I meant to agree with both Jay and Judy that there often exists a level of
non-conscious patterns that nonetheless have important effects for our
identities and activities. As Judy says:
> It suggests, to me at least,
> that apprenticeship and socialization into a community of
> practice may depend in critical ways on differences that
> do _not_ make a difference semiotically, meaningfully, or
> consciously in our public frames of reference -- or at least
> those which explicitly 'count' for us -- but may make all
> the difference in the world to how we in fact establish our
> membership in a community.
>
Jay points out that these "pre-semiotic" patterns are often tied to
particular contexts, and thus defy accounts in terms of decontextualized
structure or competence. But I meant to urge a discussion of whether we
might need to distinguish between "semiotic," "meaningful," and
"conscious" in order to build an adequate account of this "pre-semiotic"
level.
Jim Martin had suggested that the "pre-semiotic" level might not be
"pre-semiotic." Or, perhaps better, that there must be some sort of
systematicity at this level for it to have definite effects on our
identities and activities. I proposed that this is in fact a crucial
question, because (as Jay pointed out) we are discovering more and more
that contingent, context-specific aspects of activities are crucial to
their meaning for participants.
So, then, I would agree that this level is "non-conscious." I thus agree
that it is not CONSCIOUSLY "meaningful," but I think it would be
inappropriate to restrict "meaning" to only conscious things.
Participants in activities often orient to (what I would call) meaningful
aspects without being aware of what they are doing. Goffman and the
conversation analysts have provided many examples.
Perhaps the most interesting question, though, is whether this level of
non-conscious but implicitly meaningful patterns -- which are constructed
in particular contexts -- can be analyzed as "semiotic" phenomena. If
this means a traditional structuralist type of analysis -- one that proposes
type-type relationships between signs and objects -- I would agree
with Jay that the answer is no (or only minimally). But semiotics also
involves indexical and iconic signalling, and it seems to me that these
are the right sorts of tools to study Jay's "pre-semiotic" level.
Stanton Wortham