Having been distracted by the normalities of life, and a conference talk in
Atlanta, I'm sorry I've not been responding in a more timely way ... but
the timescales of listlife are elastic, I hope .....
I take it from a quick perusal that there was some confusion about Alfred's
query on figure-ground, confusing it with grounded theory, perhaps? In any
case, I see figure-ground as a rather basic dualistic dichotomy ...
essentially it adds to a reasonable presumption that contrast is a way of
visually marking salience (it is, at least in my culture) the less
reasonable assumption that identity itself (figure) is only possible
against some background of not-self. I think that immunology has gotten
beyond this view, but I wish I knew more about the current models ...
Edelman has some interesting versions of these. Perhaps my own critique
would be that identity or self or phenomenal realia (or constructiva, take
your pick) do not appear against a single ground, but against multiple
grounds ... in fact the persistence of the real is in large part
constructed by re-constrast against new grounds ... not-this, not-that,
not-the-next, etc. But I am not so much of a Buddhist as to imagine that
all reality is negative, is not-that. It is also integrative, is also
this-with-that. (BTW, "negative" in this context simply means formal
negation, not undesirability). The "negative dialectic" can be quite
useful, but not if it locks us into single contrasts. There is systemness
in meaning and in phenomenality, there is necessary multiplicity of
contrast and combination ... and with that comes a certain
freedom-in-fuzziness ... we can slip and slide around ... we can
re-configure and re-imagine ... we can blur categorial boundaries because
they have to be drawn in some many more dimensions of difference than we
can handle at once cognitively (or linguistically) that we can somewhat
pick-and-choose among our simplifications and slide from one to another by
way of the higher dimensions they share. Figure-ground is for people who
want reality to be neat and meaning determinate. We lovers of chaos like a
little smoke with our mirrors .....
Alfred also raises some interesting questions about interactionalism and
what I today think of as internalism ... i.e. trying to frame accounts of
the-world-we-see that honestly reflect our place inside that world, as part
of it, rather than vainly trying to replace God with a Science that claims
to know the world as if from outside of it.
This issue does matter to semiotics in a number of ways. If we give
accounts of the evaluative or relational dimensions of
utterances-in-dialogues, we have to do so in ways that make clear that our
accounts come from inside one particular culture that frames the possible
meaningful aspects of relationships and evaluations in particular ways. If
we give accounts of dialogues in which we were not original participants,
then we have to take into account that as analysts we have become secondary
participants in those dialogues ... making meaning with and from them in
ways very much like the ways the original participants did (we hope). This
means, for example, that there is a distortion in accounts of
meaning-in-dialogue if we analyze the dialogue synoptically, as if what
came to be said could have meant the same thing as it was being said (i.e.
dynamically) as it might have meant after it was said. I believe insight
into realtime discourse requires a juxtaposition of both synoptic and
dynamic perspectives, but the latter is, for the analyst, as much of an
artificial construction as the former would be for the original
participants. In either case, it matters that we are inside the
meaning-world of what we study in one sense, and outside it, or at least
alongside it, in another.
Functional semantics CAN be trivialized by a lack of humility about
meaning, process, and insiderness. It can be made to seem as if its
categories were universal, external to any real speech community, and
independent of the sense in which the analyst both is and is not inside the
textworld being analyzed. That is science scorning wisdom, which becomes
the dupe of its own pretensions, the victim of illusions born of the will
to power. But the wise use of these tools can resist the originary
conditions of their discourse traditions. The wisdom is not, for the most
part, in the tools themselves. It has to be supplied by thoughtfulness of
the analyst. As always.
JAY.
PS. In the particular flavor of functional linguistics I appropriate for my
own work, there is a strong tradition that meanings are made, not given,
and that both the functional situation/context and the meaning-reality
which the (re-)presentational content of discourse signifies, are
themselves at least co-constituted by the semiotic process itself. I would
say that the semiotic processes and the other material processes in a
community form a single ecosocial system, indissociably.
At 05:10 PM 11/12/2002 +0100, you wrote:
>Dear XMCA members,
>
>I just want to tell you how grateful I am receiving so many and so
>interesting responses and questions to my SemEco presentations and
>elucidations. I want to spend as much time as I can to the growing
>text of my SemEco compendium. Yet there is an excellent symbiosis and
>mutual instigation between the book and XMCA discussion which I
>really appreciate. So I hope to steadily present further material in
>suitable portions. My excuses to all who find some of my posts too
>long and too many.
>
>The second point pertains to my remark on the probable role of the
>figure-ground principle on the basic procedure of Western philosophy
>and science. Nobody has taken that. Have I not been clear enough? Or
>do you not think it is a worthwhile subject? I could understand if
>you feel it's a very hot potato. If it has its role in all of
>science, then the science cannot claim to operate independently of
>human perceivers and thinkers. No matter whether some human conceived
>apparatus is mediating from the object to the perceiver. Which, is
>indeed, what a couple of scientists suspected and had troubles
>integrating into their understanding of their science. One famous
>example is Wolfgang Pauli and the role of the experimenter have and
>following extra-scientific options in designing this or that
>experiment for clearing a certain theoretical question. I don't want
>to delay further going on in presenting chapters of SemEco, but this
>is really an important point.
>
>
>As to Jay's highly interesting exposition of functional
>semiotic/semantic views on the problem of appraisal etc. I shall
>respond soon. There is an ambivalence for me, however, which I would
>like to clear if possible in advance.
>
>Do I understand your exposee rightly, Jay, that what you denote as
>semiotic pertains to the relation of some complex and dynamic object
>range and its inquiry by the researcher and theoretician? For
>instance the basic evaluative dimensions your mention: how do you see
>that differentiation? Is it one of the field of inquiry; or is it one
>attained mainly by the ways of distinctions our semantic order
>suggests; or is it one of unavoidable cooperation, so to say,
>inquiring and the inquired? Obviously, its not a categorical system
>of distinctions but rather one of qualities that my coexist in any
>concrete circumstances; so it may have the character of a typology
>that allow to ascribe several if not all of the dimensions to any one
>item, perhaps in a kind of characteristic profile?
>
>Or am I completely wrong in that functional semantics is not a
>discourse with references outside the discourse, i.e. of the nature
>of a coordination of signifiers to something signified or a dyadic
>semiotic meaning designative dimensions to something that is to be
>described by them?
>
>Alfred
>--
>
>Alfred Lang, Psychology, Univ. Bern, Switzerland
>http://www.langpapers.net --- alfred.lang@psy.unibe.ch
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
---------------------------
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