Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film

Christian Metz, Cormac Deane

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231540643
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Christian Metz is best known for applying Saussurean theories of semiology to film analysis. In the 1970s, he used Sigmund Freud's psychology and Jacques Lacan's mirror theory to explain the popularity of cinema. In this final book, Metz uses the concept of enunciation to articulate how films "speak" and explore where this communication occurs, offering critical direction for theorists who struggle with the phenomena of new media.

If a film frame contains another frame, which frame do we emphasize? And should we consider this staging an impersonal act of enunciation? Consulting a range of genres and national trends, Metz builds a novel theory around the placement and subjectivity of screens within screens, which pulls in—and forces him to reassess—his work on authorship, film language, and the position of the spectator. Metz again takes up the linguistic and theoretical work of Benveniste, Genette, Casetti, and Bordwell, drawing surprising conclusions that presage current writings on digital media. Metz's analysis enriches work on cybernetic emergence, self-assembly, self-reference, hypertext, and texts that self-produce in such a way that the human element disappears. A critical introduction by Cormac Deane bolsters the connection between Metz's findings and nascent digital-media theory, emphasizing Metz's keen awareness of the methodological and philosophical concerns we wrestle with today.

PART I

HUMANOID ENUNCIATION

1

HUMANOID ENUNCIATION

Not only has enunciation been defined in many different ways, but the concept also contains several distinct ideas. The latter fact no doubt contributes to the former. Two of these ideas have been well treated in the Sémiotique dictionary compiled by A. J. Greimas and Joseph Courtés: enunciation is a production, and it is a transition, a transition from a virtual instance (such as a code) to a real instance.¹ But there is a third idea, which is in fact the primary one for Émile Benveniste, Roman Jakobson, and, in the field of narratology, Gérard Genette.²

By enunciation we designate the presence, at both “ends” of a statement, of two human beings or, more exactly, of subjects (we should recall that for Benveniste the pairing I/YOU defines the “correlation of subjectivity”). Of course, narratology never tires of repeating that the enunciator and the addressee are abstract and structural phenomena, “positions”; that it would be clumsy to confuse them with the “empirical” sender and receiver (author, reader); that in theory and in practice enunciation is different from communication, and so on. Jean-Paul Simon, one of the first people in our field to have tackled these questions, is particularly concise on this point: enunciation does not summon up a “full” and “transcendental” subject but an “encoded and coded subject.”³ But we should not take these conventional formulations too literally, or at least we should not follow them in all their consequences. If there is no doubt that in general we can tell a narrator apart from an author, for example, the locations of enunciation itself—enunciation that we are told is purely textual—are nonetheless most often conceived of as people of some sort. We have to admit that we cannot think of them otherwise; we cannot represent them to ourselves clearly, except as instances of incarnation. What is more, in the transmission process these instances are supposed to occupy the locations of enunciation. So, no matter how much somebody talks to me about the addressee, I will think of the spectator so that I can understand what is being said, and this spectator will (theoretically or miraculously) morph into the role of “addressee.” Enunciation tends to take on a humanoid aspect.

For all that, we should not transfer onto the enunciative apparatus [appareil] the characteristics of its instance of incarnation, as do those narratologists who, having defined some Ideal (or Implied, Immanent, etc.) Reader, detail his reactions in the vocabulary of human and naive psychology. Moreover, words such as enunciator and addressee, with their suffixes, carry within themselves anthropomorphic connotations that are difficult to avoid and are quite bothersome in various fields, especially in film, where everything is based on machines. When what is at stake is the physical inscription of enunciation in the text, it would be better to have recourse to the names of things. I will propose, provisionally, as we will see, “source [foyer (ou source)] of enunciation” and “enunciative target (or destination).” (The human subject reappears when someone comes to occupy the source or the target.) Some time ago, Albert Laffay pointed out that at the heart of all films, with their “ultra-photographic interventions” and their various manipulations, one finds a “virtual linguistic source [foyer],” an “exhibitor of images,” a “fictitious person” (we will return to the term fictitious), a “master of ceremonies,” a “great artist,” and as a result, finally, a “structure without images” (this last remark is exceptionally perceptive).⁴

Instances of incarnation do not map onto enunciative positions in a regular, homological way. So the spectator who is comically said to be real (also known as the spectator), whom we naturally expect to belong to the side of the target, also occupies the source [foyer] inasmuch as he is identified with the camera, while occupying the target, in that the film watches him. This second, reverse movement has been explored very well by Marc Vernet. The third fictive dimension of the screen creates a point of perspective that is directed toward us, “an anonymous look in the mirror that breaks and recasts the dual relation of the spectator to the image.”⁵ The spectator is, then, an I and a YOU at the same time. But as soon as it is put this way, it is clear that this idea does not really tell us very much. This is the first sign of the problems that come with using personal pronouns. These pronouns can only lead to a deictic conception of enunciation in cinema, which I think is poorly suited to the realities of film. This theory is nevertheless the most common in the field. It often remains implicit, even more or less unconscious. We find it forcefully articulated and fully self-aware for the first time in the work of the best current analyst of cinematic enunciation, Francesco Casetti.⁶ He lists his categories of the main enunciative configurations according to “executive hyperphrases,” which, taken together, constitute a kind of template for deictics. So, for the look to camera: “HE (the character) and I (the enunciator), we watch you (the addressee),” and so on for all the important configurations that enunciation creates.

But is an I who cannot become a YOU still an I? The question could be asked of a psychoanalyst, whose answer we can predict, and of a linguist, for whom the reversibility of the first two persons is part of what defines them.

This reversibility is strongly present in oral exchange, which is the prototypical form of “discourse,” as Benveniste distinguishes it from “story,” and it provides him with the point of departure for all his theorizing about enunciation.⁷ In a conversation, one has the feeling that one can see, or touch, the source [foyer] and the target of enunciation (whereas in fact they conceal themselves at this point of contact, taking as they do the form of grammatical pronouns). Once again, this is to confuse them with their instance of incarnation, with the two people who are talking. What we take to be the source [foyer] of enunciation is another utterance, which is simultaneous. It is the mimico-gestural utterance of the subject who speaks, which is to say of the same person (hence the confusion). The fact remains that the degree of reversibility of the enunciative poles is at a maximum in oral exchange. Instances of incarnation are real human bodies that combine two modes of presence in a remarkable way: presence between one another, and physical presence at the moment of their utterances (unlike written exchanges, messages on answering machines, etc., and most unlike literature, cinema, and painting). The reactions of the addressee are liable step-by-step to modify or reprogram what the enunciator says, by means of the parallel and logically anterior to-and-fro of listeners and speakers. On the whole, the theory of enunciation is largely constructed on situations that are exceptional in their structural characteristics but very common in everyday life.

The reversibility of characters is less prevalent in written dialogue, transcriptions, and other kinds of “reported speech” (we know that Benveniste was interested in this,⁸ as was Genette).⁹ Here there is no longer any real feedback from the target back to the source [source]; rather there are (written) utterances that mimic other (oral) ones and also mimic this feedback effect. This mimicking is made possible by the identity of the global code (i.e., language) and above all of deictic terms that generally have the same form for the oral as for the written, so they seem to match up.

Pragmatics, to which nothing human is alien, has no doubt paid attention to the many intermediate cases. So, for example, the I in official discourse, whom nobody is supposed to answer even if the speaker is known by everyone, or again the I that signs off at the end of a leaflet, and so on. We come then by degrees to “story” [histoire], where the reversibility of characters disappears since in principle the third person alone is used. “Historical narration” [énonciation historique], to use another phrase from Benveniste,¹⁰ is not indicated by any markers. Casetti will say that in certain cases enunciation is “presupposed,” postulated by the simple presence of an utterance, or in the realm of fiction, it is “diegeticized.” (But at the far end of the spectrum, enunciation may itself be enunciated).¹¹

Before going any further, we should cover some elementary ground on true deictics that are found in articulated language. I will use examples from French and, seeing that the precise list of deictics varies according to different linguists, I will limit myself to the most common types: personal, possessive, and demonstrative pronouns;¹² adverbs of time and place; and verb tense. It should not be forgotten that there is a large overlap between the category of deictics and that of anaphoric reference. I will provisionally use the term index to cover the two, not forgetting that anaphoric and cataphoric reference in film have been discussed by Michel Colin,¹³ by Jean-Paul Simon some time ago,¹⁴ and later on by Paul Verstraten,¹⁵ Lisa Block de Behar¹⁶ and others.

For a start, a distinction must be made between twofold indices and those that are “simple.” The former have one form reserved for discourse and another for story, as in “yesterday / the day before.” “Yesterday” is deictic, while “the day before” is anaphoric, as the latter no longer refers back to the circumstances of enunciation but to some previous information contained in the utterance. By contrast, other indices have the same form for story and for discourse—this is the case with personal and possessive third-person pronouns and all demonstratives: that is what one physically points at, and it is also what the preceding sentence points at. The distinction between “twofold” and other examples is clearly irrelevant for terms that are used either solely in discourse (second-person personal and possessive pronouns), or solely in “story,” such as the simple past or the past anterior.^* Twofold examples arise only for terms that have two functions.

The second major dividing factor is between deictics that change signifier for the same referent according to the circumstances of enunciation and deictics that remain as they are. In a conversation Mr. Durand calls himself “I” when he is the one who is speaking, but he is “YOU” when Mr. Dupont speaks to him. July 18 is “tomorrow” if one is speaking on July 17, but it is “yesterday” if it is now July 19, and so on. This category corresponds more or less to what philosophers of language call “token-reflexives,” whereby the particular character of every enunciation (its “token”) is reflected in the literal sense of the utterance. To know what is meant by here, we need to know where the word was uttered on a particular occasion. These are deictics par excellence (perhaps the only ones),¹⁷ both because they appropriate a very particular mechanism of reference and because they include the key words I and YOU (which are also the ones that Casetti names). What is special about them is that they supply us with information about the enunciation through the enunciation itself and that they are in this way inseparable from actual changes in the real world, unlike in film or in books. This group contains the following: personal and possessive pronouns in the first and second persons; in verbs, the triad of present/past/future to designate the same date, depending on the moment of speaking; adverbs such as yesterday/today/tomorrow, or even here/there for the same location, according to how close or far away it is, left/right, and so on.¹⁸ These terms, which are subject to change, contrast with those in which the signifier does not vary for a unique referent, even if the coordinates of the enunciation change—that is to say, even if the sentence is uttered later, elsewhere, or by another person. Examples include the timeless present (“The earth is round”), and all demonstratives, except those that are organized as “close/far” pairs, such as this/that.

This brief recap has aimed simply to underline the extreme precision of the deictic system, even when it is summed up in the simplest way. It comes as no surprise that one finds all of these mechanisms in the dialogue of a sound film, since the speech has been recorded en bloc. The same is true for dialogue in novels, as the mimicking transcription that I mentioned earlier is always possible. However, when it comes to this I—an I whose structural constraints I have partially described, these constraints themselves determining its meaning—what is the point in calling this I the source [foyer] of enunciation of an entire film or novel, or of any other noninteractive discourse that is completed before it is presented, if we do not allow enunciation or the reader-spectator any chance to intervene, even if only from the outside—for example, by closing the book or switching off the television? With some precision, Gianfranco Bettetini concisely names this kind of discourse, which includes most classical texts, “monodirectional,” a term that I will retain.¹⁹

Among these discourses that are created and finalized in advance, we still have to distinguish between those that are linguistic, such as literary narrative, and those that are audiovisual. In the latter, speech, which can be quite faithful to everyday language, must work with the image. It is not the only bearer of meaning of the message, and the body of the text remains partially beyond it. In a novel, nothing is spoken—everything becomes writing—but the language is sovereign and the idiom unchanged (the text’s idiom is also what is spoken by characters and readers). Discourse is strewn with “mimed” deictics as well as, particularly in passages of “story,” anaphorics, but these are often expressed with the same word (such as this), with the result that a sense of unity persists. Any spontaneous perception of the gap between story and discourse is often fogged by these anaphoro-deictic terms, because if we did not move beyond them, discourse would transform itself into story without changing signifiers, so everything would shift mechanically by one notch, and the role of the situation would be replaced by the role of context. (In terms of pragmatics, we could say that the co-text becomes the exact substitute for the context.) Further, in writing, anaphora is less distant from deixis, as the latter operates on “situations” that themselves are pure products of the utterance. In discourse, in the dialogue of a novel, a character may speak of “this dog” if we know from the book that there is a dog in the room at that moment. In “story” the narrator of the same novel could say “this dog” if he is referring back to the previous sentence, where we learned that there was a dog in the room at that moment. In the former we have reconstituted deixis, in the latter ordinary anaphora.

To sum up: on the one h...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Translator’s Introduction
• Part I: Humanoid Enunciation
• Part II: Some Landscapes of Enunciation (A Guided Tour)
• Part III: A Walk In The Clouds (Taking Theoretical Flight)
• Notes
• On the Shelf: Works Cited
• Index
• Series List