Stanton wrote
>.... 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....
>... 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.
It seems intuitively obvious that certain non-conscious events
are indexicalized already in our practices (events in which
culture is implicated though not yet recognized as such).
But how can we say that off-pitch & out-of-phase "acoustical
discrepancies" in a piece of music are indexicalized or
iconically _signaled_?
And yet, if the "infra-semiotic subtleties" are
>critical to the acquisition of both performance and 'receptive'
>habitus, and thus to the otherwise 'ineffable' qualities that
>define someone as a member of a community through their way of
>participating in particular activities (unconscious style,
>body hexis, etc.)" (from Jay's message)
then they are differences that DO make a difference.... They are
already implicated in what is meaningful to us.
Meaning sort of fizzles when I try to imagine differences that
don't make a difference but do,
although I assume there are differences that don't
make a difference but that might.
That's all the meaning I can muster.
- Judy
P.S., with all due respect to the arguments associated with Bakhtin,
I feel obliged to point out that the quote Stanton attributed to
me was authored by Jay.
Judy Diamondstone
diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu
Rutgers University
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