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

["Christine Goldbeck" <cgoldie@verizon.net>]

" 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 wholeheartedly concur.


"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."

For me, the relationships to other forms (panorama, cinema, artists' books, 
installations, for example) was discovered in the study of visual art, which 
is not surprising given that writing for and reading by screen requires a 
visual acuity (just one reason to study C.S. Peirce).

... and, it is just occurring to me that the threads of this month's 
discussion would make for a darn fine exquisite corpse.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bill Seaman" <bseaman@risd.edu>
To: <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Sent: Sunday, October 23, 2005 3:58 PM
Subject: [-empyre-] C. S. Peirce and Code


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 semanticsS 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
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