Abstract
Ogden and Richards emphasized that in an act of communication the message does not exist before being coded; in addition, coding is a process of creation: the message self-generates in the communication process itself. As such, the term “receptor” should be replaced by the term “reader”—in other words, the “universal receptor” breaks into a multitude of readers, whose readings are culturally pre-determined. The significance of a sign is not given beforehand, it is born following the encounter between the message and the cultural loading with which the reader welcomes the message. As homo significans, we relate not to objects, but to “interpretants” (Peirce). For man, the world is a universe of interpretants. But this renders manipulation possible through partial truths or even fake news, i.e. through the plausible denaturation of reality. The acceptance of a phrase as true is not related to its relation with reality, but rather to its relation with the reader’s cultural loading. This paper describes the mechanism of semiosis that makes possible the exercise of power to have people over other people, through the management of their cultural loading.
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Notes
- 1.
Excerpt from the poem entitled A Hidden Game: “From time, abstracted the depth of this peaceful crest, Gone through the mirror into redeemed azure. Engraving on the sinking flocks of rustic fest. Out of the water groups, a second game, more pure. Latent Nadir! The poet elevates summation. Of spread out harps you lose in a reverted flight. And painfully distils a song: hidden, as only sea’s cremation. Sways its Medusas under the greenish bells of light” (tr. Liviu Georgescu, http://www.poezia.3x.ro/BARBUi5.htm).
- 2.
Which equals to the prevalence of the essence over the existence, because, as noted by Adrian-Paul Iliescu, “the idea of essence returns in the modern philosophy disguised under the name of intension” (Iliescu 1989: 124).
- 3.
Related to the re-orientation of such types of discourses from facts toward cultural loading of the reader, through the autonomization of the interpretant in relation to the object, see Bruno (1991), for the scientific discourse, or Borţun (2014), for the news discourse.
- 4.
For Charles S. Peirce, semiosis is “an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant” (apud Eco 1976: 32).
- 5.
- 6.
In Saussurian language, the signifier becomes useless and the signified coincides with the object, since semiosis does no longer imply any agency.
- 7.
In his vision, the main source of error in the semiosis process is language, conviction that we shall later find at Hilbert, la Carnap and Frege or young Wittgenstein, who will attempt to regulate language up to the point in which it leads to no interpretation errors of reality.
- 8.
Gulag, Holocaust and other disasters of the 20th century have been accepted by a significant number of individuals and, because of the interpretants’ swaying away, in the diabolic labs of Stalinist and Nazist propaganda.
- 9.
The term has been launched by Fareed Rafiq Zakaria, in 1997, being used by political scientists to describe the current political regimes in Poland, Russia and Hungary (Pârvulescu 2017).
- 10.
According to Allan S. Janik and Stephen S. Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s interest in language has had, from the very beginning, an ethical stake, but he because progressively aware of it. Since it was not clear from the start, he asked confusing questions to his friends from the Vienna Circle, and, as a result, it is said that they sent his to Cambridge, hoping that Russell would understand that their young fried wanted to find out (Janik and Toulmin 1973).
- 11.
The moralist Adam Smith, who had published, 17 years before, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), was not interested in poverty as a strictly economic phenomenon, but rather in misery, which is material as well as moral; he was not interested in wealth, but in prosperity, as a form of civilization, as a society that allows its members to be moral: “a polite society”.
- 12.
„ … nein, gerade Thatsachen giebt es nicht, nur Interpretationen” (Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1885–1887, Krtitische Studienausgabe, hg. von G. Colti und M. Montinari, Munchen, 1988, Bd. 12, p. 315 (apud Goian 2017: iii–iv). The idea has been translated, with other arguments, by the post-positivist epistemologists that Raymond Boudon called „anthropologists of science”, among them, the most important ones are Kuhn and Feyerabend, whom he reproaches the thesis according to which “facts are that scholars consider to be facts” (Boudon 593).
- 13.
A prophecy can not only be self-fulfilling, but also self-destructive when its very formulation may lead to the non-fulfillment of the predicted events, although upon its formulation it was true.
- 14.
It is more an explicit recognition of the fact that people do not need truth, the performance of a consensus unfolded over this. The tacit avoidance of the truth dates long back and, if we were to believe Jean-Francois Revel, the marginalization of this value is a constant aspect of human history (Revel 2007: 231–235).
- 15.
See the contributions of scholars such as W. J. T. Mitchell, Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel at the online discussion of the concept of “image war”, organized in Nomadikon by Øyvind Vågnes and Asbjørn Grønstad (http://www.nomadikon.net/contentitem.aspx?ci=320). In Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9–11 to the Present W. J. T. Mitchell describes what he calls the image war thus: “it has been waged against images (thus acts of iconoclasm or image destruction have been critical to it); and it has been fought by means of images deployed to shock the enemy, images meant to appall and demoralize, images designed to replicate themselves endlessly and to infect the collective imaginary of global populations” (apud Mitchell 2012).
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Borţun, D. (2019). The Game of Reflection and the Power Over People. A Semiotic Approach to Communication. In: Olteanu, A., Stables, A., Borţun, D. (eds) Meanings & Co.. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91986-7_5
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