Symbol & Sign

In the modern day, we usually push Symbols into a subset of Signs that intelligent beings use to communicate. I do not like the way we do this, because I think we lose sight of the most important part of communication; i.e., that it is a dynamic process, not a static entity, and the understanding we glean from communication is something new in history, not a revealing of something old that was hidden.

I have a very strong suspicion of this in the phenomenon of the Meme which was so popular, and still may be widespread, not too long ago.
Succintly stated, the Meme was a concept felt to be necessary to sum up the dynamics of things that went "viral", things that obviously were spreading among people and affecting them and changing right before our eyes; the old ways of looking at signs and symbols was not adequate, because it had lost all notion of liveliness, it was no mensch, had no chutzpah, language and intelligence having been spread out on the medical examiner's table and autopsied until there was nothing of the spark of life left.

The basis of the discipline of Semiotics was linguistics and language, and the science has never escaped its origins in discrete words and phonemes. It is a science that has a extensive basis of understandoing of linguistics, but has no way to understand the vitality of creation, either linguistically or in any other area that intelligent beings create in.

A Symbol is not language alone. It is not solely linguistic.
A film is a symbol. A video is a symbol.

We shall create the science of symbols on our understanding not merely of language, but on every other conscious form of communication, so we may well include the Imaging of intelligent beings, and the cinema is a form of communication based on the grammar of Imaging, not Talking!

Furthermore, a symbol is not a static sign: it is a living creation that builds itself upon other symbols.
If I read Plato's Ion and make discoveries about art and its communication to an audience, I am not elucidating the meaning of Plato necessarily. What I am doing is creating a new entity - the philosophy of Plato through time and including my exposure to it - which is a new entity, not merely the unfolding of the old master genius.
It is a Dynamic Symbolic Process that builds upon previous dynamic symbolic processes. It is a "throwing with" - a joint effort of intelligence - sym meaning "together" (although in the Plato example one may be the superior party) - of inter-communication. And it does not stay just here; it "throws" beyond - bolos. And it creates something new, not a modification of something old.
As long as we continue to think in the old way that our efforts but modify something pre-existing, we shall never be able to understand the incredible strength of symbolic processes... or myths, too, if you will.

When pagans worshipped local nature gods, what did they worship? Did they worship a mountain? The fields? The agricultural genius of the fields? They worshipped their own interplay with the environment, combined with the "old stories" and the histories of the entire agricultural experience of their people and other peoples with whom they had contact. They worshipped the plenty of the harvest in its abundance, and they wished to avert the emptiness of the drought and famine!
They developed dyspepsia in the bacchanalia of the good years, and buried the young and old in the terror of the bad.
They watched the cycle of renewal every year. They became experts of the secret lives of plants. They developed sciences of trees and bushes and wheats and grasses...
Yet we tend to think of them as ritually-bound peoples of little wit.
The Symbol of the Nature God could kill them or support them and they knew it.

In our time, we do not understand Symbols. We think them dead, even though in 2008 the Symbolic Structure of Value and Money, the entire system of financial communication almost destroyed us back to the stone age. We need not fear any force of nature as much as we need fear our own creations! Earthquakes and tsunamis merely kill; our own symbolic creations will enslave and debase, then kill, if we let them run rogue. If we use them wisely, they will liberate and enrich us.

The picture at top is an Arapohoe Ghost Dance shirt. It has meaning that cannot be captured in language alone. It belonged to a dynamic and living symbolic structure that went extinct... until you read about it.

--note


more to come on this. I have spent years searching for an understanding of how we create the world.