Re: VMs: semiotics & vms: homepage

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Gabriele,

> To Nick, Rene and all the people who chatted with me the previous days:
> could you please check it out? I'd like to know on one hand if I'm clear and
> on the other hand if you agree...

While in many ways I applaud semiotics as a discipline, it does seem to me 
that the VMs is in many ways a worst-case scenario for it, pointing right 
to the heart of what the semiotics "research programme" (in Lakatos' sense) 
is all about (ie, meaning) and how its various approaches & frameworks can 
fail to satisfy when (as in the VMs' case) meaning is inaccessible - 
semiotics seems essentially predicated on *access to meaning*.

Further, the central conceit of semiotics would appear to be that 
semioticians somehow believe they have a "VIP backstage pass" to the 
preferred meaning of a text, by studying its form, its content, its 
provenance, or even its surrounding culture (as you're doing here).

However, what we're engaged in (as a community) is already effectively a 
(largely frustrated) semiotic endeavour - we're trying (art history-style) 
to decode the signs, shapes, provenance, stories, etc, whilst 
simultaneously trying to reconstruct (science-style) its technology, 
materials, production, encoding, etc, all to try to pin down the "meaning 
in the middle". If that isn't semiotics, I don't know what is. :-)

You might also be careful about where you place your epistemology of 
hypotheses - for the most part, proposing theories is often merely our way 
of trying to provoke responses from our subject matter - so, rather than 
seeing (the accumulation of) theories solely as being the *ends* of our 
study [ie, as a target to aim for] (which Gibbons et al. [1994] classify as 
"Mode 1" knowledge), theories here are just as much our *means* to those 
ends [ie, as a tool] ("Mode 2" knowledge).

All in all, this would appear to mean you're engaged in a semiotic analysis 
of the means of a semiotic endeavour, which could end up slightly circular 
/ self-referential if you're not careful. :-o

One final thought: I believe that practitioners have a responsibility both 
to build and to destroy their own disciplines, though the Peter Principle 
usually prevails over the latter (ie, it's not in the Royal Tailor's 
self-interest to describe the Emperor's lack of attire). But here you have 
an artefact that (I believe) actively critiques and pushes the limits of 
semiotics (and semiotic frameworks) right to the edge - which is perhaps 
just as interesting (to a semiotics theorist) as the VMs itself.

That is, rather than simply ask what semiotics tells us about the VMs, one 
might instead ask - what does the VMs tell us about semiotics? :-o

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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