| Resumo |
The theory with which I approach the related issues of meaning – learning – knowing – identity is Social Semiotics. Its central assumption is that meaning is constantly newly made and remade in social (inter-) action, by social agents using existing socially made cultural resources. In the process, existing cultural/semiotic resources are subject to constant change by social / semiotic agents (whether in transformation or transduction); as is ‘the matter at issue’ (i.e. knowledge, of any kind); as are those engaged in interaction (i.e. in terms of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘identity’). The theory, in other words, takes ‘the social’ as prior, and has the dynamic of change at its core. The theoretical issue, then, is how to set an apt frame for a semiotic theory which can account for these processes, when the social is marked by profound diversity and provisionality; and where changes in technologies act as major and constant amplifiers of these factors, both socially and semiotically. Some crucial questions – apart from that about the apt frame – are how to name this new world, when the existing/available terms – e.g. ‘language’, ‘grammar’, ‘text’ - all point back toward an entirely differently conceived social; and where the meanings that attach still to terms in use – e.g. ‘coherence’, ‘genre’, ‘syntax’ – tend still to be associated with conceptions of language as the dominant semiotic resource. For those of us interested in ‘language’ – and in ‘Linguistics’ - perhaps the most immediate, direct question is the simple one: “what’s this got to do with me?” In the lecture I will make the point that, as with most (?) /all (?) disciplines that have come to us from the 20th century or before, the ‘fit’ has given way, between the world whose questions gave rise to these disciplines, and the world which in turn is still, largely, projected in them. In very many places, maybe everywhere, that ‘fit’ no longer exists. I will suggest (not of course in any way a novel suggestion) that ‘language’ can no longer be seen as a discrete phenomenon, but rather as one which has to be radically ‘re-thought’/’re-conceptualized’ in all its inter-connections and in all ways – socially, semiotically, epistemologically/ontologically - and integrated anew in the social and semiotic world of the present. |
