Towards a semiotic theory of historico-cultural cycles: The semiotic contours of Spengler's “prime symbols”
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Steven Bonta
Steven Bonta (b. 1964) is a language instructor at Penn State University 〈scb17@psu.edu〉. His research interests include South Asian languages (Tamil, Sinhala, Pali), writing systems, and linguistics, and semiotics. His publications include “Negombo fishermen's Tamil (NFT): A Sinhala-influenced dialect from a bilingual Sri Lankan community” (2008); “Colloquial Sinhala influence on Negombo fishermen's Tamil: A case of Indo-Aryan-influenced contact-induced change in a Dravidian dialect” (2010); “Identifiying functional homology and markedness relationships in the Harappan Signary: Towards a methodology for classifying Harappan signs” (2011); and “Bilingualism among the Tamil-speaking Roman Catholic Karavas and Chettis of Negombo” (2012).
Abstract
Oswald Spengler's theory of historico-cultural cycles is based on the notion of the “prime symbol,” an abstract metaphor for space/extension manifested in the art, science, and religion of a given culture. This paper is a preliminary reconciliation of the Spenglerian semiotic anatomy of culture writ large with a few of the semiotic insights of Peirce. I propose that the developmental cycle of a given culture does not contain the Spenglerian Prime Symbol (Spengler's view) but is instead contained and conditioned by it. Inasmuch as a Culture in the aggregate is also a Symbol in the full Peircean sense of the word, I also propose that the development of each Culture is an effort of the Culture-Symbol to represent itself in terms of its Prime Symbol.
About the author
Steven Bonta (b. 1964) is a language instructor at Penn State University 〈scb17@psu.edu〉. His research interests include South Asian languages (Tamil, Sinhala, Pali), writing systems, and linguistics, and semiotics. His publications include “Negombo fishermen's Tamil (NFT): A Sinhala-influenced dialect from a bilingual Sri Lankan community” (2008); “Colloquial Sinhala influence on Negombo fishermen's Tamil: A case of Indo-Aryan-influenced contact-induced change in a Dravidian dialect” (2010); “Identifiying functional homology and markedness relationships in the Harappan Signary: Towards a methodology for classifying Harappan signs” (2011); and “Bilingualism among the Tamil-speaking Roman Catholic Karavas and Chettis of Negombo” (2012).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Munich/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Semiotic degeneracy of social life: Prolegomenon to a human science of semiosis
- Heterosemiosis: Mixing sign systems in graphic narrative texts
- Do speakers really unconsciously and imagistically gesture about what is important when they are telling a story?
- On the institutional aspect of institutionalized and institutionalizing semiotics
- At the intersection of text and talk: On the reproduction and transformation of language in the multi-lingual evaluation of multi-lingual texts
- Cave paintings of the Early Stone Age: The early writings of modern man
- Revisiting legal terms: A semiotic perspective
- Two child narrators: Defamiliarization, empathy, and reader-response in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue's Room
- The development of an idea in a context of rejection
- Stopovers at logic and cybernetics: Georg Klaus's road to semiotics
- The sign in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit
- The semiotic logic of signification of conspiracy theories
- Biopolitics, surveillance, and the subject of ADHD
- Signification in atonal, amotivic music? Extending the properties of actoriality in Ligeti's second string quartet
- Translation, materiality, intersemioticity: Excursions in experimental literature
- Teleological historical narrative as a strategy for constructing political antagonism: The example of the narrative of Estonia's regaining of independence
- Testing the limits of oral narration
- How to do things with websites: Reconsidering Austin's perlocutionary act in online communication
- Fashionable yet strategic similarities: Diego Velázquez's creative consciousness seen through Saussurean-Hegelian composite approach
- Piaget's system of spatial logic: The semiosis of index
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- Towards a semiotic theory of historico-cultural cycles: The semiotic contours of Spengler's “prime symbols”
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- A semiotic model of visual change
- Semiotics, theatre, and the body: The performative disjunctures between theory and praxis
- On Peirce's diagrammatic models for ten classes of signs
- Phytosemiotics revisited: Botanical behavior and sign transduction
- Review article
- The dialogic lacuna in Fenves's Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time
