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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