Norman N. Holland, The Critical I

The Critical I
Norman N. Holland
New York

Columbia University Press

[i] [ii] [iii]

Copyright © 1992 by Norman Holland
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Holland, Norman Norwood, 1927--
   The critical I/Norman N. Holland
    p.    cm.
   Includes bibliographical references and index.
   ISBN 0-231-07650-9
   1. Criticism. 2. Literature--20th century--History and criticism.
3. Saussure, Ferdinand de, 1957-1913. 4. Literature--Psychology.
I. Title
PN94.H64   1991
801'.95'0904--dc20
                91-27851
               CIP
[iv]

Jacket copy [not included in book version]

"Literary theory needs a dose of common sense," claims Norman N. Holland in this witty, lively book. He argues that current theory is based on an outmoded and discredited Saussurean linguistics. Saussure assumed that language determines its meaning independently of the individuals using the language. Modern theorists, by adopting his passive "I," feel free to eliminate the subject altogether.
By contrast, the three parts of The Critical I focus on the people involved in literature: audience, critics, and theorists. Using the response of three spectators to a softporn film, The Story of O, Holland updates the model of response to film and literature that he developed in The I and The Brain of Robert Frost. He lucidly explains how "reader" responses are both typical and "individual."
Holland then uses this model to compare interpretations by eight professor critics--a New Critic of 1943, three psychoanalytic critics, and four postmodernists--of "Thirty days hath September." He finds surprising similarities, but the crucial difference is their idea of the I. The unpsychological critics cannot deal with the I, while the psychological critics write with a much clearer idea of what the self contributes to response.
Finally, Holland tackles the major modern and postmodern theorists including Lacan, Derrida, Miller, de Man, Barthes, and Foucault. He proves that these theorists' ideas about the I rest on false linguistic and psycholinguistic premises. He calls for a different model, one that acknowledges the individuals who create literature and literary experiences.
* NORMAN N. HOLLAND holds the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar's Chair in English at the University of Florida. he has published ten books on literary criticism and theory, including The Dynamics of Literary Response, Poems in Persons (both published by Columbia University Press, and Holland's Guide to Psychoanalytic Psychology and Literature-and Psychology.

About the Online Text [not included in book version]

This is the complete text of the first edition of this book, published in 1992 by Columbia University Press and subsequently reissued, unchanged, in paperback. I have corrected typos, and I have omitted the index. (Use the search commands of your browser instead.) Otherwise the text is unchanged. To make it easy to cite--ever the optimist--I have indicated the original page numbers in brackets--[1],[2],[3], and so on.
This is a short book. For simplicity of downloading, I have made it into one file of 604 Kb.
Besides easy searching, the electronic edition has another advantage. Footnotes are designated by degree signs like this.° Clicking on one will take you to that particular note. Then the BACK command in your browser will take you, appropriately enough, back to your place in the text where you were. No paging back and forth. The footnotes are, however, resolutely limited to bibliographical information.
Simply for reading the book, you will probably prefer to download it and print it out.

[iv]

To Jane, the I for this I

[v]
[vi]

Contents

Preface     xi

Part One I-ing an Audience     1

1 Kim's Case Study     3
2 Agnes     7
3 Norm     11
4 Ted     16
5 Feedback     20
6 Identity     26
7 Code and Canons     32
8 The Kuleshov Effect     41
9 The Model     48

Part Two I-ing Critics     59

10 Criticism As Public(ation)     61
11 A Text and a Critic     64
12 A Derridian Critic     71 [vii]
13 The Challenges     75
14 Three Postmoderns     78
15 A Psychoanalytic Critic     82
16 Psychoanalytic Critics     92
17 Differences     97

Part Three I-ing Theorists     105

18 The I in Trouble     107
19 The Active Text     114
20 Derrida     119
21 Saussure     122
22 Chomsky     133
23 Derrida Again     151
24 Vanishing the I     167
25 Barthes     171
26 Foucault     176
27 Eco     179
28 Iser     184
29 Fish     187
30 Lacan     192
31 Conclusions: Looking Backward     209
32 Conclusions: Looking Forward     221

Notes 233
References 243
Index 257
[omitted in this electronic version] [viii]

I [ai] pron. The first person singular pronoun in the nominative case. Used to represent the speaker or writer. --n. The pronoun I regarded as a word or represented as a person; metaphorically the self; ego. --n. pl. I's. Persons. --v. neologism. To consider ideas or writings from the standpoint of what they say about the I or self.    --to I. --I-ing.

[ix]
[x]

Preface

     The Critical I. You can take my title in at least eighteen different ways. Please note that I do not say it has at least eighteen different meanings. My not saying that is the very core of this book.
    "I" is defined on the preceding page in three different ways. As a pronoun or noun, it can refer to me specifically or to the idea of the subject generally. But it is also a verb, and you will find me using I-ing from time to time. In my title, I intend all three: pronoun, noun, and verb. This book is an "I-ing" (pun intended) of some contemporary practices in literary criticism.
        As for "critical," the trusty Oxford English Dictionary offers six senses. "Given to judging, esp. to adverse or unfavourable criticism." Yes. I's in general do judge and often adversely, and this I does a lot of that both in and out of this book. "Involving or exercising careful judgment." I'd like to think so. "Occupied with or skilful in criticism." The degree of skill you will have to judge for yourself, but "occupied with"--oh, yes! This book is much occupied with current literary, filmic, and other forms of criticism. "Med. Relating to the crisis or turning point of a disease." Sure. You [xi]could think of this book as addressing a disease, a disease of the intellect. "Of the nature of, or constituting, a crisis." That seems a bit dramatic for something that has so removed itself from the real world as literary criticism today, but still, it fits. "Math. and Physics. Constituting or relating to the point at which some action, property, or condition passes over into another." Now, wouldn't that be nice! If only this critical I marked the point at which there was a change in the actions of critics. It hardly seems likely, though, given the professorial investment in today's practice.
    The Critical I is an I-ing of current criticism, its practice and theory. I-ing means two things to me. First, I look at today's critical practice to see what some of the practitioners assume about the I, the person engaged in the literary transaction. Second, I compare what critical practice and theory say about that I to a model of the I based in psychology and linguistics.
    Part 1 establishes a baseline, my I-ing of an actual audience, three people seeing a porn movie. Surely, if any text should determine a response, a pornographic one should. But it doesn't. Their three responses have some things in common yet remain, finally, individual. From their comments on the movie, I derive a model of how they see the same movie but see it differently. This is an update of the model in The I, 1985, and The Brain of Robert Frost, 1988. I test the model against the famous Kuleshov experiment--yes, it will explain the Kuleshov effect. The analysis of response yields a picture of the I that we can use to think coherently about literature, even in all kinds of postmodern ways.
    In part 2 a group of critics--a New Critic, three deconstructionists, two Lacanians, two psychoanalytic critics, and a generic postmodernist--read "Thirty days hath September." The question is, What do they assume about the I who reads and writes? The answers show profound differences between the psychological critics and the others--and profound confusions.
    In part 3 I challenge today's literary "theory." The whole elaborate structure rests on a disproven linguistics and a dubious psychology. That is, most of today's "theory" carries on as though Chomsky's 1957 revolution in linguistics never took place. Most literary "theory" proceeds as though the only psychology were a crude stimulus-response behaviorism. The argu-[xii]ment applies to a wide range of contemporary theorists: Barthes, de Man, Eco, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Miller, and others. These leading theorists criticize the old New Critics for mistaken linguistic and psychological assumptions--and they are right to do so. Yet they often draw on those same assumptions themselves.
    What is needed today is literary theory that, one, acknowledges the human beings who create literature and literary experiences and, two, rests on a firm foundation in current linguistics and psychology. That is the promise this book holds out.
    Speaking of human beings, I owe much in this book to a great many of them. I am thinking particularly of the students, colleagues, and friends who have helped me develop the ideas in this book. Some provided the responses discussed in parts 1 and 2. Others provided criticism of the manuscript or consultation. Still others aided with research. All have helped make this a better book than it would otherwise have been, and to all I am deeply grateful. Let me thank specifically Robert de Beaugrand, Theodore Bickford, Alistair Duckworth, Gerald Graff, Deborah Hooker, Arthur Samuel Kimball, John Leavey, Brenda Marshall, Kimberley McSherry, Daniel Moors, Bernard Paris, Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Robert Ray, Craig Saper, Murray Schwartz, Robert Silhol, Henry Sullivan, Gregory Ulmer, and Agnes Webb.
    To John Perlette in English and Gary Miller in classics at the University of Florida, I owe especial and large appreciation for their careful readings of part 3 and their detailed help in matters of literary and linguistic theory. Both went far beyond the basics of collegiality. Both took the time to teach me a great deal. The book and I have profited much, and I am more grateful for what they did for this book and its author than I can say.
    Some of the chapters that follow have appeared in earlier forms as articles and lectures. The parts of part 1 that deal with The Story of O first appeared as "I-ing Film" in Critical Inquiry (1986), 12: 654-71. The parts that deal with the Kuleshov experiment appeared as "Film Response from Eye to I: The Kuleshov Experiment" in South Atlantic Quarterly (1989), 88.2: 416-442. They appeared in a still earlier form as "Psychoanalyse und Film: das Kuleschow-Experiment," Phantasie und Deutung: Psychologisches Verstehen von Literatur und Film, herausgeben[xiii] von Wolfram Mauser, Ursula Renner, und Walter Schönau (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1986), pp. 282-298. Some of part 2 appeared as "Twenty-Five Years and Thirty Days" in Psychoanalytic Quarterly (1986), 55: 23-52. Part 3 began as the keynote address, "Speaking Figuratively, I . . . " for the University of Louisville's Fourteenth Annual Twentieth-Century Literature Conference on Self and Other (February 22, 1985). Let me thank Professor Harriette Seiler here for both invitation and hospitality. Versions of what I say in chapter 30 about Lacan have appeared as an article-review of The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction, by Bice Benvenuto and Roger Kennedy in Psychoanalytic Psychology (1990), 7.1: 139-149, and as "I-ing Lacan" in Criticism and Lacan: Essays and Dialogue on Language, Structure, and the Unconscious, edited by Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1990), pp. 87-108. Most recently, I have discussed the matter as "The Trouble(s) with Lacan" at the Seventh International Conference on Literature and Psychology at Urbino, July 6-9, 1990. I am grateful to the editors of Critical Inquiry, the University of Georgia Press, New Literary History, Psychoanalytic Psychology, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and South Atlantic Quarterly, for permission to adapt here materials that first appeared under their aegis.
    In addition I appreciate the help I have received from Stuart Krichevsky of Sterling Lord Literistics and Jennifer Crewe and Leslie Bialler of Columbia University Press in achieving publication. Most of all, though, I am grateful to the lady of the dedication--for everything.
[xiv]

PART ONE   /  I-ing an Audience
[1] [2]
1  /  Kim's Case Study
    Kimberley McSherry was a graduate student at the Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo when I was teaching there. Kim had taught high school, and she was returning to the university for a master's degree. For a research project for that degree, she wanted to compare men's and women's responses to a pornographic movie. Accordingly, she led Agnes, Ted, and Norm (me) to a suburban art theater to see Just Jaeckin's well-known film, The Story of O, which was based on the anonymous novel of that name.
    We were all involved in the literature-and-psychology Ph.D. program. Agnes had also taught school but was now embarked on a Ph.D. in education. Unlike Kim, she was a mother as well as a teacher and student. Ted, recently married, was trying to decide that spring between going into the family business and becoming a professor of English. Norm was--is--a professor of English, in his mid-forties at the time of Kim's case study, husband, father, and the student of reader-response with whom Kim was working.
    After we had viewed this soft-porn, sadomasochistic [3] movie, Kim asked us to tell how we interpreted the movie and to talk about how we felt as we watched it. She asked us to narrate the story in our own words and to say how we felt toward the several characters--standard questions for this kind of reader-response case study.° She tape recorded and transcribed these interviews, which approximated free associations. In doing so, she achieved something rare in the world of film studies: a record in considerable detail of what some real spectators said in response to a real film. She was I-ing an audience.
    Kim and I were testing the proposition that people respond to texts, in this instance a movie, in determinate ways. We thought Kim's study would shed light on the various theories people set out so enthusiastically these days to account for such patterns. Surely if any film can dictate a standardized response, a pornographic film would. Kim expected The Story of O to stimulate desire in the men watching it, and she thought it might stimulate in women exactly the opposite response.
    But it didn't. Kim did not find any pattern of differences between male and female responses to The Story of O. That is an even more interesting result than the predicted one, and Kim did indeed get her M.A. Kim's results show, I think, that we need to balance theory against fact. To that end, I would like to explore here in some detail what the three of us, Agnes, Norm, and Ted, said about The Story of O.
    For those of you who have not seen it, the movie begins when O's lover, René, takes her to a castle where she submits to whippings and degrading sexual experiences at the hands of René and other men to whom he gives her. O obeys with apparent pleasure, and her accepting all this abuse initiates her into a sort of secret society, whose rules she continues to obey when she "graduates" from the castle. Soon René turns her over to his great friend, Sir Stephen. He too whips her, gives her to other men, uses her to lure women for René, and even has her branded. O submits to all this proudly and happily. She regards these experiences (and Sir Stephen does too) as evidence of a sublime kind of love. The film ends as they vaunt their relationship before a party of admiring guests, she wearing an owl headdress, but otherwise naked and chained to Sir Stephen.[4]
    None of us reported being sexually aroused by the film. That, you might think, was to be expected, given the anaesthetic tone of Kim's case study. I am not so sure. We had all four of us just participated, the previous semester, in an unusually open "Delphi seminar,"° in which we said a great many frank things about ourselves and one another. Indeed that was why Kim felt free to ask the three of us to watch this porn movie. Had any one of us found the film purely and simply sexy, I am sure we would have had no inhibitions about saying so. Also, since Kim was working with free associations, I would have expected them to reveal any suppressed arousals.
    In any case, what I would like to address is a more general question about reponse. The three subjects, Agnes, Ted, and Norm, did sometimes feel and think about the film more or less alike. At other times, though, we squarely contradicted one another. I want to ask, therefore, two questions of the responses Kim taped. First, we three saw the same film, but responded differently. How can one relate the variety of responses to the singleness of the film? Second, we were about equally skilled in seeing and analyzing movies. How can one relate the variety of our responses to our having roughly the same skills with which to see this film? In general, then, the question I want to ask is, What is the relation, in our seeing this movie, between what we three shared in seeing The Story of O and what was quite individual and unique to each one of us?
    Customarily, critics and theorists say that the film caused or controlled our responses, and then each of the three of us added some individual variation to the general response dictated by the movie. Viewers and film "interact." I think we can find a much more precise answer and one closer to what we know in the 1990s about human psychology. To do so, however, you and I will need to look almost microscopically at key words, phrasings, and recurrences in what the three viewers said.° You and I need to do that, rather than paraphrase, because, as in a psychoanalysis, what counts is the exact wording. To understand the viewers' unconscious reactions as well as their conscious statements, the surface of their language is as important as the people or events referred to "through" their language. Our particular phrasings [5] of our thoughts are what reveal patterns of repetition and contrast that will in turn show how we three were making an experience of the film.
    For example, the film opens oddly. The opening scene shows O's lover René undressing her in a taxi as he takes her to the castle where she will undergo her sexual instruction. Having done the scene once, a voice over announces that they will do the scene again. Each of us "made sense of" that replay differently--as we shall see.
[6]

2  /  Agnes

    This is how Agnes began to talk about the repetition of the opening scene: "I had a sort of snotty view. I was going to sit there and watch what they were doing wrong in the movie. They said the trees were dark, and I thought, they're not dark; they're light." (As I hear her, by this opening move, Agnes is establishing her own control over the film.) A few sentences later, on noticing that the film "sort of revised the fantasy," "Then I thought, this is somebody's fantasy, and then I relaxed. Since it's a fantasy, I don't have to do anything about it, just watch it." She relaxed, yet the theme of control--doing something about it--remained strong. "I thought about the revising of it, because I revise my fantasies. I start them out, and if I don't like the direction the story is taking, I start them over again. See if you can make it work differently."
    She said she associated the castle where O trains in perversity with
girls' schools that I had gone to and taught in. The silly little thingswalking in line, attention to clothes, costume, furniture, the kind of dainty, precise eating [7] they were doing at the table, downcast eyes. We were trained in high school to keep our eyes down, like postulants in a convent, plus all the physical restraints. I keep thinking of high school.
Agnes associated control with schools she herself went to, with the school O goes to, and later, with the place where O is branded. She commented on it, "You could fly. You could leave." On the other hand, if you are in a certain place, that limits your choices. Thus, "Once you accept going to the castle--well, going into that place is of your own free will, but once you're there and have committed yourself to bearing this, there isn't any free will to individual acts. You've accepted the whole thing."
    She went on to associate the castle of pain with her own dominance, as a high school teacher, over students. "Just being in the school and being a student with a teacher, you can say you have the freedom not to answer, and then you ask them a question, well, there really isn't freedom not to answer." Agnes recalled her own high school: "the no running, no laughing, no talking, no running around, no physical exuberance at all." She remembered a retreat at which a friend got hysterical on the stone floor.
    Agnes went on to imagine herself in the castle:

I remember thinking, after a few days, if that had happened to me, I would have been so disoriented I wouldn't remember what day it was, or what time of the day it was. And I thought that just before the comment she made, that she didn't know what day it was or where she was, and at that point I felt sympathy for her, and I suppose at that point I accepted the reasons that she was there--really believed those reasons.

    A place can disorient you, and, because she saw O as being victimized by a place, Agnes sympathized with her and believed her.
    In this part of Agnes' response, we are seeing one of her major themes: we are controlled by the places we are in. We are also seeing the process critics loosely term "identification," but now we can see how it really works. Agnes has taken O's feelings into herself, making them her own. Notice, though, that to do this, she first picked out of the stream of the film something O said and shaped it into something that mattered to her, Agnes. She decided that O was disoriented because of the place she was in. Then Agnes could say, "At that point I felt sympathy." "At that point [8] I accepted the reasons . . . really believed." At that point she was not judging or controlling O. Agnes was feeling as O felt (or, more precisely, as she imagined O felt). Agnes "identified" to the extent she had fitted O to her own psychological themes.
    In Agnes' world, place controls you, and escape from that place means freedom. In another example of her spatial mode of thinking, Agnes thought "connection" important. Connection to her means purpose, the opposite of isolation, self-centeredness, or indifference. Thus she could read pain in the movie in two different ways, depending on connection. Bad pain is "where you become turned in on yourself. Suffering becomes a way of life, rather than a means to something." The bad thing about the pain in this movie was that "I didn't see anything creative coming out of, or anything generated out of all the accepting of pain and suffering and humiliation. She [O] became predatory."
    Agnes (herself a mother) contrasted that kind of pain with childbearing, the pain of which, she said (citing Helene Deutsch°), resolves childhood fantasies for a woman. "Not that suffering is good for you, but suffering has a resolving effect."

It was that hysterical seeking of pain I think is so horrible. . . . That's what I thought was in the movie. I thought it was the unregenerative type. I thought it had become seeking of pain for pain's sake, rather than the healthier aspect of pain--the joy of pain, as funny as that sounds--when pain is actively connected to something of worth to it.
"Actively connected." That phrase says to me something about Agnes' sense of place as a way to be active and in charge. Suffering "enables them [women] to go on to another stage of development--one where the suffering isn't dwelt on or lulled over," another place. The opposite--isolation, self-containedness--Agnes associated with not controlling your circumstances and with pain for pain's sake.
    Thus at the beginning of the movie she read O this way:
When the film started, in the car, I remember not liking O. She had no expression on her face. She was taking off her clothes and looking at the driver. I think she said at one point, the driver will hear or is looking, and other than that, she seemed to have no reaction on her face. Her face was blank. And I remember thinking at that [9] point, you don't have to do this. You could react somewhat and not be like a dream-walker.
Agnes wondered in the early part of the movie, "Why are you so dumb to do this and to go through all this pain?" "She kept telling us over and over, it was to prove her love for him [René]," and Agnes had trouble believing that. At the end of the film, "I remember thinking she had become predatory. As predatory as all the people were in that spa, or pain factory. But beautiful in all her cold, aloof predatoriness. I think it was the aloofness and coldness that bothered me. Very calculated."
    It was the lack of connection ("aloofness") that put Agnes off. It was "coldness" that she read as "predatory." Conversely, the only motive she, with her values, could hear was one of connection: O was suffering pain to prove her love for her first lover, René. "I suppose at that point I accepted the reasons that she was there--really believed those reasons. She was there out of love for René, and I thought that was a pretty odd way to work it out."
    Again, in a spatial mode, when Agnes disapproved of René, "I wrote him out of it." "I just considered he wasn't an important part of it." She simply moved him out of the film. She ended his connection to it. Conversely, when she liked Sir Stephen, O's second lover, she placed him: "The only time I liked Stephen was in the scene where they were talking outdoors. There was a colonnade, and she was holding his arm . . . " Connection established is good. "But then he tells her he will give her to someone else, and I thought, `Ugh! I don't like that.' " Connection broken is bad.
[10]

3  /  Norm
    Agnes saw The Story of O through her belief in the power of place and connection. To hear Agnes' patterns as a pattern, it helps if you contrast another response, say, Norm's--mine (although here I will write of my long-ago self in the third person). Agnes had used the replay of the opening episode as a chance to relax her controls. Norm, however, found it an occasion to intellectualize the film. "There are a lot of puzzles for me in this movie. One is that opening scene in the cab. They run that scene, and then they say, Well here is another version, and then they do it again. I couldn't figure out what was going on there."
    In general, Norm treated the film as something to be figured out.
I was struck by all the Os. That is . . . starting with her underwear in the very first scene, where he [René] undresses her in the cab, you get a whole lot of circles. Like the necklace--that leather thing she wears around her neck--or the various chains, the garter-type corset--Os of all kinds. I just had a sense of circular openings of one kind or another. The manacles, handcuffs that she [11] wears--all kinds of stuff like that. And this kept running through the movie. . . . There are many others--the way her eyes are circles when she's dressed up like the bird at the end, the many different kinds of rings--the one on her hand, the one on her genitals--many, many circles around.
     Norm's interpretation of the Os suggests why he converted the movie to an intellectual puzzle.

I kept hearing or thinking about the Os as simply the initial for "obey," which would be the way I would do it [i.e., work the movie out critically], and that holds in French too, and also a . . . zero in the sense that she becomes a kind of nullity--a no-person--at the end, and the O as in the chains, a kind of bondage.

Although Norm is a psychoanalytic critic, supposedly alert to sexual symbolism, it seems not to have occurred to him to talk about these enclosing Os as possible symbols for a vagina. Rather, he read those Os as ethical rules to be obeyed by O (but implicitly, perhaps also by himself). "She has to learn all this stuff and these are the rules of the game--the rules of this world. And so I felt the O and the circles were all kinds of constraints."
     Norm did something very similar with the opening "retake":

I couldn't figure out what was going on there. And I thought to myself, `Well, perhaps it's like a fable. We're not supposed to take this story as true, but only like a fairy story,' which indeed makes perfect sense, because it seems like a very unreal, impossible place--the castle or wherever it was--so that . . . it becomes a tale with a moral, like an Aesop's fable, but a longer version, and you begin to wonder what the moral is.
In other words, by Norm's effort to make "perfect sense" of it, to convert this sexy film into a puzzle he could solve intellectually, he was trying to put the film into an ethical framework. Just as Norm read O as having to learn the rules of this world, he felt he had to find an Aesopian moral to the story. He was using rules for interpretation to generate rules for conduct.
     When Norm talked about O's branding Sir Stephen with the hot round end of his cigarette holder, he hinted at what he was trying to puzzle through. "Finally, of course, when she marks him with her O, she indicates in some way that she isn't a nullity, that she has, in some way, taken possession of him." If you can mark [12] the film as your own, as by your skilled interpretation of it, you are not a nullity. You have taken possession of it. It does not master you--you master it.
     By interpreting, Norm would learn "the rules of the game, the rules of this world." That suggests to me now, thinking about Norm then, that he was hoping by his puzzling to find the rules of the much bigger, realer world you and Norm and O and I inhabit. Hence, like Agnes, Norm gave a religious reading of the film:
It's as though people were in the service of an exotic kind of cult. The rules in many ways were as strict as they might be for a monastery or a nunnery, or something like that. There were these confessions you had to make, tasks you had to perform, ordeals you had to go through, and you became initiated into a group of believers who had these rules.
Norm converted the bizarre, perverse practices of "this world" into religious and moral rules.
     Further, Norm seems to have felt that this sadomasochistic pattern of either ruling or being ruled represented an almost desirable mode of human society, even if the rules are perverse. "I don't know what in the film was saying that to me, but something was saying that very much: that everybody would be doing this if they had any real guts--if they were really able to go with their unconscious desire." (In 1991, it occurs to me that it may have been the solemn, almost liturgical music.) "It's as though these [sadomasochistic] people are the really courageous ones--the heroes."
     This heroism and these rules have a lot to do with possession in Norm's interpretation.
Part of the specialness of this group was, I think, the sense of possession. [13] I remember a line that I jotted down, that you can't give something away unless you truly own it. And one of the rules of the group is that the women are all common property. If another guy says, "Well, I'd like to go to bed with her," well, you just hand your girlfriend right over.
This, Norm said, was "so sick and so lousy."
     At the same time, he thought there was something ennobling about this possession.
This is that sort of total possession, which is at the same time total nonpossession, because you don't have any right to her, and in that sense, it's like all those paradoxes that you read in the New Testament . . . . In order to find your soul, you have to lose your soul--or whatever. It's as though to really own a girl, you have to not own her. It's all sort of paradoxical.
He was also saying that to be possessed or controlled is to be a fool or a dupe or a slave. The second lover, Sir Stephen, therefore fitted his values better: "There seemed to be much more to him." "He seemed to be much the master of both René and of O, and just really on top of the whole situation." "A much more interesting character, and a man who was much more in tune with all these religious possibilities--the spiritual discipline quality." René, by contrast, Norm saw as driven to obey this cult. Hence his "giving her over to other men really struck me as so sick and so lousy."
     To be active, possessing, or controlling is the opposite of sick and lousy. Indeed, Norm thought Sir Stephen so sophisticated a possessor that he could risk being the possessee. "He learned something at the end. To some slight extent, he became her servant, as she was his, at the end--in a way that never happened with René." If you are "really on top of the whole situation," if you learn something, if you know the rules of this "spiritual discipline," then you can relax and become the woman's servant, and it's all right, even "imposing."
     Norm's attitude toward O was by no means this equitable. "I responded to O as a body all the time. Very little response to her as a person." By responding to O as a mere body or possession, he freed the attractive sexy world of the senses from the world of ethical standards. His phrasing, however, suggests that he thought he ought to respond to O as a person, not as (in his phrase) "just a lady with her clothes off." By his word "lady" he suggested an upper-class woman subjected to a series of restricting and degrading rules, some of which make her naked to the sexual demands of men.
     In sum, if Agnes shaped the movie through place and connection, Norm re-created the film around the idea of a person's achieving domination by possessing rules. He could possess or master this movie or woman or world by solving abstract, intel-[14] lectual puzzles of the kind he felt comfortable with. They yield the rules of "this world," which turn out to be, in his view, moral, even religious. It is as though one could rid oneself of guilt by looking literarily for patterns of repetition and contrast. By recognizing the themes, you can master the strangest, most disturbing things, making them ethically coherent.
     Norm's need to possess by means of this skill at generalizing themes fends off what is a real danger for him: the loss of possession and being controlled by another. A Sir Stephen who is master is so superior he can risk being possessed or controlled. In effect, pain, loss of possession, and subjection to the control of another are so dangerous for Norm that to risk them constitutes a bravery that is, for all its perversity, admirable, even holy.
     In writing about this film, I--and now I mean the 1991 Norm--have seen it again and again. I'm not sure my feelings now are the same as they were then, but they are surely similar. My interpretation of the characters and events is virtually the same, however. I have the curious sensation, as I reread the associations of this earlier Norm, that they feel comfortable to me. I would not use the same words today, but these words feel right somehow. To borrow a term from Freud, they are heimlich.
[15]

4  /  Ted

     Ted shaped the film quite differently from either Agnes or Norm. For Agnes, it was domination by place, for Norm, domination by rules. For Ted, it was domination by one's growing up:

I felt as though I was actually seeing the fantasies which underlie submission in women and aggression in men. We can't help it because that's a part of our lives, because that's the way men and women are brought up to be. And I thought it was fascinating that we were actually seeing the fantasies associated with these attitudes. I think they were all of our fantasies.

When Ted says these "were all of our fantasies," I hear him telling me something about himself. He feels he was brought up to believe that being aggressive and controlling was being manly and being submissive was womanly.
     Just moments before, he had been talking about the sadomasochistic college as a place where the women learned to submit: "I don't think they [the women] have to learn in there. I think they learn it naturally as they grow up." And he went on about as-[16] sertiveness and sadism. "Obey, obey, obey. I'm your master and all that--I lost my train of thought."
     In the same way, he broke off talking about a submissive woman he and his wife knew.

We've just had an experience with some friends up in Toronto, and we've been criticizing this girl that we know because she's so submissive, and she's going out with this business executive type who completely controls her life and tells her exactly what to do and she seems to love it. That seems to be exactly what she wants.
     I still feel that microphone. I suppose after a while I'll get used to it. This is a new experience for me. I can't just free associate under these conditions.

I find his response at this moment fascinating. In talking about women's being forced to submit, he seems to cast himself in that role. He feels the microphone as coercion, and he loses his ability to think freely. In effect, he and his wife have been saying to the woman in Toronto, "You don't have control, but we do." In the interview situation, however, he felt he might not have control, and that threatened Ted. "My fear was that I was going to see victims in this movie, and I didn't want to see victims."
     Agnes thought O's consent illusory, but Ted found it a reassurance: she really did keep control. "Obviously, she consented to it, so she must have been getting some satisfaction out of it." The opposite possibility, "that made me nervous, at first. I didn't like that. I was afraid that she was going to be a victim, and she was going to go into that against her will, but then when she consented to it all, that sort of put me to ease a bit. Then I could be interested in it."
     Notice, by the way, how Ted's interpretation serves him as a defense. He allayed his anxiety by the way he read O's consent as really reflecting her will. Then he could enjoy the movie. A successful defense allows a (perhaps illicit) pleasure in fantasy. Often, when we are in a movie or theater audience, we can "borrow" a defense from the others around us. We think to ourselves, "If they are laughing and enjoying it, I can too," or "If the people around me are crying, it's all right for me to cry." Here, Ted borrowed a defense from the characters. If they are consenting, he can "be interested in it." Like Agnes, he could identify to the [17] extent he read the characters as having his own characteristic defenses.
     Throughout the movie, people's consenting or having the possibility of not consenting reassured Ted: "There were no victims because everyone consented to it. There was no one screaming, `No, no, no,' except with obvious ambivalence, because they had consented right beforehand. They knew what they were getting into, even so far as the branding." A refusal of consent therefore served Ted as a reassurance. "I liked it when the girl ran screaming from the branding [of O] scene. I liked that. I was happy to see that there was some sanity in the movie." For Ted, the ability to consent or refuse equals "sanity."
     Thus, when Sir Stephen lets O brand him, that showed he had completed his own development as a masochistic personality, "because he accepted the brand. The brand was a test. There was a choice: Would he leave his hand there or pull it away? He left his hand there. I still feel as though I'm talking into that microphone." As before, talking about the issue of keeping control reminded Ted, uncomfortably, that he was not wholly in control of his own situation in the interview.
     One way Ted kept control in the movie was to dichotomize its situations. Then he would choose between the alternatives. For example, he described O as both "submissive" and "ruthless." "I was excited at first . . . but then . . . I felt myself getting cold toward her." He felt pity at first, but no pity when she consented. Well, a little: "I pitied the human part of her at those moments she was getting hurt, even if she did seem to enjoy it."
     He singled out the moment when O did some whipping herself. "The sadistic side of her personality was bound to come out sooner or later. She had such a high degree of the masochistic, it was just a matter of time before the complementary aspect of it was revealed." (Another way Ted kept control was by using his psychoanalytic knowledge.)
     Later, approving of Ivan (who wants to marry O), he said, "There was gentleness instead of these guys unzipping their pants and going to it." That, I thought, was the ultimate dichotomy for Ted: being offered a choice ("gentleness") or having the choice made by others for their own pleasure. And I thought, too, he [18] saw the choice as being made by a man (himself), choosing either to be gentle or brutally sexual. For Ted, more than for Agnes or Norm, the issue in the film was submission or domination, but the ultimate question was whether he, Ted, was dominated or not, by the film, the microphone, or his own growing up.
[19]

5  /  Feedback

     When we set out three responses this way, we can see substantial differences among them. Agnes, Norm, and Ted "read" the same things in the movie rather differently, although they did see the "same things." All three remarked on the doubling of the first scene, the training castle, and the brandings. All three used the same codes of crosscut or flashback to read the film.
     Agnes took the doubling of the first scene to mean that the scene represented someone's fantasy. Norm assumed it meant that he could interpret the story as a fable or fairy story.
     Ted read the castle where O learns her perversion in terms of what he took to be universal gender patterns of submission and obedience. The same castle reminded Agnes of the prohibitions in her own conservative Catholic girls' high school.
     Agnes decided that, when O was branded, she was not, really, doing these things of her own free will, only because she was committed to a certain place. Ted felt that she "obviously" consented to it.
     Late in the film, O burns an "O" into Sir Stephen's hand, and Ted saw this as the completion of her devel-[20] opment, sadism now accompanying masochism. Norm interpreted it as one in a pattern of O's throughout the film.
     Agnes related pain in the movie to the pain she thought her own religious upbringing encouraged and rewarded. Norm also thought the film had a religious dimension, but because of the rules and paradoxes he read in the film.
     The biggest differences came in the responses to characters. For example, Agnes thought O was like a sleepwalker, cold, aloof, and (finally) predatory. For Norm, however, she was just a naked body, while Ted felt cold toward her, because she submitted and consented to pain.
     As for O's first lover, René, Agnes dismissed him as a repellent procurer, while Norm disliked him, calling him sick and lousy. Agnes just wanted Sir Stephen, O's second lover, to make O happy, while Norm thought him the most interesting character in the film: imposing, masterful, perhaps even a spiritual adept. Ivan, the boy who wanted to marry O, Norm thought lacking in courage, while Ted thought him normal and gentle.
     The point of all this is that we three spectators saw the same images on the screen, but we saw them differently. The movie itself was, of course, simply "there." The same beady reflections bounced from the screen to the eyes of all of us looking at Jaeckin's film. Everybody saw sadomasochism, whips, panties, leather, René, and Sir Stephen. Everybody agreed that René's name was not Algernon. These perceptions at least were relatively fixed. Each of us, however, read the characters of René and Stephen differently. Each of us toned the undressings or the trainings differently. The film we saw was the same--but different. How can one understand the multiplicity of our responses alongside the singleness of the film? How can one understand our variety within the generality of the codes for understanding movies that we all shared? To answer, I propose to read Kim's case study in the light of a much larger and far more rigorous experimental tradition, namely, contemporary cognitive and perceptual psychology.
     We have learned a great deal since 1950 about human perception. Today psychologists of perception say the way we see and hear is like a dialogue. The world does not simply shove itself through our senses into our minds in a stimulus-response way. [21] Rather, we propose hypotheses to reality, and reality disposes of them. We perceive by trying out constructions on the world. The world confirms and rewards these hypotheses or gives back nothing, chaos, or painful correction. In other words, the mere seeing or hearing something, to say nothing of interpreting a character or theme, proceeds by feedback.°
     To get at the idea of feedback, think of a familiar mechanical example, the cruise con-[22] trol on a big American car. Suppose that we have set the desired speed at sixty-five. The speedometer senses that the car is going sixty or sixty-eight or sixty-five--whatever. Somewhere in its innards, the cruise control compares the speed the speedometer senses with the speed set by the driver. If the car is going at sixty instead of sixty-five, the cruise control feeds more gas to the carburetor. If the car is going at sixty-eight, it feeds less. If the car is going at sixty-five, the control does nothing.
     One can think of such a control system as asking questions of the world it senses: Are we moving at more or less than sixtyfive miles per hour? The system of car and road then answers that question. If the answer is "No," the control system feeds the appropriate amount of gas. It does something physical to the car so the cruise control will perceive the correct value. In effect, the system's behavior controls the system's perception of speed.°
     We can analogize from the car's feedback system to the feedback systems we humans use to meet the world. The control system is like a rudimentary brain. In effect, the cruise control constantly tests its world, limited to the speed of the car. It asks, What is the difference between what I see and what I want to see (the reference level or standard that has been set in me from outside)? I will act so as to minimize that difference. The control system uses sensors and valves to change the speed of the car, so that the cruise control will get a yes answer to the value of sixty-five set by the driver from outside the loop.
     In such a control network, there has to be something outside the feedback loop to set the standard for the loop the way the driver sets the cruise control. Outside the loop, the human driver compares what is happening with what he or she wants to happen and the driver sets the cruise control faster or slower accordingly. In other words, the human driver behaves much as the cruise control does: testing the environment, being satisfied or dissatisfied with the results, acting accordingly, testing again, and so on, round and round. The driver is another loop setting the standard for the lower loop which is the cruise control.
     Notice that stimulus-response makes an inadequate model for such a cybernetic or feedback process. A gust of headwind might slow the car down and cause the cruise control to feed more gas to the engine. But then again, it might not--if, for example, the road simultaneously went downhill. The stimulus does not just cause a response. The stimulus enters an ongoing system of testing for error and then correcting for error. The cruise control takes in a stimulus from outside like wind or a hill. Speed is all the control senses, however. Therefore the stimulus gets lumped into all the other information the cruise control is processing about speed. The cruise control then compares the speed that it senses is happening with the speed that is programmed to happen, and it accelerates or decelerates accordingly. The higher-level feedback loop, the driver, sets the standard for the lower-level loop, the cruise control.
     Whether running in steady-state or dealing with a new stimulus, the cruise control functions, as we say, automatically. If the car starts running at sixty-eight miles an hour (because, say, it is going down a hill), the feedback within the system reduces the gasoline fed to the engine so as to slow the car down to the sixty-five set as its standard. That is, if the car is "on automatic," the smaller networks of the system keep cycling round the loop. These lower-level loops sustain the more encompassing standard. At least they do unless--and this is where Agnes and Ted and Norm come in--unless the human driver outside the loop resets the standard for the low-level control system inside the loop.
     The higher-level human loop controls another lowerlevel loop--and this is the key to Agnes', Ted's, and Norm's response to the film. At higher levels at least, The Story of O does not "stimulate" or even "dominate" or "control" Agnes' experience. Agnes and the movie make an experience together. More exactly, she uses the film to make an experience. She tests what she is seeing by codes at different levels. Is this a hand? A face? A garter? Does this castle place O? Is this a crosscut? A flashback? Notice how the "replaying" of the opening scene did not fit that test for [23] her. "Is this a flashback?" she asked herself. The sequence of scenes didn't fit her usual notions of a flashback. She had to work out a new way of coping with it.
     In general, the spectator of a film brings to it a construction or hypothesis ("Is this a flashback?"). The film confirms or denies the hypothesis. The spectator supplies a new construction or hypothesis. The film gives its next response. That leads to a next construction from the spectator, and so on round and round the loop, over and over again. The system is circular--hence the term feedback loop. To begin, continue, and regulate that questioning, each spectator looks to the physical film, the reflections from the beady screen. The whole process thus rests on the physical film, but the film "controls" our responses only reactively. The film controls Agnes' response only as it answers questions posed by Agnes from her repertoire of hypotheses. What Agnes gets from the film depends on what Agnes asks the film. It is Agnes who begins, continues, and regulates the loop that determines what the film can say to her.
     It is Agnes, moreover, who determines whether the feedback is satisfactory, and hence, whether a given construction has worked. It is Agnes who hears the answers fed back, and she hears them in the same distinctive style in which she posed the questions. In other words, the film "controls" her responses only reactively, and even that control takes place within Agnes' individual style. That is, she colors both the hypotheses she poses to the film and the answers she sees and hears from it.
     Outside the cruise control built into the car is the human who sets the speed. The standard so set comes from the values and concerns of the driver. Agnes, in watching The Story of O, cared about themes of connection and intimacy. Ted developed themes of submission and dominance. Norm talked about rules, interpretations, and morality. Out of these large concerns, our three spectators (probably unconsciously) set their three different standards for the way they interpreted smaller elements: a leather halter, a grimace, the branding of Sir Stephen, or the character of René.
     The film met the concerns of Agnes or Ted--or it didn't. The physical film made their constructions easy or hard, and so confirmed or denied their hypotheses. They then tried new readings of the film or clung to old ones. They may have strained the film [24] to get what they wanted, or they may simply have rejected it. However they did it, though, they saw the film through the lenses of their particular values and concerns. Our state of mind shapes the hypotheses we bring to the film, and those hypotheses then determine how we see it.
[25]

6  /  Identity

     Agnes', Ted's, and Norm's values and concerns shaped the way they saw the film. To relate an individual response like Agnes' to the film, then, we need to have a way of talking fairly precisely about her individuality. I propose, as I have before, identity. Basically, we use the word to refer to the continuity we see between a self at one moment and a self at another moment years later. Of the many ideas of personal identity, I have found the psychoanalyst, Heinz Lichtenstein's, the most useful. We can think of a person's identity as a theme and variations, as in music. We can try to read humans as though they were works of art, because, in a way, they are.
     As I watch that other work of art, The Story of O, at any given moment, I am seeing something different from what I was seeing a moment before. Late in the film, O first enjoys a dinner deluxe. Then, on that very table, she suffers a degrading, but desired, sexual assault. I can phrase a relation between those two events by seeing them as variations on one theme: obedience, perhaps, or nullifying the self through appetite or being the subject of appetite. I can read other events of [26] the film as variations on other themes. I can relate those several themes to one another. Ultimately, then, I can relate any two events in the film. The similarity I see between them comes from my perception that they share a theme. The difference comes simply because they are different. The similarities restate themes. The differences I can read as variations on the themes.
     So I can use the concept of identity to read Agnes, Ted, and Norm thematically. At any given moment, I see Agnes or Ted doing something new. The very name Agnes or Ted, however, shows that I sense a continuity between the Agnes and Ted I see at this present moment and the Agnes and Ted that I have seen up to now. I can use themes, as I use their names, to describe these continuities. Even if I say, "That's not like Ted," I am assuming that there is a like-Ted, a set of Ted-themes, that I must now modify to include this new and surprising act. I can think of the sameness that I call "Ted" as a theme or style that I perceive as persisting through the variations. I can understand changes and growth in this "Ted" as variations on one or several such identity themes. In the case of Norm, we have seen a continuity of moralism and intellectualizing over a dozen years.
     "I can think . . . " "I can understand . . . " An identity is not something "in" a person, but a way to think about that person. Identity is a construct, a way to represent the continuities we see in someone. Identity is a representation, a way of using words to explore and inquire into the interactions between one self and other selves. Identity is thus decentered, imperfectly known, systematically elusive, not simply "in" the person being interpreted, but "between" interpreter and interpretee. In other words, I can only construct Ted's identity from within my own identity. I phrase an identity for Ted or Agnes by the very same feedback processes of testing with which I saw the film or by which I see anything, according to modern psychology. I cannot know someone's identity--I cannot know anything at all (as we shall see)--except through my own identity.
     Identity is somebody's representation of an identity, but, because of feedback, it is also an agency and a consequence in feedback loops. In this aspect, we can think of it as "in" Ted. His identity both acts and is a consequence of its own acts, like the speed of the car under cruise control. Indeed we can think of [27] identity as like the cruise control, in that identity is what governs the various loops by which Ted perceives. At the same time Ted is created as a result of those loops, like the speed of the car.
     Like the cruise control, an identity deals with a stimulus that impinges upon it by bringing to bear on that stimulus tests (or hypotheses or guesses). Is that cigarette holder hot enough to burn Sir Stephen? Does that nod of the head mean yes? Does that eight-sided red sign mean "Stop"? Does this set of free associations have a theme? Does the causality in this movie make sense? You pose a hypothesis, and you get back an answer that may or may not meet your standards for satisfying that hypothesis. If unsatisfied, you will try a new hypothesis. If satisfied, you will subside. Yes, Ted thought, that nod of the head does mean yes. She is consenting. I can go on to think about the next thing. But suppose Ted had thought, No, that nod can't mean yes. She can't want them to do these things to her. Then Ted would have wanted (probably) to try other questions. If it doesn't mean yes, what does it mean? I have to come up with some other hypotheses.
     Through this testing, an identity experiences the stimuli that come from the world on its own terms, so to speak. If our tests make sense, that is, if we feel coherence or satisfaction in terms of our particular identity, we accept what we are testing. If our tests give us unsatisfactory (or incoherent or painful) feelings, we defend against what is coming from outside. We have to try some other line of inquiry or deal otherwise with the stimulus.
     Agnes, Ted, and Norm experienced the movie as they experience the world--by testing it. Their identities governed, and were governed by, feedback loops of hypothesis and response. Because they perceived through this testing, their identities experienced the movie on their own terms. Yet they also experienced the movie with similarities to the experiences others have--because Agnes, Ted, and Norm were using tests that others also use. Hence they saw The Story of O both as others do and differently from others. Agnes', Ted's, and Norm's readings are each unique and all similar, because a unique identity tries out similar guesses about the movie. We can account for the uniqueness as individual identity. We can account for the sameness by the sameness of the hypotheses they brought to the movie. Some were hypotheses [28] about real things like, Is this a garter? Some were hypotheses about movies like, Is this a flashback?
     Incidentally, it is these shared hypotheses that enable separate identities to cohere as the collective, audience. Because many of the people in the theater with Agnes, Ted, and Norm shared some of their hypotheses, they had somewhat similar experiences of the film. Accordingly they were hushed or restless, laughing or crying. When people in the audience manifest their experiences this way, even just by quietly watching, they have a multiplier effect. They make their behavior available to other members of the audience to use as a license. More precisely, we can use the responses of others as a (probably) unconscious defense. One can think, These people are taking this movie seriously. I can too. Indeed it would be embarrassing if I didn't. In an unruly audience, one might think, These noisy, jeering people think this is junk. I am free to reject and attack it, too. Or, These laughing people think this is funny. I am entitled to laugh, too. The presence of others in the theater watching this sexual movie no doubt eased some of the guilt Agnes, Ted, and Norm might otherwise have felt.
     The audience's supplying defenses, however, does not change the basic process. The behavior of the other people in the theater simply becomes one more fact to be processed by the identity in question. Identity governs feedback loops that test hypotheses against the physical film, the surrounding audience, and every other physical aspect of the film, the theater, the advertising, and so on.
     Identity is not, therefore, something separate, autonomous, or finite. Rather, to think of identity at all, I have to think of it "always already" governing a repertoire of feedback loops. My I includes the various schemata my human body and my culture have supplied me for testing, and so perceiving, my world. My I is inseparably coupled to these loops, which come from my culture, but they are also part and parcel of my personal history. From the point of view of cognitive science, Ulric Neisser writes, "Every person's possibilities for perceiving and acting are entirely unique, because no one else occupies exactly his position in the world or has had exactly his history."°[29
     We thus arrive at a way of modeling how Agnes', Ted's, and Norm's responses are the same but different, individual but collective. One's identity-themes may be unique, but the loops they govern are certainly not. Hypotheses about garters and flashbacks are widely shared in our culture. The history, however, of the individual I that combines loops and identity and the I that results are unique (since no two people can have exactly the same experiences).
     The feedbacks that an identity governs go on in a hierarchy of higher and lower feedbacks. The spectator begins, continues, and regulates these trials, to be sure, but not always directly. In this hierarchy of feedbacks, a higher feedback can set the standard for a lower (as the driver sets the cruise control).
     An individual identity has experiences by using widely shared hypotheses. Higher levels tell lower levels what will feel satisfying or unsatisfying. My notion of what makes sense in a movie requires that when it shows an eight-sided red sign, it means "Stop." If that familiar lower-level loop does not work, I have to try a more complex reading of the red octagon before I can get about the larger business of reading the scene it is in.
     Agnes set standards of commitment and connection at the highest level. At this high level, she expressed her identity most directly. She also had a repertoire of tests to apply to The Story of O, tests about flashback and motivation that were not unique to her but would be shared by any competent moviegoer. Her concerns and values set standards for these lower or more automatic processes that seem less personal to her, like perceiving a garter as a garter or a crosscut as a crosscut. As Sir Frederic Bartlett wrote in his classic Remembering a half century ago: perception "is directed by interest and feeling."°
     Higher, more individual concerns direct lower-level processes like memory or perception that are physiologically about the same for all of us. What results, therefore, is a perception of the film that is both uniquely different from the perceptions of other members of the audience and somewhat the same. Agnes' need for commitment led her to see a repeated scene as the revision of a fantasy, but she did see that the scene was repeated, and so did we all. Her experience of a Catholic girls' school drove her perception of the castle, but she saw a castle just as the rest of us did. [30] Once we admit the role of what Bartlett calls the "appetites, instincts, interests, and ideals peculiar to any given subject," we can sort out how her response is both shared and individual, both the same as Ted's or Norm's, and different. We can then go on to model the way her individual experience of the film combines shared culture with her individual identity.
[31]

7  /  Codes and Canons

     Once we have the idea of an identity governing a repertoire of feedbacks in a hierarchy, we can use it to think about the kinds of codes Agnes, Ted, and Norm must have used for perceiving The Story of O. If I analogize from the more familiar case of reading, it seems to me their identities must be governing at least one physical and two cultural levels of schemata.
     We can, that is, draw distinctions within the hierarchy we suppose for Agnes, Ted, and Norm. One, surely, would be between mental testing and physical. The physical level is controlled by the mental, as the speed of the cruise control is set by the driver. In that sense, we can speak of "lower," controlled loops and "higher," controlling loops.
     In these lower loops, physical perception uses the body's hard-wired circuits or to use a currently popular term, transducers. Our retinas translate edges into neuronal impulses just the way a phonograph cartridge (another "transducer") translates the hills and valleys of a long-playing record into electrical impulses. At the most immediate level of perception, the physical systems of our eyes or ears or noses make brightnesses [32] and tones and edges and tastes into electrochemical changes in our neurons and finally in our minds.
     Dr. Johnson gleefully kicked a stone. He was proving to Boswell how solid and "there" the world is and how wrong Bishop Berkeley was to claim that that solidity depends upon our perceptions. In fact, he was proving precisely Berkeley's position. The solidity of the stone depends precisely upon his physical method of perception, a kick. By newer modes of perception, we now "know" that the stone is made up of quarks and other unkickable entities.
     Nevertheless, in a larger sense, Dr. Johnson was right. We do rely totally upon the solidity of the world we physically sense. As we have seen with The Story of O, all our feedbacks, no matter how abstract, rest finally on our physical connection to the physical world.
     Reading provides an example as obvious as Dr. Johnson's rock. We can't read at all if there is not enough light--why? Because as we put our hypotheses into the text (Is this a g? a t?), there is no feedback with which to say yea or nay. Likewise, if the bulb in the projector burns out, there is no way one can ask of the image, Is this Sir Stephen? Is this a garter?, and get feedback. Perception, at its most basic, takes place at a relatively low physiological level.
     Once we distinguish mental feedbacks from these physiological transductions, however, we can draw further distinctions. Mostly our physiological schemata are built into our bodies. We were born with them. By contrast, a surprising proportion of the hypotheses we live by are learned. (That is one major difference between us and our primate relatives.) Imagine, for a moment, how much of your daily experience rests on perceptual hypotheses you had to learn: aromas, art, cause-and-effect, clothing, colors, flavors, gender, manufactured objects (natural objects too), money, music, numbers, pain, reading, relationships, rules for conduct, rules for safety, shapes, spatial relations, time--the list could go on and on. Most of these we learned as children, either very early from our parents or later in school.
     We internalize these higher feedbacks from our culture. Then these mental, cultural loops use the lower, physiological loops we were born with. We edit a clustering of tones into a scream [33] or an aria, or we understand a jumble of tastes and smells as "soup." We convert curves into letter a. We understand the pink and grey and tan reflections from the screen as O's face. We recognize a bra as a bra, a bath as a bath, and so on throughout the movie. At higher levels of inference, we surmise that O works as a photographer, that Sir Stephen is very rich, and that the woman wearing a black uniform and a white apron is a maid. We are constantly processing the raw sensations we get from the screen into "facts" or "story" or "event." To do so, we test by means of the hypotheses that we internalized from our culture. We use these hypotheses to convert immediate, low-level sensations from transducers into higher-level things and events and persons. At least this is a rough approximation of familiar psychological processes.
     The first distinction that we can draw in our hierarchy, then, is between physiological feedback loops, close to raw, unmediated, unprocessed sensations, mere transductions, and "internalized culture." Among the cultural loops, we can then draw a second useful distinction. Some of the schemata we apply to the world are very loose, others very tight, so tight as to constitute a normality. For example, one cannot normally, in our culture, read an eight-sided red sign at an intersection as other than a stop sign. You break the law if you do. "Normally" has unfortunate connotations of health and sickness, but it is the only word I know to say what I want to say. "Customarily" or "typically" almost serve, but cultures are more coercive than those neutral terms suggest. One cannot "normally" interpret a certain configuration of stars and stripes as anything but an American flag. Someone who announced it was the Brazilian flag we would think mad or strangely ignorant. "In a department store, you are given goods in exchange for money or a debt." No member of our culture would normally believe that department stores give their wares away. Someone who behaved as though they did would quickly find themselves in trouble. Such schemata constitute cultural norms, and in that strict sense they are "norm-al."
     Other schemata we hold quite loosely. "That's not art!" shouts the politician at the new sculpture in City Hall. "That's not music!" wails the irate neighbor at the teenager's rock-and-roll. "That's rank injustice!" grumble the well-to-do at a new tax. [34] It is customary, it is even "norm-al" for people to disagree in our culture about political, aesthetic, and even factual matters.
     We can separate loose from tight cultural feedbacks by the shibboleth, "No member of this culture would normally say the rule is otherwise." "Not otherwise" rules are mostly conventions: the flag; uniforms; money; units of time, and so on. Red means stop and green means go. "Otherwise" rules are all the things we normally differ about, including many things we assert are "facts." Like the "facts" about welfare or capitalism or the Arabs or AIDS.
     "Not otherwise" cultural codes depend upon the culture to which we belong. "Otherwise" cultural codes depend on the "interpretive communities"° we belong to within that culture. Lots of normal members of our culture would have trouble saying what distinguishes a Burgundy from a Bordeaux, something that would be automatic for most winegrowers. Lots of normal members of our culture might feel a diminished seventh called for some subsequent tonality--but lots of normal people wouldn't, including some avant-garde musicians. Within the American grain, I can read as a liberal or a rightwinger, a postmodern critic or a structuralist, a theist or a humanist, depending on the opinions I hold, depending on the political or intellectual community to which I belong. All these are "could be otherwise" rules.
     Language provides our most familiar sets of "otherwise" and "not otherwise" schemata. No member of our culture would normally hear the sound [red] as a form of the verb "to go." In reading, no member of our culture would normally read r other than as r , as g , for example, or n . No member of our culture would normally think that 4 really means five.
     If we think simply of reading one letter, we realize that we cannot read otherwise than as the code prescribes. I cannot see g as something other than g . The process is: I see (via physiological feedback) some printer's ink on a page. I try out on my partially processed sensation the hypotheses I learned as a child in this culture for reading letters. From the hypotheses for g , I get positive feedback, and the loop closes tightly, no longer admitting the possibility of f or z . Further, the code I used is common to everyone in my alphabetic culture. No normal mem-[35] ber of my culture could see g other than as g or ing other than as ing or gaping as other than gaping . These perceptions are culture-bound. These are positive. On the negative side, I can make no sense at all of Arabic or Japanese characters. Why? Because I never internalized the hypotheses for them.
     Reading letters or single words provides one example of testing a physical reality by means of "not otherwise" cultural codes. Other "not otherwise" codes in reading would be understanding the relationship of an adjective to its noun or a subject to its predicate in a sentence. "This house is red." No normal person in my syntactic culture could think I was saying the house was not red or that "this house" was part of some other sentence. By this kind of "not otherwise" code, we recognize objects. There are probably peoples to whom O's garter belt has no meaning at all, but for most of Western culture, garter belts respond to a "not otherwise" code. So do traffic lights, toaster ovens, and all the thousands of other artifacts of our culture. Conversely we would have great difficulty in recognizing or using the objects in a Bushman's hut or an Eskimo's igloo.
     Obviously, even though the code itself may be "not otherwise," there may be "otherwises"--ambiguities--in its application. "This house is red, also this color." Is the house two colors or is "this color" red? I claim only that the code is unambiguous. The rule we would apply is shared by all normal members of a certain culture, and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to vary it, although we might very well differ about how to apply the rule. That is why the rules are also hypotheses or, conversely, we derive the hypotheses to apply from the rules we know.
     In reading both books and movies, however, we also use a second, looser kind of rule, rules that can be otherwise. I am thinking, for example, of the kind of code by which we read a facial expression. Does that curve of her mouth mean O is enjoying whipping this other woman? Do Sir Stephen's quick speech and half-shut eyes mean he really disapproves of O when he is first alone with her? Similarly, we have loose codes for interpreting motivation. Does Sir Stephen hate and contemn O at first? Or is he just saying those awful things to cause her pain? Or both? Does René really love her? If so, then how can I reconcile his giving her to Sir Stephen with my ideas of love? Or is he using her [36] to get at Sir Stephen? Since it causes her pain, why does O continue to do what she is doing? Even looser are the ideas by which we formulate character. Is René a masochist? A sadist? I could read him via Freud, Jung, Horney, or your generic social psychologist. Does Ivan love O or just wish to own her as Sir Stephen does? Is Sir Stephen a good man? Honest? Loving and caring? Movies aside, we need to interpret in order to get along in the world, yet our interpretations necessarily differ from our fellow human beings' because, at this level of interpretation, the rules "could be otherwise."
     Perhaps the most pervasive example of "could be otherwise" rules is the meanings of words. Words look as though they mean according to a one-to-one code as recorded in a dictionary, but the actual process is more complicated. Film might refer to a movie or to the stock on which it was shot or to something entirely different, the grime on a windowpane or what forms on top of boiling milk, or some complicated combination of these. Words do not simply "mean" or "signify." Rather, we make them mean by bringing to bear some set of tests. When I hear "film" in the context of movies, am I hearing about The Story of O, 35 mm. stock, or dirt on the lens? Which works in the context? I have to construe to find out. I have to hypothesize.
     Lots of people in our culture might normally read "whip" otherwise than we viewers of The Story of O. A chef might think of a whisk for whipping cream. A Member of Parliament might think of a party leader. Lots of normal members of American culture, on hearing [red] might try as a first meaning, neither a color nor the past participle of "to read," but a political epithet. We differ about the meanings of words, and it is normal to do so.
     So with sentences. When I told Kim McSherry, "I was struck by all the O's," I used the physical sentence (via codes) to express and confirm something in my own mind. The sentence did not deliver a meaning like a pipeline, however. I did not put a meaning into one end of the sentence which she then took out at the other. She used the same physical sentence but to confirm what was probably a quite different hypothesis in her mind. I might have been saying to myself, Does "was struck" express my feeling of puzzlement? She might have been, as the psychoanalysts say, listening with the third ear. She might well have asked herself, [37] How does an O strike? What fantasy about Os is he expressing in this sadomasochistic context? Her higher-level interpretations took for granted the lower-level, fixed codes she and I shared. These are the codes by which I said and she recognized "O" or "struck." But we did not arrive at the same meanings for the words "O" or "struck." By "O's," was I saying the heroine's name or referring to circles or nullities? Did my "struck" hint at the whippings in the movie?
     I suggest the terms "codes" and "canons" to divide rules according to this "otherwise" shibboleth. By this definition, codes cannot, if you are functioning as a normal member of the culture, be otherwise. We all use codes to know that a g is a g or a garter belt a garter belt. "Canons" can be otherwise, depending on which interpretive community you belong to within a given culture.
     The meanings we supply to words are canons. You can read "whip" as a chef or a politician or a masochist would. Even if we cannot get loose from a or 4 , you and I, at this higher level of "could be otherwise," can and do differ. In particular, we can differ as to what theme runs through a set of free associations, indeed as to whether it is right to talk of themes at all. We will read identities differently, and we may disagree as to whether there are such things. As in the lower levels, we try these hypotheses on the "out there," but we hold the hypotheses themselves as a matter of belief, perhaps, or efficiency. We may think of "whip" as prune whip or as persuasive legislator in order to communicate with the particular person we are talking to. Or we continue to try out ideas of human perfection or conservative reluctance because they have worked for us in the past. Or we may use the language of deconstructionism, Lacan, psychoanalysis, or Marx because we believe in a certain set of ideas.
     We have distinguished physiological codes from cultural codes, and cultural codes from canons. A third distinction we can draw is between personal concerns and cultural, between identity and canon. It is the difference between Norm's moralistic concerns about The Story of O and the widely shared but by no means universal view that the movie is "pornographic." Concerns and values that are relatively rare and personal (identity themes) [38] can parallel concerns that are widely shared in the culture although they "can be otherwise" (canons).
     Many people, in today's America, seeing The Story of O, would be outraged. Many, no doubt, would proclaim widely shared religious or "family" values. Yet the deeper reasons for the outrage (and for the values) will be as various as Agnes' need for commitment, Norm's for rules, or Ted's for submission-dominance. These deeper needs may be unconscious in a psychoanalytic sense. Certainly their roots will be.
     One can be a rightwinger or a liberal, and those are culturally shared canons. Yet the deeper needs that those overt political stances satisfy may be quite personal, having no cultural backing. It is useful to keep in mind that identical opinions (canons) can reflect--must reflect--different identities.° In this respect, canon and identity blur into each other, because the unconscious needs that lead someone to choose some particular repertoire of canons also shape identity. This model does not force a choice between conscious and unconscious response. Rather, unconscious response finds expression in conscious comment.
     It is we who use codes and canons to serve our conscious and unconscious wishes. Hence, the distinction between code and canon overlaps the psychoanalytic distinction between what is conscious and what is unconscious. We will be aware of our canons and some of our codes, but canons and codes alike will draw on unconscious roots. It is through codes and canons that our needs, both conscious and unconscious, express themselves, determining our perceptions.
     Oftentimes literary critics and philosophers polarize conscious and unconscious or the individual and the culture. Either a response is individual or it is cultural. But that much over-simplifies the matter. Identity fulfills itself by acting on the world through cultural canons, cultural codes, and physique. Even the most rigid cultural codes serve personal needs. Codes enlarge us.
     Conversely, codes can limit us. I can read 4 as four , but by the same token it is well-nigh impossible for me to see 4 as anything but four . It is very hard for me to drive on the left as you have to do in Japan.
     In this way, these hypothesizing loops both enable and limit [39] their users. Hence this cognitive-psychoanalytic model does not force a choice between a response to a film determined by codes, canons, culture, or the film itself and a response that an autonomous individual chooses. In this model Agnes, Ted, and Norm are not simply "free" or "autonomous" (in the nineteenth-century sense). Neither are they simply the products of their culture (as some twentieth-century thinkers imagine). Nor are they constrained by the film. Rather they are both free and determined. They see the movie both in uniquely personal and in shared and culturally dictated ways. By using the idea of an identity governing codes and canons, it is possible to explore in some detail how culture and personality, determinism and freedom, combine.
     We are dealing with a spectrum, moreover. Large "otherwise" hypotheses (like beliefs or ideology) do not limit us as strictly as do smaller "otherwise" hypotheses like the meanings of words or images. And none of the "otherwise" canons have the consequences of the "not otherwise" codes like the shapes of letters and numbers or the "not otherwise" physical and physiological constraints. We can change our canons, but we would have great difficulty changing our codes. We can add codes, as when we learn a language, but the codes themselves are givens. As for the physical world, it is as hard as Dr. Johnson's rock. The distinctions I am drawing are by no means that hard. They do, however, let us sort out the different ways we are "free" to act individually and constrained to act culturally when we respond to a movie or language or anything, really.
[40]

8  /  The Kuleshov Effect

     For cinema, the classic investigation of codes and canons was the Kuleshov experiment. In 1929 the Russian director and theorist, V. I. Pudovkin, described an experiment that has since passed into the mythology of film as "the Kuleshov effect." I say the "mythology" of film because it is not clear exactly what happened in the experiment. Indeed it's not clear that the experiment ever took place at all. Nevertheless, people have written as though some experiment had in fact taken place, and, as so often, that is enough to constitute "research" in the humanities. The experiment has become something of an inkblot into which to project all kinds of theories,° and now I suppose I am about to do the same. I propose to re-read the experiment in the light of the distinctions I am drawing between codes and canons. In doing so, I am bringing to bear on the Kuleshov experiment, as on McSherry's case study, contemporary cognitive and perceptual psychology.
     Pudovkin described the experiment this way:
Kuleshov ["a young painter and theoretician of the film"] and I made an interesting experiment. We took [41] from some film or other several close-ups of the well-known Russian actor Mosjukhin. We chose close-ups which were static and which did not express any feeling at all--quiet close-ups. We joined these close-ups, which were all similar, with other bits of film in three different combinations. In the first combination the close-up of Mosjukhin was immediately followed by a shot of a plate of soup standing on a table. It was obvious and certain that Mosjukhin was looking at this soup. In the second combination the face of Mosjukhin was joined to shots showing a coffin in which lay a dead woman. In the third the close-up was followed by a shot of a little girl playing with a funny toy bear. When we showed the three combinations to an audience which had not been let into the secret the result was terrific. The public raved about the acting of the artist. They pointed out the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same.°
     Kuleshov himself, in an interview published when he was sixty-eight, recalled that they had kept their experimentally edited films around for years, looking at them repeatedly, until they were destroyed during World War II. He remembered the experiment somewhat differently from Pudovkin, mixing it up with a second experiment involving the actor's intention. The film was never shown to a theater audience, he said. Only the experimenters looked at it. (If that were true, of course, it would be the same as the experiment's never having taken place at all, since the whole thing depends on an audience "which had not been let into the secret.") Kuleshov also remembered the shot of the dead woman differently, as a half-naked woman lying seductively on a sofa, but perhaps that is the memory of an old man thinking of half-naked actresses.°
     We can supplement Kuleshov's cuts, though, with a more modern, more sophisticated example of montage, the time-flow segment in Mike Nichols' The Graduate (1967). Nichols' editing plays off Benjamin's trysts with Mrs. Robinson against his summer by the swimming pool at home. Benjamin walks through a door at home--and into the hotel room where he meets Mrs. Robinson. He gets out of bed with Mrs. Robinson, and he is in the living room at home. In the living room at home, sipping a [42] beer, he is lying on the bed in the hotel room as Mrs. Robinson walks back and forth in front of him, getting dressed. He dives into the pool, pulls himself up onto a rubber float, and finds himself on top of Mrs. Robinson.
     When I watch that sequence, I also interpret it. The thought occurs to me that rolling over onto Mrs. Robinson has become routine. She has become as empty as an inflatable sex doll or as idle as a rubber raft in the summer sun. Perhaps she is full of hot air. When he opens the door, I think of the doors and windows that occur throughout this film all the way to the climax which takes the form of barring the doors to the wedding. From doors, I go to transitions, again, all through the film from the moving sidewalk in the airport at the opening of the film to his frantic driving to and from Berkeley to the bus in which the lovers escape at the end. For me The Graduate is a film very much about transitions, notably Benjamin as a young man in transition from university to career, from sex to love, from his parents' program to his own.
     My interpretation of the sequence in The Graduate illustrates the same phenomenon as the three responses to The Story of O. A personal reading uses "normal" readings that everybody shares. That is, everybody sees the door as a door, Benjamin as a young man, and Mrs. Robinson as an older woman. I think everybody in our culture must also interpret Nichols' cuts from the pool to the hotel room as showing two aspects of Benjamin's life. We all interpret Nichols' images and cuts by means of feedbacks from very basic "not otherwise" codes for seeing movies, codes that we learned early in life .
     Different people, however, will interpret differently the putting of Benjamin on top of, first, the raft, second, Mrs. Robinson. Not everybody will think of Mrs. Robinson as full of hot air. That interpretation might be "otherwise." Not everybody, moreover, will think of that summer as tedious or Benjamin as guilty. These readings reveal canons at work, the same way the readings of Mosjukhin's face did.
     Then, when I go even further and read from Nichols' jump cuts to a whole film about transitions, I am showing my critical beliefs in pattern and wholeness. You might read the film from a feminist or a psychoanalytic perspective. Someone else might de-[43] velop a Christian or Marxist meaning. Each of us would use Nichols' cuts in the service of our high-level canons in different ways. Each of us would be using codes so as to work out our various canons.
     I mention this film because I can use my own reading as an example of a personal reading overlaid onto other readings that everybody shares. When I unpack my reading of Nichols's cuts, I can see it involves two stages and two kinds of cultural hypotheses. It involves hypotheses that I consciously choose or that less consciously simply "feel right" to me and other hypotheses that my culture inscribed in my perceptual modes. My reading involves, in short, hypotheses that could be otherwise and hypotheses that could not be otherwise. In exactly the same way, the Kuleshov experiment cuts between "otherwise" and "not otherwise" cultural loops, between codes and canons.
     The Kuleshov audience's canon-plus-code reading of Mosjukhin's face also demonstrates how high-level canons use low-level codes. "That expression on Mosjukhin's face means something, but what? Ah. The other shot shows a bowl of soup. He has forgotten his soup. What would make a man forget his soup? Heavy pensiveness. Yes, his face does look as though he is thinking hard." All this, of course, very fast, quite unconscious, and almost automatic.
     That automaticity is why, if we consider the process by introspection alone, it feels as though we are being physically controlled by the film. These lower-level feedbacks happen willy-nilly, without our being aware of them. They feel as though they are happening to us without any action on our part. We cannot do otherwise. Everybody gets the same results. We feel as though we are being caused, simply responding in some behaviorist way to a stimulus.
     But we aren't. The cognitive scientists tell us° that, even at the very lowest levels of perception, we are applying hypotheses to what the world supplies us. In school, I was told that the eye is like a camera. Light passes through the lens and falls on the retina, where it stimulates nerves that send images to the brain along what amounts to a oneway street from outside to inside. That picture, according to modern perceptual psychology, is false. The eye has to scan the world, and if the movements of the eyeball are [44] canceled out, we see nothing. We see colors, not because a certain frequency of light falls on the retina, but because the blue-green and the red peaks in our retinas process the light into a certain sensation. We use the same kinds of feedbacks at the lowest, physiological level that we do at the highest interpretive level. Norwood Hanson put it neatly: "People, not their eyes, see. Cameras and eyeballs are blind."°
     Lower-level, automatic perceptions do not model higher-level interpretations. The psychology of perception suggests it is the other way round. The higher-level processes provide the model for the lower-level processes. It is by lower-level processes that we see sixteen or twenty-four frames a second as motion [45] or a cut from a bowl of soup to a man's face as different angles on one event. When one begins reading modern perceptual psychology, one learns that these lower-level processes work the same way as the higher-level processes by which I understand The Graduate as a film about transitions. That is, the feedbacks we can sense ourselves using as we try out complicated hypotheses on a film is also operating unconsciously, automatically, and quickly in our small perceptions of a door, a bowl of soup, or even the seeing of sixteen and twenty-four still pictures a second as motion. The feedbacks by which I read Mosjukhin's expression continue and build on the feedbacks by which I see a cut from a bowl of soup to a man's face as different angles on one event. To interpret the character of Sir Stephen or the state of O's mind, Ted and Agnes and Norm needed to be able to build on the lower-level, syntactic codes of film. We had to be able to take for granted things like crosscutting, establishing shots, the look of a bra or a garter, or the sufficient brightness of the projector bulb.
     At higher levels we were very much on our own. Our assertions about characters, facial expressions, motivations, themes, all the things interpreters disagree about, by that very fact, show that they come from our applying canons.
     We can read back from the answers that people get to see what kinds of questions they were asking, that is, what kinds of hypotheses they were trying out. If everybody in the audience gets similar results, they are using a low-level feedback, either a physical-physiological loop or a "not otherwise" cultural code. This is the way we all see twentyfour frames a second as motion or we all see Mrs. Robinson as Mrs. Robinson and the rubber raft as a rubber raft. When different people get different results, that is the sign of a "could be otherwise" canon. We may well differ as to whether the cuts represent Benjamin's sexual fantasies, his guilt, or his boredom. Readings of this kind represent the feedback from canons that I (consciously or unconsciously) choose and hold. By contrast, the "not otherwise" readings result from applying codes "inscribed" (consciously or unconsciously) in my perceptual modes by my culture.
     The Kuleshov experiment cut precisely between canon and code, between the "otherwise" and the "not otherwise" kinds of cultural loops. In interpreting the juxtaposition of Mosjukhin's face with a bowl of soup or a playing child--that is, in reading the montage--everybody responded the same. "It was obvious and certain that Mosjukhin was looking at this soup." Evidently, no person in the Kuleshov interpretive community would normally see two shots, one after the other, as unrelated. They were using a "not otherwise" code, but one for interpreting the juxtaposition of shots rather than the image of a face or a bowl of soup. We are seeing some filmic syntax in action.
     Reading the expression on the actor's face, however, was evidently like supplying a meaning for "whip" or "red." It could be otherwise. The audience could read the same image on the screen as heavy pensiveness, deep sorrow, or a light, happy smile. The hypotheses about Mosjukhin's expressions are canons, since a given image accepts a variety of interpretations. In other words, it is not a matter of stimulus-response at all, but of projection.
     Our canons for interpreting a relatively neutral facial expression vary widely from interpreter to interpreter and situation to situation. When Kuleshov's audience projected the emotion appropriate to the soup, woman, or child onto Mosjukhin's face, the uniformity of their response shows they were using codes, but not codes for reading neutral facial expressions. (Those are canons.) They were using two codes. One related the first shot to the second. The second code had to do with the images. Our codes relate coffins to death and (usually) sorrow. Our codes relate soup to hunger. Kuleshov's audience used these codes to project an emotion onto the face which they then imagined (as we do when we project) that they read it "from" the face.[46]
     Then, although Pudovkin had no reason to mention them, we are also seeing a number of other lower-level "not otherwise" loops at work in the Kuleshov experiment. Some were cultural. The spectators all saw the soup as soup and Mosjukhin as a man. They all treated the blacks and whites and greys on the screen as representations of reality. Other low-level, "not otherwise" loops were physiological. The audience all saw sixteen frames a second as motion. They all were able to discern whites, blacks, greys, and the edges of the images.
     In short, we have drawn distinctions between identity, canon, code, and physiological feedback. These distinctions let us sort out a classic problem in cinema theory. We have an explanatory model.
[47]

9  /  The Model

     We have a combination of two case studies and one (perhaps) experiment. No one of them is as rigorous as a proper psychologist would like, but perhaps they do not need to be. We can interpret them in the light of a vast body of highly rigorous experimental work, namely, the remarkable developments since 1950 in cognitive and perceptual psychology. The model I have been developing in chapters 5, 6, and 7 rests on a huge body of experimental work by others. Except for the role of a psychoanalytic idea of identity--that is my contribution--the model states in minimal form the picture of the mind developed in the burgeoning field of "cognitive science" or in the title of Howard Gardner's strong summary, "the mind's new science."° Applied to movies, the theory is best known in the works of David Bordwell and Edward Branigan.° Applied to the visual arts, Ernst Gombrich is the most widely read spokesman.° Applied to literature, I have been developing the model in earlier works,° and it pervades the standard textbooks on the psychology of reading (although these seem not to be known by literary critics).°[48
     "The literature on cognitivism in psychology, philosophy, social theory, linguistics, anthropology, and even aesthetics," writes Bordwell, "has become so vast that no introduction can do justice to it. Indeed nobody can keep track of it."° That is not my purpose. I want to suggest here a minimal statement of the idea of the human being that cognitive science has developed. My own contribution is simply to suggest that it is an identity (as developed in psychoanalytic thought) that governs the feedback loops described by cognitive scientists.
     This combination of a theme-and-variations identity with "constructivism" allows us to draw a coherent picture of an individual's response to a text or, indeed, to anything. That is, we can state this model of an I in a very general form. An identity governs a hierarchy of feedback loops, each providing the standard for the loop below it. We can think of this model as having three levels--

at the highest level, a unique identity interpreted as a theme and variations;

at intermediate levels, loops internalized from culture, of two kinds:

canon-loops, rules about which different "interpretive communities" regularly differ;

code-loops: "No member of this culture would normally believe the rule is otherwise."

at the lowest level, physiological loops the human species shares.

We respond to movies and other things through this hierarchy.
     At lower and intermediate levels, we test what is before us, as the cruise control of chapter 5 tested the speed of the car. The lowest, most basic level consists of the physiological tests we make of the physical film: its brightness, loudness, contrast, edges, and so on. This testing process converts that physical film reflected from the screen in front of us into impulses along our neurons, impulses that correspond to brightness, loudness, speed, or sequence. These lowest-level tests elicit a physiological feedback that can be as decisive and coercive as a wall or a flash of light.
     Above these physiological feedback loops, we can distinguish two kinds of psychological loops or codes, higher and lower. The lower limits us in a manner almost physical. This is the syntax of [49] film and of objects. It involves tests based on hypotheses or rules that "cannot be otherwise." A garter has to be a garter, a flashback a flashback. Then other, higher codes use these lower physical and syntactic codes in the service of different modes of interpretation and different interpretive communities. We test the film to see if it embodies our ideas about the gaze or the suture or the female body. Monitoring all these lower levels is an identity with emotions. Does this feel right to me, to my especial sensibility? Can I read this film in such a way as to express my own identity? And that is what Agnes, Ted, and Norm did.
     This model, an identity governing canons, codes, and physiological tests, enables me, finally, to do what I set out to do. I can understand the relation between Agnes', Ted's, and Norm's individual responses and the aspects of those responses they shared with others in the theater: the physical film, the codes for seeing that film; moral and social values.
     I can relate their personal responses to what they shared with most other human beings: the physical film, the various lights and shadows and colors reflected from the screen. I can relate their responses to the codes they shared with all members of their moviegoing culture: the objects they saw on the screen; the syntax of film editing; the spatial relations they inferred from close-up and long shot. Most important, and that is the question with which we began, I can put into words a comparison among Agnes' and Ted's and Norm's responses. I can see what they are doing as the setting of very individual standards for culturally shared feedback processes of perception. The various reference levels in their feedbacks--their interrogations of the film--I can phrase as functions of their different identities.
     As I formulate Ted, he was the kind of person who divides the world into those who dominate and those who submit. His concern for control colored his perceptions of men and women, parents and children, microphones--and The Story of O. As I read myself now, some years after the event, I see a Norm who tried to master the film by figuring out rules by means of which the characters could live and enjoy living. (I think I am doing the same thing in the paragraphs you are reading.) Agnes, as I represent her, was the kind of person for whom commitment and connection are the most important values, often represented by [50] places, and she controlled the characters and the situations to reflect her themes. Each of our identities used methods of interpretation that fitted the concerns of that identity.
     Each of our identities used methods of interpretation, but these methods in turn used--built on--lower-level interpretations. At the most basic level, there was the physical film. "They [the voice over] said the trees were dark," said Agnes, "and I thought, they're not dark. They're light." Even Agnes' rejection of what the voice said rested on a still lower level of perception, her hearing of the sound track.
     "They were in the car taking off her panties and cutting her bra, and she said that it didn't work that way sometimes, and then she sort of revised the fantasy." No one in our culture could read that bra as a man's undershirt or her panties as a hat. Using the codes for the physical images she was seeing, Agnes had to see O being stripped, and having seen that she had to find a way of dealing with it.
     "Her face was blank," said Agnes. "And I remember thinking at that point, you don't have to do this." "I thought it was O's fantasy. I thought about the revising of it, because I revise my fantasies. I start them out, and if I don't like the direction the story is taking, I start them over again." Agnes felt freed of restraint--an important issue for her--because she interpreted O's voice as describing a fantasy. Then she could revise the fantasy and assure O, "You don't have to do this."
     Finally, an identity like Agnes', Ted's, or Norm's uses theories about this film (and film in general) to create a personal experience of The Story of O. Each of their identities is an agency that sets the reference levels for the feedback loops it governs. It is not only the identity that gives rise to each of their experiences of this film, but also the identity that results from it, and this circularity is the essence of feedback or, if you prefer, inquiry leading to dialogue.
     Norm seeks to master the world by knowing patterns and unities. Hence he reads the re-run of the opening sequence as legitimating his search for a moral in the picture. Agnes wants to establish connections and intimacies, so she reads that opening re-run as some person's fantasy, to be revised like her own.
     Ted was working out themes of submission and dominance. [51] Hence, for him, the important thing about O's branding Sir Stephen was Ted's perception of Sir Stephen's consent. Norm, however, wanted to find unity and pattern, and he focused on the "O" on Sir Stephen's hand, one O among many Os.
     Ted saw the castle where O is trained as a symbol of universal human patterns of submission and obedience. Agnes, with her sense of connection through place, thought of her own Catholic girls' high school. Again, Agnes saw O's branding in terms of connection: she submitted to it only because she was committed to a certain place. Ted felt that she "obviously" consented to it.
     Agnes related the pain in the movie to the pain she thought her own religious upbringing encouraged--she established a connection. Norm also thought of religion, but rules and paradoxes, not pain.
     Agnes just wanted Sir Stephen, O's second lover, to make O happy--connections again--while Norm thought him impressively dominant, perhaps even a magus or guru--someone who had mastered the system. Ivan, the boy who wanted to marry O, Norm thought lacking somehow, a bit spineless, because he was unwilling to undergo the spiritual discipline Norm saw in Sir Stephen. Ted thought him normal and gentle, because he and O were able temporarily to escape the submission-dominance polarity.
     In short, by understanding Agnes', Ted's, and Norm's identities as themes, I can understand their different readings of the same scene, event, or character as variations on those themes. At the same time that they were interpeting differently, however, they were also building similar intepretations on shared canons and codes. All saw whips, bras, and a castle. Thus, I can understand how each saw a different movie and each saw the same movie.
     Most film theories have the film dictating or controlling the response. Typical is the "suture" theory of film response. It says that the film creates gaps, offscreen spaces, and the next shot fills them. The spectator is, so to speak, sewed or sealed into the film so that the spectator sees events as the camera does. Such theories are, in psychological jargon, stimulus-response theories or, in the language of reader-response, text-active theories. Some are bi-active. That is, they explain the commonalities in Agnes', Ted's, or Norm's response by saying the film controls those. Then [52] Agnes, Ted, and Norm can add their individual variations to "the" standard response.
     Both these kinds of theories, text-active and biactive, seem weak to me. There are, I think, several reasons to prefer a spectatoractive or reader-active model.
     One you have just seen. You can explain with it. In a complex set of responses series of responses, like Agnes', Ted's, and Norm's, there are two things to be explained. Why are they alike in the ways that they are alike? Why are they different? Most people assume that the likenesses are caused somehow by the film--the text. The film "guides" or "controls" or "constrains" its audience. One can better explain the similarities in reponse, however, by saying that they come about because Agnes, Ted, and Norm are using similar hypotheses on the film, similar notions of garters, whips, flashsbacks, and cross-cutting. This is the model the psychologists of reading have arrived at in their experiments, although they do not pay much attention to individual differences. Why is it better? Because it rests on the psychologists' experimental evidence. Because it provides a psychological account of the way we perceive texts. There is no explanatory power, no psychology really, in statements that the film guides, controls, or constrains its viewers. How does such guiding come about? Nobody says.
     Naturally, the identity-governing-feedbacks picture explains the second matter, why the individual responses are different, because that is what it was designed to do. By contrast a bi-active model requires two kinds of explanations, one for the likenesses, another for the differences. (And it is as mute on the details of the psychology of difference as it is of likeness.)
     Positing two modes of response introduces another difficulty. If there are two modes by which we apprehend texts, what determines which mode is in action at any given moment? Why does the one model cease functioning and the other come into play? People agree that O wears tight garters--that, says the text-active model, the film controls. People disagree about what the rewriting of the opening fantasy means. In the rewriting, the text does not control, and individuals decide. But why did the text suddenly lose control? And when? By contrast a reader-active model ex-[53] plains both the sharing of basic features (garters) and the differences about other basic features (like the rewriting). Similarly, a reader-active model explains differences arising from gender, age, education, or class with one model. By contrast, the idea that some things are text-active and some reader-active, usually expressed as "interaction," again requires two different models. Again the question arises, When and why does textcontrol stop and control from the viewer's gender, age, education, or class take over?
     In short, the reader-active picture of an identity governing a hierarchy of feedbacks has advantages of precision and parsimony. Using it, I can understand how a complex series of responses, like Agnes', Ted's, and Norm's, can be simultaneously very personal to each of them but have elements shared by other viewers of the film. I can see how they could read the images of the film, its conventions, and its sequence as other filmgoers would and yet derive from those same shared responses highly individual interpretations of O's actions. I can understand how Kuleshov's audience could all agree about the meaning of the cuts (when there was no "meaning" in them). I can understand how they could all see the actor's face as having different expressions, when the expressions were in fact the same. I can understand how my reading of Benjamin Braddock's summer builds upon and uses Mike Nichols' radical experiments in cutting.
     By contrast, a text-active model has considerable difficulty with the Kuleshov effect.° The text or stimulus is just one piece of film, a montage of shots. If we assume the Kuleshov cuts were the stimulus, the audience all responded the same way. All agreed the face was being put in a certain context. Reading the actor's face, however, the audience did different things with the same stimulus. Because the audience saw that one stimulus (Mosjukhin's face) differently in different contexts, a stimulus-response model requires us to assume that the individual shot is one stimulus but the juxtaposition of face and context, the cuts, another. I find the idea that one thing is two different stimuli very confusing. I find it much easier to imagine one individual using two different codes on one thing.
     A second reason I prefer this model is that it fits what the great majority of modern psychologists tell us about perception. [54] We perceive in a continuing dialogue, in which we pose a question to the "out there," and that question elicits an answer which affects the next question. This question-and-answer or feedback model corresponds precisely (even quantitatively) to the processes that the psychologists of perception tell us are the way we perceive all kinds of things, not just movies.° Hence, this model provides a continuity between the way we see a certain set of pinks and yellows as a flesh tone, the way we see the twenty-four frames a second into continuous motion, the way we perceive a pair of panties as a pair of panties, the way we know how to interpret a certain kind of cut as a flashback, and the way we find the relation between René and O interesting or sick and lousy. We can see why, given a cut from a bowl of soup to a man's face, we interpret the facial expression as hunger. Our high-level conclusions are our own, but we built those high-level conclusions from the most immediate questions that we made the physical film answer yea or nay to. By contrast, a text-active model gives us no way to explain why responses are variable in some respects and fixed in others.
     I have a third reason for preferring this model to suture or other text-active theories. This hierarchy of feedbacks in which the deepest and most far-reaching concerns of an Agnes or a Norm set the reference levels for particular perceptions fits what the physiologists of the brain tell us about that mysterious architecture. Obviously, there is much they do not know, and this feedback metaphor drastically simplifies what we do know about the brain. On the other hand, the metaphor does open the possibility of exploring the ways we read films with some attention to what we know about the way the human body works.
     Even identity, we now know, may be a psychic structure. The human brain, like the brain of all higher mammals, goes through a process of growing and losing neurons and synapses (the gaps between neurons where the action is). In the first few years of our life we sprout synapses at an astonishing rate. The six-year-old child has a brain that is as big as an adult's and uses twice the energy--as those of us who have parented six-year-olds had suspected. From the age of eleven on, however, only the fittest of these neurons and synapses survive. That is, only if we use them do neurons and synapses get the neurochemicals they need. [55] Furthermore, that has been true from birth. Only the neurons and synapses that we used got the necessary chemicals to survive. The child who grew up in New York developed neurons for blocks and subways. The child who grew up in Kansas gets a brain for big skies and fields of grain, quite a different kind of space. The child whose mother over-controlled developed patterns of mind and action to fit her pattern. In this way, the patterns of relationship to people and things that we established from earliest infancy to adolescence became inscribed in the very structure of our brains. That inscribed structure is, it seems to me, the physiological basis for psychoanalysis' sayings about the importance of early childhood. That inscribed structure is what we call identity.°
     A fourth reason I adopted this model is that it combines traditional and poststructuralist views of persons and texts. An identity governing feedbacks not only makes sense of the old idea of persons and texts as organic unities, but it also fits our late twentieth-century skepticism about such certainties or essences. If we follow psychoanalysts, psychologists, and biologists (I am thinking here of Maturana and Varela°), we imagine identity as an organic unity. We imagine an "originary" identity in the language of today's deconstructionists, and they would say we err in doing so. Yet perhaps we are not so old-fashioned as it seems. The model also says our imagining is necessarily "off." Identity is decentered because identity is always somebody's representation of an identity, and the somebody can only do that through the somebody's own identity. Agnes, Ted, and Norm are always somebody's Agnes, somebody's Ted, somebody's Norm. In this essay, each of their identities is a product of my interpretation through a hierarchy of feedback loops that I use for reading identities. These and all identities, therefore, are decentered and systematically elusive. This model uses, but avoids being trapped by, essentialism.
     Even if I try to read my own identity, I can only read it by splitting myself. That is why, at those points in this book, I have referred to myself in the third person, as "Norm." The part of me that (consciously and unconsciously) interprets my I is not quite the same as the identity being interpreted, "Norm." The identity that exists after a given act is not quite the same as the identity that (consciously and unconsciously) performed that act. Hence, [56] even if it is "in" our own brains, identity is necessarily imperfect, elusive, decentered, deconstructed, because identity can only be one identity's reading of the psychic structure underlying another's identity.
     To summarize, we can relate three things. One, a real individual response. Two, the text that evoked it. Three, the feedbacks, the codes and canons, by which the individual reads the text. The model consists of a hierarchy of feedbacks governed by a theme-and-variations identity (itself a construct through this very process of perception). A personal identity sets the standards for canons ("otherwise" cultural feedback loops) which in turn set the standards for codes ("not otherwise" cultural feedback loops) which in turn set the standards for "not otherwise" physical and physiological feedback loops. A personal identity governs these three levels, consciously and unconsciously using them to serve that I's idea of pleasure and to defeat that I's idea of pain. The I itself, however, is decentered, some necessarily other I's way of phrasing the viewer's individuality through just this kind of identity-governs-feedback process.
     I cannot tell whether this is too complicated a model of an audience's response for a humanistic readership. Really, though, compared to the hermetic complexities of modern film and literary theory, I cannot believe that it is. I propose it because I do not know a better way to relate a real individual response to the film that evoked it and to the tests we all use for seeing movies. I believe it is the strongest model we critics presently have for what goes on when you and I "I" a film, a poem, a story, any text, anything. That is, we can explain with it. It gains further strength from "harder" disciplines than literary theory: psychoanalysis, experimental psychology, and neuroscience. For me, it is especially satisfying. Professor Holland's identity theory forms the ultimate intellectualization of Norm the moviegoer's need for pattern and unity. Nevertheless, I have to confess that this model is not one that most critics of film or literature use. Perhaps, then, this is a cue to eye, to I, some critics in action.
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PART TWO   /  I-ing Critics
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10  /  Criticism as Public(action)
     Agnes', Ted's, and Norm's responses illustrate the kind of thing audiences do. They saw a movie both in shared and in wholly individual ways. We can understand how they did these two seemingly contradictory things if we apply a model of a unique, theme-and variations identity governing a hierarchy of hypothesizing loops. Some of these hypotheses are shared by all humans, some by all humans within a culture, and some by all humans within an interpretive community within a culture.
     That is what audiences do. What do critics do? In a sense a critic is no more than an audience member who speaks to and for the rest of us in a more public and formal way than Agnes, Ted, and Norm did. Literary criticism in this sense simply means making public statements about literature or making public statements, prompted by literature, about society, history, psychology, or, in general, the human condition.
     Despite its public nature, however, I suspect the average citizen finds literary criticism as we academics

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PART ONE / I-ing an Audience

PART TWO / I-ing Critics

New York

Columbia University Press