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the mise-en-scène, every element of that portion of the world that has been framed (put on the platform) becomes significant. I am thinking of the sociopsychological frame analysis proposed by Erving Goffman in his latest book. Goffman imagines two situations, both concerning a mirror and a lady. First situation: The mirror is in a beauty parlor, and the lady, instead of using it to adjust her hairdo, inspects the quality of its frame. That seems irregular. Second situation: The mirror is exhibited in an antiques shop, and the lady, instead of considering the quality of the frame, mirrors herself and adjusts her hair. That seems irregular. The difference in the mode of framing has changed the meaning of the actions of the characters in play. The contextual frame has changed the meaning of the mirror's carved framethat is, the frame as situation has given a different semiotic purport to the frame as object. In both cases, however, there is a framing, an ideal platforming or staging, that imposes and prescribes the semiotic pertinence both of the objects and of the actions, even though they are not intentional behavior or nonartificial items. |
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I should, however, stress that, until now, I have incorrectly put together natural and unintentional signs. I have done it on purpose because it is a kind of confusion frequently made by many semioticians. But we should disambiguate it. |
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On one hand, I can produce a false natural event, as when I purposely produce a false imprint in order to fool somebody. I can produce a false symptom by painting red spots on my face to pretend I have measles. On the other hand, I can produce unintentionally what usually is conceived to be intentional (the most typical examples are psychoanalytic slips of the tongue or those common errors that everybody makes when speaking a foreign language), but I also can produce intentionally what is usually believed to be unintentional. For instance, his pronunciation shows that a man is, let me say, a Frenchman speaking English. The choice of English words is an intentional act, the way of pronouncing them, even though semiotically important (it means to me "Frenchman") is unintentional. |
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But what about an actor who purposefully and caricaturally emits English phonemes with a French accent in order to tell his audience that he pretends (theatrically) to be a Frenchman who pretends (in theatrical reality) to be an American? The elementary mechanisms of human interaction and the elementary mechanisms of dramatic fiction are the same. This is not a witty idea of mine: from Goffman to Bateson and from the current researches in ethnomethodology to the experiences of a Palo Alto group (think also of Eric Berne's behavioral games models |
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