Todd says that, contrary to the old school Lacanian film theoriests (Laura Mulvey et al.), one shouldn’t watch cinema with a conscious intention of ‘fighting back’, of resisiting the ideological pull. On the contrary, for McGowan:
“Our ability to contest an ideological structure depends on our ability to recognize the real point at which it breaks down, not on our ability to distance ourselves from that structure through the process of conscious reflection. When cinema lulls the subject into its dreamy, fantasmatic netherworld it may insert the subject into ideology, but it also may open up the possibility of an encounter with the traumatic real that disrupts the power of ideology (15).
“Ideology constantly works to obscure the traumatic real of the gaze because this real threatens the stability of the social order that ideology protects. This stability depends on the illusion of wholeness and the power to account symbolically for everything. The real makrs a point of failure, not just of the subject’s look but also of ideology’s explanatory power. That is to say, the real traumatizes not just the subject that encounters it but also the bit Other as well. The hold that symbolic authority has over subjects depends on the avoidance of the traumatic real that exposes the imposture of all authority. When the subject experiences the traumatic real, it recognizes symbolic autority’s failure to account for everything. This is the key to the political power of the gaze. Though the encounter with the gaze traumatizes the subject, it also provides the basis for the subject’s freedom —freedom from teh constaints of the big Other (16).
Sorry for the lengthy quotes but McGowan makes the point here that avoids all confusion. Any questions before about the nature of Lacan’s real is cleared up here in the way that McGowan uses the real to act as that which fucks ideology, exposes it as a fraud but more importantly exposes our fucked up relation to the big Other. The big Other may provide us with total symbolic sense and meaning, provide us with the comfort of stable identities and meaning, but
retaining this world of sense depends on the continued capitulation fo the subject to the big Other. The subject pays the price for meaning with its freedom. The encounter with the traumatic real, which is an encounter with a point of non-sense within the big Other (what the big Other cannot render meaningful), frees the subject from its subjection. In the moment of the traumatic encounter, the subject experiences the groundlessness —and ultimately the nonexistence— of the big Other and the symbolic world that the big Other sustains.
As a result of the traumatic encounter with the real, freedom opens up for the subject (16-17).
It is in this encounter with the real that the subject experiences true freedom. This is because this is the point where the symbolic order fails, failure of ideology’s master signfier. And McGowan goes further to call “Every authentic political act has its origins in an encounter with the real.”
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