Subjectivity and objectivity in the domain of POSSESSION
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Hansjakob Seiler
Abstract
POSSESSION embodies two correlative institutional principles, one called EGO-subjectivity, the other called WORLD-objectivity. EGO-subjectivity means an institution that is ideally represented by EGO. It gradually acquires and eventually possesses control over objects of the outside world. WORLD-objectivity means an institution ideally represented by objects. Its principle ensures warranty for possessive control. Its onset is at a point where control by EGO is strongest and tapers off where control is weaker. The dynamic emanating from the two institutional principles is thus converse: From EGO toward WORLD and from WORLD toward EGO.
This fundamental schema of POSSESSION underlies our three levels of analysis: one, the cognitive-conceptual, is above grammar but not outside language. We exemplify it by pointing out two correlative basic notions in legal thinking. The intermediate level of General Comparative Grammar features the typological range of variation corresponding to the invariant POSSESSION. The variation represented in the form of a continuum spans between a possessive relation inherent in relational nouns like ‘father’ and a relation established and warranted (EGO has x; x belongs to EGO: converses!). The ‘bottom’ level of individual languages exhibits evidence for the more abstract contentions on the levels above.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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- Semiotics of resistance: Being, memory, history — the counter-current of signs
- Political semiotics
- The habitual conception of action and social theory
- Sign, dialogue, and alterity
- Ten theses on perception in terms of work: A Rossi-Landian/Wittgensteinian point of view
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- Modernity and the articulation of the gender system: Order, conflict, and chaos
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- The socio-symbolic function of language
- Observations on the structure and function of communicative genres
- Multimodal genres and transmedia traversals: Social semiotics and the political economy of the sign
- The world according to Playmobil
- Language and globalization
- Semiotics as semioethics in the era of global communication
- Preface
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- Subjectivity out of irony
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- A theory of psychosomatic medicine: An attempt at an explanatory summary
- The subject and the indexicality of the photograph
- Blade Runner's blade runners
- ‘For crying out loud’: The repression of the child's subjectivity in ‘The House of Tiny Tearaways’
- Playing the system: Videogames/players/characters
- Subjects and reading strategies in hypermedia: The re-emergence of the author
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: What is sociosemiotics?
- Semiotics of resistance: Being, memory, history — the counter-current of signs
- Political semiotics
- The habitual conception of action and social theory
- Sign, dialogue, and alterity
- Ten theses on perception in terms of work: A Rossi-Landian/Wittgensteinian point of view
- The social semiotics of space: Metaphor, ideology, and political economy
- Modernity and the articulation of the gender system: Order, conflict, and chaos
- Collective remembering
- The socio-symbolic function of language
- Observations on the structure and function of communicative genres
- Multimodal genres and transmedia traversals: Social semiotics and the political economy of the sign
- The world according to Playmobil
- Language and globalization
- Semiotics as semioethics in the era of global communication
- Preface
- Exchange and subjectivity, commodity, and gift
- Subjectivity out of irony
- Subjectivity and objectivity in the domain of POSSESSION
- A theory of psychosomatic medicine: An attempt at an explanatory summary
- The subject and the indexicality of the photograph
- Blade Runner's blade runners
- ‘For crying out loud’: The repression of the child's subjectivity in ‘The House of Tiny Tearaways’
- Playing the system: Videogames/players/characters
- Subjects and reading strategies in hypermedia: The re-emergence of the author
