Text/Textuality

The specific terms in which the integrity of the literary object was questioned by the semiological text helped to catalyze discussion about objects in other disciplines. Kristeva's interest in painting and music has already been remarked. The most concerted effort to make the textual paradigm matter outside literary studies, however, was in cinema studies, where in the course of the 1970s "textual analysis" came to be synonymous with a rigorous psychoanalytically and/or philosophically inflected neoformalism. This development had strong immediate repercussions outside France, notably in Britain, where many of the writers affiliated with the journal Screen saw themselves as contributing to the "textual analysis" initiative. In France, the figures typically associated with elaborating the cinematic text would include Christian Metz, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, Raymond Bellour, Michel Marie, and Thierry Kuntzel. That each is quite distinctive does not deny that, taken as a whole, they represent a concerted effort to displace the filmographic or humanistic object of cinema studies by bringing to bear upon the institutional consensus sustaining it all the questions animated in the works of Derrida, Kristeva, and Barthes.

Because the sound track figured centrally as one of the "codes" to weave into the textual analysis of film, music (one of several components of the sound track), and more specifically musicology, also became a site for the elaboration of the semiological text. Pitched against musicological structuralism (of the sort embodied in the work of Jean-Jacques Nattiez), the textual analysis of music sought to push away from the concerns of compositional syntax, and toward music's performativity, especially its interaction with the array of practices legitimated by post-Cagean aesthetics, notably of course dance and experimental theater. While it is certainly true that the textual analysis of music has never had the sort of impact enjoyed by cinema studies, the writings of Daniel Charles and Ivanka Stoïanova have had influence. Moreover, precisely because of its emergence in musicology the textual paradigm has in significant ways secured its status as a uniquely powerful model of interdisciplinary and inter-media critical analysis. Indeed, textuality as a quality attributable to a wide variety of cultural practices derives its analytical force from the disciplinary dissemination both latent within the paradigm and materialized in its historical development.