There are any number of ways of thinking about the non-signifying sign.
What Mike lays out in his remarks are the material components -- marks --
that "signs" must embody. But there are of course all kinds of invisible,
non-signifying marks: mood, affect, style, etc... Look at Roman Jakobson's
"Poetic function" in which he lays the various components of the
communicative event (meaning being only one component; consider phatic
discouse -- the 'ums' and 'ahs': they don't mean anything per se but they
are communicatively effective and affective. Look at Benveniste's essay on
the indexical -- "I," "here," "this"; none of these words have a meaning per
se: they have a function that only happens in the utterance).
And then there are non-signifying signs themselves -- signs that will never
have been signs at all. Merleau-Ponty, for instance, gives us the gesture
-- a communicative event that is at once signifier, signified, and
signifying, eg, when I say "dog," I don't point to the dog -- I invoke dog
-- not its essence but a continuous component: a metonym. For Merleau-Ponty,
then, there really aren't signs; there is no division between signifier and
signified. All there are are gestures, modes of configuring the world on
the fly, an entire metonymic rhetorics. (If you care, this was the subject
of my dissertation -- UC Berkeley, 98, rhetoric).
Austin, of course, gives us the performative as a mode of superseding
signification.
There are any number of critiques of the sign -- Ricoeur's Metaphore Vive
covers a lot of ground as he makes his way through dozens of theorists.
And then there's Deleuze, who gives us "sense" as distinct from meaning
(sense is the emergent manner in which diverse modies hang together.)
that's a start -- hope it helps,
Daniel Coffeen
http://www.joyfulcomplexity.com
*
*
Film-Philosophy Email Discussion Salon.
After hitting 'reply' please always delete the text of the message you are replying to.
To leave, send the message: leave film-philosophy to: [log in to unmask]
For help email: [log in to unmask], not the salon.
**
|