I thank Judy Diamondstone for valiantly interpreting some of what
I tried to say in my difficult posting about Keil's
'participatory discrepancy' discoveries in jazz and folk music
performances and the deep issue of the 'infra-semiotic'. I
generally agree with her basic interpretation in response to Jim
Martin's and Stanton Wortham's original questions.
The infrasemiotic belongs in part to the relatively ineffable, or
at least to the very difficult to articulate. We are talking here
about the permeable boundary between the not-yet-semiotic and the
already-socially-meaningful. About the great reservoir of
continuous variability out of which cultures make segmentary,
categorial sense in some ways rather than others. About the
ground of the possibility of genuinely new meanings and new
activities coming into being in history, rather than there simply
being combinatorial reshufflings of already existing categories
and types.
I have been trying to find a useful discourse of the
infrasemiotic at least since the early 80s, and I have made only
a very little progress. But my intuition that this notion may
hold the key to solving most of the other puzzles that interest
me keeps me coming back to it. The discussion of dance
improvisation by a choreographer in the Postscript to _Textual
Politics_ (which dates from the early 80s), and the notions in
chapter 6 (ca 1992) on the intersection of the material and
semiotic aspects of social practices/ecological processes in
ecosocial change belong to this thread. So do my new and still
mostly unpublished ideas about the role of mathematics in
extending the mostly typological semantics of natural language
towards being able to make sense of the domain of more
continuously varying, 'topological' material phenomena, as in
much of the classical natural sciences.
Jim and Stanton both wondered how unstructured phenomena can have
effects that are meaningful. Here we have to read our notions of
'structured' backwards, and anti-positivistically. The structure
is never 'there' and given in the phenomena; it appears when we
choose to pay attention to some aspects of the phenomena, to
foreground them using our cultural categories. And not
surprisingly we have evolved cultural categories which reveal
useful 'structure' in the sorts of phenomena we have happened to
pay a lot of attention to. So the syntax of European classical
music, and its notation and categories of interest, are in
intimate reciprocal relationship with the phenomena of interest
in this music. But any oscilloscope will both show you how much
more is going on that we do not have categories to describe, and
show you how hard it is to build an oscilloscope that 'hears'
what the culturally trained human ear does. And this is even more
so for jazz or many non-Western musics, and in the case of the
phonology vs. the acoustic phonetics of spoken language. It is
undoubtedly true of the phenomena of natural science as well. A
critical (and not too well known) analysis of self-organization
phenomena in certain chemical and thermodynamic systems shows
that while it is quite true that orderliness is spontaneously
increasing -- if we choose to look at certain variables -- that
at the same time there are in principle many other variables in
terms of which the system is still becoming more disorderly
instead. But we are more _interested_ in the genesis of order --
i.e. order of the kinds we are culturally able to discern and
appreciate.
Our machines, and our organisms, fortunately, cannot be perfect
cultural filters. Their, and our, interactivity in the material
world participates in a myriad of relationships that have no
meaning in our (or perhaps to date any) human culture. These are
not formal relationships, but simply interactional dependencies,
and when viewed in terms of the limited set of categories
(variables) that we do have (time, duration, frequency, energy,
etc.) may seem random or may seem simply 'noise' (cf. Keil's PDs)
added to the 'signal' which our categories _do_ recognize as
meaningful (i.e. beat, melody, harmony). But because we
participate 'organically' in systems that are always doing more
than is meaningful in any cultural terms, we can 'feel' what we
cannot meaningfully perceive or know. And we can observe a trace
on an oscilloscope built to show what is meaningful, but that
shows also what is not, but is nonetheless in some important
sense 'there'. There is always more in any material interactivity
than any set of culturally meaningful categories can 'comprehend'
or 'exhaust'; something which overflows our cups. I take this to
be the most profound message of phenomenology for semiotics; one
that you can hear in Merleau-Ponty and Ortega y Gasset, in
Husserl (and perhaps in Heidegger), but that did not seem to make
it adequately into most of ethnomethodology (though it inspired
its effort to break from structuralist social theory).
In a parallel break, we get Bourdieu's notion of habitus,
deriving from the body _hexis_, the indescribable 'stance' and
style of body movement characteristic of a culture or community
of practice, and situated in his discourse of the 'participatory'
as dispositions-toward/in-activity, like those that make the
experienced athlete or dancer or instrumentalist (or scuba-diver
:) respond to even unexpected (improvisational) events in a way
that distinguishes them. Reponse tendencies built into the
organic body by repeated participations, bodily being-in-
situations, and which operate without semiotic mediation, or at
least in ways that go beyond semiotic mediation.
Yes, we can call this 'unconscious' meaning, but I have not found
that a really useful way of talking about it. The point is not to
assimilate it to meaning, but to find how to distinguish it as
something that acts like meaning, but is differently grounded and
capable of erupting into meaning, overflowing meaning, perhaps
becoming meaningful but not as yet being meaningful. What is
useful perhaps here is to take the notion of unconscious back to
its sources in Freud, where it is very much about what the body
feels but the conscious category system does not present. The
semioticization of the unconscious, both by Freud himself in the
_Traumdeutung_ and later by Lacan, while enormously useful, loses
the infrasemiotic insight that might have been.
Stanton also suggested that indexical and iconic meaning might be
closer to such matters than symbolic (Peircean) meaning. I think
this is probably true, for Peirce certainly struggled to talk
about the relation of the material to the semiotic in some of his
most difficult passages (on 'habit formation' in the evolution of
the material-semiotic universe), and sought to extend the notion
of semiosis beyond what humans do to what happens in complex,
evolving, self-organizing systems more generally. There is a
possible link here, to the iconic in the case of, say,
topological mathematically describable continuous variation,
which is one way to analyze the-more-in-the-noise; and to the
indexical as the meaning-equivalent that inheres in cause-effect
material-interactional interdependence (and _not_ in its more
common sense of the stylistic marker, though that's loosely
related).
For purposes of interest to many here, I think that Bourdieu
provides a good link to Keil's ethnographic hypothesis (a vast
leap, by the way, from the evidence for PD's) that ontogenetic
development of culturally characteristic ways of being/doing (and
apprenticeship into communities of practice generally) may depend
to a much greater extent than hitherto appreciated on the
infrasemiotic aspects of bodily interactivity, as opposed to the
(doubtless also important, but already acknowledged) more
explicit semiotic mediations in these interactions.
I have more notes on all this, but this has been much more than
enough. If interest continues, time then for more examples and
puzzles. JAY.
---------------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU