Hi Jay and everybody--
Jay, I really like your points. I'd like to make one clarification. I think
I created some confusion. Ilyenkov's notion of Ideal is much bigger than
smysl and includes znachenie as well (so there is Ideal as smysl and Ideal
as znachenie and they are not in opposition to each other). According to
Ilyenkov, Ideal also includes ideology (e.g., money fetishism like, "Money
make money"). Ilyenkov was a philosopher and not a psychologist and his
concepts were philosophical. Ideal includes any psychological, social,
cultural, and historical aspect of phenomena that generated by
socio-historico-cultural activities and practices.
Jay wrote,
> This seems to be a way of getting the social Ideal, the more
> objective social-fact sort of meaning-potential or meaning-typicality of
> the znachenie-meaning linked into the more personal
> smysl-meaning, so that
> the latter does not appear as totally idiosyncratic and arbitrary. This
> seems very reasonable to me. We make meaning, but we do not make
> it just as
> we please. What we mean on any given occasion may be unique, but
> the way we
> make it deploys words and other signs that have a degree of
> conventionalization in their comprehensible uses. The more we
> deviate from
> their typical uses (and we can do this), the more local social
> work we have
> to do to get our innovations understood. Whether cliche or coinage, the
> social is never absent from meaningful communication. Even in the most
> idiosyncratic smysl, the meaning arises in part from our participation in
> socially recognizable activities (eating) and our use of not totally
> unexpected signs ('bread').
Soviet culturologist Losev argued that separation on personal and social is
a socio-historico-cultural construct that appeared in some moment of history
of societies (namely when cities and property appeared). I wonder how the
idea of personal as totally idiosyncratic and arbitrary historically has
developed (I mean what circumstances and social relations pushed for this
concept).
What do you think?
Eugene
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jay Lemke [mailto:jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2000 12:00 AM
> To: XMCA LISTGROUP
> Subject: RE: sense and meaning
>
>
> I found the recent comments by both Helen and Eugene insightful
> follow-ups
> in this discussion.
>
> Helen raises a number of points, but I think they mainly all turn around
> one key issue: how do the more stable structural relations, whether of
> genre conventions or semantic contrast systems (slots), arise from the
> meaning-making activity of speech in context?
>
> Eugene, in elaborating and correcting my guess about Ilyenkov's Ideal and
> znachenie, points to the related core issue of how we get from a znak
> (sign, signifier) to a smysl (locally specific meaning), portraying
> Ilyenkov's view as a sort of transaction between the 'collective
> fossil' of
> znachenie-meaning and the 'hungry for bread' smysl-meaning of the 'bread'
> znak/word. This seems to be a way of getting the social Ideal, the more
> objective social-fact sort of meaning-potential or meaning-typicality of
> the znachenie-meaning linked into the more personal
> smysl-meaning, so that
> the latter does not appear as totally idiosyncratic and arbitrary. This
> seems very reasonable to me. We make meaning, but we do not make
> it just as
> we please. What we mean on any given occasion may be unique, but
> the way we
> make it deploys words and other signs that have a degree of
> conventionalization in their comprehensible uses. The more we
> deviate from
> their typical uses (and we can do this), the more local social
> work we have
> to do to get our innovations understood. Whether cliche or coinage, the
> social is never absent from meaningful communication. Even in the most
> idiosyncratic smysl, the meaning arises in part from our participation in
> socially recognizable activities (eating) and our use of not totally
> unexpected signs ('bread').
>
> But what Helen is wondering about is where the ' collective fossils' come
> from? Halliday uses a different metaphor to get at this issue: the
> structured systems, the znachenie slot-meanings, are like the CLIMATE,
> while smysl meaning-making is like the WEATHER. This is a less absolute
> distinction than Langue vs. Parole; it invokes more a matter of
> degree, of
> perspective, of time-scale. The linguistic phenomena are the
> same, whether
> we attend to similarities in meanings-made across speakers, settings,
> activities, and time (toward Climate, system, znachenie), or whether we
> focus on distinctiveness of meanings made in particular events (today's
> smysl or weather). On the short timescale what changes is
> who's-meaning-what-where; on the long timescale (historical) what's
> changing is the slot-system itself. (Maybe on the VERY long timescale,
> what's changing is the evolutionary bioprogram for possible languages,
> though I attribute less meaning-power to this than to the other
> enablers of
> talk).
>
> There are a lot of time-scales and social-scales between the smysl-event
> and the evolution of the capacity to do semiosis with language. Seen from
> the event-scale, the slowly changing patterns of semantic options and
> probabilities in a speech community may seem static, but I don't
> believe in
> timeless a priori structuralism. Panta rhei ... everything
> changes ... all
> phenomena happen on one or more characteristic time-scales. Here, too,
> there is a negotiation or transaction: the kinds of novelties in language
> use patterns that catch on over a historical timescale (decades, say) are
> partly constrained by more slowly changing (quasi-static) patterns within
> which the innovations either fit comfortably or do not. A social class
> accent innovation (fashion) that runs afoul of basic phonological
> contrasts
> in the language used to distinguish many common words with similar vowels
> creates more problems of ambiguity than the profit of fashionability
> repays. Some other innovation with lower system cost is more likely to
> catch on and spread and get used over a larger area and for a longer time.
>
> Genres change on a fairly observable historical timescale. Chuck Bazerman
> has worked a lot on this. Some work by Latour and colleagues on science
> genres and technological innovations is similar. There is a lot of
> intertextuality involved. We are constantly meaning-now in
> relation to what
> we and others have meant on other occasions. This is the basis of
> Bakhtin's
> notions about how we appropriate 'authoritative' or simply the Words of
> Others to make our own meanings. We do not usually appropriate their
> smysl-meanings. We are not usually enacting that similar a take on some
> event. Rather we accumulate experience with the FORMS people have used to
> make their smysl-meanings, and the CONTEXTS in which they have
> done so, and
> we (cf. Peter's view of reading, which is also mine) create our own
> smysl-meanings in response to the texts as signs, the contexts we deem
> relevant, and our personal take on it all. We accumulate moreover
> a certain
> set of dispositions for using the forms (znak-signs) in various
> contexts to
> typically make various kinds of meanings, we formulate a sense of how our
> usage patterns are like those we infer for other people's usage, and this
> becomes our personal sense of the znachenie of the word. Writ
> large, across
> the many scales of meaning in language (word, phrase, clause,
> bits of text,
> longer stretches, organizational units, genres, etc.), we gain a sense,
> often a tacit one, of the generic or social common-denominator meanings,
> the znachenie, of our language resources at each level. We experience a
> cross-section of the community's usage patterns, including our own, and
> this 'sampling in the large' forms the basis for our sense of znachenie,
> for the slots.
>
> Linguists, especially historically minded ones, or empirically oriented
> ones, sample across large 'corpora' of texts (and today of
> transcribed oral
> texts) for large communities, and across time and historical eras (harder
> to do). Contemporary 'structuralism' involves both a principle of
> identifying systems of interrelated categorial contrasts
> (semantic systems)
> and an approximation (the systems are only approximately static
> in time, on
> some timescale). We do just what the ordinary speaker does, but
> on a bigger
> scale. And we have a meta-language so we can cooperate with each other in
> testing our, now explicit rather than tacit, hypotheses about what the
> typical patterns are, their distribution over contexts,
> probabilities, etc.
>
> When any of us come as speakers or writers to write the next
> word, the next
> sentence, in a partially completed text-in-the-making, we are aware,
> tacitly or explicitly, by disposition or in meta-language, of the
> znachenie
> options that seem to change relatively slowly on the timescale of
> utterances or even text authorship, and we find that, GIVEN what we have
> already started to say, and the smysl-activity we are meaning (as a verb)
> in, that some possible next choices of word/sign fit with social patterns
> (idiom, usage, style, genre) that now serve as resources as well as
> constraints for making a meaning for ourselves (more resource, less
> constraint, since we have the nonlinguistic sources of the smysl
> at work in
> us too) and for others (still resource, but more constrained as we
> negotiate between smysl and znachenie in search of possible approximate
> communicability). It is always easier to be understood if you only say
> what's typically said.
>
> So this is a bit of how I understand the dynamic between the social scale
> of znachenie-meaning and the event scale of smysl-meaning,
> mediated by all
> the doings, accumulatings of dispositions and articulatings of
> patterns, on
> the many scales in between.
>
> 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>
> ---------------------------
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