From: Arlo Bensinger (ajb102@psu.edu)
Date: Tue Feb 15 2005 - 21:42:36 GMT
Scott/Paul,
Just to chime in quick...
I am currently working on a paper that links pre-semiosis with Dynamic
Quality. Pirsig began in ZMM:
The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the
building of this structure [semiosis], is something everybody does. All the
time we are aware of millions of things around us- these changing shapes,
these burning hills, the sound of the engine [clip]- aware of these things
but not really conscious of them [presemiosis] unless there is something
unusual or unless the reflect something we are predisposed to see [based on
our cultural-historical semiotic mediation]. [clip] From all this awareness
we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same
as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it [Quality can
never be captured in a semiotic system of this distortive process]. [big
clip]. To understand what he was trying to do it's necessary to see that
part of the landscape, inseparable from it, which must be understood, is a
figure in the middle of it, sorting sand into piles.
Pirsig uses the amoeba and heat example, in that the response to heat is
presemiotic (Dynamic) first, as in "this is poor Quality", and
semiotically-mediated (in humans) later with the conscious understanding of
"heat". An infant would respond like the amoeba by having only the
awareness of low Quality. Eventually, as the infant ages, he/she will be
able to formulate this experience into a semiotic system to symbollically
re-experience the experience culturally, but always after the primary DQ
experience.
Umberto Eco calls the presemiotic experience that prompts semiotic response
the "Dynamical Object" (the use of Dynamic is coincidental). In Kant and
the Platypus, Eco says, mirroring Pirsig:
But there is a phenomenon we must understand as presemiotic, or
protosemiotic (in the sense that it constitutes the signal that gets the
semiosic process underway), which we will call primary indexicality [clip].
Primary indexicality occurs when, amid the thick stuff of sensations that
bombard us, we suddenly select something that we set against the general
background and decide we want to speak about it (when, in other words,
while we live surrounded by luminous, thermile, tactic, and interoceptive
sensations, only one of these attracts our attention, and only afterward we
say that it is cold, or we have a sore foot).
Before language, before semiosis, there is only uncategorized,
unconceptualized, unmediated "experience". Eastern mysticism, in it many
guises, has an ubiquitous element of "escaping words" either through
meditation, live burial, paradoxes, koans, etc. This desire to return to
presemiotic experience, Pirsig links up with "experiencing Dynamic
Quality". Platt refers to it very eloquently in his writings on art.
With infants, I think their prelingual, presemiotic experience is very much
pure Dynamic Quality. With adults, the "key" is to return to a state of
semiosis (language) with some insight or improvement based on your journey
into presemiosis. Infants are, of course, unable to do this as they have
not appropriated any semiotic system.
In this sense, language is a form of symbolic violence (to paraphrase
Bourdieu), in that though it is vital for our survival, and our ability to
construct static, social-cultural-historical edifices, it does, in effect,
rip us out of primary, direct experience of the world, and creates the
false illusion of SOM. A double-edged sword, if you will.
Arlo
At 02:40 PM 2/15/2005, you wrote:
>Scott
>
>Scott said:
>Hence the gist of my metaphysics: to reject the
>language/world-without-language distinction.
>
>Paul:
>What about the pre-lingual experience of infants?
>
>Regards
>
>Paul
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