Christian Metzs Identification, Mirror and The Passion for Perceiving:

A Brief Overview
In his essay Identification, Mirror and The passion for Perceiving, an
excerpt from the book The Imaginary Signifier, Christian Metz draws on the
works of spectatorship theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and expands the
notion of the cinematic apparatus to encompass a more general view of the
imaginary signifier and its institutional context. Metz attempts, through the
use of psychoanalysis, to discover an original grounding event that would
systematically explain the nature of the film spectator. Although Baudry drew
some ideas from the thought of psychoanalysis, Metz goes much further in
incorporating psychoanalytic notions into his theory of film spectatorship.

Metz agrees with Baudry that there are always certain structures that go into
the constitution and pleasure of the cinematic spectator. Both writers agree
that the spectator is constructed and positioned by the cinematic apparatus.
For Baudry it was the cinematic apparatus as a technical instrument, for Metz
it is the more general notion of the cinematic institution. For Metz the
interlocking mechanisms of cinema institutions (production, exhibition, the
development of classical Hollywood cinema) work to fashion individuals to
conditions of fantasy, desire, and pleasure and it makes moviegoers out of
them. This intersection of individual and institution is evident when Metz
speaks of a deep kinship between the psychic situation of the spectator and
the financial and industrial mechanisms of the cinema. Not only is an
impression of reality created, as Baudry would say, but a deep psychic
gratification or pleasure is produced that goes beyond mere enjoyment and
touches deep unconscious material in the spectator. As Metz has pointed out
Hollywood is about the creation of good objects in the psychoanalytic sense
of the phrase. Good objects or rather films that produce pleasure and
compel the spectator to return to the cinema again and again. Thus for Metz
spectator is never a flesh and blood viewer but S/he is an artificial construct, a
site of specific effects produced by cinematic apparatus.
One of the primary psychic structures involved in cinematic spectatorship is
the process of denial or disavowal. Metz believes that the film spectator exists
in a state of hallucination and regression; the spectator believes, on some
level, that the events and characters on the screen are real even though they
are not. The film viewer suspends his or her disbelief even though he or she
also knows that it is only a movie. For Metz, this splitting of belief into two
contradictory states was based on a more primal disavowal, more specifically
the disavowal associated with fetishism and castration anxiety in the child.
According to Freud, the mechanism of disavowal is the mode of defense
whereby the subject refuses to acknowledge the reality of a traumatic event or
perception. Disavowal is founded on the male childs persistent belief in the
phallus of the mother despite the anxiety producing image of her lack of a
penis i.e. the reality of castration. ( In the adult, Freud believed, a fetishism,
such as the sexual need for a particular object like a shoe, is a way of denying
the anxiety produced by the thought of the castration of the mother by
substituting an object for the castrated phallus.) As Metz states in The
Imaginary Signifier:
In the face of this unveiling of a lack (we are already close to the cinematic
signifier), the child will have to double up its belief (another cinematic
characteristic) and from then on forever hold two contradictory opinions In
other words, it will, perhaps definitively, retain its former belief beneath the new
ones, but it will also hold to its new perceptual observation while disavowing it
on another level. Thus establishing the lasting matrix, the affective prototype of
all the splittings of disbelief (68).
For Metz the film spectators ability to hold two contradictory opinions is
rooted in the early experience of the childs disavowal of castration by
maintaining a belief in the maternal phallus. Metz maintains this is the root or
matrix of the ability to psychically hold two different emotional experiences
which the cinematic apparatus then activates. The spectator is split into two
different states; there is an incredulous spectator that knows the events on the
screen are merely projected light and are fictional (that is, there is in the
spectator a deeper psychic layer that perceives that the mother doesnt
possess a penis and therefore is castrated) and a credulous spectator that
believes the events and characters on the screen are real ( that is, there is in
the spectator a refusal to believe that the mother is castrated and a desire to
believe she has a penis). For Metz, fundamental to the film-viewing situation is
the continual back and forth splitting of consciousness and belief based on this
primary fetishistic disavowal. (It is fetishistic because it allows simultaneous
elaboration of two contradictory meanings and experiences.) The
consciousness of the spectator is divided; a no to reality and a yes to the
cinematic illusion. The cinematic experience is made possible by and
recapitulates for the film spectator the earlier unconscious experience.
Another important structure of the spectator for Metz is identification as
primary cinematic identification. There is, at a fundamental level, a
displacement of the spectators perceptual system by the technical and
institutional apparatus of the cinema; Metz sees this as identification with the
act of looking or perceiving itself. As Metz states:

I am all-perceiving (T)he spectator identifies with himself, with himself as a
pure act of perception (as wakefulness, alertness): as condition of possibility of
the perceived and hence as a kind of transcendental subject, anterior to every
there is( 48).
Metz considers this type of identification primary because it makes all other
identifications, such as identifications with characters, emotions, and events,
possible. This primary identification is constructed and directed by the camera
and its intermediate relay the projector. The spectators consciousness merges
or becomes the perception of the camera/projector. For Metz this type of
identification of the spectator is not a kind of empathy found in the way
spectators feel and share the feelings of the characters on the screen, rather it
is the act by which the spectator sees (and believes) what the
camera/projector sees. The spectator perceives from the position of the
camera/projector. For Metz, and for Baudry, the spectator identifies not so
much with what is represented, that is the content of the film, but with what
creates the film; the cinematic apparatus.
Metz, in a more psychoanalytic turn, relates this experience of primary
identification with what psychoanalysts have termed the mirror phase. For
psychoanalysts like Jacque Lacan one of the formative psychic processes of
human beings is the mirror phase; the infants ego or self emerges through the
infants identification with an image of its own body in a mirror (or could we
say also with the mothers face, or any surface or other that projects back to
the infant). Around six to eighteen months, when the child perceives its image
in the mirror, it mistakes or misrecognizes this unified, coherent image for
itself. A self-image that is superior or idealized because of its apparent
coherency and unity; the actual child is really quite uncoordinated and
fragmentary in its movements and abilities. The child then identifies with this
image and finds, according to Lacan, satisfaction in its unity, a unity which the
child cannot experience in its own body. The child not only identifies with this
image of itself but begins to perceive itself through the otherness of this
image, i.e. it can see itself as something that is other, as other people would
see the child. What ties this process to the cinema for Metz is that it takes
place with visual images; the child sees itself as an image which is distanced
and objectified and identifies with it. For Metz there is a primary similarity
between the infant in front of the mirror and the spectator sitting in front of
the screen. Both are identifying with and fascinated by images and
furthermore images which are ideals. The early process of the mirror phase
through which the child constructs an ego by identifying and absorbing an
image in a mirror underpins the later experience of the film spectator that
identifies with the idealized images of the projector on the screen. However
Metz also distinguishes a difference in film spectatorship from the Lacanian
mirror stage. For Lacan the beginning of the constitution of the subject in the
mirror stage occurs because it is a self-image the infant perceives in the mirror;
Metz observes that in the act of watching a film we are profoundly absent
from the images on the screen. Although we feel as though our perception is
ubiquitous within the world of the film, a surveillance of all things within it, we
can never see ourselves directly within this world.
Source:
http://pietothemediaecologist.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/christian-metz-
and-the-imaginary-signifier/