Enunciation and Space: Composition, Configuration, and Scenarization
Enonciation et espace : composition, configuration and scénarisation
Résumé
The concept of the scene has not received major attention in semiotics; it is hard to find it in dictionaries, summaries, or indexes, especially as a metalanguage term. Among the language sciences, it is discourse analysis that has probably attributed a major role to the notion of scene, with the idea that the enunciation scene is part of an established space, pre-organized and mediated by a discursive genre within a specific social domain. These distinctions are valuable, but on one hand, they are established to ultimately privilege the ‘intradiscursive’ dimension, to avoid concepts like situation or enunciation context, which are less manageable by the language sciences; on the other hand, these distinctions do not fully clarify why do people move from the term space or site, used in semiotics, to the specific concept of the scene. If the semioticians begin to substitute the term scene for the notion of space, it is because they want to indicate the tension between two treatments, two ways of entering space: ‘configuration’ takes advantage of the space to circumvent the limits of a potential polyvalent actoriality; ‘composition’ integrates this space to structure and localize specific actantial relations. This dialectic between configuration and composition defines, through modal proportion, a regime of involvement of the instances observed both through distinctive categories (the actors) and through participative categories (the actants). By integrating the behavioral indeterminacy of the different instances involved, scenarization is the dynamic and dialectical perspective-making of that proportion.