Giving Voice to the Child

Elizabeth Affuso

Discourse, Volume 33, Issue 2 , Spring 2011, pp. 284-286 (Review)

Published by Wayne State University Press

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 Giving Voice to the Child

Elizabeth Affuso

Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of the Voice and Affect in Postwar Rep-

resentations of the Child by Lisa Cartwright. Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2008. 304 pages. $79.95 hardback, $22.95 paperback.

Lacanian theories of identification have long dominated theories of

film spectatorship. In Moral Spectatorship, Lisa Cartwright proposes
a reconsideration of spectator theory, shifting from the logocen-
tric Lacanian model to one that privileges affect and empathy as
spectatorial modes, and aims, as she writes, to “recognize and even
facilitate the otherness of the other” (2). Cartwright conceives of
film spectatorship as an intersubjective experience, a point that
she emphasizes throughout the book in both her engagement with
theory and her case studies, which take a fascinating turn into the
realm of disability studies through her engaging consideration of
representations of the deaf in cinema and facilitated writing, a practice
wherein caregivers collaborate with subjects to help them speak. In
laying out her case for moral spectatorship, Cartwright also engages
in a redemptive reading of a number of overlooked or marginalized
psychoanalytic thinkers, most notably Melanie Klein, D. W. Win-
nicott, André Green, and Heinz Kohut.
Moral Spectatorship engages in a bit of intellectual archaeology,
examining dominant film theory’s construction of the subject in
order to understand why the discipline moved so strongly toward
Lacanian psychoanalysis. She then makes the case for pursuing an

Discourse, 33.2, Spring 2011, pp. 284–286.

Copyright © 2012 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.
On Cartwright’s Moral Spectatorship 285

alternative theorization of the subject of film spectatorship, premised

upon empathy rather than identification. Her turn to empathy, how-
ever, does not preclude projection and even projective identification.
Cartwright actively avoids Lacan’s work as a model for thinking about
identification. She instead proposes looking to Klein, Kohut, Win-
nicott, and Green, noting that these thinkers

introduced concepts that support film theory’s interest in a subject

model that veers from the various normative, ideal, and unitary forms
offered in liberal humanist political and psychological theories. . . .
[T]his body of work provides concepts and models that can help us to
get past some of the impasses created by the Lacanian model’s adher-
ence to language. (13)

This move asserts that film theory should move beyond a language-
based model and toward an affective model of spectatorship. This
theoretical intervention, written with admirable clarity, promises
an impact beyond Cartwright’s fascinating and well-selected case
studies. Most germane is her insistence that “identification with
screen characters is a film theory concept that requires more careful
material disaggregation and analysis” (55). For all the richness that
Cartwright brings to the field, the pace of theoretical discussion
can at times feel rushed for readers not already versed in the work
of the theorists she draws upon. Fortunately, her case studies help
alleviate some of this difficulty by providing object lessons in the
application of these theories.
Much of the originality of the book lies in the turn to disability
studies and Cartwright’s engagement in her chapter “The (Deaf)
Woman’s Film and the Quiet Revolution in Film Sound: On Projec-
tion, Incorporation, and Voice.” Cartwright examines films about
deaf women in the postwar period, including close readings of
Johnny Belinda (dir. Jean Negulesco, 1948), Mandy (dir. Alexander
Mackendrick, 1952), Thursday’s Children (dir. Lindsay Anderson and
Guy Brenton, 1954), The Miracle Worker (dir. Arthur Penn, 1962), and
Children of a Lesser God (dir. Randa Haines, 1985). Integrated into
the film analysis is a broader examination of the role of sound in the
cinema during the postwar period and how different forms of sound
technology reproduce the voice. “A Child Is Being Beaten: Disorders
of Authorship, Agency, and Affect in Facilitated Communication,”
the book’s fascinating third chapter, concerns children who are
given voice through facilitated communication programs for the
computer. Cartwright examines issues surrounding facilitated com-
munication in both the context of film and television representations
of it and in an explanation of the history of the technology. With
286 Elizabeth Affuso

her turn toward facilitated communication, Cartwright expands the

reach of the book well beyond film studies, or even film and media
studies, to the fields of child psychology and disability studies.
Although Moral Spectatorship focuses primarily upon films
addressing ethical questions raised by filmic explorations of disabil-
ity, the book’s impact promises to be wide-ranging. In her conclusion
she states,

moral spectatorship is a set of practices film theory can use to work on

and through. But to work on a set of practices critically means neither
to advocate for that sort of practice nor to denigrate its terms and its
agents. If the tone, throughout this volume, seems ambivalent, and some-
times even sympathetic, toward its objects and actors, this is the effect
of a wish that film theory might move beyond performing at either end
of the critical spectrum of advocacy and derision with regard to viewing
practices. (229)

Moral Spectatorship raises a lot of interesting questions about

spectatorship, genre, and technology for film scholars to consider,
which is partly a function of Cartwright’s self-reflexive writing style.
At a moment when the discipline has increasingly begun to take
stock of its history, it is heartening to read a work that couples its
historiographic gaze upon film theory with a series of astonishing
and unexplored paths for expanding the field.