18 10 2017. Culture is symbolic. This is the topic for this class. I stated
all along my source, namely Ferdinand De Saussure and his “Course
in General Linguistics” (1916), then pragmatic semiotics as delimited in
the works of Umberto
Eco, and eventually Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
The aim of
the class was to clarify the meaning of this sentence by Max Weber that we
shall read next class reported by Clifford
Geertz: “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun”.
We analysed
what a SIGN is made of, that is its SIGNIFIER (significant in the original French, significante in Italian) and a SIGNIFIED (signifie, meaning,
significato).
We insisted
on the ARBITRARY link between the two parts (Language is not a NATURAL link towards
reality).
Then we
discussed about the REFERENTIAL THEORY
of the signified and the more useful THEORY
OF USE of the signified. According to the first, the meaning corresponds to
“the real thing” or the “mental image” we can formulate for that sign. But we
have seen this be too weak a theory to explain the most interesting part of
human communication, which is made of signs for which one can hardly detect a physical referent or a mental image. With a few examples we
have insisted that signs derive their meaning from the shared usage with other
people, among other signs. Their meaning is given by their contextualization among other signs, in what we can figure out as a
semantic web, a specific interconnection of signs. Meanings are
public, not the minds of people.
Signs are arbitrary not in the sense they are
totally random, but in the sense the connection between signifier and signified
is established by culture, i.e. it may transform from context to context.
In order to
exemplify this complex relation between sings and culture we watched this video on Ochobo, a Japanese aesthetic principle.
We ended
class noticing that the intersubjective
existence of Ochobo makes it quite different from the objective reality of stones and the totally subjective belief in fairies. Signs as cultural means of expression
are a tricky object of research and analysis. We have to move towards symbolic anthropology to collect the
tools and method that may help us develop a sound understanding of cultures as
webs of signs.
Q1 Identify and analyse an
ochobo-like thing of your knowledge. Focus on its being not related to “one
physical thing”, but the expression of cultural creativity in elaborating a
notion which has no concrete referent and whose meaning must be identified in
the usage of that sign.
