Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child

In Moral Spectatorship, Lisa Cartwright rethinks the politics of spectatorship in film studies. At the same time, she offers a new theory of the human subject that takes into account affective relationships and technologies that facilitate human agency. Seeking to expand concepts of representation beyond the visual, Cartwright develops her theory through interpretations of two contexts in which adult caregivers help bring children to voice. She considers mid-twentieth-century social-problem melodramas about deaf and nonverbal girls and young women, including Johnny Belinda, Thursday's Children, The Miracle Worker, and Children of a Lesser God. Cartwright also analyzes the controversies surrounding facilitated communication, a technological practice in which caregivers help children with communication disorders achieve "voice" through writing facilitated by computers. This practice has inspired contempt among many professional and lay people who charge that the facilitator can manipulate the child's speech.For more than two decades, film theory has been dominated by a model of identification tacitly based on the idea of feeling what the other feels or of imagining oneself to be the other. Cartwright argues that the custodial relationships underlying both the melodramas and facilitated speech involve a different kind of identification, which she calls "empathetic." In empathetic identification, the subject does not necessarily feel the other's feelings or imagine him or herself in the other's place; rather he or she recognizes and enables the otherness of the other. Building on the theories of affect developed by the French psychoanalyst Andre Green and the American cognitive psychologist Silvan Tomkins, Cartwright develops a theory of spectatorship based on empathetic identification.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Spectatorship, Affect, and Representation 1 1. Moral Spectatorship: Rethinking Identification in Film Theory 11 2. The (Deaf) Woman's Film and the Quiet Revolution in Film Sound: On Projection, Incorporation, and Voice 51 3. "A Child Is Being Beaten": Disorders of Authorship, Agency, and Affect in Facilitated Communication 157 Conclusion: On Empathy and Moral Spectatorship 229 Notes 241 References 255 Index 281

About the Author :
Lisa Cartwright is Professor of Communication and Science Studies and a faculty member in Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture, a coauthor of Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, and a coeditor of The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender and Science.

Review :
"Moral Spectatorship is an important and brave book that dares to consider the formation of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in cinema (and life) through concepts such as feeling, affect, dependency, and care. Drawing upon psychoanalytic theory (not Lacan's), Lisa Cartwright writes with both passion and skepticism about--and around--a selection of films that foreground the radically ethical nature of human communication, reminding us that film studies can change not only the way we see films but also the way we view our lives."--Vivian Sobchack, author of Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture "Uncovering alternative traditions in the psychoanalytic study of affect and object relations, while pairing them with deep explorations of American and continental moral philosophy, Lisa Cartwright proposes a series of arguments that will radically remap our understanding of spectatorship and identification. Moral Spectatorship is a path-breaking book and perhaps the first entirely new approach to subject, empathy, and affect in visual cultural studies to have appeared in the new millennium."--D. N. Rodowick, Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University