On Dicentization

Abstract

Diverse phenomena in sociocultural life are analyzed with recourse to Peirce's concept of the dicent interpretant. Attention to the semiotic role of the interpretant, itself a sign that articulates with connected signs in the generative process of semiosis, contributes to expanded understanding of ritual and attendant anthropological objects. I discuss how semiotic ideology makes possible, and makes real, a particular transformation of potentials of form expressed as likenesses into actual existents represented as contiguities. I develop an indexical treatment of such transformations that I label dicentization. Indexicality and iconicity have become central to linguistic anthropology and dicentization offers an account of how they work together beyond language in cultural semiosis. The article generalizes and applies the resulting explanatory model to a range of social phenomena described in the literature, including Aboriginal Australian iconography, Medieval Japanese asceticism, Homeric and Freudian psychologies of rage, and traps and primitivism in African and modern art. The analysis contributes to a semiotic realist conception of the continuity of representation and reality. [dicent, interpretant, ritual, indexicality, semiotic realism]Our ability to perceive reality means that reality realizes (actualizes) itself in us; that this in turn is the only way that we can realize (appropriate through understanding) the fact that reality is so realizing itself in us; and that in so doing the self-realization of reality itself takes place. Keiji Nishitani "Religion and Nothingness" (1982:5) The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. The very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of an infinite increase in knowledge.

Intersubjective Traps over Tricks on the Kazakhstani Puppet Stage: Animation as Dicentization

“…Ball describes the dicentization of icons as the process in which a first gets interpreted as a second: “Dicentization applies to situations in which images are perceived to come alive, either through some external agency or our own, whereby relations of identity, otherness, and existence are invoked and made actual” (Ball , 156). Puppets are objects that come alive through the work of multiple agencies.…”

“…However, the way this occurs depends not only on the techniques of the puppeteer but also varies according to audiences, as discussed below. Moreover, dicentization is a creative process, with signs growing out of one another (Ball , 152). At the puppet theater, artists construe different child and adult audiences as interpreting signs, generating ideologies surrounding age, audience, and understandings of animation.…”

Let There Be Light: Wauja People and the Practice of Photographic Primitivism in Sebastião Salgado's Genesis

“… See Gell () on how this very adoption assumes a specifically Western definition of what counts as art (masks), missing many, for example, African cultural products that could, and should, be seen as art but are not (traps). So the products of primitivist appropriation are predetermined by selection bias, and Western aesthetics continues to prioritize iconicity (masks and metaphors) instead of indexicality (traps and contiguities) (Ball ). …”

“… There is a connection between Stallabrass's account of what I am calling realist primitivism and Peirce's definition of the dicisign, which in his logical semiotic is the proposition (Peirce [1903]). Semiotic analysis of the ways that photographs count as propositions, what Peirce called dicent signs or dicisigns, shows that they may be characterized in terms of a process of dicentization (Ball , ). …”

On the Iconization of Simplified Chinese

“… The reformulation of iconization as rhematization shifts the focus from changing signs to people's changing interpretations of signs (Ball ; Gal ). Following Woolard (), I use the term iconization in this article because of its prevalence in the sociolinguistic and linguistic‐anthropological literature, but it is meant to capture people's interpretations of sign–object relationships. …”