New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 27
Wuilleumier insists on the reversability of the process; reflexion on
cinematic montage can induce us to revise our very conception of
language.
Peter Brunette and David Wills, finally, in their Screen/Play: Derrida and
Film Theory (1989), deploy Derridean categories in order to explore such
issues as “Derrida and Contemporary Film Studies,” “Film as Writing,”
and the implications for film theory of Derrida’s observations concerning
“the frame” and the “postal.” The authors interrogate the various
totalizing notions which they see as surreptitiously informing film theory
and analysis—the notion of “narrative film,” of immaculately pure genres,
of Hollywood as a self-identical coherent system, of the primacy of the
visual (seen as analogous to the primacy of speech over writing in the
logocentric tradition). Shying away from any “glib borrowing of a readymade
theory,” the authors call for a move beyond “totalizations,” invoking
the possibilities of an “anagrammatical” reading practice that sees cinema
as writing, text, as “an interplay of presence and absence, of the seen and
not seen, in relations not reducible either to totalization of transcendence”
(Brunette and Wills 1989:58). In a form of “split writing,” the authors read
(on facing pages) Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black and David Lynch’s Blue
Velvet, not in order to demonstrate a methodology, but rather to expose
textual “undecidabilities” and “fissures,” all as part of a kind of meditation
on reading which problematizes the very self-constitution of the text’s
meaning.
Considerable debate has raged around the question of whether
poststructuralism is an extension of structuralism or a rejection of it, a
neostructuralism or an anti-structuralism. For Jonathon Culler, Derridean
poststructuralism constitutes a radicalization of the Saussurean project, a
working out of the implications of the Saussurean principle that in the
linguistic system there are only differences without positive terms. For
others, such as Christopher Norris, Derridean deconstruction marks a
radical repudiation of the structuralist project. In fact, as its name implies,
poststructuralism exists in both continuity and rupture with structuralism.
It shares the structuralist premise of the determining, constitutive role of
language, and generally continues within the structuralist problematic,
especially the assumption that signification is based on difference. At the
same time, it rejects structuralism’s “dream of scientificity,” its hopes of
stabilizing the play of difference within an all-encompassing master-system.
(We will return to issues of Derridean post-structuralism and
deconstruction in subsequent chapters, when we speak in more detail of
textual analysis, écriture and intertextuality.)