I suppose I'd answer the query about what difference would it
make if they were shown to be material by saying that for me the
question is not whether they are or not (non-positivist that I
am), but the use of seeing them as. Gordon and others have amply
noted how one can talk about discourse as material, from its
trace on the oscilloscope or the magnetic recording medium, to
the material bodies that produce it and use it differently
according to the habitus of those bodies (accents, dialects,
class- and gender- specific semantic styles, etc.).
Bored as I am with making a Thing of whatever English can treat
as a noun, I find it more exciting to reconstrue all as Process,
which is close enough to Activity for present purposes. Meanings
are made in and by material systems, or I might say that the
interdependent doings that constitute material systems (ecosocial
systems particularly) critically include doings that make
meaning, and doings that are construed as meaningful by other
such processes. Meaning-making is always part of activity more
broadly defined, always material, and this does make quite a
difference to the view we take of many sorts of phenomena. My
recent plenary paper for an interdisciplinary semiotics
conference in Odense, Denmark ("Matter and Meaning") tried to
identify some of these differences, and I'm happy to make it
available (and will probably publish at least an edited version
this year or next).
Without giving the arguments, I conclude there that the
materiality of meaning-making implies, for instance, that all
meaning-making is polysemiotic: you can't ever make meaning with
the resources of just one analytically separable semiotic system,
such as language, alone. So all semiotics is multimedia semiotics
and language cannot be adequately characterized autonomously
insofar as it is a social (and not just a formalizable)
phenomenon. The role of visualization in interpreting verbal text
cannot be ignored. The role of semantic construal in the use of
pictorial, or actional, representation cannot be neglected.
Another cluster of consequences: the dynamical processes by which
the material and semiotic-discursive aspects of ecosocial systems
change (as well as are maintained) are intimately interdepent.
You can't understand language change apart from social-cultural
change, or vice versa. Not only is the acquisition of activity
forms semiotically mediated, but the forms of semiotic mediation
depend on the activities in which they are deployed. Materiality
implies not only 'leakage' from one semiotic mode to another, but
'slippage' between what a material sign or activity does mean and
what it could mean, because it can always mean more through the
material interaction-valences it can have beyond the semiotic-
valeurs it currently does have (or can be construed as having).
You cannot speak a phoneme, you have to speak a 'phone' a
physical sound. In order to activate the distinctive features of
the phonology you must always utter a sound that has other, non-
distinctive (even not heard) acoustic features, which could
become semiotically significant because they are always
potentially materially significant. (Sound is just an easy
example, the principle holds generally for the materiality of
semiosis.)
Matter is not the paradigm of what is material. Material
processes, doings and happenings, are the more general case of
materiality as it is understood in the natural sciences. A
phenomenon (genre, theory, social values) does not have to make
sense as a material _object_ in order to be a phenomenon in the
material order of our culture's discourses. Writing-a-genre is a
process phenomenon, just as washing-the-dishes is. It is linked
with other such processes to form the systemhood of our social-
material being-with-the-world. Its materiality matters every bit
as much as its meaningfulness.
A 'theory' is the noun-way of talking about, say, 'theorizing-
ala-Vygotsky' or 'using-a-theory' as a process. English and many
other indo-european languages get around their cumbersome and
limited resources for verb-qualification by exploiting their
elaborate resources for noun qualification. They export the
specificity of the Process to the noun and leave the verb as a
generalized grammatical hook for the syntax: make-sense, make-
meaning, do-dishes, take-exams, write-dissertations, play-tennis,
fly-planes, do-calculations, make-measurements, etc. Sometimes
there are single-word verb synonyms, sometimes not. Try
rearticulating the semantics of pseudo-Things (which seem things
because we have nouns for them, rather than vice versa) such as
'theory' or 'mind' to see them more usefully as processes. Or use
them grammatically as verbs and hear how they feel (tack an '-
ing' on if you have trouble doing this). Non-native speakers of
English can try this in their first languages; speakers of non-IE
languages may discover other tricks.
Hug your abstract nouns until they dance with you.
JAY.
-------------------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU