New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 21
utterance—from the wearing of clothes to the choice of an entrée in a meal
—presupposed a system (of fashion, cuisine or language) generating the
possibilities of social meaning. Even economics came to be seen in its
semiotic dimension, as a symbolic system comparable to the symbolic
exchange of words in a language, while psychoanalysis, with Lacan, came
to see the unconscious itself as “structured like a language.” (Lacanian
developments will be discussed in Part IV.)
The 1960s and early 1970s might be seen as the height of semiotic
“imperialism,” when the discipline annexed vast territories of cultural
phenomena for exploration. In A Theory of Semiotics, Eco (1976) defined
the field as including such diverse enterprises as narratology (the subject of
Part III), ZOOSEMIOTICS (the communicative behavior of non-human
com– munities), KINESICS and PROXEMICS (sociocultural codes having
to do, respectively, with human movement and closeness), text theory,
unknown alphabets, secret codes, musical codes, medical semiotics and
olfactory signs. A good deal of semiotic analysis has been applied to areas
previously considered either flagrantly non-linguistic—fashion, cuisine—or
to areas traditionally deemed beneath the dignity of literary or cultural
studies comic strips, photo-romans, James Bond novels. Film semiotics
emerged, in the early 1960s, as part of this structuralist euphoria, leading
to short-lived dreams of a total scientificity, dreams which were to be
undone by internal self-questioning, by the attraction of other
methodological models, and by the political developments summed up in
the phrase “May 1968.”
The political orientation of much of contemporary film theory had its
origins in the political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s. This upheaval
had major consequences for intellectual film culture, marked in France by
the leftward turn of Cahiers du Cinema and the work of the Marxist film
journal Cinétique. A key figure in these developments was the
structuralistMarxist Louis Althusser and especially his theory of ideology.
Raymond Williams has argued that the term IDEOLOGY can be
understood in three senses: (1) a system of beliefs characteristic of a
particular class or group; (2) a system of illusory beliefs—false ideas or
false consciousness—which can be contrasted with true or scientific
knowledge; and (3) the general process of meanings and ideas (Williams
1983:152–7). The notion of BOURGEOIS IDEOLOGY was an attempt by
Marxism to explain the ways that capitalist social relations are reproduced
by its subjects in ways that do not involve force or coercion. By what
processes does the individual subject internalize social norms? As defined
by traditional Marxism, ideology referred to a distortion of thought which
both arises from and conceals social contradiction. As defined by Lenin,
Althusser and Gramsci, the concept of bourgeois ideology refers to that
ideology generated by class society through which the dominant class
comes to provide the general conceptual framework for a society’s