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Chaosophy - autonomous learning

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matter of content extends so much more effectively beyond traditional<br />

encodings, since the semiotic alloy that composes its matter<br />

of expression is itself open to multiple systems of external intensities.<br />

Its matters of expression are not fixed. They go in different directions.<br />

Christian Metz enumerates some of them, emphasizing that<br />

each has an intrinsic system of pertinent features:<br />

1) the phonic fabric of expression, that refers to spoken language<br />

(signifying semiology);<br />

2) the sonorous but nonphonic fabric that refers to instrumental<br />

music (asignifying semiotic);<br />

3) the visual and colored fabric that refers to painting (mixed,<br />

symbolic, and asignifying semiotic);<br />

4) the noncolored, visual fabric that refers to black and white<br />

photography (mixed, symbolic, and asignifying semiotic);<br />

5) the gestures and movements of the human body, etc. (symbolic<br />

semiologies).<br />

Umberto Eco had already pointed out that cinema does not<br />

bend to a system of double articulation, and that this had even led<br />

him to try to find a third articulation. But, doubtless, it is preferable<br />

to follow Metz who believes that cinema escapes all systems of<br />

double articulation, and, in my opinion, all elementary systems of<br />

significative encoding. The meanings in cinema are not directly<br />

encoded in a machine of intersecting syntagmatic and paradigmatic<br />

axes-they always come to it, secondarily, from external constraints<br />

that model it. If silent film, for example, had succeeded in expressing<br />

the intensities of desire in relation to the social field in a way that<br />

was much more immediate and authentic than that of the talkies, it<br />

was not because it was less expressive, but because the signifying script<br />

had not yet taken possession of the image and because, in these conditions,<br />

capitalism had not yet seized all the advantages it could take<br />

from it. The successive inventions of the talkies, of color, of television,<br />

etc., insofar as they enriched the possibilities of expressing<br />

:)f /243

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