Reading through the postings on znachenie and smysl (which I am using now
as loan-words in English, defined as the discussion has been trying to
define them), I was particulary taken with Harry Daniels making the
connection to Stanislavsky and 'understatement' -- which sounds to me like
another mistranslation that should have come out as something like 'subtext'.
But by whatever name, it emphasizes that the written text, the script here,
is only an opportunity for meaning-making, a set of written signs that we
know have many uses in many contexts, typical uses in similar contexts, and
which _suggest_ for us ways in which we might _produce_ a specific,
personal, local, felt meaning from the merely abstract meaning-potential
associated with the words.
For Stanislavsky, as for LSV it seems from some other postings, and
probably for many of us in an activity-centered perspective, the personal,
immediate, highly specific, local meaning -- the smysl -- comes when a word
is used as part of an activity, in an instance, unique in its specificity,
of doing, getting something done, feeling the way we feel in doing it,
involving our bodies at every level in the whole action, etc. I think
Bakhtin would also agree with this. And this is what "meaning" means for
me, and what I think it should mean in discourses about meaning.
It fits fairly well also with a Peircean stance, in my view, because for
Peirce it was neither the object (referent) nor the interpretant (mediator
between the signifier and the referent) that really got to meaning ... it
was the chain, the process we follow in going from a signifier via a whole
sequence of referents and interpretants, embedded in some activity, toward
some more and more context-specific final (or provisionally stable)
interpretation -- what the sign winds up meaning for us in relation to what
we're doing with it at the moment. A nicely dynamic view, like a good
dramatic scene.
So the problem here really centers on znachenie. On this putative more
social, abstract, system-determined 'meaning' of the sign. But that is not
really a 'meaning' at all. It is a meaning-potential, a distributional set
of probabilities for winding up as some meaning, or an abstract position in
an abstract system of 'meaning-contrasts' that distinguishes systematically
the meaning-potentials of one sign vs. another in the same system of signs
(e.g. two words). But a word in itself does not "have a meaning" in any
very useful sense, not in isolation and out of context (of other words and
of its situated use). Nor I think do signs in general, taken as what Peirce
would call 'representamina' , the signifiers, not even at the level of
abstraction of a lexeme or morpheme in linguistics. In a semantic system,
there are certain available slots: intersections of various dimensions of
possible meaning contrast that are systematic in the language in the sense
that the same sorts of contrasts occur all over the place (e.g. positive
vs. negative, extreme degree/moderate degree/small degree,
desirable/undesirable, animate/inanimate, etc.). Some slots are filled by
just one word, some by several words (synonyms), some by no one word (it
takes a phrase). The properties of a slot in the system, a system 'value'
in Saussure's terms, are about as close as one gets to a definite znachenie.
Unfortunately, lots of words can be used to fill several different slots
(polysemy). Even worse, for a notion of word-meaning (or generally of
sign-znachenie), the typical smysl-meanings that get made with a word are
very different depending on the other words it gets used with in phrases or
clauses, and depending on the situation/activity. So words acquire a sort
of fuzzy halo of meaning potential around each of their slot-meanings --
connotations. There is really no clear line between denotation and
connotation, as there is not between literal meanings and metaphoric
meanings. Logicians hate this and go to great lengths to put words (or
propositions) in one-to-one correspondence with 'meanings' (or referents)
in order to preserve a very outdated theory of truth. Literary critics can
tell you a lot more about how we make meaning with words.
So I am afraid that a contrast between smysl and znachenie may be a
contrast between what meaning is experientially and in the most
sophisticated theories I know vs. what meaning is supposed to be according
to a traditional and not very useful theory of the definite, abstract
meanings of words or signs. I don't know whether LSV subscribed to that
traditional theory, was trying to use the smysl-znachenie pair to pry his
way out of it, or was, like most people who study this subject, mainly
interested in how you get a smysl from a znak in the first (or last) place.
Mike's intuitions about the social or intersubjective construction of
znachenie meanings would make sense to me in two circumstances: a local one
where people are making co-smysl, jointly constructed activity-specific
meaning; and a system-scale one in which networks of communication and
induction into typical social practices insures that there is sufficient
similarity or articulation among the ways people make local meanings with
widely distributed signs, that it is possible to reason backwards from the
smysls-made to a more or less common meaning-potential for the signs. But
that kind of znachenie as a social-fact (or Ideal?) is either a very
abstract and information-poor gloss (a slot), or a very elaborate
statistical probability distribution across possible contexts (the best
that scientific linguistics can do), or a shared social myth of little
interpretive use (the basis of the traditional theory).
Peter's paper of course also bears on this issue. Readers of texts, for
Peter, are making wonderful smysls from the word signs of the texts. He is
foregrounding the fact that the smysl you make with a word is not made just
with the linguistic semiotic system, it is co-mediated (complex
interpretants ala Peirce) by the ways we involve the word,
Stanislavsky-style in our subtexts of action, using all the semiotic
resources at our disposal, bodily and externalized. We visualize, we
muscularize, we enact the smysl. It is not actually clear that the
znachenie (of any kind) plays a necessary role in this process, though that
has been the basic assumption of most modern theories (not Peirce's). I
think the znachenie (of any of the three kinds above) _can_ play a role (as
an intermediate interpretant), but does not have to, and typically does not
in fact do so in fluent production or interpretation, which are much more
automated processes. What really does happen is what everyone from Peirce
to Bakhtin to LSV to Stanislavsky wants to understand. Me, too.
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue May 23 2000 - 09:21:11 PDT