ABSTRACT
The denial of semioticity which Kuhn stresses must be related to the concept of the non-naturalness of all social formations. Since everything is constructed, no "nature" pre-existent, the production process of a film, and the production of its meanings, can be recognized as arbitrary. It is arbitrary inasmuch as it is each time an ideological position rather than the representation of a prior essence, truth, or nature. It is in that sense that the concept of the arbitrary must be seen as inseparable from the concept of meaninglessness. Meaning does not inhere, it is formed, produced by complex processes, within film and without. On that level the division between art and Iife must be seen not as Iife being art, aestheticizing Iife in other words, but rather as art being life, in the sense that all discourses are inseparable from history and the real. Film is a cultural discourse, both material and ideological. To be more specific, the ideological is also material, the material of ideology. Material must not mean just that which you can touch, some object.
