Speech

Discursive logic is the sequence of utterances in a discourse along a logical line of the type:

A => B => C...

When discourse recounts events (historical narrative, or fictional narrative) it follows chronology; when discourse develops arguments (demonstration, reasoning), it goes from cause to cause, or from consequence to consequence.

The scene is often marked by the failure of discursive logic: the character's speech is theatricalized to the point where gesture means more than speech. It's the fact that he speaks, not the content of his speech, that signifies. Sometimes, on the contrary, speech is cut off, garbled, hindered, interrupted, inaudible, incomprehensible: the fact that someone is speaking makes a tableau independently of what he's saying.

This conflicting relationship between scene and discourse is linked to the historical evolution of devices: from the end of the Renaissance onwards, the scene expresses the new semiological organization, while discourse is identified with the old, medieval world, where speech was performance, i.e. effective speech. Just as in the painted scene narrative episodes fade into the blur of a vague space (a landscape, a distance), so in the written scene performative speech becomes vain speech, impeded speech, or incomprehensible.