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Conférence de Constantine V. Nakassis de l'université de Chicago dans le cadre de l'ARAL (Atelier de Recherche en Anthropologie du Langage) Cerlis, Université Paris Descartes.Le 26 JUIN à 17h Salle J536 (batiment Jacob, université Paris Descartes, 45 rue des Saints-Pères, Paris)AbstractAt the birth of structuralism infilm studies, the question of ‘film language’ and the analogy of linguisticanalysis to film analysis was already decreed problematic by its primaryadvocate, Christian Metz. And while semiology has largely atrophied as a topicin American film studies, and the analogy to language/linguistics has been repudiated,a number of scholars—primarily European—continued to engage the analogiesbetween language and film through appeal to the pragmatics of speech, inparticular, by taking up Émile Benveniste’s concept of enunciation. Yetwhile enunciation for Benveniste focused on (how language indexed) the actnessof utterances (as lexicalized and grammaticalized in deictic form classes) andhow speech “does things with words,” in theorizing filmic enunciation, filmscholars such as Christian Metz, André Gaudreault, Francesco Casetti and othershave focused on Benveniste’s distinction of histoire and discourse andits relationship to deixis (or rather, personal pronouns). Based on this, Metzand others argued for the impersonal, machinicnature ofenunciation in film and (wrongly) its fundamental difference from the personal,presentist nature of enunciation in linguistic discourse. Unfortunately, to mymind, in doing so such work turned towards the question of filmic narrative andtextuality, and their theorization in literary studies, and away from questionsof the contextualized social action enabled by cinema. In this paper, through a number ofexamples from the Tamil cinema of south India, I discuss the question of theperformativity of images and the act(ness) of filmic enunciation. Drawing onlinguistic anthropological discussion of the metapragmatics of efficaciousaction in speech and multimodal ritual, Austin’s discussion of linguisticperformativity, and Goffman’s deconstruction of the speaker and hearer (viz.his discussion of participation frameworks and production formats), I revisitBenveniste’s notion of enunciation and follow the (deictic) path not taken infilm studies. I argue that rather than leading us ‘into’the (storied) filmictext—as seemingly sui generis and autonomous, impersonal and machinic—Benveniste’sdiscussion leads us ‘outwards’ into events of cinematic semiosis. Such a shift inorientation demonstrates how the personal or impersonal nature of cinematicenunciation is not a medium feature but a situated, semiotic achievement; it isan empirical question and, as we see in the Tamil cases discussed, deeplypolitical in nature. This points up the deeply ideological (and methodological)blinders that have beset much film theory while pointing to a productive avenueto non-reductively rethink language and cinema, and thus linguisticanthropology and film studies, together. Constantine V. Nakassis is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Associate Faculty in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is a linguistic anthropologist with interests in semiotics, mass media and film theory, intellectual property, and youth culture; his regional focus is Tamil Nadu, India. He is the author of Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation in South India (2016, University of Chicago Press) and is currently working on a book about the ontological politics of the Tamil cinema of south India, entitled Onscreen/Offscreen. For more information and publications, see https://anthropology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/constantine-v-nakassis