A Note on the Vocabulary of Reception: Toward Some Unresolved Difficulties
Submitted as a Contributed Note to “The Journal of Transhistorical Sign Systems”, Vol. 19b, 2253
Sula Vanthorpe-Osei, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Foundational Semiotic Theory, University of Accra, Supervised by Professor Kwame Asante-Vidal
In preparing the literature review for my doctoral thesis on the conditions of sign reception, I have encountered a difficulty that I do not know how to resolve and that I am setting down here in the hope that it may be useful to others working in the field, or that someone better positioned than I am to address it will recognise it as worth addressing.
The difficulty is this. The vocabulary available to describe what happens in the moment of sign reception—the moment when a structured environment and an attuned receiver come into the relationship that produces what we call a sign—is a vocabulary of two terms. We have the environment. We have the receiver. We have, in Pieterse-Nakamura’s resonance framework, a considerably richer account of the environment than earlier frameworks provided, and we have, in the pressure tradition running from Okonkwo-Bernstein through Arredondo-Weiss, a rich account of the receiver. But the vocabulary remains, at its foundation, a vocabulary of two things and a relationship between them. My difficulty is that I am not sure this is adequate—not sure, that is, whether environment and receiver are the right foundational terms, or whether they are themselves products of something more primary that the two-term vocabulary cannot, by its own structure, make visible.
I want to be careful about what I am and am not claiming, because the distinction matters and I do not wish to overstate a difficulty that may, on reflection, dissolve under scrutiny that I have not yet been able to give it. I am not claiming that the environment is not real, or that the receiver is not real, or that the relationship between them is not the appropriate object of semiotic inquiry. I am asking whether both terms—environment, receiver—are, at a level of description below the level at which semiotic science currently operates, already abstractions from something more primary. Abstractions of the kind that are necessary and productive for working within a framework but that carry, inside them, a prior decision that the framework does not examine. The prior decision in this case would be: that environment and receiver are two things. That they are distinguishable from each other in the way that the vocabulary implies they are. That the boundary between them is a feature of the situation rather than a product of the description.
I notice this difficulty most acutely in reading the RSP’s Hyde Park findings. Pieterse-Nakamura describes the attuned community—the gay men of 1960s Sydney—entering an environment—Hyde Park—that carried a resonance impression from a prior community—the Gadigal. The attuned community detects the impression, is drawn to it, makes a territory of it. The account is sequential: environment, then entry, then detection, then sign system. But I find myself wanting to ask: was there a moment at which the attuned community was not yet in relationship with the environment? A moment before entry? And if so, what was that moment—was it a moment of two separate things, environment and community, existing in parallel but not yet in contact? Or was the relationship already underway before what we would call contact occurred, in some sense that the sequential account does not capture?
I raise this not to contest the RSP findings, which I regard as the most important contribution to semiotic science in my lifetime, but because the question seems to follow from them. If the attuned receiver is attuned to a particular kind of structure, and the structured environment carries a particular kind of impression, and the two find each other with the regularity that the RSP data suggest—then something is already organising the encounter before the encounter occurs, and I am not sure what to call that something or where to locate it in the existing framework. It does not seem to be in the environment, because the environment does not seek out the receiver. It does not seem to be in the receiver, because the receiver does not know what they are attuned to until after the attunement has produced a detection. It seems to be in the relationship, and the difficulty is that relationship, in our existing vocabulary, is what happens between two things—it is not something that precedes the two things and produces them.
It may be that what we describe as environment and receiver are already abstractions from a more primary relational event, though I have neither the evidence nor the vocabulary to defend such a suggestion and therefore mention it only as a speculative possibility. I mean by this that the two-term vocabulary may be a necessary starting point that will eventually require supplementation by a vocabulary capable of describing whatever it is that has already occurred between environment and receiver before either becomes, to the other, an environment or a receiver. I do not know what such a vocabulary would look like. I am aware that the question may be unanswerable with current instruments, and possibly with any instruments that operate from within the two-term framework, since the instruments were themselves built to measure the relationship between terms rather than what precedes the terms. I mention it because I have been unable to stop thinking about it, and because the semiotic tradition has, in my reading of it, a history of productive advances made by people who mentioned in passing things they could not yet defend, and because I would rather set down the difficulty at the beginning of my career than arrive at it, undisclosed, at the end.
My supervisor, Professor Asante-Vidal, has told me that this is the kind of question one either learns to live with productively or learns to set aside gracefully, and that the choice between these two responses is, in his experience, the most reliable predictor of what kind of scholar one will become. I am attempting the productive version. The essay above is the result so far. It is not, I recognise, an advance on the existing literature. It is a record of an obstruction in my reading of that literature, offered in the hope that someone who has encountered the same obstruction and found their way around it might be willing to say how.
The author thanks Professor Asante-Vidal for supervision that has consistently been wiser than she has known how to fully receive, and Professor Pieterse-Nakamura, whose 2250 lecture she read at the age of sixteen and has not stopped reading since. Correspondence is welcomed. The author is aware that she is twenty-three years old and that this contribution may reflect the limits of that age as much as the merits of the question.
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