Dig your concise definition of semiotics. Care to weigh in on the semiotics of torn jeans, tattoos, mom jeans, hoodies, or those increasingly irrelevant face masks?
Of these, I've thought the most about the nature of tattoos. They are, as they ever were, tribal markers and thus an indication of the weakness of modernity. As I am trying to save the idea of 'tribal' I will make the distinction by using the term 'feral'. Tattoos are anti-modern in the way they replace trust in structured communication. I have a strong sense that the tattoo is a second order epistemic strategy at the level of a villager or a gangster. It symbolizes one's philosophy, most tend to be shallow. My daughter and her best friend got tattooed together. I considered doing the same when I was her age with my best friend. Since I have expected a dark age, I have created my own personal sigil. But I have never been able to conceive of a set of symbols that would be appropriate to my own evolving philosophy.
I do appreciate the arts & crafts of tattoos for their own sake. My cousin has the most extraordinarily appealing tattoo I have ever seen on a man. I absolutely think it works on a primal level - and that I was immediately attracted to his shows something about our similarity on an aesthetic level. The fact that he had his made in Southeast Asia in the ritual way, which is much more painful than the modern way, says that very feral thing. But American men do not have much choice when it comes to rites of passage and we live contingently in a post-modern fog because of that.
Torn & stonewashed jeans have always symbolized to me a kind of fake nod to 'authenticity' by affluent consumers. This has been consistent going back to 80s feral rock. When I spent time in Washington state, I was reminded of how it stands in stark contrast to Carhartt and Wrangler which symbolize a hard work aesthetic. In this light I tend to notice them a lot on chubby girls who aim to show some skin.
Hoodies are are both sinister and disarming. I think they are remarkably flexible because they are sweatshirts and as such often carry alma mater symbols. For myself, the archetypal hoodie is worn on a broad shouldered middle age man jogging in the early morning mist. His breath can be seen but not his face. The pullover hoodie is navy blue and NAVY is in large block gold letters. As I used to belong in the tribe of 'dads in cargo shorts' I have such pullover hoodies with my kid's school logos. But the greater sinister symbolism is self-evident.
I've also noticed the self-advertised vulnerability of women who wear sweaters whose sleeves half cover their hands. Some beta males do this to the same effect, reducing themselves to gamma with their man buns.
As for masks, I'm going to need a whole essay on that one. But I will say this. I'm the kind of person who wants to setup a technical helpdesk and reference library right next to the palm reader on Venice Beach. So I have recently thought about putting two bandaids on my left shoulder as a symbol.
Dang! I ask for a taste, and you give me a plate lunch, with hints about another one coming. Your interpretations are very similar to mine, especially spot on about tattoos, which range from Maori-style full body art, through some gorgeous sleeves, to poorly-conceived tramp stamps and prison stuff. CNu above is making my brain hurt, just thinking about the semiotics of movement. BUT, I've learned to read the "body language" of most drivers on the road, so the phenomenon definitely exists. This discussion has motivated me to to return to Bertin's encyclopedic Semiology of Graphics, which I'll be reading with a new set of eyes.
Late to the comment party, but this is serious business and has taken a couple of days to cook up in my mind. First, I recognise your semiotic insight and notice I got to a similar place by a very different route. Bluntly as a recovering academic I had to get beyond what Wittgenstein called 'the cage of language'. I have used Buddhist meditation to get down to what I think of as the bare metal of experience. To drop that false 'knowingness' that education induces by over developing the ability to manipulate language to represent abstractions until embodied connection to reality is lost. On the other hand that very educated ability has helped me 'figure it all out' and I am of course using words to the best of my ability right now to describe my experience. I've found that the Taoist injunction that 'The way that can be spoken about, is not the constant way.' is a good reminder that the verbal is always secondary.
But for me the really astonishing aspect of your post is the last part about third order epistemics - PM, SA, MP! Again by an entirely different process - Theravada Buddhism - I have come to very similar conclusions and act on them every day. You already have me reading Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. You mention that Eastern philosophy has an expected place in your ongoing work. I recommend the Dhammapada (Easwaran translation is good), and the Tao te Ching and the Lost writings of Wu Hsin. I think this kind of experiential convergence goes a long way to indicate that there actually is a capacity to apprehend the real that underpins human development. A foundation that is not in any way a simulation - Richard Rorty and Elon Musk notwithstanding.
On semiotics, I find it particularly interesting that there is no effective, universal notation for movement. Given the superabundance of steadily evolving and readily applicable technology, the importance and universality of movement and movement "systems" - and the likely demand for such a system of notation https://subrealism.blogspot.com/2020/12/a-contemporary-longitudinal-breakdown.html - and yet - there's nothing there but a hard semiotic vacuum.
As for meditation and prayer - is there such a thing absent somatics? Is meditation and prayer anything so much as applied awareness and systematic knowledge of the body as the all-encompassing collection of stresses, anxieties, and pains comprising the "self"?
I enjoyed that essay. After thinking a minute it occurred to me that there has got to be some high level understanding of this at Boston Dynamics, especially when it comes to sensing weight and applying force for balance. They might even be able to apply semantic rules to a language of movement that gives warnings and errors should the language put the object in question in a compromising position. It will be a long time before that map approaches the granularity of the territory.
I see meditation as the applied awareness and systematic knowledge of the body, and prayer as a ritual to make one mindful of ethical commitments. A prayer in that regard is a miniature sacrament - a recited pledge. Rarely do they converge to the same mystical locus: the embodiment of the divine.
Dig your concise definition of semiotics. Care to weigh in on the semiotics of torn jeans, tattoos, mom jeans, hoodies, or those increasingly irrelevant face masks?
Of these, I've thought the most about the nature of tattoos. They are, as they ever were, tribal markers and thus an indication of the weakness of modernity. As I am trying to save the idea of 'tribal' I will make the distinction by using the term 'feral'. Tattoos are anti-modern in the way they replace trust in structured communication. I have a strong sense that the tattoo is a second order epistemic strategy at the level of a villager or a gangster. It symbolizes one's philosophy, most tend to be shallow. My daughter and her best friend got tattooed together. I considered doing the same when I was her age with my best friend. Since I have expected a dark age, I have created my own personal sigil. But I have never been able to conceive of a set of symbols that would be appropriate to my own evolving philosophy.
I do appreciate the arts & crafts of tattoos for their own sake. My cousin has the most extraordinarily appealing tattoo I have ever seen on a man. I absolutely think it works on a primal level - and that I was immediately attracted to his shows something about our similarity on an aesthetic level. The fact that he had his made in Southeast Asia in the ritual way, which is much more painful than the modern way, says that very feral thing. But American men do not have much choice when it comes to rites of passage and we live contingently in a post-modern fog because of that.
Torn & stonewashed jeans have always symbolized to me a kind of fake nod to 'authenticity' by affluent consumers. This has been consistent going back to 80s feral rock. When I spent time in Washington state, I was reminded of how it stands in stark contrast to Carhartt and Wrangler which symbolize a hard work aesthetic. In this light I tend to notice them a lot on chubby girls who aim to show some skin.
Hoodies are are both sinister and disarming. I think they are remarkably flexible because they are sweatshirts and as such often carry alma mater symbols. For myself, the archetypal hoodie is worn on a broad shouldered middle age man jogging in the early morning mist. His breath can be seen but not his face. The pullover hoodie is navy blue and NAVY is in large block gold letters. As I used to belong in the tribe of 'dads in cargo shorts' I have such pullover hoodies with my kid's school logos. But the greater sinister symbolism is self-evident.
I've also noticed the self-advertised vulnerability of women who wear sweaters whose sleeves half cover their hands. Some beta males do this to the same effect, reducing themselves to gamma with their man buns.
As for masks, I'm going to need a whole essay on that one. But I will say this. I'm the kind of person who wants to setup a technical helpdesk and reference library right next to the palm reader on Venice Beach. So I have recently thought about putting two bandaids on my left shoulder as a symbol.
Dang! I ask for a taste, and you give me a plate lunch, with hints about another one coming. Your interpretations are very similar to mine, especially spot on about tattoos, which range from Maori-style full body art, through some gorgeous sleeves, to poorly-conceived tramp stamps and prison stuff. CNu above is making my brain hurt, just thinking about the semiotics of movement. BUT, I've learned to read the "body language" of most drivers on the road, so the phenomenon definitely exists. This discussion has motivated me to to return to Bertin's encyclopedic Semiology of Graphics, which I'll be reading with a new set of eyes.
Late to the comment party, but this is serious business and has taken a couple of days to cook up in my mind. First, I recognise your semiotic insight and notice I got to a similar place by a very different route. Bluntly as a recovering academic I had to get beyond what Wittgenstein called 'the cage of language'. I have used Buddhist meditation to get down to what I think of as the bare metal of experience. To drop that false 'knowingness' that education induces by over developing the ability to manipulate language to represent abstractions until embodied connection to reality is lost. On the other hand that very educated ability has helped me 'figure it all out' and I am of course using words to the best of my ability right now to describe my experience. I've found that the Taoist injunction that 'The way that can be spoken about, is not the constant way.' is a good reminder that the verbal is always secondary.
But for me the really astonishing aspect of your post is the last part about third order epistemics - PM, SA, MP! Again by an entirely different process - Theravada Buddhism - I have come to very similar conclusions and act on them every day. You already have me reading Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. You mention that Eastern philosophy has an expected place in your ongoing work. I recommend the Dhammapada (Easwaran translation is good), and the Tao te Ching and the Lost writings of Wu Hsin. I think this kind of experiential convergence goes a long way to indicate that there actually is a capacity to apprehend the real that underpins human development. A foundation that is not in any way a simulation - Richard Rorty and Elon Musk notwithstanding.
On semiotics, I find it particularly interesting that there is no effective, universal notation for movement. Given the superabundance of steadily evolving and readily applicable technology, the importance and universality of movement and movement "systems" - and the likely demand for such a system of notation https://subrealism.blogspot.com/2020/12/a-contemporary-longitudinal-breakdown.html - and yet - there's nothing there but a hard semiotic vacuum.
As for meditation and prayer - is there such a thing absent somatics? Is meditation and prayer anything so much as applied awareness and systematic knowledge of the body as the all-encompassing collection of stresses, anxieties, and pains comprising the "self"?
I enjoyed that essay. After thinking a minute it occurred to me that there has got to be some high level understanding of this at Boston Dynamics, especially when it comes to sensing weight and applying force for balance. They might even be able to apply semantic rules to a language of movement that gives warnings and errors should the language put the object in question in a compromising position. It will be a long time before that map approaches the granularity of the territory.
I see meditation as the applied awareness and systematic knowledge of the body, and prayer as a ritual to make one mindful of ethical commitments. A prayer in that regard is a miniature sacrament - a recited pledge. Rarely do they converge to the same mystical locus: the embodiment of the divine.