Open AccessFrom materiality to system
Author(s) -
Louis Armand
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
sign systems studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.17
H-Index - 7
eISSN - 1736-7409
pISSN - 1406-4243
DOI - 10.12697/sss.2006.34.1.05
Subject(s) - semiosis , materiality (auditing) , epistemology , contemporary philosophy , dialectic , philosophy , sociology , semiotics , salient , argument (complex analysis) , aesthetics , computer science , biochemistry , chemistry , artificial intelligence
This paper seeks to address the relation of materiality to structure and phenomena of signification or semiosis. It examines the logical consequences of several major lines of argument concerning the status of semiosis with regards to the human or broadly “organic” life-world and to the “zero degree” of base materiality — from Peirce to Lotman and Sebeok — and questions the classificatory rationale that delimits semiosis to the exclusion of a general treatment of dynamic systems. Recent investigations into neurosemiotics have provided salient arguments for the need to treat semiosis as a characteristic of systems in general, and to establish a more transverse understanding of signifiability upon the basis of what makes dynamic structures, as such, possible.