[-empyre-] C. S. Peirce and Code

[Bill Seaman <bseaman@risd.edu>]

Seaman:

Language is shared --- so to get at a "new 
language" or new vocabulary,  we need in part to 
use old language, to build a frame for 
potentially addressing these "new ideas" - to 
point at emergent relationships that might be new 
in some respect --- to construct a new contextual 
awareness. I guess I was trying to suggest that 
we might use new approaches to the language 
surrounding this body of practices we call 
digital writing [for me this is much broader than 
hypertext or blogs alone]. I was thinking we 
might develop vocabulary or seek to articulate 
(re-understand) relationships to other forms 
(define metaphors?) to better point at or unpack 
the media elements and processes that are at 
operation in some of the new forms of meaning 
production that include digital text. Peirce has 
many many forms of relations he has articulated 
and he is of course of great value. Alternately, 
there might be new modes of approach that can 
help illuminate this complex nexus forms.

Here are a few others that I have found:

Integrational Linguistics:
A First Reader
Edited by:  Roy Harris & George Wolf
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
1998

Introduction

The same applies, furthermore, not only to 
language but to all modes of human communication. 
For, contrary to what is commonly assumed in 
orthodox linguistics, there is no sharp dividing 
line separating language from other modes of 
communication, or linguistic behaviour from 
non-linguistic behaviour.  For human beings, a 
sign is a sign because it has an integrational 
function in the particular circumstances in which 
it occurs, and when voluntarily produced by human 
agency its production is always a creative act on 
the part of one of more individuals acting in a 
certain situation.  Whatever we recognize as a 
linguistic sign (by whatever criteria seem 
appropriate to the occasion) is always a 
non-linguistic sign as well.  The two are never 
mutually exclusive.  Human beings do not inhabit 
a communicational space which is 
compartmentalized into language and non-language, 
but an integrated space where all signs are 
interconnected.
(P. 2)

Language and Communication (from Integrational Linguistics):

An 'integrational' approach, on the contrary, 
assumes that linguistic analysis must focus in 
the first instance on understanding the 
communication situation(s) which give(s)rise to 
any episode of linguistic behaviour.  In short, 
for the integrationist language cannot  be 
decontextualized.

If the study of language cannot be segregated 
from the study of communicational behaviour, it 
follows that the orthodox approach to linguistic 
analysis is flawed at a very fundamental level.. 
For it presupposes, in effect, that linguistic 
signs are determinate, being components of an 
abstract system which exists independently of any 
particular communicational interaction that 
particular persons might entertain or pursue in 
particular cases.  But this determinacy, 
according to the integrationist, is the last 
thing a linguist is entitled to take for granted. 
Linguistic communication is far more 'open-ended' 
than the segregational approach assumes, but also 
far more dependent on particular circumstances,

Language as Social Interaction:
Integrationalism versus Segregationalism
(Roy Harris)

The alternative approach, the integrational1 
approach, sees language as manifested in a 
complex of human abilities and activities that 
are all integrated in social interaction, often 
intricately so and in such a manner that it makes 
little sense to segregate the linguistic from the 
non-linguistic components.   (P.6)

It is not surprising that the clearest expression 
of an integrational perspective on language 
should have come from one of the leading figures 
in social anthropology of the interwar period, 
Malinowski.  But Malinowski's most famous dictum, 
that language is "a mode of action, rather than a 
countersign of thought', when watered down into 
such statements as 'the context of situation is 
indispensable for the understanding of the word's 
or 'the utterance has no meaning except in the 
context of situation' (Malinowski 1923: 307), 
appears to reduce readily to truisms with which 
nobody would disagree.  As interpreted by J.R. 
Firth, Malinowski's claim emerges  in the sadly 
emasculated guise of recognizing an 'outer' layer 
of contextualization statements that the 
descriptive linguist is obligated to undertake in 
order to 'complete' the description of a 
language.  (P.9)

In America, the attempt to integrate linguistics 
in the general study of communicative behaviour 
was pursued most systematically by Kenneth Pike, 
while in England a similar emphasis emerged in 
the work of Firth, for whom 'the central concept 
of the whole of semantics? is the context of 
situation.  In that context are the human 
participant or participants, what they say, and 
what is going on.'  (Firth 1957: 27).  In both 
Pike and Firth, however, one sees a further 
consequence of the compromise between the 
segregationalist and integrationalist positions. 
Although Firth uses the term integration, for him 
the analysis of what wider integration begins 
'when phonetician, grammarian and lexicoprapher 
have finished.'  In other words, Firth works from 
utterances "outwards', and not from the total 
context 'inwards'.  Like Pike, he seems to have 
conceived of the non-verbal part of communicative 
behaviour essentially as language carried on by 
other means.  This evident even terminologically 
in the case of Pike, who introduced such units as 
the 'behavioreme' ( a term clearly modeled on 
phoneme and morpheme).  Thus in both cases, the 
approach eventually adopted envisaged an 
extension of the analysis of language systems to 
embrace a certain range of related social facts, 
rather than any rethinking of the basic 
assumptions underlying the postulation of 
language systems in the first place.   (P. 9)

--------
see also:

Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design.

We see our work as part of 'social semiotics' and 
it is therefore important to place it in context 
of what 'semiotics' is and has been in this 
century. Three schools of semiotics have applied 
ideas from the domain of linguistics to other, 
non-linguistic modes of communication. The first 
was the Prague School of the 1930s and early 
1940s. It developed the work of the Russian 
Formalists by providing it with a linguistic 
basis. Notions such as 'foregrounding' were 
applied to language (e.g. the 'foregrounding' of 
phonological or syntactic forms through 
'deviation' from standard forms, for artistic 
purposes) as well as to study the art 
(Mukarovsky), theatre (Honzl), cinema (Jakobson) 
and costume (Bogatyrev). Each of these semiotic 
systems could fulfil the same communicative 
functions (the 'referential' and the 'poetic' 
functions). The second was the Paris School of 
the 1960s and 1970s, which applied to the ideas 
of Saussure and other linguists (Schefer), 
photography (Barthes, Lindekens), fashion 
(Barthes), cinema (Metz), music (Nattiez), comic 
strips (Fresnault-Deruelle), etc. The ideas 
developed by this school are still taught in 
countless courses of media-studies, art and 
design, often under the heading 'semiology', 
despite the fact that they are at the same time 
regarded as being overtaken by 
post-structuralism. Everywhere students are 
learning about 'langue' and 'parole'; the 
'signifier' and the 'signified'; 'arbitrary' and 
'motivated' signs; 'icons', 'indexes' and 
'symbols' (these terms come from Peirce, but are 
incorporated in the framework of 'semiology'); 
'syntagmatics' and 'paradigmatics'; and so on - 
generally without being given access to 
alternative theories of semiotics (or of 
linguistics)... The third fledgling movement of 
this kind is 'social semiotics', which began in 
Australia, where the ideas of Michael Halliday 
inspired studies of literature (Treadgold, 
Thibault), visual semiotics (O'Toole, ourselves) 
and music (Van Leeuwen), as well as other 
semiotic modes (Hodge and Kress.) (Kress and Van 
Leeuwen, 1996, p.5)

KRESS, G. and VAN LEEUWEN, T. 1996. Reading 
Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London/New 
York: Routledge Press.

------

I am completely in agreement about language 
always being in a state of evolution.

and yes --- the word Code becomes quite slippery in this context...

[ps sorry If I did a typo - I do know how to 
spell Peirce and pronounce his name... ]

Peter Morse Said:

> Having given this some thought I am not persuaded of the idea that
> hypertext is revolutionary or a genuinely new mode of language. It
> seems a bit old-fashioned to invoke the idea of a "new" language (a
> utopian dream of expressing the previously inexpressible; a
> narcissist's fantasy of public incomprehension; Orwell's "newspeak"
> and "doublethink"), as this is something that permeates avowedly
> Modernist tracts and practices, and yet the fact remains that these
> things were written in language. What is new here? What is actually
> meant when you say a "new language"? The language itself or the
> conformation of the language? All language is necessarily evolving,
> changing and diversifying  - it is a precondition of language that it
> does so (otherwise why would there be so many different languages -
> English monolinguals tend to be very limited in their ideas about
> this), and clearly it has done so for millenia...
--
Professor Bill Seaman, Ph.D.
Department  Head
Digital+ Media Department (Graduate Division)
Rhode Island School of Design
Two College St.
Providence, R.I. 02903-4956
401 277 4956
fax 401 277 4966
bseaman@risd.edu

http://billseaman.com
http://www.art.235media.de/index.php?show=2
http://digitalmedia.risd.edu