but by the very people who would usually be regarded as deeply conservative. Add to this the fact that many of these people included in their mourning the invention of new spiritual rituals garnered from ‘New Age’ practices and you have all the elements to suggest that ‘the people’ had cracked. But that is because many commentators had failed to engage with what the lives of ordinary people had been like except to comment on the new media communities of soaps or the absence of sociality. Indeed, the problem goes further than this. The form assumed by any revolution, uprising or mass movement from below is always a surprise and cannot be contained within pre-existing discourses. Psychological and sociological discourse cannot contemplate ordinary people as agents of transformation, except in and through a theory of government and hierarchical leadership that privileges political action and whose inverse is the hysterical mob that does not know what it is doing. In these traditional discourses, social change is always described as political transformation. These theories of the social in which the state has a central place contain an implicit notion of hierarchically

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ordered sociality, a notion of ordinary people as disempowered, and a notion of ordinary behaviour as irrational. Hence crowd emotions, unorthodox spirituality and the spontaneous actions of ordinary people are forever pathologized. The idea that ordinary people could understand something that others had missed through all the hyperbole thrown at them by the media, and could recognize what they wanted to do about it in a practice of profound social and political comment and indeed protest, is beyond the comprehension of many of the broadsheet and intellectual commentators. They were either duped into mass hysteria by the media or produced a people power that would only make sense when harnessed and guided by the state. This is why sections of the broadsheet press began the week with wild claims about mass hysteria and ended it in serious discussion about the fall of the House of Windsor: only these extremes could be countenanced within the discourses that the press and the ‘so-called’ experts had set up.

Psychological selfhood and self-invention If the civilizing project of liberal democracy was to produce a rational subject capable of accepting the moral and political order, a selfgoverning citizen, the production of a rational autonomous subject was central to that project (Henriques et al. 1998). What has been practised for most of this century, with increasing urgency and increasing acceptance, is a project through which the animal, instinctual subject (taking the emotions as the object of rational discourse), the subject of the masses, is to be remade as a subject capable of understanding, judging and amending his or her own psychology, one indeed who can understand self-transformation as a key issue in both self-improvement and managing the exigencies of daily life. The huge number of selfhelp volumes and the insistence of television chat shows (from Oprah to Parkinson to Letterman) to invite their audiences to public scrutiny is mirrored by the work equally accomplished in the social work office, school or law court, for example. At the end of the twentieth century, this was a culmination of what was a scientific project at its beginning. Ordinary people are not made in the image of the autonomous psychological subject: they are to become it. Blackman (1999a) argues that Diana stood as an icon for that ordinary transformation and, in doing so, placed herself as a subject in need of change, just like the masses and unlike the cold and distant Royals.

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This opposition should be seen as an opposition between two forms of rationality; the expression of emotionality is, after all, championed by Oprah Winfrey and others, as being a rational act, a claim that has done much to undermine older notions of emotional self-control. Indeed, Blackman argues that Diana displayed the very features that had been understood by Le Bon and his predecessors as the dangerous characteristics of the masses: sympathy, oversensitivity and a feminine irrationality. Emotionality, irrationality, fragility and passivity were markers of a femininity that lay outside the rational celebrated in western cultures. These very characteristics had, however, also become part of a project of self-development in which the ability to feel, to nurture, to empathize and to confess were valorized and celebrated as part of a new ‘culture of intimacy’ (p. 1). Blackman argues that it was Diana’s appeal to these characteristics, and her presentation as someone who was both capable of selftransformation and rising above and beyond her circumstances with courage, that appealed to many ordinary women struggling to adapt themselves. Blackman (1999a) continues: Diana’s confession of suffering was constituted within a discourse of selfhelp and coping. In the contemporary cultural sphere transformations in the way psychopathology signifies are occurring. Madness is no longer constituted as irretrievably Other, but an(other) which can be worked upon and transformed (Rose 1996b). From the confessional spaces of chat shows to the pages of women’s magazines, problems of personal existence are presented as stimuli for change and self-transformation. Failure and psychopathology can be overcome and transformed on a route to selfdevelopment. These cultural practices promote a desired image of femininity where women are addressed ‘as if ’ they have the capacity to be autonomous, in control, independent and choosing. Failures in these capacities signify as failures in coping which can be improved on the path to self-betterment and self-empowerment. (p. 4)

It was ordinary women who knew more than others about the dreams of self-transformation, who lived in marriages where princes no longer stayed forever and often left for a younger model, leaving them to bring up children alone while struggling to earn a living. It is these women, who, throughout the Tory 1980s and 90s, struggled to hang on to ‘love’, caring and kindness against a Thatcherite tenet of selfpromotion. No wonder then that Diana’s confessions left them feeling that someone had at last articulated just how bloody hard it was to

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attempt to become an autonomous woman and just how sick the struggle could make you. Small wonder also that the invectives of the tabloid press – ‘[Diana] was pathetic. And anyone who thinks otherwise is as disturbed as she is’ (Daily Express, 23 November 1995) – produced a massive groundswell of indignation and dissent on the part of those very subjects who had been struggling so hard. It is as though a gigantic wave of identification with that struggle flooded all before it at her death. Nothing was going to be allowed to silence that struggle any more, and if she articulated the desperate hurt that people had been feeling, who would not want to mourn the embodiment of all that pain and love? It was that wave which momentarily flooded the country in the aftermath of her death, and when the water receded, the barrenness of the Conservative era, with its greed and selfishness, was left for all to see. It is deeply ironic that Diana rather than Margaret Thatcher turned out to be the icon of the 1980s. As Blackman points out, it is predominantly women who were the ‘ordinary people’ who valorized Diana, but, as we want to show in the next section, this was at a moment of profound class and gender transformation within Britain and elsewhere. Becoming a psychological subject is not a simple human accomplishment but a struggle in which the push to become an autonomous being is managed and regulated, pathologizing other characteristics through which difficult lives are lived but which exist in the margins of modern life. That those characteristics mix together to produce a rebellion of the damned is hardly surprising.

Gender, class and labour in New Britain It was perhaps the hit film The Full Monty, released in 1997, that first captured the mood for popular culture of what had been happening for some time in Britain and elsewhere. The manufacturing base of the country had been eroded during the 1980s, leaving the industrial heartland as a wasteland, supplanted by financial industries, which, along with the communications and service sectors, became the mainstay of the British economy. Traditional male working-class occupations dried up, and, as the film graphically shows, many working-class men struggled to find new forms of work, having to cope as they did with the rise in women’s employment and economic power, although many women were of course still employed in lowpaid, part-time work.

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Another media product, the BBC serial The Missing Postman, perhaps illustrates well the gendered reactions to the huge and terrifying changes that were taking place. The missing postman is a man who is made redundant but refuses to give up his work, by cycling around the country personally delivering his last sack of letters. He becomes a cause célèbre and a fugitive in the process. On his travels he meets many men who have themselves lost their jobs and are now working in service industries. It is they who most count him as their hero, the man who refuses to give up. The desperate experience suffered by these men leave them with no sense of how to cope with their loss and where to move on to. As they struggle to comprehend the savageness of the changes that confront them, many such men are also overwhelmed by wives who cope with this change in different ways and who face the prospect of self-transformation with more accomplishment and positivity than they do. In the serial the missing postman’s wife ‘comes to life’ after her husband’s disappearance, demolishing the interior of her home and remaking it with such panache that the media crews eventually sent to interview him turn instead to her dramatic interiors. She is remade as an interior decorator with a lucrative living at the very moment he is broken by defeat. His only way out it seems is to leave again on an adventure to deliver one more letter to Italy. At the moment of Diana’s self-transformation, many women were, economically as well as domestically and personally, having to remake themselves. This process, sometimes referred to as the ‘feminization of the economy’, produces not only a huge change in class relations, but also a huge shift of gender. It may be that many of the men who had to face the terrible mourning of their work and manhood began also to have to face the emotionality and self-transformation that Diana embodied. It is at this moment that so many commented on the loss of the British stiff upper lip and dwelt on the image of men too laying flowers and crying in mourning. Indeed, one television documentary highlighted a man who said that he had not been able to mourn the death of a parent but was openly and publicly mourning the death of Diana. It was a time at which there was much loss to mourn about, doubtless mixed with the catharsis of the end of the Tory years and the end of the feeling perhaps that the lid still had to be kept on things in order to keep going in the dark days that it seemed would never end. Thus, for the ordinary people of Britain, so much was changing, and those changes were, and are still, painfully difficult. It was the discourse of self-help that gave many the psychological resources to cope and that provided a heroine of self-transformation.

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It is significant that 1997 also produced a new tome from the Labour Party think-tank, Demos. Entitled Tomorrow’s Women (Wilkinson et al. 1997), it set out a version of the feminization of the economy thesis, drawing on market research data. Its tone was highly celebratory, stating that ‘as male jobs disappear, women’s importance in society is set to rise, as is their confidence’ (p. 8). The publication divides women into five ‘personality’ groups, which themselves provide an important indication of the type of self-invention favoured in Blair’s Britain. This classification put forward by Demos speaks of the necessity of being able to transform oneself in relation to the new labour market discussed above. The five groups are ‘Networking Naomi’, ‘New Age Angela’, ‘Mannish Mel’, ‘Back to Basics Barbara’ and ‘Frustrated Fran’. Of these it is Frustrated Fran who would be categorized as being the most traditionally working class, although class is never mentioned. They are understood as coming from social groups C1, C2 and D and are often single parents in poorly paid, often part-time work. It is these women who, claims Demos, are locked out of the brighter future offered to their better educated and middle-class sisters. The use by Demos of market research categories builds patterns of identity based on models of consumption: these are the new wage earners, the women who, like the missing postman’s wife, must go and create themselves a work identity, one which accords with the new labour market and the new labour force. Demos talk of ‘Fran becoming increasingly marginalized and frustrated at the success of other women, resulting in anger, pessimism, frustration and rage, which could be set to explode’ (p. 31). In September 1997 it did not so much explode as implode. Indeed, it seems as if Demos could only understand angry sentiments expressed as rage but not as love, or loss, or a desire for kindness or spirituality. It seems as if the same tired old notions of angry working-class masculinity have been dressed up in the service of the new femininity. Indeed, excluding Fran, the four types of femininity discussed by Demos suggest the avenues of remaking and self-invention that belie the struggles of the ordinary people with which this chapter has been concerned. For Demos these are mere descriptions and not discourses through which new feminine subject positions are produced and regulated. There are, however, those in Britain who argue that the feminization thesis presented by Demos and others blurs another change that has happened and continues to happen within Britain, that is, that women are being allowed to enter the professional and manage-

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rial labour market at precisely the time at which the status of professions in particular are changing. Adonis and Pollard (1997) argue that: the thirty years since the mid-1960s have seen the rise of the Super Class – a new elite of top professionals and managers, at once meritocratic yet exclusive, very highly paid yet powerfully convinced of the justice of its rewards, and increasingly divorced from the rest of society by wealth, education, values, residence and lifestyle. It is a seminal development in modern Britain, as critical as the rise of organised labour a century ago, and rivalled in contemporary significance only by the denigration of the manual working class. (p. 67)

These authors argue that the professions now have far less status and are paid far less than this new élite in the financial and multinational sector. Woman are thus being allowed entry into professions at precisely the time when these professions are being devalued and highflying men are going elsewhere. It is this new, largely male, superclass that eighteen years of Tory rule allowed to flourish and that witnessed the huge changes in gender and class relations that we have mentioned. This period then is one of massive transformation for the social fabric of Britain, but a transformation that leaves patterns of inequality no less stark but differently organized. Hence, the terror of those working in the public sector concerning the loss of security, status and salary, the loss by most people of any sense of job security, the uncertainties meeting young people with low or no qualifications, which have so dramatically changed the patterns of gendered employment. All this is occurring in a context in which Britain is witnessing no absence of wealth, especially in the South East. Indeed, the media are full of stories of executives on million-pound bonuses enjoying a spending spree. In all of this turbulence, a longing for love, kindness, caring and stability is hardly surprising. Such momentous changes have certainly not destroyed inequality but they have changed it, so that the old certainties of community support in traditional working-class areas have been badly dented. In this scenario, constantly remaking oneself is a necessity for all, no matter where their social location. The loss of jobs for life has affected all sectors of the working population, and in the realm of consumption, late capitalism in the west operates saturation marketing techniques that attempt to create demand for marginal goods and services. These marketing techniques use refined emotionality to feed an ego desperate for self-invention and convinced of the need for

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personal transformation as a means of keeping at bay loss of status and poverty in this changing world. We are proposing therefore that ‘the necessity of self-invention’ attributed to Diana in the Guardian extract quoted earlier in this chapter is a painful necessity for the ordinary people who mourned her and a way of coping with today’s uncertainties when it is no longer possible to know who, what or where you are or are supposed to be. It is also clear that the state and the market encourage these transformations as long as they stay within certain defined boundaries. It is the Diana experience that shows to us where these ‘official boundaries’ of self-transformation lie. It is revealing that, in the weeks following Diana’s funeral, it emerged that production and attendance at, for example, cinema had been dramatically reduced in the week of her death. This revelation corresponded with apparently officially sanctioned requests from Elton John and Diana’s children for mourning to be curtailed, a request that corresponded with the decision to begin the removal of flowers and that was repeated on the anniversary of her death one year later. The limits of allowable personal transformation had been clearly defined. Ordinary people are obviously not only more modern, as the Guardian suggests, but also more creative and inventive, and more of a danger, than they are usually given credit for being. It is this point which brings us back to the issue of the political place of the ordinary people in modernity, that is, that both the psychological and sociological projects depend upon a complex intertwining of subject and state. The people who sat around the trees of Kensington Palace Gardens lighting their candles were not waiting to be led – they were leading. They were daring to express those maligned characteristics of emotionality and spirituality, and they were making new practices of sociality, fashioning them out of the cast-off detritus of rational government. The regulation of them as subjects was of course formed from the discourses and practices through which their psychological and social reinvention was socially sanctioned to appear, but they made something out of what they had. It is they who showed what can be done without the benefit of any intellectual leadership to show them the way. Perhaps that is why the person they mourned presented herself as, albeit an educational failure, one smart enough to become a major international figure. At the start of the new century, we are witnessing the possibility of a different kind of politics. New ceremonies, new ways to live, new ways of coping all offer testimony to the ways in which ordinary people

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struggle with the exigencies of self-invention in a rapidly transforming world. In this world self-invention has both to be sanctioned and intensely regulated: Demos women and crying men are OK, but extended mourning practices are not. This is not a reading of an autonomous self-reflexivity in a ‘third way’ but an attempt to understand the complexities of self-production and the ways in which that self-production cannot be contained even by the very forces of government that deemed it necessary. Despite everything, modernity does not have the measure of the subject. What are the practices through which people are both constituted by and constitute their own responses to media fictions? One of the aims of this book has been to demonstrate that we need to examine media consumption as one of the aspects of being a subject, not as a separate field such as audience research that attempts to construct its object with assumptions concerning the psychological characteristics of audiences. If media fictions are part and parcel of the living of life in the present, these need to be explored as one aspect in which the fictions and fantasies of the subject are constituted through, or in relation to, the regimes of deeply interdiscursive meaning through which subjects understand themselves and others. Although we have not laid out a foolproof method for that kind of work, we hope that we have at least sketched out what might fruitfully be the basis of a different and more productive way of understanding the psychology–media relationship. The rest of the work remains to be done.

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Index civilized 28 human behaviour 28 see also aggression; violence behaviourism 49, 53, 95 Bhabha, Homi 23–4, 119, 152–3 bipolar disorder 128 black experience 158 v. white experience 159 black men, as objects of fear and desire 163–4 black people 119 and IQ tests 155–6 black psyche, v. white psyche 159 black psychology 158–9 Brady, Ian 9–10, 12, 147 Braidotti, Rosi 86, 88, 89 Bulger, James 37, 41–2 Burt, Sir Cyril 155 Butler, Judith 86, 87–8, 88

A abuse, cycle of 145 academic psychology 90 active audience 51–4, 57, 163–4, 181 active/passive dichotomy 3, 14, 56, 58 Adorno, Theodor 63 aggression media violence and 43 see also violence Aids 170–5 film projects 175–7 alienation 97–8 Althusser, Louis 66–7, 69, 70, 182 on ideology 66–7, 69, 91 animality 35 animals v. humans 28 antiessentialism 67–8 antihumanisms 90 anti-realism 109 antisocial behaviour, media as cause of 39–40, 43, 45 audience active 51–4, 57, 163–4, 181 active/passive dichotomy 3, 14, 56, 58 and cultural resources 52 empowerment of 57 audience research 51, 52–3 authenticity 97 authoritarian personality 63 autism 98, 184 autonomous self 4–5, 113, 115 fiction of 4, 104, 115, 123, 134 see also self autonomous selfhood 5 ethic of 125–6

C castration complex 72, 75 catatonia 100 chat shows and co-dependency 103–4 and self-control 41 children aggressive behaviour 43 development process 40 murderous 37–8 working-class 41 cinema, see films Cixous, Helene 84 class 41, 191–5 race and intelligence 155–6 Super Class 194 see also working class entries Clement, Catherine 84 co-dependency 103–4 cognitive mapping 95 cognitive psychology 53 collective mind 32 colonial stereotype 7, 23–4, 152–3, 154–5, 159

B Barthes, Roland 21 Baudrillard, Jean 96–7, 97–100 behaviour antisocial, media as cause of 39–40, 43, 45 207

Index

208 colonial subject 158, 160 colonial subjectivity 23 communication breakdown of 16–25 media distortion of 17 message content 16 models 16, 17, 18 noise in 16 process of 16 see also language; meanings; media companionship, media as 49 connotation 22 consciousness constructed nature of 68 and Marxism 64–5 consciousness raising 79, 80 coping, madness as inability to cope 127–8 criminality 122–51 associated meanings 152 media portrayals 124–6 criminal personality 129, 135 criminals characteristics 6 as psychological subjects 11 critical polytextualism 115 critical psychology 55, 93, 101–21 crowds 1, 31–2 characteristics of 186 collective mind 32 contagion of 32, 35 oversuggestibility of 31, 32, 33, 35, 38 revolutionary 187–9 see also masses; mass mind Cullen enquiry 123 culpability 135 cults 36 cultural backgrounds of viewers, and media text 52 cultural studies, importance of psychological issues 59–60 cultural theory, postmodernist, psychological concepts in 93–5 cyborg 89, 111, 185 cycle of abuse 145

D Dallas fans 86 Dance with a Stranger (film) 141

dangerousness, scale of 127 Darwin, Charles 29 decentring of the individual 112–13 defences 72 delirium 96 de Saussure, Ferdinand 71 desensitization 40 desire, unfulfillability of 73 desired self 103 detachment, politics of passionate detachment 82 developmental psychology 32 Diana, Princess of Wales mass hysteria? 186–8 media representation 142–3, 143–4, 147–50 self-invention 186, 195 self-transformation 189–91, 192 dictatorship 62 diminished responsibility 130 discontinuity v. continuous progression, alternative historiographies 27 discourse(s) 25, 117 psy discourses 103, 104–5, 110, 119, 124 racial 117 self-discourses 112 discourse analysis 54, 114–15 discursive psychology 107, 108 diversion, media as 49 drag 88 dreams 72–3 interpretation of 72–3 drugs 172–3 Dunblane 123

E economy, feminization of 192 écriture feminine 84 ecstasy 96 education, media education 77–8 effects theories v. Marxism 65 Ellis, Ruth 141, 142 empowerment, of audience 57 escapism, media as 49 essentialism 18, 88 ethic of autonomous selfhood 125–6 ethnomethodology 54 exclusion systems 124

Index exogamy, law of 70 experience 118 Eysenck, Hans 155

F Fanon, Frantz 159–61 fantasy 71–2 Butler’s views on 87, 87–8 as defensive structure 72 Fanon on 159–60 in films v. audience’s 177 of hetero-masculinity 171–2 infantile fantasies 62, 74 and masculinity 81 of primordial dispossession 160 projective fantasy 159 and race 159–61 social fantasy 49 woman as 75, 81, 87 Fascism 62, 99–100 fascist potential in population 63 father, law of the 71, 82, 83, 84 fear 160 on the streets 126–8 female impersonators 88 feminine painting 84 feminine writing 84 femininism, French writers 82–4 femininity achievement of role 80 attributes of 136, 137, 140, 141, 145 Imaginary 82 as masquerade 88 postmodernity and 84, 86–8 and rationality 138–42 feminism 184–5 feminists’ views about Freud 80–1, 82–3 and film theory 81 and psychoanalysis 79–89 second-wave 79 feminization of the economy 192 fiction of the autonomous self 4, 104, 113, 115, 123, 134 fictions functioning in truth 103, 121 field-dependent thinking 41 film-making, avant-garde 82 films female viewers 86

209 psychoanalysis of 76–7 women in 81, 81–2 see also individual film titles film theory feminism and 81 see also screen theory Findley 126–7 Foucault, Michel 27–8, 32, 88, 91 on anxiety of judging 11 approach to truth 33–4, 109 on repression and sexuality 168–70 France feminist writers 82–4 liberalism v. colonialism 22–3 psychology theory 93 student revolts 66 Frankfurt School 18, 61–4, 65, 181–2 Freud, Sigmund 34–5, 61–2, 71–2 feminists’ views about 80–1, 82–3 sexuality theory 35 Freudo-Marxism 62, 66 F Scale test 63 The Full Monty (film) 191–2

G Galton, F 154 gay men 172 gender 88 and rationality 138–42, 157 gendered pleasures 177 government and the masses 32 and social problems 29 gratification, see uses and gratifications research group membership 54–5 group psychoanalysis 35–6 group psychopathology 34 groups, irrationality as problem of 34

H hallucinations 60, 61, 73, 126 of the absent breast 72 Hamilton 123 The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (film) 140 Haraway, Donna 88, 89 Harré, R 106–7

Index

210 hearing voices 103, 126–7 evidence of chemical imbalance 133 Peter Sutcliffe and 122, 129–30 Hearing Voices Network (Hvn) 132–4 hetero-masculinity, fantasies of 171–2 Hindley, Myra 9–10, 11, 12, 136–7, 144, 147 historiography of psychology 26–7, 102–3 history of the present 28 see also historiography Hollywood films, women in 81, 81–2 homosexual stereotype 170–3 Hudson, Rock 171–2 human behaviour 28 humanism 90 human nature, in critical psychology 102 humanness, rationality as definition of 27, 29–30 humans v. animals 28 hypodermic model of media effects 44

individual/society dualism 3, 34, 47, 65, 91, 107 critiques of 68, 70 infantile wishes/fantasies 62, 74 infants 91 insanity, see madness inspiration 96 instability, psychological, words describing 10 intelligence 90 eugenics strategies in protection of 154 race and 154, 155–8 intelligence quotient, see IQ tests interdiscursivity 183 interpellation 67, 68, 69 intertextuality 6, 180 of texts 20, 21, 23 IQ tests 155–6 Irigaray, Lucia 82–3 irrationality 32, 33 as group problem 34 irrational mind 57 ISAs essay (Ideology and ideological state apparatuses) 66

J I identification 87 overidentification 86 projective 162, 166 identity 87 overdetermination of 164–5 problems with 54–8 self-identity 54 socio-cognitive approach to 54 use of media to understand 49 ideology Althusser’s approach 66–7, 69, 91 and identities 67 Marxist theories 36, 64 use of term 119 Ideology and Consciousness 91–2 the Imaginary 74, 98 Imaginary femininity 82 Imaginary Order 74, 182, 184 impersonators 88 inauthenticity 97 individual, decentring of 112–13

Jameson, Frederick 94–5 Jamieson, Redfield 129 jealousy 114 journals, self-published 91–2 judiciary, and the media 37

K killers insane 124–5, 134–5 serial killers 146–7

L Lacan, Jacques 67–8, 69, 182 fantasy and femininity 81–2 psychoanalysis 70–5 language 106, 108 in creating moral structure 20 dualisms 19–20 as endpoint of discourse 115 interpretation problems 17 reflecting/describing subjectivity 25

Index representing stable reality 17 as self-expression 112 as signification 21 synchronic/diachronic 72 see also communication Le Bon, Gustave 31–2, 34 legal system attitude to violent women 140–2 and culpability 135 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 70, 75 liberal humanist thought 113 lithium therapy 129 Lyotard, JF 97

M McCarthyism 101 madness 116 or badness? 122–3, 129–30 criminally insane 129 as inability to cope 127–8 insane killers 124–5, 134–5 media portrayals 124–6 men’s v. women’s 138–9 not always easily identifiable 144 ordinary 128–30 reasoning madness 147 and violence 125 male hysteria 96 manic depression 128 ‘manipulationist’ thesis 58 Marx, Karl 36–7 Marxism 64–5 and consciousness 64–5 v. effects theories 65 Freudo-Marxism 62, 66 ideology 36, 64 masculinity 96 fantasy and 81 law of the father 71, 82, 83, 84 masses 1–2, 98–100 hysterical 187–9 oversensitivity of 31–3 psychology of 3 see also crowds; mass mind mass media, see media mass mind 13–14, 57, 60, 135–6 easy gratification 62, 65 as irrational 1–2 Marxism and 36–7, 64 political aspects 31

211 see also crowds; masses mass psychology 26–38 meanings 21 intended meaning 16 media as site for production of 20 preferred meaning 21 regimes of, discursive and productive roles of 24–5 of televisual text 44, 51–2 media as agent of socialization 18 and aggression in individuals 43 anti-democratic tendencies 40 banality 36 as companionship 49 compensating for personal deficits 50 coverage of events 50 crime representation 135–6 distortion of communication 17 as diversion 49 effects of, see media effects as escapism 49 hysteria 13–15 liberal-functionalist approach 50 mass media 135–6 v. mind 20 perspectives of 39 portrayals of madness 124–6 reader positions 56 reporting of violence 39–42 role 20 role in shaping public opinion 101 semiotics of media production 47–9 as site for production of meanings 20 studies, see media studies subjectivity and 102 surveillance of world information 50 television and meanings 44, 51–2 television as agent of socialization 44–5 triviality 36 to understand own personal identity 49 and viewers’ cultural backgrounds 52 see also audience; communication

Index

212 media consumption studies 39–58 towards a science of? 44–5 media education 77–8 media effects antisocial behaviour 39–40, 43, 45 creating a ‘we-feeling’ 50–1 on crime 37 by desensitization 40 hypodermic model 44 influencing individuals’ thoughts 43 opposition to research 45–7 quantification 42–3 research 40–2, 52, 53 susceptibility of ‘ordinary people’ 3 media representations 7–8 media studies audience research 51, 52–3 communication models 17 correlational method 43 effects research 40–2, 52, 53 experimental method 43 importance of psychological issues 59–60 measuring tools 43 methodological problems 44 object of 20 uses and gratifications research 49–51, 52, 53 melancholy 99 mental illness v. personality disorder 123 Mercer, Koebena 162–5 merit 154 metaphor 72 metonymy 72 micro-physics 33 mind irrational 57 v. media 20 see also mass mind mirror stage in infancy 69 Misery (film) 140 misinformation 17, 18 The Missing Postman (television serial) 192 Mitchell, Juliet 80–1

Moors Murders, see Brady, Ian; Hindley, Myra morality 154 Morley, David 59–60 mourning, public 192, 196 Mulvey, Laura 81–2 murderers, children as 37–8 myth 22

N narcissism 86 nation states 153 new paradigm research 106, 107–8 nomads 89, 111, 185 normalization, age of 153–5, 168 normative images 166–7 novels, romantic, women readers 86 Nussbaum 141

O objectivity 108–9 object-oriented perception 41 Oedipus complex 72 office viewing 86 Other, psychology of the 9–12 Otherness 10–12, 115, 119–21, 150, 185 and racial difference 158, 160–2 of sexuality 169, 170, 176, 186 women’s 140 overidentification 86 oversuggestibility, of crowds 31, 32, 33, 35, 38

P Pagett, Nicola 128–9 painting, feminine 84 Paris Match 22 patriarchal power 71, 75 law of the father 71, 82, 83, 84 Payne, Thomas 36 Peer Gynt 118 people power 2–3 performativity 87, 88 personality disorder v. mental illness 123 personality theory 63–4 personhood 183 phallus 71, 75, 81, 83, 84

Index Philadelphia (film) 175–6 plans of human life 106 pleasures gendered 177 women’s 82, 83, 84–6, 185 politics of passionate detachment 82 polytextualism 115 population management, psychology as science of 30–1 positivist framework of psychology 105 post-Fordism 58 postmodernity and femininity 84, 86–8 postmodern psychology 90–100, 107, 108 psychological concepts in cultural theory 93–5 postmodernization 120 poststructuralism 31, 87 power 117–18 people power 2–3 prejudice 17, 18 premenstrual syndrome 140 projective fantasy 159 projective identification 162, 166 psychiatry 125 psychical reality 71, 72 psychoanalysis and feminism 79–89 in film interpretation 76–7 of groups 35–6 increasing influence of 93 Lacan’s concepts 70–5 as metatheory 87 v. sociology 85 turnback to 23 psychological complex 28 psychological instability, words describing 10 psychological knowledge 109 psychological selfhood 189–91 psychology academic 90 black psychology 158–9 claims to truth 27 cognitive 53 concepts in postmodernist cultural theory 93–5 crisis in 105–8, 183

213 critical psychology 55, 93, 101–21 developmental 32 discursive 107, 108 diversity of models 26 emergence of 28, 48 essentialist approach 18 experimental method 105–6 French theory 93 historiography of 26–7, 102–3 of individual 18 of masses 3 mass psychology 26–38 move from religious to biological explanation 28–9 positivist framework 105 postmodern 90–100, 107, 108 as progression from falsehood to truth 27, 29 ‘reformist’ psychologies 158 as science of population management 30–1 social learning model 44 social psychology 34–5, 63 of survival 166 traditional v. discursive 25 psychopathology of groups 34 media portrayals 124–6 psychoses 60, 61 psy complex 28–30 psy discourses 103, 104–5, 110, 119, 124

Q queer spectatorship 177 Quilt Project 173–5

R race and fantasy 159–61 and intelligence 154, 155–8 see also colonial subject racial discourse 117 racism 18–19 racist stereotype 19, 24 ‘radical’, meaning of 90 radicality 66 rationality 32, 34, 154, 156–8

214 as definition of humanness 27, 29–30 and gender 138–42, 157 see also irrationality reader positions 56, 57 realism, in critical psychology 102 reality depiction of 17 psychical 71, 72 and representation 17, 19, 20 semiotic production of 19–25 social 105 reason 157 ‘reformist’ psychologies 158 regulation 98 representation 96 politics of 173–7 and reality 17, 19, 20 regime of 23 as signification 20 repression, age of 168–70 repression hypothesis 168 research new paradigm research 106, 107–8 see also media studies resistance 100 responsibility 135 diminished 130 risk 127 romantic novels, women readers 86 rules of human life 106 rupture v. continuous progression, alternative historiographies 27

S St Theresa of Avila 60–1 Saussure, Ferdinand de 71 schizophrenia 60, 103, 127 concept of 94, 94–5, 184 screen theory 76–7, 85, 110–11, 161, 182 see also film theory self 18, 20, 24, 163–4 desired 103 making-up of 3–9 psychological selfhood 189–91 see also autonomous self; autonomous selfhood self-control 40 chat shows and 41

Index self-discourses 112 self-expression 98, 112 self-harm 135 self-help practices of 104 selfhood, psychological 189–91 self-identity 54 see also identity self-invention 189, 195, 196 semiotics 19–20 serial killers 146–7 sex 168–9 sexology 169 sexuality 167–8, 169 masculine 130–1 Otherness of 169, 170, 176, 186 theory of 35 signification 20, 71, 75, 97 language as 21 regulative role of 23 representation as 20 washing powders as example of 21, 22 signifieds 20, 21 signifiers 20, 21 indexical 22 polysemic 22–3 signifier/signified relationship 20–1, 71, 97, 152 signs 20–1 denotative level 21 materiality of 134–8 silence 98 Silence of the Lambs (film) 147 Silverlake (film) 175 simulacrum 97 simulation 97, 98 soap opera, female viewers 86 social class, see class social fantasy 49 socialization, agents of 18, 44–5 social learning model, in psychology 44 social problems, change in government strategies 29 social psychology 34–5, 63 social reality 105 social subjects 53–4 society, see individual/society dualism socio-cognitive approach to identity 54

Index sociology, v. psychoanalysis 85 space 97 beyond the body 96 spectatorship, queer 177 Steinberg, Joel 140–1 stereotypes 17–18 colonial stereotype 7, 23–4, 152–3, 154–5, 159 effect of 17–18 homosexual stereotype 170–3 psychological and social components 17 racist 19, 24 structuralism 96 structural positioning/location 56, 163, 181 stupor 96 subject, theory of 182 subject formation 153, 163 subjectification 24, 28 costs and consequences of 124 v. subjectivity 153 technologies of 28 subjectivity 65, 69, 110, 111 colonial 23 and culture 71 discursive approach 112 language reflecting/describing 25 and the media 102 modernist approach 112 in postmodernity 84 resistant 99 v. subjectification 153 suggestibility 40 oversuggestibility of crowds 31, 32, 33, 35, 38 surveillance 50 survival, psychology of 166 Sutcliffe, Peter 10, 122, 129–31 Symbolic Order 74, 75, 83, 182, 184

T talk 108, 117 television, see media texts decoding v. encoding 23 intertextual 20, 21, 23 Thatcher, Margaret 142 Theresa of Avila, Saint 60–1 Tomorrow’s Women 193

215 The Torch Song Trilogy (film) 167–8, 170 trances 96 transformation, a politics of 165–7 truth 61, 103, 108, 109 claims to, of psychology 27 Foucault’s approach to 33–4, 109 psychology as progression from falsehood to 27, 29 as a rhetorical device 183 twilight states 96

U unconscious 67–9, 72–3 femininity and 80 as structured as a language 182 universal subject 169 uses and gratifications research 49–51, 52, 53

V veridicality 33 videos 42, 46 female viewers 86 violence 46 viewers, see audience violence and madness 125 on video 46 in women 138–42 see also aggression visions 60–1 voices, see hearing voices voting 32–3 vulnerability 40, 48, 52, 60

W war neuroses 96 washing powders, example of signification 21, 22 ‘we-feeling’ 50–1 West, Fred 9, 10, 136 West, Rosemary 9, 10, 11, 136, 142–6 wish fulfilment 73–4, 75 woman, as fantasy 75, 81, 87 women aggressive capability 11 in films 81, 81–2

Index

216 law’s attitude to 140–2 and masculine sexuality 130–1 media consumption 50 objectification of 161 personality groups 193–4 pleasures 82, 83, 84–6, 185 prone to outside influences 137 rise in employment of 191–2, 194 self-transformation 190–1, 192 television characters 52 violent 138–42, 146 see also femininity; feminism women’s bodies 83, 84 women’s liberation movement 80 see also feminism

Working Class 75 in Marxism 64 working-class people children 41 easy gratification 65 infantile working class 62 and psychoses 60, 61 see also class writing, feminine 84 Wundt, Wilhelm 26

Y Yorkshire Ripper, see Sutcliffe, Peter youth culture 55