跨界太极学术 | Spectatorial Theory in the Age of Media Culture(1)

Spectatorial Theory in the Age 

of Media Culture

Elizabeth Klaver

The last few decades of the twentieth century have seen the rise of a significant and powerful media culture. We now live in an age in which those media forces associated with visual entertainment - film, theatre, and television - have come increasingly to circulate among and interact with each other. Given the consequently porous nature of media boundaries, how should viewership and its effect on subjectivity be theorized today? Does the concept of the 'spectatorial gaze', as developed by critics in film and extended to theatre and television, actually work, given the plurality of the media culture? Elizabeth Klaver argues in the following essay that the 'ways of looking' currently available to viewers break down the isolated gaze of mastery - with or without its sexual-political connotations - and offer instead the potential and sometimes the actuality of performative interaction. Elizabeth Klaver is Assistant Professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. As part of her current work on the media culture, she has recently published in the field of television and contemporary drama, and has also published articles on beckett and lonesco.

IN 1977, MEGAN TERRY began performing her teleplay Brazil Fado as a theatre piece. Although commissioned by WNET-NY, the teleplay was never broadcast on television because of its political content, which implicates the US government and US corporations in the torture of Brazilian political prisoners.

Though recast for the theatre, the play continues to retain many of its features as a teleplay. For example, Terry originally envisioned a broadcast over two separate TV channels, which would be watched simultaneously on two separate TV sets. One channel would show the action of a Brazilian TV studio or represent its broadcast, while the other channel would depict an American domestic scene.

In situating the teleplay in the theatre,Terry reset the actions in two separate playing areas - the Brazilian TV studio in front of and below the scene of the American home. By dividing the stage in this way, both actions can be played simultaneously as if still running on separate TV channels. Moreover, the characters in the American home play to a camera or its signifier, which the stage directions indicate is aligned with the audience.1 The play now appears to Ijroadcast' a re-presentation of the teleplay in theatre space.

Terry's incorporation of television and filmic camera techniques in a theatre production gives rise to an array of looks and gazes which makes Brazil Fado of particular interest to spectatorial theory. The complex of relations among the visual, the visible, and visibility in this intersection of media comes out of the play's effort to perform the media culture or a cross-section of it.

By the media culture I mean the interactions of media discourses and their impact on life, experience, and reality a network of relations that has been intensifying in power and significance during the last few decades of the twentieth century. Often, the media culture is equated with postmodernism, a broader term that suggests a number of complementary conditions and theories post-essentialist feminism, the crisis in representation, the consumer culture, to name a few. Granted that the media culture itself opens up to a large spectrum of media forces, which includes the shopping mall camera and theories of surveillance, I am limiting my use of the term to the plurality of film, theatre, and television, the media popularly associated with visual performance, and to the enormous space of their circulation.

Phenomenology of the Returned Gaze

As early as 1977 Brazil Fado demonstrated that the media culture ought to be imagined as a domain of interconnections, a multidimensional grid. While this grid may be currently dominated by television, as Fredric Jameson argues,2 intersections, influences, and alterities occur in this site as well. Not only do the three major media influence each other (theatre realism on television, television close-ups on film), they seem to perform each other.

Television, of course, has always aired films and plays, but lately popular movies such as Groundhog Day and Stay Tuned have attempted to replicate the structure of television by borrowing certain features such as its repetition and bricolage of texts. Similarly, avant-garde theatre groups such as Terry's Omaha Magic Theatre and The Wooster Group in New York have taken to including throughout the 1980s and 1990s broadcast and closed-circuit television in their performances.

In fact, my project in this essay grows out of an interest in plays that include television structure, style, and technology - those theatre pieces like Brazil Fado that attempt to perform the media culture or a slice of it and has become a consideration of the looks and gazes traversing and cutting across the media and of those related spectatorial theories and their critical applications. How are looks and gazes theorized with respect to each of the media? Does the plurality of the media culture change the way that spectatorship is positioned? In what ways can one medium and its theory be used to explore another? Does the transference from one medium to another alter or disrupt notions of viewing? Can one medium and its viewer-positioning become the radical alterity of another?

While the following discussion attends to these issues, I focus specifically on the workings and theory of the spectatorial gaze and its viewing-subject. By examining the development of the spectatorial gaze in film and its traversal of theatre and television, I intend to show that the theory introduced in the 1970s and still dominant today of an authoritative gaze belonging to a monolithic spectator cannot be applied systematically to all three media, and that a destabilizing element exists in the phenomenology of a returned gaze that also roams across the media culture.

Rather than the paradigm of visual mastery constructed in isolation by one medium and its apparatus, a better model for the plurality of the media culture has been available all along in the inclusiveness of performance. At the end of this essay, I return to Terry's Brazil Fado to test what happens to viewership in a site that performs an array of the looks and gazes available in the media culture.

To a large degree, my privileging of a theatre site is both artificial and arbitrary artificial because any medium that performs the media culture also acts as a ground for it, and arbitrary because film and television can also provide performances of these interactions. It would be fascinating, for instance, to study the alterations that would transpire in viewership if Groundhog Day or Stay Tuned were broadcast on network television.

Overview of Looking Structures

Because film, theatre, and television have idiosyncratic aspects to their looking structures but operate as porous boundaries within the media grid, the media culture offers a plurality of ways to look and of viewing positions. Contrary to the sort of spectatorial theory that posits an isolated spectator constructed in one viewing position, the range of looks and gazes in the media culture suggests that numerous positions exist for the viewer. Indeed, Robert H. Deming, in writing about the televisionsubject, argues that the TV viewer is constructed by the media environment,3 never simply by a particular TV show.

By extension, every viewer in the media culture also must be 'a function of competing discourses'.4 And such a delineation means that watching occurs from an intersection of viewing positions, a placement that recalls Jean-Frangois Lyotard's notion of subjectivity as being situated at the intersection of language elements.5 A viewer watching any of the media, then, will be at the crossroads of various media looks and open to a variety of subject positions. Already, this situation begins to suggest that the theory of a spectatorial gaze operating in isolated relation to one medium cannot be fully functional in the plurality of the media culture.

Thus, in uncovering a multiple positioning in viewing, the notion of the viewer as purely passive and simply acted upon by one medium can be given up and replaced by a performative modality in which agency, as an aspect of the interplay among viewing positions, is recognized. In other words, the viewer exerts agency by performing in the viewing situation, by bringing a history of media and life experiences to whatever show she is watching.

This sort of agency is born up by common sense. It explains the intertextuality a viewer might note, for instance, between the film and TV versions of The Fugitive, and also accounts for the sceptical, critical, or ironic distance she might bring to a viewing experience. This theoretical shift from a passive, monolithic voyeur, who is constructed and controlled by the looking structures embedded in a show, to a pluralistic, changing, interactive viewer is similar to the characterization of postmodernism by Barbara Freedman as the move 'from a spectator consciousness to a displaced and displacing performer consciousness'.6

The sort of performative modality Freedman associates with postmodernism seems to be an appropriate trope for the media culture itself, especially in terms of the intersections that occur between viewers and spectacles. Since it need not be limited to the watched spectacle, whether 'on' (mediated) or the world at large, performance can be recognized as an articulated network of signs, gazes, and looks, or in semiotic terms, as discourses acting on a world.

For example, the viewer has a performative effect on the viewed simply by causing alterations in whatever is looked at, as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle suggests.

Similarly, phenomenology indicates that the spectacle of the world also has a performative impact on the see-er and cannot be regarded as simply a passive representation. As Jacques Lacan suggests in his anecdote of the sardine can, the spectacle can become the subject simply by looking back at the level of light.7

The Spectator and Performative Modality

This blurring of the binary division between spectator and spectacle is antithetical to Guy Debord's society of the spectacle - the modern capitalist world made up of vast media extravagances that are governed by the logic of the spectacle.8 Despite Herbert Blau's attempt to connect the high visibility of media with the commodity-conscious society of the spectacle,9 Debord's society ultimately devolves into a scene of conspiracy, which renders the spectator utterly passive and isolated from the spectacle.10

Interestingly, Debord has appealed to some spectatorial theorists, especially film critics who have identified film as spectacle and the spectator as passive voyeur. Clearly, though, the society of the spectacle doesn't translate to a media culture recognized as performative and pluralistic. In The Woman at the Keyhole, in fact, Judith Mayne indicates limitations in the way various film theories divide the spectacle from the spectator, and points to an idea common to 'notions of the cinematic spectacle' which assumes 'a spectator who is held, contained, and regulated by the mechanisms of the cinematic apparatus'.11 On the contrary, a performative modality would indicate that a spectator, as well as a play, film, or television show, can act on the world.

Moreover, in terms of the interaction of looks between the viewer and the viewed, phenomenological theory shows how the subject, being in the world, is destabilized and destabilizing. Indeed, the descriptions Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jacques Lacan give to the relation of the subject to world and the viewer to viewed can be interpreted as a performance trope which breaks down the notion of spectator mastery.

To Merleau-Ponty, the see-er does not appropriate the world she sees, but in looking opens herself to it, lives in it from the inside, and becomes immersed in it.12 A potentiality exists in the space between viewer and viewed, the exchange of an object for a subject in the spectacle that looks back, which might be termed Sartre's possibility of 'being-seen-by-the-Other'13 or Lacan's gaze.

Of course, there are differences in the ways that Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Lacan theorize these relations: Sartre and Lacan are more deconstructive of the subject than Merleau-Ponty, who implies in 'Eye and Mind' a transcendent plenitude. Despite these differences, the work of the phenomenologists is vital for theorizing about the media culture, for it not only unmasters the privilege of viewing the world (or visual art) as a representation, but also catches up the relations between viewer and viewed in a performative modality, the articulated structure of semiosis.

The returned gaze, then, is one of the most powerful looks operating in the media culture. It opposes the viability of the spectatorial gaze by uncovering the relations of performance. Indeed, considered as a whole the matrix of looks in the media culture shows that the returned gaze interrelates with the looks of a pluralistic subject not only in destabilizing spectator subjectivity and fragmenting identification, but also in bolstering the opportunity for agency.

In making the subject divided and provisional, the returned gaze counters theories of the subject as the 'solidified effect of discursive or ideological pressures', pointing instead towards an ever-changing subjectivity that can manifest itself as a performative function of ironic distance, even of resistance.14 Bringing this linkage back to the viewing experience involved in a play, film, or television show indicates that the sort of performative modality thus generated will tend to illuminate the entire room, so to speak, rather than simply shine a light on what is viewed.

Film, Theatre, Television

In recent years the cinematic model has been the most influential of theories on spectatorial discussion. Most critics agree that classic film theory derives from the Renaissance pictorial perspective of looking through a window at the world, a position that secures the spectator as complement to the director and as visual authority over the spectacle.15

During the 1970s and 1980s theorists such as Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey also provided a psychoanalytic methodology to explain the visual operation and fascination of film. This theory posits that the spectator enjoys the narrative of film by identifying with the filmic other's perspective in a procedure similar to Lacan's mirror stage. Initially, the spectator understands herself as a pure act of perception before beginning to identify with the camera's and ultimately the director's look.16 In a process termed suturing, the camera provides a keyhole series of unspecified point-of-view shots (looks) before supplying the critical reverse shot that reveals the character doing the looking.

The spectator's gaze thus coincides with the looks of a character, an equivalency that instals the illusion of coherent selfhood in the spectator and generates the voyeuristic position. The spectatorial gaze constructed out of suturing allows the spectator to align with a gaze but remain outside of the spectacle, an authoritative see-er invisible to the seen. While this suturing technique occurs again and again in films by a wide range of directors from Alfred Hitchcock to Kevin Costner, such a process of identification, as Metz himself points out, does not entirely coincide with the mirror stage, for the spectator does not see an image of herself reflected in the filmic other.17

Although he makes a brilliant set of correspondences between the spectator's eye as searchlight duplicating camera and projector, and the spectator's consciousness duplicating screen and filmstrip,18 Metz does not recognize the possibility of a returned gaze. In his article, 'Voyeurism, the Look, and Dwoskin', Paul Willemen makes this step by positing a disruptive Lacanian look the film takes at the viewer. Interestingly, Willemen remarks that a signifier of this gaze can be the projector's light beam reflected back on to the faces of the audience, an idea that suggests a swivelling of Metz's eye/searchlight/projector. Willemen provides several examples in Dwoskin's work, particularly in Girl, where the spectator becomes increasingly shamefaced in the subject position of voyeur as the imaginary, returned gaze makes itself felt.19

The Sexuality of Looking

Willemen's insight recognizes Lacan's later reformulation of the mirror stage in which he identifies the returned gaze as fundamental to the discomforting function of me'connaissance, the misrecognition of whole selfhood.20 The returned gaze, then, disrupts the filmic spectator constructed by suturing, because it interrupts the seamless spectatorial gaze, fractures identification and the illusion of whole selfhood, and collapses the rigid division between spectator and spectacle. The returned gaze does not allow the audience to hide behind darkened lenses, but makes them perform, in Lacan's terms, as speculum mundi.

Not admitting the possibility of a returned gaze, though, is one way classic film theory has posed the voyeuristic spectator as the only subject position available to the filmic viewer, even while demonstrating it as constructed. This rather artful supposition has kept the filmic viewer in the secret, protected position of master of the spectacle.

Another way of delimiting spectatorship to a single, isolated position occurs in the rigid feminist film theory postulated by Laura Mulvey in her seminal essay, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'. Relying in a similar way to Metz on the mirror stage, Mulvey links voyeuristic pleasure in film with the Freudian scopophilic drive, in which the subject objectifies others through a controlling look.21 The binary opposition between subject and object according to this theory is all too apparent, especially in the rather mechanical spin-offs made by some feminists. Mulvey herself assigns 'active/ male' to the subject looking and 'passive/ female' to the object looked at.22

According to Steven Shaviro, Mulvey's analysis constructs a schemata of vision that is more totalizing and monolithic than the films she discusses.23 Unfortunately, the systematizing of what should have been a symptomatic analysis 24 immediately cemented itself during the 1970s and 1980s as virtually the only way of mapping filmic positions and relations.25 Although Mulvey in later writings modified her bipartite extremism, there still remains an underlying problem in feminist film theory of deterministically equating sexual difference with the structures of looking - in particular, making the spectator's gaze necessarily masculine.

However, the notion of sexual difference(s) itself has recently come under scrutiny by writers such as Teresa de Lauretis, who suggests that subjectivity is more complex than simply the division of subject and object. She argues that the subject ought to be recognized as multiple rather than unified, a perspective that allows more freedom of identification for the viewer within the plurality of the media culture.26

This theoretical move better explains the visual pleasure of Stay Tuned, a film that continually repositions its spectator in a variety of 'television' viewing angles. Deliberately drawing on the viewer's knowledge of another medium, the film's ways of looking are based on the recognition that the viewer is constructed at an intersection of multiple positions in the media culture and not at one position by one (masculine) spectatorial gaze.

Interestingly, some recent films, such as the short Ruins Within by Mehrnaz SaeedVafa, are beginning to make ironic critiques of the theory of the spectatorial gaze by demonstrating that it cannot be applied systematically. In this film, the theory is shown to be just as artificially constructed as the spectator it is supposed to generate, because the operation of the spectatorial gaze simply does not work. The film renders the suturing process so highly visible and foregrounds psychological cliches so obviously (female belly-dancer, male eyes, mirror, cigar, father) that it is as if the audience, rather than watching a film, is watching film theory.

The theoretical text shimmers with such opacity that it here acts as metafilmic commentary, making a ghostly patina out of the complex of looks operating within the film and between film and viewer. Functioning as a signifier of the returned gaze, the metafilm effects a performative modality in the range of the visible by reflecting back to the viewer her inability to enter the voyeuristic position and the illusion of whole selfhood. In the process of disallowing authoritative mastery, the returned gaze in Ruins Within opens up subjectivity to other possible agencies. Rather than being passively sutured into the spectatorial gaze, the viewer brings into play from world or viewing experiences attitudes of scepticism, critical distance, or ironic detachment. This deconstruction of the spectatorial gaze and its theory is important to viewers, perhaps most of all to women viewers, because it acknowledges that other ways of looking are indeed available.27

New Ways of Theatrical Watching

While a number of films and film critics are destabilizing the spectatorial gaze, ironically the spectatorial paradigm made so influential by classic film theory is being deconstructed even further by the very power it has had to traverse the media culture. In considering spectatorship with respect to theatre, the influence of filmic gazing and its theory becomes immediately apparent both in experiments made by playwrights and in analyses made by critics.

Nevertheless, while theatre can provide to some degree a spectatorial gaze in the filmic sense by directed lighting and alignment of the audience with a director's vision, it is questionable whether a sustained, authoritative gaze can ever really dominate theatre's spillage of looks. Even in fourthwall theatre, with its attempt to instal a pictorial perspective and division between spectator and spectacle, the viewer's look is still free to roam all over the performance site. And because it does not offer a keyhole like the camera's eye and series of controlling shots, theatre makes the application of a spectatorial gaze and its voyeuristic subject not particularly viable.

For instance, a brilliant transference of filmic technique and its spectatorial theory to theatre has been made by Samuel Beckett. In a series of plays written during and after he made his film, Film (1964), in which a camera's look chases the Buster Keaton character, he experimented with filmic spectatorial gazing. In Play three figures in funerary urns on a dark stage are tortured into speech by a cruel spotlight; in Rockaby an old woman rocks in the dark, swaying in and out of the spotlight trained on her face; in Not I an Auditor watches a Mouth, both of them faintly lit but separated by the blackness of the stage.

In the first two instances, Beckett provides a theatre version of Metz's correspondences in attempting to place the audience in the position of filmic viewer by suturing the audience's eye to the searchlight's beam. But in Not I, an ironic viewing position similar to the one established in Ruins Within arises, for the audience watches someone watching someone else.

It is as if Not I means to display the point that in theatre-space an authoritative, spectatorial gaze and identification with a character's perspective are weak functions at best. Rather than replicating Metz's model, Beckett's positioning of the audience at the third vertex of a looking triangle is more like one of Sartre's accounts in Being and Nothingness of a series of looks in which a 'theatre' architecture emerges. In summary, Sartre writes of watching and fixing into objects those people who are speaking, a position that measures his power. But if an other sees him and them, Sartre's look loses power simply to manifest instead a relation in the world. The other's look confers spatiality upon Sartre, and he becomes a look-as-object.28

With Sartre in the position of Beckett's Auditor, Mouth as 'those people', and the audience as other, we can see a 'theatre' space forming which confers spatiality upon a network of looks. Rather than suturing the spectator to Auditor, a repulsion of suturing takes place, because the position of the audience provides ironic distance from the figures on stage, making Auditor's gaze a look-asobject to the other and obliterating Auditor's power as subject.

Beckett's Not I illustrates certain aspects of a performative modality in its denial of the spectatorial model by demystifying the function of a purely passive spectator and her relation to the spectacle. I would disagree with Kathleen O'Gorman's recent analysis of the play, which well represents the use of classic (feminist) film theory in theatre, because in arguing that the spectator is sutured to Auditor's point of view, she instals a necessarily masculine gaze even though Auditor's gender is not specified by Beckett.29 This application allows only one subject position for viewing - a masculine voyeur who fetishizes the female Mouth.

However, the audience's act of looking in Not I, as in Sartre's 'theatre', must affect the viewed, even if merely to denature Auditor's objectifying look at Mouth. And, as other critics have pointed out, Mouth also becomes Mouth-as-Eye, the returned gaze of Lacanian ocelli which tends to turn back the objectifying power of Auditor's look. Indeed, the dynamic of looks and gazes generated by the play makes a performative impact on the audience by opening up a number of possible viewing-subject positions, the simplest of which could be critical interloper.30

As Not I exemplifies, the looks occurring in theatre space, even when they are traversed by filmic gazing, are not really explicable by a spectatorial paradigm and, indeed, tend to undo it. Granting to film 'a more direct perceptual identification with the seeing eye of the camera', Freedman states that 'theatre divides and disperses the possibilities of identification'.31 She goes on to theorize the privileging of the returned gaze by theatre, a look that would stare down any comfortable, emplaced, voyeuristic gaze 32

Possibilities of 'Staring Down'

Freedman's fine discussion, though, tends to lump all kinds of theatre together, failing to recognize that many plays work hard to play down the appearance of a disrupting, returned gaze from the stage. Rather than her notion of theatre always having a returned gaze in action, I would rephrase Sartre to suggest that theatre is always engaged in the permanent possibility of staring down. And those plays that are more postmodernist tend to demystify their looks and gazes, making something happen in the space between viewer and viewed.

In other words, some plays generate a performative modality in which both the viewer and the viewed participate. However, as Marc Silverstein argues in his discussion of the theatre and theory of Helene Cixous, the phenomenological theory of seeing can suggest an illusory unity of the spectator with the 'presence' of the spectacle.33 The spectator's subjectivity would not be deconstructed in this case, but simply united with the spectacle in a plenitude.

Indeed, Merleau-Ponty describes such a moment of plenitude between the subject and object in his discussion of art: 'It is as if [artists are] claiming that there is a total or absolute vision, outside of which there is nothing and which closes itself over them.'34 In theatre, as well as in painting, the looks involved in vision and visibility are part of the performance, part of the operation of semiosis which makes a total or absolute vision always unavailable.

To Lacan, the returned gaze as object could at most generate the desire for plenitude. And to Sartre, the apprehension of an other's gaze causes the subject to flow outside herself, not to a plenitude but to 'a subtle alienation of all [her] possibilities, which are now associated with objects of the world'.35 Such a notion of the self suggests that the theatre viewer's subjectivity, rather than being constructed in either plenitude or voyeurism, is more accurately described as made in performance at an intersection with things of the (play) world.

Notes and References

An earlier version of this paper was read at the 'Unnatural Acts: Theorizing the Performative' conference, University of California, Riverside, February 1993.

1.  Megan Terry, Brazil Fado (Omaha: Omaha Magic Theatre Press, 1978), p. 6.

2.  Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991), p. 69.

3.  Robert H. Deming, The Television SpectatorSubject', Journal of Film and Video, XXXVIII, No. 3 (1985), p. 48.

4.  Ibid., p. 61.

5.  Jean-Francois Lyotard, trans. Geoff Benningtonand Brian Massumi, The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xxiv.

6.  Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca; London: Cornell UP, 1991), p. 74.

7.  Jacques Lacan, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis (New York; London: Norton, 1981), p. 95-6.

8.  Guy Debord, trans. Malcolm Imrie, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (London; New York: Verso, 1990), p. 7.

9.  Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990), p. 58.

10.Debord, op. cit., p. 22,58-62.

11.Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women's Cinema (Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1990), p. 17. See also her comments on Debord, p. 14.

12.Maurice Merleau-Ponty, trans. Carleton Dallery,ed. James M. Edie, 'Eye and Mind', The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics (Northwestern UP, 1964), p. 162,178.

13. Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, Being and Nothingness: an Essay in Phenomenological Ontology (New York: Citadel Press, 1969), p. 233.

14.Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 22-3.

15.Kaja Silverman, 'What is a Camera?, or: Historyin the Field of Vision', Discourse, XV, No. 3 (1993), p. 3,8.

16.Christian Metz, trans. Celia Britton, AnnwylWilliams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti, The

Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982), p. 49.

17.Ibid., p. 45-6.

18.Ibid., p. 50-1.

19. Paul Willemen, ed. Philip Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: a Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), p. 216-17.

20.  Lacan, op. cit., p. 74, and Freedman, op. cit.,

p. 53, 69.

21. Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and narrative Cinema, Screen, XVL, No. 3(1975),P.8

22.Ibid.,p.11 apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993),P.12 nne-

23. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (M

24. Ibid., p. 20

25. Any James Bond movie will demonstrate thappeal of this theory. As Silverman notes(p. 5), in The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema, Jean-Louis Baudry describes a lack of separation between the body and the external world. This suggests an alternative viewpoint as early as 1975(Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, P. 313).

26. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender Essays

27. Mehrnaz Saeed- Vafa, Ruins Within: Women in the Director's Chair, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, lllinois 27 October 1993

28. Sartre, op cit, p. 242.

29. Kathleen O"Gorman, "so that people would stare: "The Gaze and the glance in Becketts Not I Modern Language Studies, XXIII, No. 3(1993), P. 34,

 30. Samuel Beckett, Not L, in Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett(New York: Grove Press, 1984), P. 213-23

31. Freedman, op cit, P. 68

32.bid.p.64

33. Marc Silversteindy presence: Cixous Phenomenology of Theater, Theatre Journal, XLIII (1991)

34. Merleau-Ponty, op cit, P 169

35. Sartre, op. cit, p. 241

36. Deming, op cit, P. 61

37. Robert Stam Television News and Its Spectator, Regarding Television: Critical App: American Anthology, ed E. Ann Kaplan(Los Angele Film Institute, 1983), P. 24

39. Television does have its own ways of holding the viewer. To bring the viewer back to a programme, it instals mini-cliffhangers before each commercial break And for its regular programming, the repetition of character and setting week after week causes the viewer to develop emotional attachments

40. John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video(London; Boston: Routledge, 1982), P. 163

41. Beverle Houston, Viewing Television: the Metapsychology of Endless Consumption, Quarterly Reviewv of film Studies, IX, No. 3(1984), p 1

42.Tbid,p.184

43. Sartre, op. cit, p. 233

44, Lacanop: Git p. 89On CBs a stylized eye (its logo)actually appears during this interruptive gap

45. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Cultureed. Hal Foster(Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), P 130

46. Megan Terry, 'An Interview with Megan terryby Felicia Hardison Londre, Studies in American Drama, 1945- Present,I(1989),p.178

47. Sartre, op cit. p. 241

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