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And, in fact, it happens that only by fully realizing the drama of a young Frenchman suffering from the paralysis of Restoration can one really understand what it means that Napoleon irreversibly died in 1821. After reading Stendhal's novel one enriches that statement by a further series of possible connotative contents. And, if that statement has an object, even the immediate object of the expression becomes more 'dense' because of that particular interpretation. Le rouge et le noir is an interpretant of the above statement for at least two reasons: first, because of its internal structure, that is, by its contextual references to the situation of France after the death of Napoleon; second, because of the many testable critical statements which have presented Stendhal's novels as a Bildungsroman telling the story of an impossible and frustrated Bonapartist dream. Therefore the book is recognized as the interpretant of the statements by force of concrete and testable correlations, just as we know that a given portrait interprets the content of the word 'Napoleon' because of the label put on the framework by the author, accepted by the museums, and reproduced as a caption in innumerable books on art history. |
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Obviously, in order to make the interpretant a fruitful notion, one must first of all free it from any psychological misunderstanding. I do not say that Peirce did it. On the contrary, insofar as, according to him, even ideas are signs, in various passages the interpretants appear also as mental events. I am only suggesting that from the point of view of the theory of signification, we should perform a sort of surgical operation and retain only a precise aspect of this category. Interpretants are the testable and describable correspondents associated by public agreement to another sign. In this way the analysis of content becomes a cultural operation which works only on physically testable cultural products, that is, other signs and their reciprocal correlations. Therefore the process of unlimited semiosis shows us how signification, by means of continual shiftings which refer a sign back to another sign or string of signs, circumscribes cultural units in an asymptotic fashion, without even allowing one to touch them directly, though making them accessible through other units. Thus one is never obliged to replace a cultural unit by means of something which is not a semiotic entity, and no cultural unit has to be explained by some platonic, psychic, or objectal entity. Semiosis explains itself by itself: this continual circularity is the normal condition of signification and even allows communicational processes to use signs in order to mention things and states of the world. |
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1. On this matter Peirce is very contradictory. In 1885 (1.372) "a term is a mere general description, and neither icon nor index possesses generality." |
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