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

Linguïculture: Thomas A. Sebeok as a revolutionary ethnographer

Under embargo until: 2022-11-16Sebeok started his career as an ethnographer, focusing on the verbal art of anthropology to describe the cultures associated with then-called “primitive” languages. He followed Bloomfield’s linguistics to study Boas’ anthropology of primitive art to investigate man as a civilized member of a native indigenous community with art-like speech habits. Sebeok’s earliest articles were ethnographic descriptions of non-Western folktales from the Cheremis people, which he reformulated into Saussure’s phonetic system to involve literal but culturally free translations. Later, Sebeok developed Peirce’s ethnosemiotics by explaining Sapir-Whorf’s two-way differentiation of linguistic-and-cultural texts. The coded interplay of anthroposemiotics moved Sebeok from language-and-culture to language-with-culture, thence to build up the merged compound of linguïculture.publishedVersio

Paraphrase or parasite? The Semiotic Stories of Translation

Translation, for Saussure, assumed the codified rule of language respecting the difference between synchronic and diachronic linguistics. Translation may be regarded as a theoretical possibility, though impossible for the creative speech of language speakers. Peirce’s logical semiotics reasoned the linguistic-and-cultural (linguïcultural) interpretants of received signs. Semiotranslation is a semiotic game to change the symbiosis of two languages into one language. Identified with both Saussure and Peirce, Jakobson’s intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic forms of translation propose rewording, translation proper, and transmutation. Peirce’s semiosis creates simple and complex symbols but navigates between translation, semiotranslation, and transduction. Translation derives from the para-functions of replicas in “paraphrase” and “parasite” to signify the multiplicity of ideas and trends in biotranslation. The source text can be re-organized into the iconic activity of Saussurean paraphrase; or the target text can be indexically recontextualized in the parasitical evolution of Peirce’s instinct and facts of life applied to arts — neither approaching pure science.publishedVersio

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

Paraphrase or parasite? The Semiotic Stories of Translation

Translation, for Saussure, assumed the codified rule of language respecting the difference between synchronic and diachronic linguistics. Translation may be regarded as a theoretical possibility, though impossible for the creative speech of language speakers. Peirce’s logical semiotics reasoned the linguistic-and-cultural (linguïcultural) interpretants of received signs. Semiotranslation is a semiotic game to change the symbiosis of two languages into one language. Identified with both Saussure and Peirce, Jakobson’s intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic forms of translation propose rewording, translation proper, and transmutation. Peirce’s semiosis creates simple and complex symbols but navigates between translation, semiotranslation, and transduction. Translation derives from the para-functions of replicas in “paraphrase” and “parasite” to signify the multiplicity of ideas and trends in biotranslation. The source text can be re-organized into the iconic activity of Saussurean paraphrase; or the target text can be indexically recontextualized in the parasitical evolution of Peirce’s instinct and facts of life applied to arts — neither approaching pure science

Text semiotics: Textology as survival-machine

Signifying practices by which living creatures communicate, are, according to Sebeok, the survival-machines. Accordingly, as represented by the semiotic text analysis or Bakhtin's textology, one can speak about a human survival-machine. This has been studied by different semiotic schools (including the Moscow-Tartu school) referring to language, culture, genre and, importantly, text ideology. In this article, the aspects of textology in Peirce's generalized theory of signs become analysed. After a discussion of the concept of text in Peirce's (published and unpublished) writings, its relationship with semiosis and other Peircean categories isshown. The project of elaborating Peirce-based text-semiotics expects that it must be dramatically different from other sign-theoretical text-theories. This may be a path towards more inter-subjective and creative textology

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

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