File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_1997/phillitcrit.9709, message 58


Date: Mon, 08 Sep 1997 10:18:05 -0400
From: Reg Lilly <rlilly-AT-scott.skidmore.edu>
Subject: PLC: Sign Time  [was, skull, bones and lions]


Like Saicho, I think Howard has done a pretty good job of pointing to the non-identity of sign and intention -- the "Chicago School" (Wimsatt, and Beardsley, Hirsch, et al) also have made this point pretty effectively from an analytic approach with
what they call the "intentional fallacy," and Derrida and others have made this rather evident from a non-analytic approach in reading Husserl.  What, Dennis, is the intentionality behind the reading found in  _The Farmer's Almanac_  -- very woolly
caterpillars mean a cold winter?  What can a 'sign of the times' be or mean for one who doesn't believe in god or secular simulacra of god (eg. Hegelian Geist)?  To say that the sign's meaning is solely in the intention of the 'reader' is of course
to make of us all windowless monads -- and without the benefit of pre-established harmony! Or, one must accord an independent functioning of the signifier.
	Ironically, though I suspect Dennis would rue the consequence, to reduce the sign to intentional acts, as does Husserl, enables students to say irrefutably, in response to criticisms of their writing -- "Well, that's what I meant!"  
	One consideration that I think has been left out (or presumed) is the time of the sign.  Dennis seems to what to have his cake and eat it too, to have the originating intention both in an originating past, hence in some important respect absent, but
have this past fully present in the reception of the sign as the authentic meaning of the sign. Or, in other words, the sign is something fundamentally temporal and Dennis, along with Aristotle and/to Husserl, is conceiving of signification within an
atemporal presence where past present and future are all (indifferently) present.  This presconception, which is falsified by the experience of writing and speaking (hence has no scientific validity!), has been the stumbling stone for the theorizing
of the sign ever since Aristotle.
Reg
rlilly-AT-scott.skidmore.edu

   

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