Farewell to representation: text and society
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Gianfranco Marrone
Abstract
Cultures develop the criteria to construct and recognize their texts and pose them as normal, usual, ‘natural’. For us a book is a text; in the Middle Ages, for everyone a city was a text. But when it is necessary to critically inspect such a culture by analyzing its texts, it becomes necessary to understand those texts’ conditions of possibility and their functioning. So, from the semiotic point of view, the text is something that needs to be recognized and constructed at the same time; that is to say, invented according to the double meaning this word has for the ancient rhetoric (recovering) and for modern science (creating) (Marrone 2014). This is true for the semiotician who searches for the fundamentals of any possible social and cultural meaning but, before that, for any subject, individual or collective, looking after his own identity. On one side, the text is the starting point of any semiotic investigation, a model produced to examine and interpret a given cultural reality; on the other, such a cultural reality exists because it is textually formed. This is very briefly the thesis that I will try to demonstrate in this paper, from which it hands down a new role for the semiotic analysis of text: that of a new way of criticizing culture.
Abstract
Cultures develop the criteria to construct and recognize their texts and pose them as normal, usual, ‘natural’. For us a book is a text; in the Middle Ages, for everyone a city was a text. But when it is necessary to critically inspect such a culture by analyzing its texts, it becomes necessary to understand those texts’ conditions of possibility and their functioning. So, from the semiotic point of view, the text is something that needs to be recognized and constructed at the same time; that is to say, invented according to the double meaning this word has for the ancient rhetoric (recovering) and for modern science (creating) (Marrone 2014). This is true for the semiotician who searches for the fundamentals of any possible social and cultural meaning but, before that, for any subject, individual or collective, looking after his own identity. On one side, the text is the starting point of any semiotic investigation, a model produced to examine and interpret a given cultural reality; on the other, such a cultural reality exists because it is textually formed. This is very briefly the thesis that I will try to demonstrate in this paper, from which it hands down a new role for the semiotic analysis of text: that of a new way of criticizing culture.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter i
- Table of contents v
- Preface ix
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Section 1: Semiotics in the world and academia
- What the humanities are for – a semiotic perspective 3
- Semioethics as a vocation of semiotics. In the wake of Welby, Morris, Sebeok, Rossi- Landi 25
- “General semiotics” as the all-round interdisciplinary organizer – general semiotics (GS) vs. philosophical fundamentalism 45
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Section 2: Semiotics, experimental science and maths
- Semiotics as a metalanguage for the sciences 61
- Mastering phenomenological semiotics with Husserl and Peirce 83
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Section 3: Society, text and social semiotics
- Farewell to representation: text and society 105
- Social semiotics: Towards a sociologically grounded semiotics 121
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Section 4: Semiotics and media
- What relationship to time do the media promise us? 149
- Semiotics and interstitial mediatizations 169
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Section 5: Semiotics for moral questions
- Spaces of memory and trauma: a cultural semiotic perspective 185
- Media coverage of the voices of Colombia’s victims of dispossession 205
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Section 6: Questioning the logic of semiotics
- Sense beyond communication 225
- Semiotic paradoxes: Antinomies and ironies in a transmodern world 239
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Section 7: Manifestoes for semiotics
- Semiosis and human understanding 257
- Culture and transcendence – the concept of transcendence through the ages 293
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Section 8: Masters on past masters
- From Peirce’s pragmatic maxim to Wittgenstein’s language-games 327
- Semiotics as a critical discourse: Roland Barthes’ Mythologies 353
- Ricoeur, a disciple of Greimas? A case of paradoxical maïeutic 363
- Index 377
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter i
- Table of contents v
- Preface ix
-
Section 1: Semiotics in the world and academia
- What the humanities are for – a semiotic perspective 3
- Semioethics as a vocation of semiotics. In the wake of Welby, Morris, Sebeok, Rossi- Landi 25
- “General semiotics” as the all-round interdisciplinary organizer – general semiotics (GS) vs. philosophical fundamentalism 45
-
Section 2: Semiotics, experimental science and maths
- Semiotics as a metalanguage for the sciences 61
- Mastering phenomenological semiotics with Husserl and Peirce 83
-
Section 3: Society, text and social semiotics
- Farewell to representation: text and society 105
- Social semiotics: Towards a sociologically grounded semiotics 121
-
Section 4: Semiotics and media
- What relationship to time do the media promise us? 149
- Semiotics and interstitial mediatizations 169
-
Section 5: Semiotics for moral questions
- Spaces of memory and trauma: a cultural semiotic perspective 185
- Media coverage of the voices of Colombia’s victims of dispossession 205
-
Section 6: Questioning the logic of semiotics
- Sense beyond communication 225
- Semiotic paradoxes: Antinomies and ironies in a transmodern world 239
-
Section 7: Manifestoes for semiotics
- Semiosis and human understanding 257
- Culture and transcendence – the concept of transcendence through the ages 293
-
Section 8: Masters on past masters
- From Peirce’s pragmatic maxim to Wittgenstein’s language-games 327
- Semiotics as a critical discourse: Roland Barthes’ Mythologies 353
- Ricoeur, a disciple of Greimas? A case of paradoxical maïeutic 363
- Index 377
