I discovered this article by reading the entry of Medieval Semiotics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I had feelings of self-recognition in the description of scholastic intellectual practices like writing commentaries on texts and citations. In the subchapter 2.1 Augustine (354–430) I found a short definition of communicative function, noted "See Simone 1972: 15ff; Ruef 1981: 86.", which read:
The communicative function[6] is thus essential to the linguistic sign: “There is no reason for signifying, i.e., for giving signs except to convey into another's mind what the sign-giver has in his own mind” (Nec ulla causa est nobis significandi, id est signi dandi, nisi ad ... traiciendum in alterius animum id quod animo gerit qui signum dat) (Augustine De doctr. chr. II 3, 1963, 34: 17–20).This is an interesting definition, because it presumes that semiosic activity has to take place between two ontologically different subjects, that there must be another physical human body, another person. Anti Randviir (2004: 25) has suggested that semiogenetic activity does not necessitate another subject on the ontological plane, that in case of self-communication, communication requires two semiotically different subjects, two different sign systems, so to say. A very simple example presents itself in split-brain patients with disrupted communication between the two brain hemispheres (Fry 1977: 130-131). The patients experimented on could not describe verbally what they experienced nonverbally with the left eye or hand because the human speech-center is located in the left hemisphere of the brain. But they could adapt to the experimental conditons and score high by finding an external channel of communication between the brain hemispheres. An example:
...when, say, a circle was placed in the left hand, the patient would begin to look around the room and pick out some circular object, perhaps a clock, and would then move his head in a circle. The left hemisphere, given the clue by the movement, would then give the right answer 'Circle'... (Fry 1977: 131)So you see Augustine, there is a reason for signifying or giving signs to oneself's mind if the mind is split literally and there is an experimental pressure to score high by finding an external channel of communication between the brain hemispheres. It has to be considered that the "unity of his own mind" is not a given for any subject. No one knows himself through and through, especially in matters that concern me in the field of nonverbal communication where we are rarely if ever apt to give either a thorough descriptions or explanations to our bodily behaviour. But enough of foreplay, on to Jackson's text.
To take John L. Austin's example of things falsely considered signs, e.g. "when the cheese is in front of our noses, we see signs of cheese", then by Augustine's account, we do not see signs of cheese, but the cheese in front of our noses could cause us to think of something beyond the cheese in front of our noses, for example, how did the cheese get in front of our nose? is the cheese in front of our noses to be eaten or looked at? what country could it come from? etc. This is a long stretch, but a valid one: a sign brings to mind something other than the sign itself. But the conundrum is not gone, for the cheese in front of our noses will call to mind the word "cheese", which is something other than the mere sense impression. This could be analyzed further, but I have few devices to do it at the moment.A sign is a thing which causes us to think of something beyond the impression the thing itself makes upon the senses...(Jackson 1969: 11)
By this simple formula (1) a facial expression is sensed and (2) it indicates the emotion of the person displaying the facial expression.A sign is something that is (1) itself sensed and which (2) indicates something beyond itself to the mind...(Jackson 1969: 12)
In any case, in addition to (1) the sign and (2) what is signified by it, Augustine's definition of 'signum' includes within the signifying situation (3) the subject to whom the sign indicates something. (Jackson 1969: 13)This addition is very reminiscent of the different between de Saussure and C. Peirce, where the latter has added the (3) to his sign concept. Well, for facial expressions, (1) the expression is a sign, (2) the emotion is signified by the expression and (3) someone catches the expression and infers the emotion.
- signa naturalia is given "without any intention or desire of signifying";
- signa data on the other hand are those signs which "living creatures show to one another for the purpose of conveying, in so far as they are able, the motions of their spirits or something which they have sensed or understood";
Markus suggests an interesting way of looking at the contrast between natural and given signs. They are distinguished "....according to whether the relation of dependende is between the sign and the object, or between the sign and the subject". Smoke is a sign of fire and depends upon fire since the latter causes it. Markus goes beyond Augustine, however, when he says that signa data depends upon the will of the sign-giver for their significance. At least he goes beyond these early chapters of Book Two. For all that Augustine says here is that signa data depend upon the will of the sign-giver for their occurrence, not for their meaning. (Jackson 1969: 14)Markus's version is more applicable, though, if we bring G. H. Mead into the conversation. For him, proper communication involves inducing in the other exactly the same understanding as the signs induce in oneself.
Although will operates in both signa data and in consensio, it operates for different ends in each, namely, for occurrence and for significance. (Jackson 1969: 15)Thus intention to communicate and intention to communicate specific meaning become distinct.
In De magistro Augustine makes a universal statement: All things which we perceive we perceive either by a sense of the body or by the mind. The former are called sensibilia, the latter 'intelligibilia'. (XII. 39). Earlier in the book he gives examples of these two kinds of res. Romulus, Rome, and a river are instances of sensibilia; virtue is an instance of intelligibilia. (Jackson 1969: 18)This is important. Not once while reading John L. Austin's Sense and Sensibilia did I think to question the meaning of the latter term. Another clue: wiktionary says it is synonymous with stimuli.
Ecclesiastical writers earlier than Augustine continued to use 'sign' principally of non-linguistic entitites. [...] I have found only one instance of 'sign' applied to a linguistic entity in a Church author prior to Augustine. (Jackson 1969: 30)In the back of my head there is a quip about the stoics never thinking of words as signs. Is it possible that Augustine is the source of thinking of words as signs?
Biedarieva, Svitlana 2010. Reflections in the Umwelt. Hortus Semioticus 6: 53-58.
This article is published in the Semiotics of Nature special issue of Hortus Semioticus, an online journal for semiotic student researches. The author is a familiar face from various semiotics and art events in Tartu (in fact all of the following articles on review below have been written by student-researchers at the University of Tartu). I picked out the article because because I felt the need to brush up on the Umwelt theory.
Umberto Eco in his article "Mirrors" excludes reflection from the system of semiotic signs. Semiotic signs for Eco are all phenomena that can transmit information from a sender to a receiver. For successful interaction the information has to be coded and then decoded. This means that signs sent have to be part of the system familiar to both participants. (Biedarieva 2010: 55)Eco's view can be argued against. It seems here that the mirror-image is handled too much like a message, whilst it is in actuality a channel. Seeing yourself in the mirror means seeing yourself indirectly, through a special visual channel. What is important is what the mirror-image contains. If the question is of recognition, then the semiotic sign lies in knowing yourself as a sign (as Floyd Merrell would put it). As this article reveals, only a handful of large mammalians are able to recognize themselves in the mirror, or to know themselves as a sign. The decoding moment lies not in the mirror-image as such but recognizing the semblance or dissemblance of oneself (remember the mirror scene from Marx Brothers' 1933 Duck Soup). It would be absurd to claim that the spatiotemporal identification involved in all of this is not semiotic.
Rattasepp, Silver 2009. Movement and the Creation of Images. In: Sabine Brauckmann (ed.). Graphing Genes, Cells, and Embryos: Cultures of Seeing 3D and Beyond. Volume 380 of Preprint. Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte Berlin, 153-158.
There is not much I would quote at lenght from this article, but some very interesting points should be abbreviated and kept in mind. For example, the "enactive approach to perception, according to which perception depends fundamentally on movement". Something similar to this I have come across in the field of psychology, but cannot put my finger on, where there was presented the notion that one cannot judge the weight of some object by the activity of a single muscle (this was actually tested), but that measuring mass utilizes various muscles, tendons and other tissue of the hand, as well as the hands relation to the rest of the body (e.g. it is hard to measure the weight of something with only the forearm being able to move).
The phenomena of "cognitive offloading" which are "instances where the use of external artifacts improves the performance of tasks than performance without these artifacts" (wiki). At first sight this seems to be exactly what is at work in that split-brain patient experiment where the subjects identified shapes by using external channels of communication between the brain hemispheres. That is, the clock in embodying the message of "circle" becomes an object of cognitive offload, so to say. But example might not fit after all since by definition the artifact (clock) does not exactly "enhance" the recognition of shapes as much as "enable" it. One can only surmise that at least it is, as the poetic language in the article would suggest, a case in which cognition is "leaking out into its local surroundings" (quoted from Clark 1997: 82).
At one point Rattasepp makes the move of contrasting his current views to "older, admittedly rather obsolete ideas from the psychology of perception", which made me wonder if many, if not all, of my own findings from the 70s and before are not already obsolete - as I have yet to reach contemporary times in nonverbal communication research, the chances are quite high that what I'm preaching as classics are actually not only no longer in use (like Kinesics), but also inherently erroneous...
James Gibsons remark that in dreams and hallucinations objects cannot be viewed from different perspectives vividly reminded me the horror of Finn in Adventure Time when Princess Bubblegum decides to give him a bodily equivalent of "silent treatment" which consisted of her turning her face away from Finn in such a way that when Finn moved around her in desperate effort to see the face again, it merely slipped away, leaving nothing but the back of her head to look back at Finn. All in all this article was quite hard to read as it is written in lingo as yet ahead of "my time" (the body language research of 1970s), but generally quite interesting and agreeable.
Bennett, Tyler J. - 5.1. The Surface Order: Labour Dimension of the Widening Gyre
I am unable to find the source for this on the web, but I am not above receiving unpublished knowledge. A Symptomatology.pdf will have to do as a reference. Chosen for reading because I have yet to read Foucault's main works and more second-hand-Foucault (he tends to be like a pleasant whiff of familiar Philisophy in many a student researches) can't do much harm, other than invite more whims on semiotics.
In this move we observe the transition from coins to bills, and also the arrival of modern system of banking. Needless to say, that system had not quite achieved its contemporary splendor in Foucault's day, but he clearly anticipated the impending effects of symbolic over-writing in the area of currency. The disapperance of the non-arbitrary ground of value is even greater in the move from coin to bill by the fact that the paper on which it is printed is virtually worthless, as opposed to the coin which to this day usually possesses at least some intrinsic value. With the bill we have an even greater shift from non-arbitrary to symbolic determination of value by the fact that the bill itself exhbits the conventional pact by which it is recognized as "legal tender". The act by which the bill is imbued with its exchange value is one executed by a central authority in the name of the people, and this determination of signification by external authority is one of the central aspects of symbolic reference. To refer back to chapter one, it provides both its greatest advantage and its greatest danger. As we wrote, the economic and efficient advantages lent by the convention based determination of signification do not come without a price.I don't completely agree with paper bills being virtually worthless. Sure, an out-of-currency bill has no exchange value, but it's sociocultural value may be considerable as a historical relic, a "sign of the times", so to say. When Estonia took the one kroon bill out of currency it automatically became something of a fetish to possess as many of them as possible, some people collecting envelopes full of worthless one kroon bills. Ironically, less than a decade later kroon itself was exchanged for euros and what then became objects of pastime currency fetishism were coins and cents.
The move that Foucault was not around to see was that from bills to checks to ATMs and internet banking. This move is the best verification that the trajectory of signification described by the widening gyre [keeris] (the fact that it is widening) is an accurate one. The imposture of externally determined values that happens with paper bills does so doubly with electronic banking and ATMs. Where the bill still had a material index of value in the fact that it is tangible and that in order to use it one must handle it and pass it between hands, the bank card does not. The bank card that draws upon an unlimited credit line insured by a top tier Swiss bank is just as light, flimsy, and insubstantial, as the bank card that refers to an Alaska Credit Union account that is overdrawn for eighteen hundred dollars. And even the incospicuous swipe of the card required for in-store transactions has become obsolete as online purchases require nothing more than a sixteen digit number, an address, and a name. Obviously these transitions have afforded a greater practicality and efficiency, just as those in the realm of the natural sciences have done. They have also given money an increasingly irrealized character. What with no material trace, the several-hundred dollar purchase is as if it didn't even happen.This I would summarize as the increasing intangibility of material exchange in capitalism. The analysis begins with coins being swapped from hand to hand and then proceeds to the loss if importance of valuable metals. But the starting point should be direct exchange of products, or to take something from cultural anthropology, the exchange of gifts (which are not products as such because they are not meant to be bought or sold, sometimes not even used). I believe in the increasing intangibility with such fervor that I await the time when even entering a random six-digit security code to use the internet bank sounds overly exhaustive. For all we know, biometric retina recognition via webcam could be the "bank card" of the future.
Pern, Tanel 2012. Semiotic modelling: from models to modelling processes. Conference talk at "Cultural Polyglotism", Dedicated to Juri Lotman's 90th Anniversary, 28th February – 2nd March 2012, University of Tartu, Estonia.
This was one of the few talks I managed to witness at that conference. I remember being weary at the talk because the concept of modelling is confusing on so many levels. Firstly on the signifier or the level of spelling: modeling and modelling are written with a single l in American English and ll in British English. Secondly on the signified or concept level modeling is what a model (a person) bodily does for art and modelling is what is meant by assembling, putting together or constructing a model (form or shape). The matter is complicated much more in Estonian since the they tend to get lost in translation and become susceptible to unwarranted transformations. Because of these complexities and the high malleability of the term, great unjustice is done to it often. It is left vague and floating, ambiguous and flimsy. These are my opinions, but it seems that I'm not alone with them:
The difficulty in articulating the meaning of the word "model" is perhaps matched by the difficulty in articulating the meaning of the phrase "departure from the model." (Scarry 1985: 257)A considerable explanation of different kinds of models is given in Harré, Rom & Secord, P. F. 1976. The Explanation of Social Behaviour, but the discussion was too lenghty and at that time irrelevant for my purposes to be quoted in this here blog.
As this strives to be a guide to modelling systems theory, the prime stress is on "the sign as a model and the modelling function of the sign". This inversion is further explained by quote from Vladimir Toporov on the modelling role of the sign, which "implies both the ability of the sign to represent "external reality" and its role in programming social and individual behavior". Thus, the modelling function of the sign is classically two-fold: descriptive (it "represents") and prescriptive (it "programmes"). Next, the symbolizing function is brought to fore: the sign as a model is a single general expressive destination or objective of the world at large. I would call this a kind of cosmology, but different players have different names: Toporov's modelling complexes are compared to Max Blac's archetypes. In the next paragraph these are interpreted as modelling systems, in which case my proposal of cosmology being a modelling system makes sense inasmuch as "such modeling systems as myth and religion are least detached and most powerful. They model not specific aspects of the world but the whole world, its structure and its history" (Waldstein 2008: 111). It is interesting to note that Lotman's contention in "Art among other modelling systems" that models differ from signs in that models substitute an object of perception "productively" comes close, if one chooses to interpret it in such manner, to (Danesi 2001: 10) in that models, being "a derivative of semiosis", create internal images of external objects, allowing one to "recognize the same object subsequently without having, each time, to examine it over again "from scratch" with his or her sensory system". A long stretch of a sentence that actually reduces models to not much more than dispositions in Bourdieu's habitus theory, or dicibilia (literally: that which can be said) in Augustine's sign theory. All in all, this short paper is a terrific read.
Korp, Leene 2006. Kehast kui omast võõrast. Hortus Semioticus 1: 59-67.
The body semiotizes external stimuli. The functional slicing of the body and the complexity of physiological processes results with the processes themselves remaining unfathomable to the subject/self. Aside from buddhist views of embodiment, this paper also draws Signs of Meaning in the Universe (Hoffmeyer 1996) and Philosophy in the Flesh (Lakoff ja Johnson 1999). The body is simultaneously self and non-self, because it is always partially available to the perceiving subject [enesehinnang on pime]. By culturalization of physical necessities I presume the author to mean something along the lines of Scheflen (1972: 226): intromission (penetration) and ejaculation are universal human behaviours, but the forms of how coitus is performed differ from culture to culture. Kvaløy (2005) is cited for a remark that human body is socially used mainly for communication, for comparing oneself to others. The first part of this seems way too obvious, the second seems unnecessary. Wilden (1985) is cited for body being used as a means of communication and his example is robust: the raped women as mediums between warring sides. This is expanded to the institutions of prison and military in which both the physical and the psychical are subjugated to external rules and used as instruments and reifications of power.
0 comments:
Post a Comment