It is perhaps worth distinguishing 'logocentric bias' (taking it
for granted that true meaning is only mediated through language)
from the assumption that language, once ontogenetically developed
to some threshold level, pervades and combines with our uses of
other semiotic resources (such as imaging, drawing, humming,
drumming, calculating, etc.) to some degree, which may vary with
individuals and contexts.
As I have begun to examine these issues in my own recent work on
multimedia semiotics, I have come generally to the conclusion
that our analytic separations of pure, isolated, idealized
semiotic resource systems are academic conveniences at best. At
worst they are artificial distortions of the wholeness of our
meaning-making practices, in which we invariably must deploy
material signs, which can and usually are interpretable in
relation to the systematics of more than one semiotic code.
Developmentally, language is not, except arbitrarily, readily
distinguishable in communicative and meaning-making acts from
vocal gestures which are not linguistically coded, or other motor
gestures which are often physically associated (and perhaps
physiologically linked) with the vocal gestures, then with the
material traces of these gestures (proto-drawings), and in time a
sort of proto-writing which does not yet fully distinguish
writing from the rest of drawing.
So it should not be surprising that individuals and cultures
differ in the ways in which language mixes with other semiotic
media, and the degrees to which one or the other predominates in
particular activities. Since our own culture's (European, middle-
class, intellectual) logocentric bias is fairly obvious
historically, there is some value in trying to examine cases in
which language plays a minimal role, if only to establish the
specific characteristics of other semiotics. But I believe this
can still lead to a mirror-image of the same logocentrism, in
which efforts to distinguish other semiotics from language still
reinforce the illusion that language as such is a separable and
observable human phenomenon, which I am convinced it is not. We
never make meaning with language (or any other idealized semiotic
code) alone; we only make meaning by material practices, which
cannot be encompassed by any single such code, but always
overflow them. While it is useful to ask what 'language' or some
other 'code' contributes to the meaning of an act, it is also,
and perhaps more important, to understand how these codes combine
and mutually modulate one another, since this is the normal case.
Just as I would argue that language never functions alone, I
would also expect that language is neverly entirely absent or
irrelvant to how we make meanings with other resources (except
perhaps for those individuals who never developed a linguistic
capacity -- and I would count manual languages of the deaf as
still linguistic systems, or their near-equivalent).
Perhaps we sometimes forget that linguistic signs are a
specialization of fine motor gestures: they are intricate
patterns of movement of tongue, lips, glottis, and the rest of
the articulatory apparatus. They are not absolutely different in
developmental and physiological origin from manual sign
languages, or from the tracing of characters in the palm or the
air (though this is a tertiary formation on top of language and
writing). The division of 'tools' as material artifacts from
signs is not so great as our class (more than our cultural)
prejudices incline us to believe. The hand and the tongue are
among our first tools, and the integration of language, like that
of external tool use, with the motor coordinations of the rest of
our bodily activity in a specific action situation are, I
believe, fundamental to understanding not just the special
mediations of those with impairments, but the normal functioning
of semiotic mediation. Perhaps far more of the 'mind' is in the
hand and the tongue than is usually credited. JAY.
---------------------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU