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Sign vehicles for semiotic travels: Two new handbooks

2002; De Gruyter; Volume: 2002; Issue: 141 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1515/semi.2002.055

1613-3692

Susan Petrilli, Augusto Ponzio,

Historical Linguistics and Language Studies

ed as it is from the constitutive dialogism of sign life, gives rise to metaphysical, abstract and monological dialectic. It is odd that in the entry ‘Binarism’ in Encyclopedia of Semiotics, the author should propose Hegelian philosophy as a means of overcoming the theory of binary opposition in LeviStrauss’s structuralism (cf. ES: 81). Bakhtin, in his 1970-71 notebooks, gives a good explanation of how Hegelian monological dialectic is formed, showing how it actually has its roots in a vital dialogic sign context. The process consists in taking out the voices (division of voices) from dialogue, eliminating any (personal/emotional) intonations, and thus transforming live words into abstract concepts and judgements, so that dialectic is obtained in the form of a single abstract consciousness. Peirce himself also took a stand against the systemic skeleton of Hegelian analysis, against dialectic intended as a kind of hypochondriac search for an end, that is, as being oriented unilaterally instead of being open and contradictory (on the relation between dialogue and dialectic in Peirce and Bakhtin, see Ponzio and Bonfantini 1986 and Ponzio, Bonfantini, and Petrilli 1996). The alternative in semiotics is not between binarism and triadism, but between monologism and polylogism. The limit of the sign model proposed by the semiology of Saussurean matrix is not determined by binarism, as is understood instead in the entry ‘Binarism’ included in Ecyclopedia of Semiotics (for a careful exposition of binarism in Saussure, see § 222, ‘Binaritat’, in the above-mentioned article). On the contrary, it is determined by the fact that such binarism finds expression in the concept of equal exchange between signifier and signified, and in the reduction of complex sign life to the dichotomous scheme of code and message (cf. Ponzio 1990a: 279-280).