Spike Lee's Malcolm X as Transformational Object

In this essay, I would like to explore one way in which recent psychoanalytic theory might contribute to a postcolonial aesthetics, using Spike Lee’s film, Malcolm X, as something of a test case. I hope to show that what appear to be flaws, even mistakes, in Lee’s film—what I will call “cinematic parapraxes”—are in fact symptoms of the film’s resistance to a certain aesthetic ideal of seamless, internal consistency and closure. Reflecting on these parapraxes, I will go on to sketch an alternative aesthetic model—note that I hesitate to describe this as an “ideal”—in terms of which Lee’s work can be seen as a strong example of the “national culture” for which Frantz Fanon argues in The Wretched of the Earth.

In his book, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known, Christopher Bollas offers an intriguing account of aesthetic experience grounded in the infant’s earliest—and certainly pre-Oedipal—relations to other objects in the environment. Working from D. W. Winnicott’s notion of the mother as providing a “holding environment” for the infant’s gradual negotiation of the world surrounding him, Bollas stresses that she exists for the infant essentially as what he calls a “transformational object,” and he notes that “the mother is less significant and identifiable as an object than as a process that is identified with cumulative internal and external transformations” (1987, 14). Everything that happens to the infant happens through the mediating attention of the mother; even the effects of the child’s first tentative manipulations of the environment are decisively shaped by the mother’s intervention, with the result that the infant’s earliest ego achievements are identified with the presence of the mother as transformational object (15). As the infant gradually becomes more self-reliant, the mother “disillusions” him from this notion of her as an omnipotent transformative power, and she then emerges for him as “a person who has her own life and her own needs” (28).

Bollas’ work is largely devoted to the various ways in which the memory of the mother as transformational object manifests itself in adult behaviors and experiences and in the complex intersubjectivities of the relation between psychoanalyst and patient. A crucial aspect of Bollas’ theory is that these later manifestations of the memory of the mother have nothing to do with desire but are, rather, grounded in “a perceptual identification of the object with its function” as transformer (14). Thus, an adult’s search for an experience of transformation—and it is this search, Bollas argues, that lies behind religion, art, and even advertising, among many other things—is not so much a projection into the future as it is the “recollection” of the earliest relation to an object: “to remember not cognitively but existentially—through intense affective experience—a relationship which was identified with cumulative transformational experiences of the self” (17).

Bollas’ preferred example of the recurrence of the memory of the mother as transformational object is that of aesthetic experience. This he describes as occurring when “an individual feels a deep subjective rapport with an object (a painting, a poem, an aria or symphony, or a natural landscape) and experiences an uncanny fusion with the object, an event that reevokes an ego state that prevailed during early psychic life” (16). Bollas fleshes out this account with reference to the work of Murray Krieger, who maintains in his book, Theory of Criticism, that “to the degree that an experience is functioning in the aesthetic mode, we find ourselves locked within it, freely and yet in a controlled way playing among its surfaces and its depths. Instead of being led through it to consequences beyond, we respond as if the object calls to us to look at it for itself, to behold its face, content to study it, not to use it or go through it, beyond it” (Krieger 1976, 12; partially quoted in Bollas 1987, 34). Aesthetic experience, then, according to Bollas, is a kind of déjà vu, “an existential recollection of the time when communicating took place...