EL BDNF EN ENCÉFALOS HUMANOS CON ENFERMEDAD DE

Conceptualising the language/discourse of film censorship starts with recognising the symbolic instability of semiotic signs. Barthes(1967) showed that language is made up of signs such as words that communicate meanings. People’s perception of the world and understanding of social reality is constructed through words and expressions that they use (Bignell, 2002). Once a sign is produced, it begins a life of its own independent from the person who generated it, continues using it or interprets it. The implication to the discourse of film censorship is that once state laws construct words and expressions to define the kind of values expected from film images, the polysemic nature of film language allows state laws to be read in many ways. In other words, a sign and its semiotic materiality is what lies beyond the sphere of the subject (whether the censor or the censored).

Ponzio(1993) notes that the sign’s constitutive plurivocality is determined by identities of otherness.

Otherness implies difference which is the ability of a sign to mutate to new forms of meanings, themselves having the capacity to resist ideological containment.

The Saussurian assumption that a constructed sign starts an important life of its own underlies the arbitrary nature of signs. Yet, the same idea of signs having a life of their own can rob signs of human agency in directing signs to meaningful social, political and economic activities. Post-Saussurian traditions have pre-occupied themselves on establishing how signs can be combined together to form discourses of the powerful and weak in society and culture. Foucault is a post-Saussurian theorist who explained how hegemony and power can be sustained through discourse.

The idea that power is productive as well as coercive, situational as well as pervasive adds a crucial dimension to Foucault’s contribution (McCoy, 1993). The Foucaudian dimension also explains why state censorship of film images should not be viewed as totally a disadvantage. Power authorised through discourse does not work only as a form of repression but it also displays its productive side.

For example, the language of state laws that sanctions film from producing pornographic material or extreme violent images is done for the moral health of communities.

Yet, power’s reproduction of social discipline by acculturating film viewers to intended norms and values is a sure way in which the hegemonic tendency of power is displayed. The dilemma, as noted

30

by McCoy(1993:147) is ‘…how to discuss power while remaining faithful to power’s relational tendencies to emerge, displace, educate, abuse, appropriate, and control without making of it either a formula or transcendental scheme’. The functional nature of power is further expanded in the Foucaudian idea of ‘capillary form of existence’ (Milner 1991:74) which is a point where power reaches into the very existence of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into people’s actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday activities.

Although strong in its visioning of power’s functional role, the Foucaudian ‘capillary form of existence’ (1991: 74) underestimates human agency encouraged by intentional actions and reactions.

The intentional actions and reactions can explain why some audience choose to oppose censored material by viewing it as an example of how freedom of expression is muffled by the state or institutional board of censors. The discursive subject of censorship is not entirely the construct of culturally determining forces via discursive institutions and systems of knowledge. The implication of viewing the audience as entirely affected by official discourses place limitations as the view assumes that audiences cannot ‘think outside the box’ or ‘go against the grain’.

For Derrida, discourses are incomplete linguistic systems that are produced by the ‘play of difference’ (Howarth, 2002:42) and which mediate and organise our experience of the world. By the word incomplete Derrida implies that there are gaps and points of undecidability (2002:42) in the cultural texts which enable official discourses to both cohere and organise themselves, but at the same time, serve to undermine their coherence and unity. Put in another way, although official discourses of film censorship are organised in such a way as to focus on intended behavioral exposition, the weaknesses of such discourses can inherently be explained by the instability in the language of reference. In film, linguistic instability breeds ‘polysemy’ in language, which means character’s words, sound and music, colour, character’s actions and costume, can be subjected to multiple readings. Thus, by its very nature, film text is a reconstruction. In this recreated text, the film writes its text, modifies and combines its codes, playing some codes off against others, and thus constituting itself as a semiotic system. The system is a product of de/construction which is a form of textual exegesis—the un/packing of film text(s), a way of questioning unspoken discourses while being aware to the text’s discursive heterogeneity. The concept of ‘text’—etymologically ‘tissue’ or

‘weave’ (Stam, 2000:186) conceptualises film not only as a mimesis but also as a re/construction of

31

reality. This view is important to my study that explores how films narratives refuse to be totally subdued by domanint narratives that take the forms of state and even modes self-censorship.

The Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia (1981) complicates Derrida’s play of differences concept.

Heteroglossia is based on the notion of competing language and discourses as they operate within both text and context. When applied to my study, this entails the presence of the enterlocking language of the film censor and the censored. As Bakhtin points out, the language[s] of heteroglossia may be placed side by side, mutually supplement one another, in intertext or even contradict one another (1981). Theories of intertextuality view every text as related to other texts. For example, a television text can operate within the broader context of a film text. Or a newspaper story can create important leads to the main story of a film text. The dialogue that obtains refer to the open-ended possibilities generated by all the discursive practices of film culture, the entire matrix of communicative utterances within which the film text is situated (Stam, 2000).

Bakhtin(1981)goes further to suggest the idea of a chronotope. The chronotope in film mediates between two orders of experience and discourse: the historical and the artistic. These two aspects provide fictional environments where constellations of power are dramatised. The Bakhtinian chronotope goes deeper to reveal how concrete spatio-temporal structures in film shots amplify meaning, shape characterisation and mold the discursive space between the language of the film censor and the censored. Within the spatio-temporal structures of a film shot, ‘language is split, conflict-ridden, dispersed and drastically heterogeneous’ even as it is ‘systematic, highly coded, patterned and regular’(Palmer, 1989:313). The post-modern chronotopic multiplicities on the film screen facilitated by computer, video technology, high definitive camera and three dimensional configurations further amplify possibilities for fracture, rupture and cultural polyphony. In short, it can be a difficult task to impose hard and fast laws of censorship on film images, conflict ridden as it is by the imaginative dynamics brought by new film technology, the underlying discourses of the state, ideas of filmmakers, audiences’ horizons of expectations, polysemous nature of film language (verbal and non-verbal) and the context of film production. My study makes use of Bakhtinian (1981) ideas of how film language can carnivalise, undercut, and subvert monological dominant discourses. This wil help me to account why some films pay obeisance to the structures of feeling infiltrated by dominant and censoring perspectives, while other films accept the principle of

32

linguistic heteroglossia that encourages dialogism within narratives of films aspiring to germinate and inseminate new values in society.