Signifying Souls

Abstract

In the period after the Second World War, one of the major paradigm shifts within critical theory of the twentieth century was to occur with the emergence of structuralism, which would mark a sharp break with theorizing of previous decades. The human subject, previously thought of as the point of origin for expression and meaning, or indeed the recipient of inspiration from a higher power, was theorized as an effect of a structure that was both linguistic and ideological. Born into language and interpellated, as Louis Althusser had it, through the machinations of ideology, the subject was decentred. In film theory, two traditions gathered momentum in the 1950s and were then highly influential until the 1970s in the United States and Europe (principally in France and Italy): one was inspired by Saussurean linguistics and epitomized by the work of Roland Barthes as well as that of Christian Metz; the other took its impetus from Peircean logic, and was exemplified by a lineage that runs from Umberto Eco and Pier Paolo Pasolini through to the work of Gilles Deleuze. Gradually within the post-war period, the rise of structuralism, semiotics, and semiology led to the eclipse of the soul per se from the mainstream of theoretical discourse, as figures such as Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry came to the fore, Screen theory burgeoned, and a wide range of the more ideologically motivated theories emerged on the tide of the world-wide revolutions of the post-1968 era.