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Meta-Morphosis: Kinesis and Semiosis in Language Concerning a Theory of Enunciation

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Diagrams and Gestures

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis ((LECTMORPH))

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Abstract

My observations in this article will be restricted to the theory of enunciation developed by Antoine Culioli (1924–2018), one of the most eminent figures in French linguistics, whose thinking has not acquired the international renown due to it—this despite the fact that English-speaking linguists, as well as those of other languages, have entered into dialogue with Harris, Chomsky, Langacker and Talmy, to name but a few.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Culioli’s publications listed in the bibliography. Also of note are works in English, Cognition and representation in linguistic theory, edited by Michel Liddle (John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia 1995); and in Italian, L’arco e la freccia: scritti scelti, translated and edited by Francesco La Mantia with a preface by Tullio di Mauro (Bologna, Il Mulino, 2014).

  2. 2.

    See Jean Ladrière, “Système, épistémologie”, Encyclopoedia Universalis. http://www.universalis-edu.com/encyclopedie/systeme-epistemologie/ (accessed 7 May 2015).

  3. 3.

    “We can therefore say that, with texts, we are dealing with (mental) representations that are fixed (materialized and stabilized) through the intermediary of signs, for which we shall provide a meta-representation, so that we may manipulate them—manipulate them with a view to searching for consistencies and rules of good formation, in order to arrive at a calculation” [19: 12].

  4. 4.

    It may be useful to refer to the Lexique élémentaire de la Théorie des Opérations Prédicatives et Énonciatives d’Antoine Culioli compiled by de la Mantia [36].

  5. 5.

    Epilinguistics, which I am renaming epilanguage, refers to an unconscious, permanent activity, corresponding to a process in which forms are generated by variation-selection, in a similar way (but for language) to the epigenetic theories described by Courrèges, Changeux and Danchin (see Jean-Pierre Changeux and Antoine Danchin, “Apprendre par stabilisation sélective de synapses en cours de développement”, L’unité de l’homme 2. Le cerveau humain, Seuil, Paris, 1974). The neuronal model, known as the Darwinian model, of epigenesis through selective stabilization, has been extended, in conjectural fashion, to mental activity in general; it is based on a dynamic and interactive pattern of variation-selection, with a diversity generator and a selection system determined by the environment.

  6. 6.

    The article first appeared in Cahiers pour l’analyse, 9, 1968, Paris, Seuil.

  7. 7.

    See La Mantia [36, 35].

  8. 8.

    Sigmund Freud, “Remarques sur un cas de névrose obsessionnelle (L’homme aux rats)” [Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis], Cinq psychanalyses (Paris: P.U.F., 1954) pp. 199–261.

  9. 9.

    My examples are in the spirit of those analysed by Culioli but are not reproduced literally.

  10. 10.

    “The word is accepted, for example, to describe the area within the atom where its charge is concentrated, and within a cell, the area where its genetic material is concentrated and preserved: always in accordance with a demand for invariance, each time specific and locatable according to appropriate procedures. In the language of algebraists, a kernel acquires the meaning of invariant” (Desanti 1999: 138–140).

  11. 11.

    My hypothesis may be compared with that of Per Aage Brandt on the dual status, semiotic and cognitive, of the diagram: “The meaning of the diagram consists, so to speak, in a mental graph that is identical—at least partially—to the graph that we occasionally draw or sketch physically. It might therefore be said that the diagram is an indicator of the cognitive mechanism, which schematizes graphically while a thought is developing” [7]. Brandt’s perspective is semiotic, while Culioli’s work belongs to formal and empirical linguistics.

  12. 12.

    “Autour d’un objet” (unpublished), TOPE seminar, 17 March 2003.

  13. 13.

    Gilles Châtelet quotes this “axiom” of Hegel [Wissenschaft der Logik]: “Negativity is the rotation point (Wendungspunkt) of the movement of the concept” (op. cit., p. 30).

  14. 14.

    Oral seminar, 22/03/2006.

  15. 15.

    I would point out, in relation to this, and echoing what has been said of the role of schematic form, that the history of science reports cases of mathematical prefiguration, visual figures giving access, after the event, to mathematical realities that were unknown at the time when these graphic productions appeared in texts (see Peiffer, already cited, also [39]).

  16. 16.

    Culioli was then alluding to Taoist philosophy and to the idea that artists seek to grasp the intimate form of their subject, its internal structuring principle (the li in Chinese).

  17. 17.

    Idem, p. 30. [English edition, Introduction, p. 8.].

  18. 18.

    Oral seminar at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris.

  19. 19.

    The work of Charles Malamoud focuses mainly on Vedic ritual, based on his reading of the relevant philological and anthropological treatises. He attended courses given by Émile Benveniste from 1956 to 1962 and was a regular participant in Culioli’s seminars.

  20. 20.

    These two references are taken up and commented upon in a 2012 interview [24].

  21. 21.

    The author continues as follows: “In a more general sense, the texts are an update of the elementary and fundamental questions suggested to, or rather imposed upon, the authors by their self-attributed task of providing an explanation for ritual acts: What does it mean to begin? What does it mean to proceed to the next step? How is one to understand that the same act can be both single and multiple? What is meant by ‘too much’ and ‘not enough’? What is the relationship between parts and wholes? What does it mean to measure? How are repetition and difference to be understood? How does one tell creative reiteration apart from harmful redundancy? […] It is tempting to think that Vedic theoreticians considered rites to be the systems of acts where such concepts operated with the greatest clarity and purity and that it was for this reason that they devoted so much ingenuity and pertinacity to their analysis and glorification” [41, 180].

  22. 22.

    Gustave Guillaume, a French linguist who had a highly unusual career, at the margins of university institutions. He was the founder of “psychomecanics”, whose purpose was to analyse the operations at the root of linguistic signs—from language in its virtual state to the effectiveness of speech—in terms of cinetisms. A trend developed around his body of work, which was immense, although only a small part has been published. There are very few followers of Guillaume’s theory today but, recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in it, from a cognitive and philosophical point of view.

  23. 23.

    “A symbol incorporates a habit, and is indispensable to the application to any intellectual habit, at least. Moreover, Symbols offer the means of thinking about thoughts in ways in which we could not otherwise think of them” [43: 414].

  24. 24.

    “And in the case of the concessive, it is precisely a kind of counter to this: you do everything that you can, you make all the efforts you want, the fact remains that it does not prevent it coming to nothing; whereas, normally, your efforts should lead you to” [16: 177].

  25. 25.

    Some of these are presented in Ducard 2020.

  26. 26.

    Lawrence Barsalou is Professor of Psychology at the University of Glasgow, carrying out research at the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology.

  27. 27.

    “From this perspective, a category is typically simulated in diverse situations. Depending on the situation currently relevant, a different situated simulation is produced. […] One proposal is that the brain is a situation-processing architecture whose primary function is to capture and later simulate situated conceptualizations” [6: 15–16].

  28. 28.

    Barsalou’s model is along similar lines to one of the hypotheses put forward by Per Aage Brandt and Ulf Cronquist “That diagrammatic signs are the active components of the abstract mental figuration in working memory that accompany perception and deliver the schematizing ideas which invest and connect our categories and construe proper descriptive, narrative patterns of inferential thought and programs of sensorimotor and social action” [8, abstract].

  29. 29.

    In his theoretical model of brain functioning, the neurobiologist Edelman [30, 31] distinguishes primary consciousness, involving a “scene” in response to objects and events and connected by memory to a former experience associated with values and awareness of a superior order. This implies semantic aptitudes, with which certain primates are endowed, enabling a symbolic activity of representation to take place, made possible by language, and thus creating the potential for a consciousness of consciousness.

  30. 30.

    Let us remind ourselves of this simple definition of the image in mathematics: “In mathematics, we say that y is the image of x through the function f if y = f(x). By extension, the set of y elements for which there is an antecedent in E are called the image of a part E through an f function. For each y of the image set we can find an element x of the definition set, such as y = f(x)”. (https://www.techno-science.net/definition/10532.html).

  31. 31.

    “In mathematics, given two non-empty sets E, F and a map, we call any element x of E such as f(x) = y the antecedent (by f) of an element y of F”. (https://www.techno-science.net/definition/10523.html).

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  1. Emeritus Professor for Sciences of Language, Université Paris-Est, Créteil, Paris, France

    Dominique Ducard

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  1. Department of Humanities, Università di Palermo, Palermo, Italy

    Francesco La Mantia

  2. Centre d’Archives en Philosophie, Histoire et Édition des Sciences, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France

    Charles Alunni

  3. Departamento de Matemáticas, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia

    Fernando Zalamea

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Ducard, D. (2023). Meta-Morphosis: Kinesis and Semiosis in Language Concerning a Theory of Enunciation. In: La Mantia, F., Alunni, C., Zalamea, F. (eds) Diagrams and Gestures. Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29111-1_11

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