Thesis (PH.D.) -- Syracuse University, 2002. / "Publication number AAT 3046849"

This dissertation explores the import of Lacan's theory in critical cultural studies and examines its special contributions to an understanding of structure, ideology, and identity, especially concerning about relevant issues of ideology and identity in the condition of postmodernity. Although terms of contemporary postmodernism, such as cultural diversity and heterogeneous ideological formation, have entered our language, together with their legal and political imports, many theoretical questions and difficulties in fact still remain. By focusing on the theoretical discussion, this project tries to examine how Lacan's thinking, with philosophical and conceptual nuances, offers an alternative to reconsidering the issues of epistemological questionability and postmodernist skepticism, and the way a structure for him is formed. In addition, Lacan's formulation of psychoanalytic theory is specially illuminating in reading the notions of ideology and identity, since the psychoanalytic notion of unconscious can provide more comprehensive accounts of psychic economy that resides at the deepest level of human reality. As this work presents, Lacanian conceptual tools—such as desire, fantasy, and anxiety—constitute a new plane, a non-discursive dimension beyond the discursive discussions in widespread debates over ideology and identity. In considering cultural phenomenon in contemporary “politics of identity,” this study also investigates the political significance of Lacanian thinking through which current issues on multiculturalism, racism, and fundamentalism can be properly explained.

This dissertation is situated within the field of media studies, with a particular focus on the "materialities of communication." The concept of "materialities" is oriented to the underlying conditions that allow communication to take place: the places, carriers and modes of communication that serve to shape and even alter meaning. My dissertation asks how this "material turn" can usefully be applied to and help develop the study of theatre. / The dissertation is divided into four chapters. In Chapter 1, I undertake a critical review of the theoretical literature regarding materialities and its applications to media theory. In Chapter 2, I begin to explore the implications of the material turn for theatre. Scholarly interest in the relation of media and theatre has largely been focused on the use of media and technology within theatrical practice. I argue that theatre cannot be conceived of separately from the prevailing communicational possibilities of a given era, even if we accept the capacity for artistic intervention within these parameters. I integrate theoretical standpoints on the reproducibility, iterability and liveness of theatrical presence into a broad discussion of media and communication and thereby demonstrate a more fundamental relationship between theatricality and mediality. / In Chapter 3, I extend my discussion of a "materialities of theatre" to the subject of translatability. Translation has long functioned as a metaphor for media as well as for theatrical representation. Discourses of the translatability between media forms have recently been revived by digital technologies that present translation as a model of universalization: the search for the perfect language into which all forms of knowledge can converge. Theatre works to converge media forms as a point of intersecting bodies, texts, voices and technologies, yet also remains persistently aware of the economy of shifting linguistic exchanges that renders total translation an impossible pursuit. I thus develop a study of the materialities of theatre that can attend to this disjunction in translation theory by addressing theatre as a point of medial convergence as well as a site of linguistic difference. / In Chapter 4, I elaborate upon these standpoints by discussing circulation as a theoretical concept that, on the one hand, complements the study of materialities of communication and, on the other hand, seeks to overcome the abovementioned disjunction of translation theory. Concentrating on the case of Montreal as a site of heightened linguistic interaction, I investigate theatre as a medial system that works to absorb, interrupt and rediffuse the linguistic materialities of this city.

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M.A. (Communication) / The study comprises the testing and application of the theory of Peters (1972) as framework for the quantitative and qualitative analysis of film content. A survey of literature in the field C film content showed a lack of research on the film as semiological structure. This could be attributed to some amount of disagreement amoung researchers on the specific characteristics of film code or language. Existing theories overarticulated either technical or aesthetical aspects of film. The theory of Peters (1972) was used as framework for content analysis because it incorporates both technical and aesthetical aspects of film. Two empirical studies were conducted. in the first study the validity of Peters' theory was tested. The study was completed in three stages: (a) The compilation of a 30-item fimcriticism questionnaire. (b) The rating of two films by two groups of subjects on the mentioned questionnaire. (c) Factor analyses on the ratings of the two films. Results showed a high degree of similarity between the different factors and Peters' theoretical segments of the film. In the second study the theory of Peters (1972) was applied as framework for the quantitative and qualitative analysis of a sample of South African films. Results confirmed Peters' theory as being sufficiently comprehensive for the measurement of both technical and aesthetical aspects of film.

Habermas rejects a class-specific approach to social analysis and political practice and, in renewing the social theory of Marx, he turns primarily to a reconstruction of the work of Max Weber. The conceptualization of society is approached from the interrelated themes of rationalization, bureaucratization and reification. But Habermas seeks to overcome the instrumentalist implications of Weber's one-sided view of rationalization and related rejection of a cognitivist ethics by an expanded framework of rationality that introduces the concept of communicative action and, with it, the promise of clarifying the normative foundations of a critical theory of society. / Against contrary views of Habermas' overriding purpose this thesis shows the major strands of his theoretical programme to have their unifying interconnections within an enduring commitment to a rational morally guided practice. Critically vulnerable aspects of this programme, however, suggest that the unity of theory and practice will prove to be as elusive for him as it was for his Marxist predecessors.

This project attempts to question the way the relation between communication and ethics has traditionally been conceptualized, and to offer an alternative perspective on that relation. An implicit premise in many communication theories is that successful communication is ethically favorable, particularly in facilitating ideals such as greater understanding, participation and like-mindedness. Contrary to that view, this project proposes that ethical communication may lie in the interruption of communication, in instances wherein communication falls short, goes astray or even fails. Such interruptions, however, do not mark the end of ethical communication but rather its very beginning, for it is in such moments that communication faces the challenge of otherness. Mobilizing relevant ideas from the work of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to the field of communication studies, this project proposes the concept of interruption as the main correlative between ethics and communication. The investigation then sets out to explore three limit-cases in which the stakes of ethical communication are most crucial: understanding and misunderstanding, communicability and incommunicability, and silence and speech. The discussion employs a distinctive approach to study the place of alterity in communication: dislocation—a double gesture which implies both tampering with the proper activity of communicational procedures and pointing to the ethical possibilities opened up by interruptions. The issues above are addressed through critical analyses of themes such as: universal language or the undoing of Babel; the ethical significance of misunderstanding and the challenge introduced by translation; autism as a paradigmatic case of incommunicability in medical, scientific and social discourses; the epistemological status and the ethical stakes of incommunicability; and, finally, the ethical dimension of free speech, the significance of silence and the responsibility to the silent Other.

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