I've been thinking about this issue for a long time now, and it
comes up here regularly I think in one guise or another.
An early source for my interest in this question was Polanyi's
classic _Tacit Knowledge_. The idea of the infrasemiotic that I
proposed here a while back is one of my newer takes on the
question, closely related to phenomenological critiques of
positive knowledge (Merleau-Ponty's is among the more readable
and cogent, I think). I've also been trying to get at what I call
the topological dimensions of meaning, as opposed to the
typological or categorial ones, those that deal with continuous
and unnameable, but sometimes measurable and mathematizable,
variation in experience. I have a very brief draft paper from an
analysis of the talk of a group of medical students that pertains
to this, and I will probably write something more in time. In
_Textual Politics_ the Postscript chapter delves into some of
these issues, and in fact the argument begins from Goedel's
theorems.
Since visual modes of representation can capture some of what is
missed in most verbal ones, I would imagine that deep thinkers
about visual meaning-making, like Rudolf Arnheim, have probably
had something to say on this, too, but I don't specifically
recall it.
Outside the dominant strains of European-and-Euro-American
cultures, there is a lot said about such matters, especially in
the Hindu-Buddhist traditions, of which perhaps the practices of
Zen are the most dramatic example.
JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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