Collateral Experience and Communication: Narrative Cognition and Symbolization
-A theoretical foundation of the Peircean Narratology and its Contribution
In general, the concept of communication is understood as transmission of information in time a ...
Collateral Experience and Communication: Narrative Cognition and Symbolization
-A theoretical foundation of the Peircean Narratology and its Contribution
In general, the concept of communication is understood as transmission of information in time and dissemination of information in space with an emphasis on information. But this study argues that communication is not for circulation of information irrespective of the communicators and its context but for connecting the two elements, the things communicated and the people, with context. Accordingly, the concept of communication involves the context of a communicational act. This idea leads to restoration of the status of and thus voluntary liberty in human beings against the dominant influence of technology of the digital era. For this reason, the concept of communication should be focused in the domain of human communication.
The argumentation of the new concept of communication requires a new methodology. First of all, we need to understand the characteristics of human beings in terms of how we think rather than what we think. This can be done by thorough observation and inference from previous knowledge from various and different perspectives such as biology, anthropology, psychology, neurology, psychology, and philosophy. We are used to thinking with double consciousness in a dichotomous way such as mind and body, objective and subjective, emotion and thought. What makes it worse is that we consider this in an axiological way, generating inequality through the predominance of language over image, the self over other, and we over they, both in individuals and in society. However, this is not caused by inherent humans’ character but acquired through the modeling system of language. Now we can escape from this involuntary dichotomous idea by remembering that image existed before language and by believing that after language there will be an act.
From this aspect, the study starts with understanding in human beings. That is, this study is based on the concept of human beings whose self is acquired by semiotic system, thus suggesting a semiotic system of narrative modeling. In fact, the function of narrative is equivalent to supernormal stimuli as was discovered by a biologist named Niko Tinbergen. This suggests that biological species show a specific behavioristic pattern when responding to certain stimuli. Furthermore, in humans there are two more modeling systems, language and culture, which are discussed by a Russian semiotician, J. Lotman. These modeling systems were expanded by a biosemiotician, T. Sebeok as including a primary modeling for a species-specific case, which is analogous to the function of supernormal stimuli. Following the discussion of the modeling systems, I arrive at a holistic modeling system by narrative. Therefore, the modeling of narrative consists in three subcategories. First, there is story modeling at the prelinguistic stage of feeling with iconic representation of experience based on similarity. Second, there is narrative modeling at the linguistic stage of thinking with syntactical character of subject-and-predicate combination based on causality and contiguity, functioning as creation of a thought. Third, there is narration modeling at the postlinguistic stage of act with remediation based on generality in a new context.
The concept of modeling functions as narrative dialectic for a communication act by virtue of semiotic enterprise. Moreover, the narrative modeling provides a theoretical foundation of the ‘Pericean narratology’ along with cognitive narratology and Peirce’s pragmatism. The Peircean Narratology contributes to breaking down the bicameral mind in order to bring cultural transformation by narrative modeling, specifically narrative dialectics. The significance of the Peircean narratology lies in the capacity for auto-description of symbolization remediating the oppositional relation. Narrative dialectics is regarded as a method for understanding the actual world by symbolic narrative. Accordingly, symbolization by way of narrative dialectics is manifested by conduct which represents contextual meaning from symbolic narrative which, in turn, represents the relation of actual and imaginative narrative. In this sense, the Peircean narratology is directed to remediational semiotics which diagnoses and remedies troubles in the actual world.