A sketch of Peirce’s Firstness and its significance to art

This essay treats the growth and development of Charles S. Peirce’s three categories, particularly studying the qualities of Peirce’s Firstness, a basic formula of “airy-nothingness” (CP: 6.455) serving as fragment to Secondness and Thirdness. The categories of feeling, willing, and knowing are not separate entities but work in interaction within the three interpretants. Interpretants are triadomaniac elements through the adopted, revised, or changed habits of belief. In works of art, the first glance of Firstness arouses the spontaneous responses of musement, expressing emotions without the struggle and resistance of factual Secondness, and not yet involving logical Thirdness. The essential qualities of a loose or vague word, color, or sound give the fugitive meanings in Firstness. The flavor, brush, timbre, color, point, line, tone or touch of the First qualities of an aesthetic object is too small a base to build the logic of aesthetic judgment. The genesis art is explained by Peirce’s undegeneracy growing into group and individual interpretants and building into the passages and whole forms of double and single forms of degeneracy. The survey of the flash of Firstness is exemplified in a variety of artworks in language, music, sculpture, painting, and film. This analysis is a preliminary aid to further studies of primary Firstness in the arts

Intersemioticity and intertextuality: Picaresque and romance in opera

Jakobson introduced the concept of intersemioticity as transmutation of verbal signs by nonverbal sign systems (1959). Intersemioticity generates the linguistic-and- cultural elements of intersemiosis (from without), crystallizing mythology and archetypal symbolism, and intertextuality (from within), analyzing the human emotions in the cultural situation of language-and-music aspects. The operatic example of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1867) intertextualized the cultural trends of Scandinavia. This literary script was set to music by Grieg to make an operatic expression. After the “picaresque” adventures, Peer Gynt ends in a “romantic” revelation. Grieg’s music reworded and rephrased the script in musical verse and rhythm, following the intertextuality of Nordic folk music and Wagner’s fashionable operas. Ibsen’s Peer Gynt text has since been translated in Jakobson’s “translation proper” to other languages. After 150 years, the vocal translation of the operatic text needs the “intersemiotic translation or transmutation” to modernize the translated text and attract present-day audiences

Jakobson and Peirce: Translational intersemiosis and symbiosis in opera

Metalinguistic operations signify understanding and translation, specified in Jakobson’s varieties of six language functions and his three types of translation. Both models were first presented in the 1950s. This article is rooted in Jakobson’s models in connection with Peirce’s three categories. Bühler’s three functions with qualitative difference anticipated, perhaps not accidentally, Jakobson’s distinctions indicating qualitative difference within literary forms and structures as well as other fine arts. The semiotic discovery, criticism and perspective of elements and code-units settle the numerical differences as well as the differences in realistic messages and conceptual codes. Jakobson’s intersemiotic translation is updated in vocal translation, which deals with the virtual reality of opera on stage, reaching a catharsis of the operatic mystique. The word-tone synthesis of opera (or semiosic symbiosis) will demonstrate the typological unification of verbal and nonverbal languages

Goethe's glosses to translation

The logical and illogical unity of translation with a triadic approach was mediated by Peirce's three-way semiotics of sign, object, and interpretant. Semiotranslation creates a dynamic network of Peircean interpretants, which deal with artificial but alive signs progressively growing from undetermined ("bad") versions to higher determined ("good") translations. The three-way forms of translation were mentioned by Goethe. He imitated the old Persian poetry of Hafiz (14th Century) to compose his German paraphrase of West-östlicher Divan (1814–1819). To justify the liberties of his own translation/paraphrase, Goethe furnished notes in Noten und Abhandlungen and Paralipomena (1818–1819). Through his critical glosses, he explained information, adaptation, and reproduction of the foreign culture and literature (old Persian written in Arabic script) to become transplanted into the "equivalent" in German 19th Century verse. As critical patron of translation and cultural agent, Goethe's Divan notes are a parody mixing Orient and Occident. He built a (lack of) likeness, pointing in the pseudo-semiosis of translation to first and second degenerate types of object and sign

Fact and Fiction – Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ein biographisches Album (2012) by Michael Nedo

Review of M. Nedo: Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ein biographisches Album (2012

Hints and guesses: Legal modes of semio-logical reasoning

Legal semiotics is an internationally proliferated subfield of general semiotics. The three-step principles of Peirce’s semiotic logic are the three leading categories: firstness, secondness and thirdness, grounded on the reverse principles of logic: deduction, induction and — Peirce’s discovery — abduction. Neither induction nor abduction can provide a weaker truth claim than deduction. Abduction occurs in intuitive conclusions regarding the possibility of backward reasoning, contrary to the system of law. Civil-law cultures possess an abstract deductive orientation, governed by the rigidity of previous written law, whereas the actual fragility of a common-law system with cases and precedents inclines to induction, orienting its habituality (habits) in moral time and space. Customary law gives credit to abductive values: relevant sentiments, beliefs and propositions are upgraded to valid reasoning. The decision-making by U.S. case law and English common-law is characterized as decision law with abductive undertones

De la traduction à la sémiotraduction

En première partie, Des signes interprétés aux signes interprétatifs, le mécanisme de traduction construit des connexions logiques et non-logiques entre le signe linguistique et l’objet du texte source. Tandis que la traduction saussurienne est une compétence en deux étapes qui transpose du texte source au texte cible, le concept de sémiotraduction complète la stratégie des signes en interne de Saussure avec les signes interprétants en externe de Peirce. Les interprétants garantissent la sémiotraduction du texte source dans le texte cible. Les effets « naturels » de la sémiose agissent en trois étapes étant à la fois de « bonnes » et de « mauvaises » traductions faites par le traducteur. La signature sémiotique du traducteur implique les qualités émotionnelles, énergétiques et logiques du système de signes original et traduit. En deuxième partie, De l’intersémiose à la trans-sémiose, les trois types de traduction de Jakobson : intralinguale, interlinguale et intersémiotique, démontrent que la sémiotraduction génère l’intersémiose de Peirce. La sémiotraduction forme des habitudes centrées sur l’objectif mais sans résultat fixe, aucune méthode fixe, aucune redéfinition fixe et aucun agent fixe. Tout résultat, méthode et agent sont des essais provisoires, tentatives temporaires pour fabriquer des versions de traduction. Peirce et son idée révolutionnaire et sceptique des signes linguistiques inclut signes graphiques, acoustiques, optiques et autres signes non-linguistiques pour créer une sémiose intertextuelle, une intersémiose extralinguistique et une trans-sémiose artistique.In the first part, From interpreted signs to interpretated signs, the mechanism of translation constructs logical and non-logical connections between the linguistic sign and object of the source text. While the Saussurean two-step skill of translation is transposed from the source text into the target text, the concept of semiotranslation supplements Saussure’s sign-internal strategy into Peirce’s sign-external interpretant-signs. The interpretants guarantee the semiotranslation of source into target text. The “genuine” effects of three-way semiosis are both “good” and “bad” translations made by the translator. The semiotic signature of the translator implies the emotional, energetic, and logical qualities of the original and translated sign system. In the second part, From intersemiosis to trans-semiosis, Jakobson’s three types of intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic types of translation argue how semiotranslation generates Peirce’s intersemiosis. Semiotranslation forms goal-directed habits, but without fixed results, no fixed methods, no fixed redefinitions, and no fixed agents. All results, methods, and agents are tentative, provisional, and temporary attempts to make versions of translation. Peirce’s revolutionary and skeptical ideas of linguistic signs include graphical, acoustic, optical, and other non-linguistic signs to create intertextual semiosis, extralinguistic intersemiosis, and artistic trans-semiosis