Existential Semiotics

Eero Tarasti

Description

A fascinating series of essays seeking to define the new philosophical dimension of semiotics.

Existential semiotics involves an a priori state of signs and their fixation into objective entities. These essays define this new philosophical field.

Contents

Part One: Philosophical Reflections

On the Paths of Existential Semiotics
Signs and Transcendence
Endo-/Exogenic Signs, Fields, and Worlds
Understanding, Misunderstandings, and Self-Understanding
Signs of Anxiety; or the Problem of Semiotic Subject

Part Two: In the Forest of Symbols

From Aesthetics to Ethics
The "Structural" and "Existential" Styles in 20th Century Arts
On the Authenticity and Inauthenticity of Art

Part Three: The Social and Cultural Field of Signs

On Post-colonial Semiosis
Semiotics of Landscapes
Poetics of Place
Walt Disney and Americanness
"...and you find the right one"
Senses, Values—and Media

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie du langage
• Literary Criticism
• PHILOSOPHY
• Linguistics
• Philosophy of language
• Literary theory
• Theory
• Semiotics
• Language
• Langage

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 février 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253028532
• Langue: English

Extrait

Existential Semiotics
Advances in Semiotics EDITED BY THOMAS A. SEBEOK
Existential Semiotics
Eero Tarasti
Indiana University Press
BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS
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© 2000 by Eero Tarasti
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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tarasti, Eero. Existential semiotics / Eero Tarasti. p. cm. — (Advances in semiotics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-33722-4 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-253-21373-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Semiotics—Philosophy. I. Title. II. Series. P99.T29 2000 401´.41—dc21 00-026810 1 2 3 4 5  05 04 03 02 01 00
CONTENTS
PREFACE     As an Introduction
Part One    Philosophical Reflections
  1. On the Paths of Existential Semiotics
  2. Signs and Transcendence
  3. Endo-/Exogenic Signs, Fields, and Worlds
  4. Understanding, Misunderstanding, and Self-Understanding
  5. Signs of Anxiety; or, The Problem of the Semiotic Subject
Part Two    In the Forest of Symbols
  6. From Aesthetics to Ethics: Semiotic Observations on the Moral Aspects of Arts, Especially Music
  7. The “Structural” and “Existential” Styles in Twentieth-Century Arts
  8. On the Authenticity and Inauthenticity of Art
Part Three    The Social and Cultural Field of Signs
  9. On Post-colonial Semiosis
10. Semiotics of Landscapes
11. Poetics of Place (Particularly in Music)
12. Walt Disney and Americanness: An Existential-Semiotical Exercise
13. “…and you find the right one”: A Narratological Analysis of an Advertising Film
14. Senses, Values—and Media
INDEX
PREFACE
As an Introduction
It is certainly true that semiotics can no longer be what it was in the age of “classical semiotics,” that is, in the writings of Peirce and Saussure through Lévi-Strauss to Greimas, Barthes, Foucault, or the early Kristeva and Eco. Some semioticians have turned to “hard sciences” such as computer-assisted technological models and cognitive research, whereas others have become prophets of postmodernism or engaged with various social and gender issues. Some semioticians, such as Thomas A. Sebeok with his new writings on biosemiotics, belong to the timeless core of semiotics for every period. Among some European semioticians, of which I am one, the turn to phenomenology and hermeneutics has been obvious.
In these essays, I sketch a new philosophical basis for semiotic inquiry and try to test it using applications to various fields. I hope that music is not too foregrounded in these applications, in spite of my alter ego as a musicologist.
As to my new theory, I am not yet able to offer the reader any well-established, axiomatic system. I have been inspired by certain continental philosophers from Hegel to Kierkegaard and Heidegger to Sartre; therefore I call my new approach “existential semiotics.” However, this does not mean a return to an earlier phase. For instance, with respect to Hegel and Kierkegaard I am not primarily interested in their ideas related to romanticism, but rather in their methods of reasoning. I am occupied by processes, temporality, signs in flux, and particularly in the states before fixation into a sign, or what I call “pre-signs.”
By no means do I want to reject the findings of classical semiotics—they have to be preserved as an essential part of the semiotic heritage to the new millennium. But as is so often true in the life of sciences, they prove to be special cases, valid in certain limited areas, whereas the new research strategies may be proceeding along entirely new avenues. The strength of semiotics has always been its extraordinary flexibility and context sensitivity.
Only in this way will the science of signs also be the science of future.
Helsinki, November 15, 1999
PART ONE
Philosophical Reflections
1
On the Paths of Existential Semiotics
Very seldom do new theories and philosophies appear as complete systems that interpret texts in a consistent manner. In addition, some ideas resist a too systematic or too “scientific” expression. This has led many a scholar to make aphoristic, poetic, or novelistic utterances. The new doctrine, which I call “existential semiotics,” is precisely of this kind. Its fundamental theses start to take shape in my mind in an intuitive way, and as yet I can convey them only fragmentarily.
As a semiotician, I am faced with challenging tasks. Time passes—already decades ago, the first generation of semiotics gave place to the second generation of sign theory. Still, the classics of semiotics from Peirce to Greimas and Sebeok have not, of course, lost their pertinence and validity. Even the later works of Foucault, Barthes, and Kristeva can be considered a “second-generation semiotics,” not to mention Eco’s novels, Derrida’s deconstruction, cognitive science, Baudrillard, Bourdieu, and so on. It is common to this second generation that the foundation of classical semiotics has been pushed into the background; yet in spite of all, that foundation still exists, and the texts of these later thinkers cannot be understood without this connection. The avoidance of new theories in the proper sense characterizes all of these second-generation semioticians. Their texts reflect the conditionality of all permanent values, unbelief, the inner conflicts of postmodern man, particularly the dangers of anything “social,” “communal,” chaos instead of structures. After the glorious days of structuralism, no one has dared to create a new theory of semiotics. Joseph Margolis has spoken about universes of flux, where everything is in motion. Nothing is stable, schematic, or fixed. The rigid models of classical semiotics are not suitable for analyzing such a universe. Is it possible to model the dynamically changing, temporal, flowing world?
Is it possible that by enriching first-generation semiotics, by adding there, perhaps, the Heideggerian “timefilter,” we might construct a new approach? Or shall we completely reject the old sign theories and rebuild them on a radically new basis? If the answer to the last question is “yes,” then why should we continue speak of “semiotics” at all? There are, naturally, schools that persist in believing that things are this or that because Peirce or Greimas said so, and not because things are so. Every now and then, the semiotician wandering around the world meets such sectarians who, like the Amish people in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, strive to maintain their doctrines untouched. I am afraid they have become the “arteriosclerosis” of semiotic circulation. Semiotics has to be renewed if it wants to preserve its position on the vanguard of thought.
The next question on the way to a new semiotics concerns how to portray, in an intellectually satisfactory way, certain intuitive, visionary aspects, to which the instinct may guide a scholar. One should not despise intuition; but the problem is, how can it be rendered into a communicable model, into a metalanguage? In this vein, one encounters entities such as the “existentials” of Heidegger or the “synthetic a priori judgments” of Kant. Consequently, I am encouraged to introduce some theses of my own:
1. Reality consists of “energy fields,” in which prevail particular laws that can be described or conceptualized only with great difficulty. In such a field, similar situations or events effectually pull each other together. Correspondingly, energetically negative or positive events are connected and strengthen each other: Disasters call forth more disasters, successes bring about more successes. As it says in the Bible, the one who has much will be given more; whereas the one who has little, even that will be taken away. If something is in our minds, it soon happens. Everything that is immanent in the human mind strives for manifestation; the hidden or unconscious must be revealed—it must rise to the “surface” of reality.
Stop. Have we now sunk to the level of the psychology or telepathy of some weekly magazines? Good heavens, no!—since our modest endeavor is still strictly “scientific.” Insofar as the aforementioned intuitive knowledge can be made explicit, one really would obtain a method for explaining the past as well as forecasting the future. This would involve an effort to render the time-bound "existential” intuition into something objective. We would resolve the dilemma of Karl Jaspers: “What is valid for all the times, is objective, whereas what is transitory in a moment, but still eternal, is existential.”
In fact, however, one recognizes the above-mentioned connections of events only if he or she is there , not by external observation. Anthropologists realized this long ago, when they invented approaches such as “participating observation” or “observation making someone participate.” The observer can perceive correctly the human, semiotic field of energy only by participating in it, while at the same time being aware that he/she also influences it. Georg Henrik von Wright lectured years ago about “the argument of a brain surgeon,” a delusion that the objective description of the neural network would free us from interpretation and lead to universally valid knowledge about human action. Th