In my current general theory about semiosis, all meaning-making
has three simultaneous and necessary aspects. One of these is the
Orientational stance. I have mainly investigated this for
linguistic and visual and visual-verbal semiotics so far, but in
the theory, all formal semiotic resources are viewed as
abstractions from meaning-making activity, and so the 'actional
semiotic' is the primary one, as well as the most generally,
encompassing the others (as abstractions from certain types of
activity). Orientational stance in language-use activity would
include, for example, the stance we take toward the propositional
content of an utterance: we say x is so, but are we happy about
it or not? (there are other dimensions, too: are we sure of it?
regard it as important? etc.) The activity semiotic, as material
interactivity-cum-social-meaningfulness, is the only semiotic
(now not a formal relational resource system, but the system of
activities that construes and deploys the resources, such as
words or semantic patterns, we abstract from the activities) that
can have one of its elements (i.e. an activity-type or instance
of such) in the 'meta' relation to another.
It follows that activities can take orientational stances toward
other activities, namely those that they 'embed' or 'project'
(these are Halliday's metaphors from grammar) in the meta
relation. We can be doing something (the embedded or projected
activity) in a particular way (the embedding, projecting, or
meta-activity), with a particular stance.
As with 'play' I would not consider any of these meta-activity
orientations to be an activity in the same sense as, say, washing
the dishes, because of the meta-relation (am I washing the dishes
happily? playfully? as a way to remind someone of my
usefulness?). But each orientation is part of the stance to and
in a specific first-order activity. What are these possible
stances?
In language, at least in English, and probably in many others,
the semantics of propositions and proposals seems to dictate the
possible stances (or it could be the other way around?). A
proposition, for example, can be certain or dubious, important or
trivial; a proposal obligatory or tolerated, desired or feared,
etc. There are only a very limited number of classes of
attributes for propositions and proposals (compared say to those
for things, events, actions). Interestingly these do not include
playfulness or resistance, though they do include paradoxicality.
It would seem they do not include the meta-type stances. There
must however be a connection, and I am now planning to look into
it and already have a few untested ideas (thanks Bill!).
I would be very interested in anybody's suggestions about what
additional sorts of meta-relations among actions (framing and
framed) or stances-to-action are recognized in our own or other
cultures. So far we seem to have: as-play vs. as-real, and as-
resistance vs. as-commitment (Bill's 'pious', cf. 'authentic'
'sincere' or some unmarked stance of doing things 'monologically'
as if there were no meta-frame at all).
Both Bill's further comments seem useful. We do culturally
recognize some sort of notion of maintaining a stance or
orientation across different first-order activities. So there can
be a consistent stance of playfulness, or of piety, or of
resistance recognized across different sorts of doings. This is
the activity analogue of what I am currently studing for
language: how a consistent attitude is maintained across
different propositional contents toward which the attitude is
taken (in my on-going work on editorials and on scientific
articles). And the meta-type stances do offer us an additional
level of freedom in our activity, a recursion of that offered by
first-order semiosis itself. We can do, we can do-meaningfully,
we can imagine the meaning-for-that-doing, we can double (or
more) the meanings of a doing, and we can mark doings-meanings as
"play" "resistance" etc.
The meta-relation does thus offer a way out of the blindness of
being. To mark something as play is to create the possibility of
asking what the stance is that marks not-play, to turn simply
doing, into doing-with-[unmarked]-stance. We have often enough
around here puzzled about how our culture defines the 'real' (vs.
the imaginary). How about the puzzle of what it means to act as-
if our activity were _not play_? or _not resistance_? These
unmarked 'negatives' must also be active constructions, even if
in a sense their stances are invisible. To make them visible is
perhaps the heyoka-coyote-buddha function: to let us see the most
ordinary unselfconscious real, doing, meaning as a single way-of-
being defined by its contrasts to its Others, and not natural or
given at all. That can be 'known' (i.e. Done, Been) only from the
perspective of the meta-frame for all framing, beyond framing,
beyond action/inaction, being/not-being. JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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