(Im)personalizing Enunciation

In this article, I discuss the question of the performative act(ness) of filmic enunciation. Drawing on linguistic anthropological discussions of indexicality, entextualization and contextualization, and metapragmatics, I revisit the discussion of Christian Metz and others of “impersonal enunciation” in light of my own ethnographic studies of the Tamil cinema of South India. Doing so, I show, draws out the way that an ethnographic attention to enunciation, rather than lead “into” the text, spills outwards into events of cinematic semiosis. Such a shift in orientation demonstrates how the (im)personal nature of cinematic enunciation is not a medium feature of cinema but a situated, semiotic achievement; it is an empirical question and thus deeply political in nature. I conclude with methodological reflections for the semiotic study of cinema.