About Michelle Langford's p.s.:
> p.s. if anyone out there would like to discuss Barthes
> notion of the "grain" in relation to film, we might perhaps
> get a thread going? Is it possible to think an equivalent of
> a 'pheno-text' and a 'geno-text' for the cinema, as Barthes
> transposes Kristeva's terms into the corresponding notions
> of the 'pheno-song' and 'geno-song'?
>
I think the first thing is to remember Barthes's warning, that the human
voice is a phenomenon that escapes the approaches of informed study -
physiology, history, aesthetics, even psychoanalysis - because whatever they
have to say, there will always be a remainder, something else, not spoken, a
difference which psychoanalysis at least recognises, and assigns to the
objects of desire: in short, our relationship to a favourite voice is
effectively _erotic_. In other words, the irreducible physicality of the
voice - this is its grain. So the first question is whether this has an
equivalent at all in the case of film image - I'm not talking here of what
is on the soundtrack, which may certainly offer us the grain of the actor's
voice. I could perhaps be persuaded that there is, but whatever it might be,
I don't think it's a text, because it would have to be what's left over
after all the textual analysis has been done.
Michael Chanan
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