#structural linguistics

03/02/2022

Semiosis and Osmosis

In an ecological context, semiosis happens at the level of the Greimasian semiotic square. This is prior to any perception or understanding of communication in general, let alone between organisms. Life-forms can communicate with their environment and with one another, without any necessity or need for “understanding” the very concept of communication itself. What matters at this level is therefore whatever “works”, whatever performs its function at the material level in order for matter to get predisposed towards organ-ization.

For this kind of natural occurrence of semiosis, it doesn't matter much where the given terms are placed on the Greimasian “semiotic square” (pictured above), since any four terms, in an authentically “semiotic” relation to one another, will both imply and contradict one another simultaneously as structured signs, so long as their corresponding term is “contrary” because it is something different.

Additionally, the comparison between two signs (S1 → S2 and ~S1 → ~S2) is a “structuration” between their respective terms. This organic set of relations is not merely linguistic or even conceptual, but purely metaphysical, chemical, and scientific. In other words, the contrast between any authentically different things in the world is what creates their mutual, logical understandability. The universe can show any side of the understanding(s) involved in the process of osmosis, for instance, that resolves the tensions intrinsic to the heterogeneity of matter, a heterogeneity which the universe actually contains as existent within itself, and the relation of S to ~S is still the same as ~S to S. (Since they genuinely pertain to the nature of existence, furthermore, this semiotic relation between signs may also be called “existential”.) All this belongs to the order of what is properly called “metaphysical”.

Signification within Organ-ization as “Counter-Metaphysical”

Signification, on the other hand, may be considered “counter-metaphysical”. This is because the sign, denoted in the semiotic square as either S or ~S, is no longer equivalent to itself (within signification) as both value and other-value, as both object and other-object, terms interacting in an existential way that is totally neutral, wherein what is “understood” is purely indicative of what is simply and naturally there.

Rather, within signification, the understanding corresponds to an established organ-ization of matter wherein signals must be understood in a way that is economical, in a way that is phenomenological, towards a greater, organic unity of the posited whole. This “whole” is fundamentally illusory, but as such it “organ-izes” material communication into the categories of transmissions and exchanges.

Such organ-ized transmissions are “functional”, because they respond to a signal reflexively, and negate the understanding (on behalf of an organic “whole”) of a reason for transmitting or dispatching. And in turn, organ-ized exchanges are “purposive”, because they respond to a signal reflexively, and negate the understanding (on behalf of an organic “whole”) of a perception of exchanging, or the perception of being solicited, by a transmitted signal.

The “Signal of a Signal”? The Sign in Linguistics and Signification

Hence, in Saussurean linguistics (as I understand it), a “sign” is split in two by signification, into signifier and signified:

This kind of “sign” has lost both its natural and its metaphysical ambivalence. It is no longer the behavior of matter “understanding” the presence of other matter by a signalling reaction, but a signal signalling itself as such. The interactions between signals which can signal themselves qua signal to one another is the physical elaboration (within reality) necessary for the initialization of an organization towards the structuration (S and ~S) of any “organ-ism”.

In contrast to the vertical lines on either side of the semiotic square, which are both pointing upwards from the lower level to indicate “implication” (found in semiosis), in signification, the direction of the vertical line on the right side of the semiotic square has been reversed, now pointing from S2 to ~S1. Another way of putting it is that the semiotic square has been rotated 90 degrees clockwise, and the two terms on the bottom level have been inverted, or switched around. Furthermore, the difference between S1 and S2 has been neutralized into the signified, and correspondingly, the difference between ~S2 and ~S1 has been neutralized into the signifier.

Thus, S2 now points to ~S1 in a reversal of semiotic “implication” that makes natural semiosis no longer applicable to both signs (S and ~S) on the semiotic square. Rather, in signification, ~S now depends on S for its very substance as a potential sign that can signal itself to other signs, other signs that are also capable of signaling themselves in their capacity as signs, and now also in the form of signifiers.

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, this (Saussurean) structure of signification is denoted thus:

uppercase “S” over lowercase “s”, or signifier (in French, signifiant) over signified (in French, signifié). This reversal of the position of one term to the other from Saussure’s drawing (the ellipse divided in two resembling the semiotic square) into Lacan’s denotation, S over s, ratifies how the arrow of “implication” from ~S1 to S2 is reversed, because the signified must now be assimilated to the signifier in order to give the signifier the primacy it is due within the domain of signification proper.

In other words, if an arrow pointing up from the signifier to the signified is only one half of the semiotic square, it is because the signified, in addition to its respective meaning, must also have its originating signifier as its referent in order to be authentically signified. This “signified” therefore also corresponds to the structure of an object, because it is convertible, and figuratively speaking, “two-sided”.

The Origin of (so-called) “Evil”

It is no coincidence how this operation resembles some metaphysical or anti-natural structure of “evil”, since it forcefully abbreviates the moral world of matter, whether organic or inorganic, into a world of words which must submit to the developments of language and the rules of proper grammar. The intrinsic morality which belongs to metaphysical concepts in the natural world is thereby betrayed, turned upside-down, and becomes confusing (literally, “fused-together”) to all beings who must submit to the limits of communication through language.

This is because signification functions by implementing a seemingly backwards system of thought, based on trivial things such as “belief” and “expression”, in place of a system of communication based on simple transmissions and exchanges of matter, both organic and inorganic, between living organisms.

The Origin of Structure, and of Truth: Signification as Semiosis within Symbolization

A symbolization, according to Lacan's interpretation of Roman Jakobson in his fifth seminar Formations of the Unconscious, must have four terms. Since this relates to the Oedipal triangle later in the seminar, one might say of a symbolization: “you have to have four to have three”.

Does this mean of such a seemingly primal symbolization, as it relates to signification, that the three terms of the Oedipus complex (father, mother, child) are really four terms, somehow fused together into three by the apparently perverting mechanisms of signification itself?

One known symbolization, as it appears on the L-schema (pictured above), and which illustrates that “the unconscious [inconscient] is the discourse of the Other [Autre]”, is devoid of the vertical lines of the semiotic square which indicate “implication”.

Rather, the two signs, S → a’ (S) and A → a (~S), relate to one another via the imaginary relation between a’ and a, or the objet petit “a” and the ego (moi). This obstructs the unconscious relation between the Other (A) and the signifier (S) from being directly produced as language that is fully arbitrary (from one's own imagination), and illustrates how the signifier is actually imposed from without, where the Other is not, where it does not speak.

This is the symbolization which structures the emergence of signifiers, but only merely “structur-ates” signification in general.

The relation between S and a’ is thereby established in the form of a philosophical skepticism, in Immanuel Kant’s usage of the term. The Kantian “thing-in-itself” in this case, however, which is not what is signified by the signifier, but rather what escapes all nomination, is not the object of skepticism. The true object of this skepticism is the relation of the id (S) [in German, das Es] to the object a (a’) [in French, objet petit a], but which is a relation without substantiation if the signifier is not first discovered in “the cry”.

This does not mean, as skeptical, that it is a relation subjected to doubt, or somehow cast in a light of suspicion. Rather, it means that the structure of belief (in signification) originates from a previously established success at this form of communication and obtaining some form of satisfaction. This kind of success pertains to the respective dialectics of need and demand, and enter into a mammalian register of consideration when it comes to the organic subsistence of the terrified human child, who must rely on the untrustworthy mechanisms of love and pitifulness in order to found a solid faith and reason in its own existence.

It is with a view to this understanding of signification that I propose my own theory of the two symbolizations which bear upon the political and psychological problematic of sexual orientation: castration–frustration and castration–privation. These two symbolizations are relations between the “moments” of the Oedipus complex, of which there are three: castration, frustration, and privation.

However, the connection between the imaginary object and the real father within the moment of castration, analogous to the connection between S and a’ in the L-schema, is not a “skeptical” connection. Rather, it is a properly logical connection, one which governs rational, visual understandings of reality, and retroactively organ-izes experiences of pleasure in relation to the scopic drive. (Additionally, the vertical arrows, which were once the support of the semiotic square discussed above, are still null and void for symbolization, even at the scopic level. You can mostly disregard the solid black arrows in the symbolizations illustrated below, but it is obvious why they were needed in the first place.)

Castration–Frustration:

Castration–Privation:

This is why the line pointing from imaginary object to real father is not dashed, but solid. Additionally, the scopic drive is a drive that can treat the symbolization(s) as more versatile arrangements between terms, and attain to a truly scientific form of cognition capable of repudiating the dominance of the signifier over abstract concepts belonging to the understanding.

Just these two symbolizations, however, are not enough to de-tangle the ambiguity of a “moment”, wherein or whereby objects are disjunctively joined from the left column to their respective agents on the right column (of the symbolization). The moments which occur to the understanding in relation to castration, whether frustration or privation, must point to either term of castration (imaginary object or real father) from “outside” the symbolized configuration, while also becoming part of it, as the “other side” of castration. Real father and symbolic mother never truly “understand” one another, and neither do real father and imaginary father. There is no possibility of a semiotic “implication” within a symbolization, no equivalency between objects, nor between agents. What works instead, in the pursuit of scientific and philosophical truth, is how these two symbolizations may “subvert” one another.

Sorry, I didn’t have time to answer this yesterday and then I forgot about it for a bit... I don’t remember that much about Structuralism, but I guess a case could be made that there’s a Platonic aspect to it, insofar as it posits “la langue” as an abstract entity prior to and underlying all its individual manifestations in “la parole.” On the other hand, I don’t think you need to be a metaphysical Platonist to do structuralist linguistics.

Schema Key for Symbolizations

(Pinned Post: Introduction to Blog Content)

A symbolization consists of two distinctions and two differentiations between four terms, terms which make up two signs (S and not ~S, where not ~S still has the same two terms as ~S, or the same contrary, which is also therefore essentially identical to itself). It also consists of two distinctions and two differentiations between four moments. Relationships between symbolizations and their overlaps with other symbolizations can and will also form new symbolizations.

Getting a symbolization from a semiosic square:

In an instance of semiosis, four terms are interrelated in such a way that two signs (denoted S and ~S) are created by the terms' mutual co-existence together. Semiosis consists of an equal relating between these two signs, such that S to ~S = ~S to S, or, S is to ~S as ~S is to S.

A symbolization arises whenever S not only falls into this particular relation with ~S, but also falls into this relation with a different sign that is made up of the same pair of contraries (namely, ~S1 and ~S2). This sign/pair-of-contraries then functions as the analogous Sign ~S to the original Sign S (namely, not ~S), which thereby forms the contrary-contrary for the originary sign.

One example of a (semiosic) symbolization might be the parasitism of a mosquito; after the bloodmeal, both the mosquito and its host will exist apart from one another (still alive), resembling a symbiotic relationship. But the host probably did not benefit from the interaction at all, and most likely was physically injured by the insect bite.

Hence: S to ~S ≠ S to not ~S.

Also: S is not to ~S as S is to not ~S.

However: to say that therefore S is to ~S as S is not to not ~S is false.

Furthermore: within a (semiosic) symbolization, both ~S2 and S2, as well as ~S1 and S1, are no-longer-contradictory.

This quintessential sign discovery, then, is the Sign not ~S, so that the semiosic implication(s) which previously defined the occurrence of a semiosis between the four terms of the two signs, S and ~S, now coincides with the form of those two signs' respective contradictory relations. For the mosquito bite example, in a semiosic relation, the terms would be:

S1 = host

S2 = life

~S1 = mosquito

~S2 = life

The S2 and ~S2, the signified(s) of this parasitic interaction, which are the respective biological lives of the two organisms, are no longer contradictory to one another semiosically, which was due to the simple fact that S1 (host) and ~S1 (mosquito) are both individual life forms apart from one another. Rather, the mosquito, as a signifier, in its parasitism, contradicts the host's life (S2) in the violence which establishes a symbolization, the mosquito's process of assaulting and damaging the host's body for its own biological sustenance.

Symbolization as Reflection

Just as one's mirror-image shows one's reflection, and the reflected image is a horizontally flipped version of one's actual image or appearance, so the bottom level of a symbolization is a reflection of the bottom level of semiosis. Just how and when, throughout the entire geological history of our planet, did nature ever come to catch a glimpse of itself like that, and drive forward its evolutionary processes? One ought to wonder about that.

But as you can tell, the top level of the semiosic square isn't flipped around on the schema for a symbolization as the bottom level is flipped. S may see itself in the mirror as part of a semiosic square, standing across from the image-screen symbolization which is its genuine reflection. But reflection itself must also retain the property of identification, or else it cannot reflect, nor could it project, itself. This is an occurrence, and my own semiotic discovery, called semiotization: identification cannot happen without the primacy of implication as the primary form (or conveyance) of reflection. This form (of reflection) as such is called "agency". So the apparent falsehood of the mirror-image on the image-screen still remains half-true, and this is represented on the schema by keeping the sign S (on the schema for a symbolization) identical to the S on the semiosic square.

Symbolizations that are Trapezoidal: "Trapezia"

The American English word "trapezoid" comes from the British English word "trapezium", from the Ancient Greek word for "table", which is also the Latin name for a part of the human skeleton. Illustration of the left-hand trapezium bone:

Geometric terminology distinctions between the two English dialects:

This is important to note, because the translation of Jacques Lacan's fifth seminar Formations of the Unconscious, which I refer to the most frequently in my writing, is published by Polity, a British publisher based in Cambridge (UK), thus the "M-i-m-E trapezium" of Lacan's Schema R appropriates the British usage of the word "trapezium" in the text of the published seminar.

One might think otherwise about the difference between trapezium and trapezoid: the Greek stem "-oid" denotes a seeming appearance, or a resemblance to something else, since it literally means "shaped" (source). So, a "trapezoid" in North American English should refer to a specific kind of quadrangle, one that is "table-shaped", which may be regular or irregular, so long as two of its sides are parallel to one another, right? Sadly, that is (counterintuitively) incorrect.

Here is a post about the projective surfaces of psychosis, describing the three symbolizations formed between the three "moments" of the Oedipus complex, which are not parallelogrammatic, but rather, they are trapezoidal, they are trapezia, here using the British English definition of the term "trapezium". All you must do to discover these trapezia is twist around one side of the parallelogrammatic symbolization, and you can derive the formations of the unconscious as they are, and observe them proceeding from reality more directly. Thus, the foundations of unconscious mechanisms (cognition, disjunction, and reification), which determine our conscious perceptions before they are Oedipally re-organized, are fundamentally psychotic at base, even though they are also "closer" to the true nature of reality itself.

— (5/10/2022)

Semiotization and Re-Semiotization

Semiotization, which was described above as the identification of S with itself through reflection via semiosic implication, also may happen again, and repeatedly, in the advent of the concept. This (concept) is the reproducibility of the (Kantian) understanding in organic life processes. This becomes possible because the congruency of the mutual relationship between S and ~S (observed in semiosis) is no longer applicable within the interactions between (1) the four terms of a semiosic square, and (2) the four terms of a symbolization. ~S and not ~S are identical to one another in this situation, but through their (analogical) comparison only, as in mitotic cell division, or the transmissibility of blood between the hosts of mosquitoes. They are not identified with one another via direct reciprocity. What indicates this comparison that can be observed in organic life, for example, is the indifference of living cells to one another who perhaps came from the same parent cell, or the tacit communication between mosquitoes who individually drink the blood of hosts they never came into contact with before.

This is the same as to say that not ~S to S ≠ S to ~S. In their mutual inequivalence, the lives of organisms and their unique behaviors continually reproduce the rightful, empty places that belong to the sign (S). A concept which may take itself as a sign within the understanding may become freely abstract, but still yet subjected to this law: namely, that the concept is identical to a sign by means of analogy only. This kind of "concept", both limited and liberated in this way, is called a subject. The "semiosis", the sign-ification, which happens between oneself and one's reflection as such is the foundation of this essential possibility. Re-semiotization, furthermore, in Jacques Lacan's theory of the gaze from his eleventh seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, is the projection onto the "image screen" of the gaze from the "subject of representation".

Thus, semiotization and re-semiotization together may traverse the distance from the subject, atop the semiosic quadrangle, towards the mirror-image, its symbolization counterpart, and consequently, from the gaze of the mirror-image back to the image "screen" of the subject (and of the Other) qua a now freshly re-semiotized binary of signs. This reproducibility of the concept within the understanding has reached a fully-fledged spiritualization in the workings of an animal nervous system, and in other places as well, both living and non-living.

— (4/5/2022 and 4/6/2022)

Hence, the discussion found in Lacan's eleventh seminar of Freud's usage of the German word Vorstellungrepräsentanz, or, "representative of a representative". There is a third-or-fifth triangle with a vertex pointed at the center of the image screen coming from the dimensions of the subject. This apparently "smaller" model of the same thing, acting as the gaze itself might act, is a reflection of the subject of representation minus the gaze as it exists in nature. The Kantian "thing-in-itself" as image is therefore virtual, but no longer specular.

03/03/2022

Here is a screenshot of the English Wikipedia article on "Iconicity":

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconicity

These "iconic principles" correspond precisely to the three anti-Oedipal agents: real mother, symbolic father, and imaginary mother.

This furthermore resonates with the conceptualization of natural metaphor in the mechanisms of the unconscious which characterize its primary processes (namely, condensation and displacement).

These render a symbolization (is it still "within" a semiosis?) in its opposition to a sign (S), but in the form of a different sign, either ~S, or not ~S. This contains the icon, but this icon is the substance of the form, and iconicity is essential to this substance as its intrinsic capacity. A symbolization, however, has two pairs of terms which are internally contrary, but they are not contrary to one another, since they are internally contrary in the same way (S1 is vertically alligned with ~S1, as is S2 with ~S2). This is what opens up the dimension of temporality to the understanding.

Any given S, as long as the semiosis at hand is "natural" (i.e., authentic and actual, or, a perception enabling genuine thought), shares its upper-level "axis" in common with the symbolizations of castration, namely, the "axis" which connects the "imaginary object" of perception to the "real father" of the present moment as such. This moment both foregrounds and continuously re-establishes the castrational dimension contingent to the Oedipus complex, and defines the rules which govern the "boundaries" of the visual field, or the scopic relation to "territories".

This means that iconic principles are those which govern perception at its outermost margins, but also push back against the (Deleuzoguattarian) geologic stratum by the counteractive affection of its molecular milieus, pushing back towards the center from which the stratum emanates.

Temporally speaking, iconic principles begin and end on an affect, one attributed to a particular anti-Oedipal agent. The perception of memory depends on this ordering of anti-Oedipal agents in correspondence with reality. Hence the peculiarity of feelings that linger without the words to explain them, and in connection with the appreciations of perception indicated by contemplative cognition. This attributes sentiments to particular forms of reality that run counter to an organism's moral staying-on-task and de-stabilizes its perception, yet curiously enough, it also reverses or remedies the temporal fading of memories and re-stabilizes perception differently.

Since the Oedipus complex is a sequence of moments defined by temporal groupings of three terms together out of the four terms that make up one of the two of its castrational symbolizations (castration–frustration and castration–privation), we can take the lesson about the mathematics of a series that Lacan teaches us in the Seminar on "The Purloined Letter" and apply it respectively in order to obtain the permutations of the semiotic square which are necessary to obtain the L-schema. Then we can use this same lesson and apply it to the anti-Oedipal pairs of terms and figure out their relation to symbolizations in general.

Quantity principle:

imaginary mother <––> symbolic father –> real mother

Proximity principle:

real mother <––> imaginary mother –> symbolic father

Sequential order principle:

symbolic father <––> real mother –> imaginary mother

The epigram I devised to help explain symbolizations of castration in the Oedipus complex was: "You have to have four to have three." In a corresponding expression about iconicity, one might say: "you have to have two to have three, too."

In authentic semiosis, the relation between S and ~S must be the same as the one between ~S and S. In a symbolization, however, what no longer supports this "must" is that implication no longer functions to equivocate the semiotic relation between the pairs of terms. The four terms in a semiotic square were interchangeable with one another because the relation between any pair of terms to the other pair of terms was naturally the same. But in a symbolization, the understanding has now met with the Other, because it has learned that a sign is reproducible by means of the dimension of what is signified. Thus, the a of the ego (in the L-schema) cannot imply the existence of the signifier (top-left, S), because the signifier is the emergence of a convergence now affirmed by the discourse of the Other (lower-right, A) which is unconscious, i.e., it cannot be directly perceived as existent in the natural world, but it does exist for someone else (who knows about "it", namely, a word).

What iconic principles modify is the ~S of the semiotic square, but what the resonances of iconicity really indicate is the aphanisis (disappearance or fading away) of the symbolization that preceded its appearance to perception.

Iconic Counter-Principles

Running counter to iconic principles, however, are principles of metaphysics. I devised an epigram for each to represent their semiotic consequences:

[1. ] The metaphysical counterpart of the "quantity principle" is number, identity, or in terms of term logic, "A is A".

The name of the mother is the Name of the Father.

[2.] The metaphysical counterpart of the "proximity principle" is Dasein.

The Name of the Father is "Dasein".

[3.] Thirdly, the metaphysical counterpart of the "sequential order principle" is idealism, since the sequential description of events (materialism) "is mirrored in the speech chain".

The symbolic mother is genetic,