File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9802, message 535


Date: Tue, 24 Feb 1998 03:49:02 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-TH: being determines consciousness ?


G'day Russ,

>A question to set this one rolling further, can the notion that 'social
>existence determines consciousness, consciousness doesn't determine social
>existence' sit easily with either semiotic or discourse theory? I'd say
>not, but...

Language has a significant role to play in developing consciousness and
language is a social phenomenon by definition (as Wittgenstein said, there
ain't no such thing as a private language).

I am, for instance, conscious of what a unicorn is (and that it actually is
not) through language alone.  It was explained to me by my grand-dad, who
described it as a horse with a spike sticking out of its forehead.  So
there's a bit of structuralism there.  I had to mobilise conceptions of
'horse', 'a horse's forehead' and 'spike' and relate them as ordered to
conjure 'unicorn'.  'Unicorn' means unicorn to me because I was already
socially inculcated with a meaning system, into which it had to fit,
because I had to see it AS something/s if I was to 'see' it at all.

Barthes took semiotics the extra step (already implicit to us lot) by
employing semiotics to link meaning systems with social relations and, ipso
facto, power relations.  Anyway, my point is that meaning is necessarily
socially produced for semioticians - and this is held all the way from de
Saussure to Fiske.  Logically, as the 'reader' of a 'text', I am accorded
as much 'creativity' in the meaning process as the 'author' (yeah,
semioticians have taken to scare quotes to keep up with their pomo
colleagues).  As reader my creativity is as that of the author.  And hers
is a deployment of a *social* meaning system.  So semiotics is okay with
Marx's crucial sentence, I reckon.

As for discourse theory, well, that could mean anything, indeed it could
mean everything, and therefore gets close to meaning nothing ...

Now I'm really going to bed.

Cheers,
Rob.


************************************************************************

Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

************************************************************************

'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

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