Chaosophy - autonomous learning

of normal madness. It is illusory to believe there exists only one
subject-an autonomous subject, centered on one individual. One
never has to do with a multiplicity of subjective and semiotic modes
of which film, in particular, can show how they are orchestrated,
"machinated," and infinitely manipulated. But if it is true that the
machinic expansion, the exaltation of the cinematographic unconscious,
does not protect it-far from it-from contamination by the
significations of power, the fact remains that, with it, things do not
happen in the same way as with psychoanalysis or with even betterpoliced
artistic techniques. And this all depends on the fact that it
manifests itself through semiotic arrangements irreducible to a
syntagmatic concatenation that would discipline it mechanically,
structure it according to a rigorously formalized pattern of expression
and content. Its montage of asignifying semiotic chains of intensities,
movements, and multiplicities fundamentally tends to free it from
the signifying grid that intervenes only at a second stage, through the
filmic syntagmatic that fixes genres, crystallizes characters and behaviorial
stereotypes homogeneous to the dominant semantic field.4
This "excess" of the matters of expression over the content
certainly limits a possible comparison between cinema and psychoanalysis
with respect to repressing the unconscious. Both
fundamentally lead to the same politics, but the stakes and the means
they resort to are quite different. The psychoanalyst's clientele acquiesces
to the whole enterprise of selniotic reduction, while cinema must
permanently stay attuned to the social imaginary's mutations just to
"stay in the race." It also has to mobilize a real industry, a multiplicity
of institutions and powers capable of getting the better of the unconscious
proliferation it threatens to unleash. Spoken language itself does
not function in film the same way it does in psychoanalysis; it isn't the
law, it constitutes but one way among others, a single instrument at the
core of a complex semiotic orchestration. The semiotic components of
film glide by each other without ever fixing or stabilizing themselves in
,: 263