Thibault Paul J. re foreword b M. A Halliday K.Continuum The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Paul J. Thibault 2004 Foreword © M. A. K. Halliday 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. First published 2004 Paperback edition 2006 British Library Cataloguing in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-8264-9253-3 (paperback) Library of Congress Cataloging in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ‘Typeset by Kenneth Burnley in Wirral, Cheshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King's Lynn, NorfolkContents Beale Body-brain : Sate Meaning-making Activity, and Ecosocial Baronment: Bull Building screpecideice - - Contextualization and Meta-redundancyvi CONTENTSCONTENTS vii 12__ Scalar Heterogeneity and the Phonological and Lexicogrammatical Rank Scales 13 ‘The Emergence of Linguistic Categories from the Child’s Primary Forceful Interactions with its Environment 162 Part I Chapter 4: The Semiotic Basis of Consciousness 1 _ Firstperson and Third-person Accounts of Consciousness 171 2__ The Representation of Subjective Experience in Consciousness in Relation to the Higher-scalar Environment of the Individual 173 3 Locating the Seat of Consciousness 176. 4 The Meaning-making Capacity of the Body-brain Complex through the Discrimination of Difference 184 5 Language Functions and the Cortical Organization of the Brain: Implications for Higher-order Consciousness 189 6 _ Experiential Meaning and the Assimilation of the Phenomena of Experience to Knowable Categories 195 7_ Interpersonal Meaning as Exploratory and Orienting Activity in Relation to the Ground 198 8 The Textual Metafunction as Semiotic Means for Giving Unity and Wholeness to Meaning-making 200 9 Experiential and Interpersonal Meaning in Gaze 201 10 _Proto-interpersonal Meaning and the Child’s Exploration of its 11__ Bogdan’s Theory of Mental Sharing and Topical Predication 205 12__ Interpersonal Meaning, Value, and Action 209 13 Procedural Knowledge, Declarative Knowledge and the Semiotic Spiral towards Symbolic Consciousness 212 14 _ Interpersonal Meaning, Goal-seeking Activity, and the Goal Hierarchy 215 1b G Sepaiiuie Susie 217 16 _An Alternative Reading of Descartes in the Internalist Perspective of Interpretive Activity 224 17 The Entropic Character of Meaning 226 18 Consciousness as the Contextualization of Experience in the Perspective of the Self 227 19 _The Embeddin i s in a Higher-scalar System of Interpretance 231 Chapter 5: The Metafunctional Character of Consciousness: Some Correlations Between the Neurobiological and Semiotic Dimensions 1_ The Contextual Character of Consciousness __236 z= 3 The Metafunctions and the Shape of Consciousness 238 ‘Vague Contours of the Metafunctions in the Infant's Early Perceptual-motor Engagements with the Environment 241viii CONTENTS 4 The Structure of (Self)Consciousness in Perceptual Awareness 246 5 Damasio’s Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness 248 6 The Proto-metafunctional Structure of Core and Extended Consciousness 257 7 Integrating the Interaction System and the Meaning System Perspectives on (Self)Consciousness 264 8 Minding the Gap between Minds: Mirror Neurons and Interpersonal Meaning 267 9 Inner Speech as Linguistically Realized Higher-order Thinking 27 10 The Metafunctional Character of Inner Speech as Linguistically Constituted Thought 272 Ui The unding of the Perspectives of Self and Other in Symbolic Consciousness 276 12 Text, Social Meaning-making Practices and Higher-order Consciousness 277 Chapter 6: Brain, Meaning, and Consciousness 1 Biological and Socio-cultural Factors Form a Single System of Complexly Related and Interacting Factors: Putting Time and Activity Back into the Picture 281 2 _Re/interpreting Flohr’s Brain-based Theory of Phenomenal Awareness: A Three-level Hierarchy View of the Emergence of Proto-meaning in the Brain 283 3__ Brain, Meaning, and Symbolic Consciousness 289 4 The Embodiment of the Material and the Conscious Modes in Expression and Content 290 5 Periodicity and the Intrinsic Temporal Organization of the Expression Stratum of Speech on Diverse Scalar Levels 295 6 __ The Creation of Symbolic Objects of Consciousness in Semantic Neural Space 296 7 Contextualizing Relations, the Principle of Meta-redundancy, and the Brain as Contextualizing Tool 300 8 A Definition of Consciousness in Terms of the Semiosis that Occurs Within the Brain 302 9 The Three-level Hierarchy, Neuronal Activity, and the Emergence of the Selfperspective 310 Epilogue 314 References 318 Name Index 331 Subject Index 334List of Figures 2.1 Example of gestural scores for /pzn/ (‘pan’) and /baen/ (‘ban’); borrowed from Browman and Goldstein (1995: 189) go 3.1 Syllable structure of sail, showing moraic and non-moraic elements 113 3.2 Trajectory of wave of stressed and unstressed syllables in clause complex, showing alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables as syntagm unfolds in time 14 8.3 Trajectory of tonicity wave in clause complex 114 3.4 Rhythmic field of the word sailed, showing Ictus and Remiss phases of its temporal trajectory 128 3.5 Dependency relations between Ictus and Remiss phases in never 124 3.6 Thematicity wave in the English clause complex, showing Theme and Rheme as two peaks of informational quanta 129 3.7 Multiple modalizing fields acting on the syntagmatic domain of a proposition, showing the scope over which each field’s modalized influence extends 131 3.8 Simplified determiner system, showing the categorial distinction between the values ‘specific’ and ‘non-specific’, as symbolized by English theand a 133 3.9 Expression stratum as combinatorial hierarchy, showing reorganization of higher levels as recouplings of elements on lower levels thereby allowing for the emergence of new systemic ities and, hence, new system-environment couplings 143 3.10 The integration of initial at-oneness with the world to the expansion of information-meaning at more specified levels of semiosis along an individuating trajectory M49 3.11 Linguistic categorization and its emergence from predinguistic forceful interactions between body and environment 168 4.1 Integration-cum-presupposition hierarchy of iconic, indexical, and symbolic modes of grounding 2u 4.2 Classification of input and output impulses involved in the symbolic transduction of stimulus information and sensori-motor activity in semiosis (adapted and modified from Gibson 1983 [1966]: 46) 219 6.1 _Reentrant loop of conscious experience, showing relationship between self and object of experience 288 6.2 Content and expression and their relations to the central and peripheral nervous systems; adapted from Peng (1994) 294 6.3 Open-ended hierarchy of semiotic triplicates of levels showing the integration of perceptual, conceptual, and symbolic phenomena of conscious experience 307List of Tables 21 22 3.1 3.2 33 34 35 4.1 42 43 44 45 46 61 6.2 The robustness of the agent and its interfacing with the expression and content strata of language Stratified model of language, showing vertical hierarchy of different levels of abstraction Metafunctional analysis of exchange unit: phonological, lexicogrammatical and discourse semantic strata; tonic segments in upper case The expression stratum of spoken language in relation to the three-level hierarchy Semiotic properties of icon, index, and symbol The metafunctional organization of both phonology and lexicogrammar on the expression and content strata illustrating the operation of mixed-mode semiosis, combining both discrete typological-categorial distinctions and continuous topological variation on both strata The content stratum of language in relation to the three-tevel hierarchy Emergence of embodied category formation and its differentiation into ‘learning about’ and ‘acting on’ through forceful interaction with environment Lateralization of language functions in the left and right hemispheres according to Deacon ‘A comparison of four accounts of language form and function in context, showing an emerging consensus concerning the multifunctional nature of language and its contextual motivation Proto-experiential meaning in gaze vector Proto-interpersonal meaning in gaze vector, showing ground functions Multimodal co-deployment of perceptual-semiotic resources in the exchange between the child and his mother in Halliday's example Types of knowledge and stages of semiotic development in early infant semiosis Metafunctional analysis of the imperative clause (you) look at the mess Scalar hierarchy of anatomical structures of perception and relative functions no 135 191 194 201 213 304Foreword Itis a privilege to be invited to introduce a work of this range and importance. Paul Thibault’s book is appearing at a time when the disciplinary borders inherited from the previous century - no longer felt as enabling, but rather as constraining, as boundaries rather than borders — are tending to fuzz out and disappear; and new strategies of thought, new dimensions of knowledge are emerging. This book makes a significant contribution to the ongoing dialogue around these critical themes. One feature that contributes to the strength and effectiveness of Paul Thibault’s treatment of his topic is the way he engages with the work of leading scholars of the past hundred years whose ideas can be seen as having in some sense anticipated the directions of change. In this respect he is following up his own earlier (1997) study of Ferdinand de Saussure, the scholar usually claimed as ‘the father of modern linguistics’ and certainly the linguist most frequently revisited and commented on during the entire twentieth-century period. In the present book, Paul Thibault discusses the theoretical contributions of Saussure’s most important successor, Louis Hjelmsley, as well as those of other scholars such as Karl Buhler and Gregory Bateson who helped to shape the pattern of knowledge for their own and the succeeding time. By picking up on their work Paul Thibault provides an intellectual context for interpreting the theoretical advances made by contemporary scholars who, in their turn, are redefining the parameters of our own thinking - people such as Gerald Edelman, Jay Lemke, Antonio Damasio and Terrence Deacon. The central organizing concept running through the book is that of meaning, or semiosis ~ the realm of our existence that is distinct from, and complemen- tary to, the material realm. Paul Thibault theorizes meaning as ‘trajectories’ taking place in time, in the form of activities on a number of different scalar levels from neuronal activity in the individual brain through to movement across human populations; but manifested critically in the social meaning-making practices of the members of human groups. Here too there is an echo of a previous motif in his work, that of ‘Social Semiotics as Praxis’ (1991) developed against the background of theory of narrative. All such activities are grounded in biological processes: ‘meaning-making is to be explained in terms which are consistent with what we understand about the biological basis of semiosis’ (present volume p. 24) — but this is not to say that the whole of semiosis can be explained by reduction to biology.xii FOREWORD The most powerful manifestation of semiosis is human language; and in this book Paul Thibault’s central concern is the interpretation of language itself as a self-organizing complex system. His concept of the ‘signifying body’ encapsu- lates the notion of the human body as the locus where meaning is made, through the operation of the brain at the critical interfacing of the semiotic with the material ~ the content plane with the ecosocial environment, the expression plane with the physiological resources of the production and reception of speech. Thus all linguistic processes are grounded in processes of the body. But language cannot be reduced to bodily processes, and much of the discussion centres on the organization of language as it appears in depth with this dual perspective. Paul Thibault defines his starting point in these terms: '... the intrinsic organ- ization of language has evolved in the species (phylogenesis) and develops in the individual (ontogenesis) so that it cross-couples both with the biological makeup of the body-brain and with the socio-cultural organization of our ecosocial envi- ronment in ways that closely relate to the kinds of social activities that human beings perform’ (present volume p. 48). To me as a linguist perhaps the most significant feature of Paul Thibault’s many-faceted approach is the way he builds up the intellectual context both for language and for linguistics, language in its relation to the human condition, linguistics in its relation to human knowledge. In a sense these are two aspects of the same contextualizing process, since language figures as the centrepiece of semiosis, or meaning-making activity, and all construction of knowledge is the making of meaning. Paul Thibault's project is not so much interdisciplinary as transdisciplinary, coaligning the resources for thinking about his topic along a new thematic discussion. This is the kind of thinking that is needed so that new questions can be asked wherever there are problems to be solved. M. A. K. HALiipay Hong Kong November 2003Preface The writing of this book has arisen out of the conviction that there is an urgent need for a materialist ecosocial semiotics which is able to reconnect body-brain processes and interactions both to the social and cultural practices which directly act upon and affect human bodies, as well as to the ways in which bodily and brain processes directly participate in and are a constitutively inseparable part of our meaning-making activity. This book is concerned with the role of the body-brain complex in our social meaning-making practices. In recent years, the role of the body and the brain in our social meaning-making practices has been a source of considerable interest and discussion. However, it is my contention that these discussions do not move our understanding of the body's central role in meaning-making beyond the discourse- and language-centred models of textual ‘representation’ which continue to inform most accounts of the constitutive role of the body in social semiosis. A different orientation is called for. This orientation is what I refer to, following Jay Lemke, as an ecosocial semiotics of human meaning-making activity. Like human meaning-making activity itself, this book is very much a hybrid phenomenon. This reflects my conviction that the science of human meaning- making activity is necessarily a transdisciplinary theory and praxis. While working on the lectures of the course ‘Saussure and Beyond’ that I wrote for the Cyber Semiotics Institute between 1996 and 1998 (WWW site: hup:// www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb), it became increasingly clear to me that many of the fundamental questions concerning ecosocial semiotic theory can only be answered by engaging in a dialogue with the foundational concepts and questions of both the social and the life sciences. In some ways, my web course “Saussure and Beyond’ is a kind of Prolegomenon to the present study. In the past two decades or so, the dialogue between the human and life sciences has been given new direction and impetus by the development of the theory of complex adaptive dynamic open systems. Such systems are character- ized by the fact that their component parts give rise to newly emergent levels of organization that are not reducible to the sum of their lower-level components. Instead, the higher, global levels take on dynamical characteristics that have con- straining effects on the lower, local levels. Furthermore, dynamic open systems bring time and history to the centre of the theoretical enquiry. Time, irre- versibility, the embedding of systems in higher-scalar environments, and individ- uation, are all important features of this new way of understanding the world, including the part we play in it. Thus, the prediction and control of phenomenaPREFACE xiv and the universalizing principles and modes of explanation in the natural and social sciences that have been the hallmarks of the ‘classical’ approach to science in the past three or four centuries no longer hold sway in this new view of the world and our place in it. Meaning, the interpretation of meaning across many different scalar levels, and our being necessarily inside such systems of interpre- tance, will be seen to play a key role in this perspective The new perspectives that the theory of complex dynamic systems makes available to the science of human meaning-making activity allow us to ask new questions. What are the foundational concepts of this approach? What is the relationship between the physical-biological and the social-cultural dimensions of our being? What does this approach entail for the relationship between the expression and content strata of semiotic systems? Does meaning originate in ‘mind’ or ‘brain’, or is it the result of complex, time-bound semiotic trajectories that loop between the individual's intrinsic dynamics and the ecosocial environ- ment in which the individual is embedded? What is an ecosocial environment? How does the body brain complex relate to meaning-making activity? How does consciousness relate to meaning-making activity? What is the status of the discourse- and language-centred models of textual ‘representation’ in relation to the centrality of activity? How do the material and the semiotic dimensions of meaning-making activity combine with each other? What is the political signifi- cance of an ecosocial semiotic theory? Itis only through the attempt to understand the constitutive inseparability of the semiotic-discursive and physical-material cross-couplings and dynamics that we can adequately theorize our and others’ embodiments, our subjective experience of our ecosocial environments, our perceptions of our inner states and sensations and the meanings we attribute to these both in our internal dialogues in ‘inner’ speech activity, as well as in our interactions with others, and the materiality of the body as playing a central, not marginal, role in social meaning-making activity. In this volume, I have sought to engage with the relevant perspectives and theoretical insights of a range of disciplines ~ e.g. linguistics, semiotics, biology, and psychology ~ in order to understand their relevance to the ecosocial semiotic framework of this book and to reconstitute their perspectives and insights within that framework. In doing so, I have tried to organize the diverse insights and theoretical perspectives that I engage with in this book into a coherent set of principles and analytical tools that will serve to extend the ecosocial semiotic framework into new areas of enquiry and practice. A second book, which I have completed and which will appear after the present one, will focus more specifically on the cultural, social, interpersonal and developmental aspects of the ways in which body-brain systems are cross-coupled to their ecosocial semiotic environments. In many ways, the arguments of the two books are complementary in terms of the overall ecosocial semiotic perspective. I am grateful to Professor Gugliemo Cinque, former Dean of the Facolté di Lingue ¢ Letterature Straniere of the University of Venice, and to Professor Paolo Balboni, then Director of the Dipartimento di Scienze del Linguaggio of the same University. Both Gugliemo and Paolo generously supported my application for study leave from the University of Venice during 2002, as well as facilitating its passage through the University bureaucracy. This leave was crucial in allowing me to complete this project.PREFACE xv This book was completed in August 2002 during my stay as a Visiting Professor in the Department of English in Lingnan University in Hong Kong. I wish to express my appreciation and gratitude to my colleagues at Lingnan University and especially to the Head of the Department of English, Professor Barry Asker, for providing so much support and assistance during the period of my stay at Lingnan University and also for making my stay there such an enjoyable and rewarding one. Wendy Wong, the departmental secretary, was a constant source of invaluable secretarial and practical assistance. Ihave been privileged to be able to present some of the arguments developed in this book to colleagues and students in universities and research institutes in the following countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Norway, San Marino, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. It is impossible to thank all of you by name, but I am most grateful to all of you for providing a forum for my ideas, as well as for your critical discussion and input. L also wish to express my gratitude to the following individuals with whom I have had discussions, or whose advice, support and friendship have been critically important for the completion of this project: John Alexander, Felipe Alcdntara Iglesias, Anthony Baldry, Marco Battacchi, Olga Battacchi, Jim Benson, Paul Bouissac, David Butt, Ray Cattell, Magda Cortelli, Stephen Cowley, Michael Cummings, Fan Dai, Kristin Davidse, Ersu Ding, Paolo Fabbri, Robin Fawcett, Gillian Francis, Peter Fries, Nancy Fries, Andrew Goatly, Bill Greaves, Michael Gregory, Morag Harris, Mike Ingham, Marcel Kinsbourne, Lisa Leung, Marc Lorrimar, Bob Lumsden, Eva Maagera, Bill McGregor, Blair McKenzie, Ng Lai Ping, Kay O'Halloran, Carlo Prevignano, Helen Price, Duane Savage-Rumbaugh, Susan Savage-Rumbaugh, Stuart Shanker, Jared Tagliatela, Godfey Tanner, Carol Taylor Torsello, Gordon Tucker, Eija Ventola, and David Wallace. Lowe a special debt of gratitude ~ both intellectual and personal ~ to Michael Halliday, Rugaiya Hasan and Jay Lemke for the critically important dialogues that I have had with them on the subject matter of this book over many years. Without their constant encouragement and support, the development of the ideas in this book would have been considerably poorer. Lalso wish to thank my mother, Sylvia, my father, Philip, my brother, Mark, and my sister, Linda, for believing in me and helping to make it all happen. To my daughter, Ilaria, my profound appreciation and gratitude for her understanding and love. Thave dedicated this book to the memory of Morag Harris. My deep sense of Joss at her passing cannot adequately be expressed in words. Finally, to Ordy, for filling my life with her radiance and love. Paut J. THIBAULT Bologna October 2003In memory of Morag Anne Harris 17 November 1954-11 December 2000Part I1 Introduction 1. The Body-brain System, Meaning-making Activity, and Ecosocial Environment: Building a New, Unified Discourse This book is concerned with the relations between the body-brain system, meaning-making activity, and the ecosocial environment in which the former are embedded. An increasing number of studies in recent years show the inadequa- cies of the view that the brain is the seat of disembodied mental processes, or that cognitive and meaning-making activities stop at the skin of the individual ism. Moreover, the idea that the ‘inner’ mental life of the individual can be ed from our meaning-making (semiotic) activity itself needs to be re- examined. Traditionally, Western cultural traditions have evolved two radically distinct discourse traditions for talking about notions such as mind, cognition, and the mental, on the one hand, and society, communication, and the semiotic, on the other (see Gee 1992; Lemke 1995a: 81-82; Manghi 1988; Walkerdine 1997). Furthermore, the material basis of both ‘inner’ cognitive processes and ‘outer’ meaning-making, or semiotic, activity has been disjoined from our discourses about the mental (e.g. thinking) and meaning (eg. discourse, language). Another problem stems from the way in which semiosis is narrowly defined in terms of linguistically informed notions of text. One negative conse- quence of this restriction is the failure to sce not only the continuities that link human semiosis with the semiosis of other species, but also the continuities that exist between perception, nondinguistic conceptual thinking, mental imaging, consciousness, and semiosis. A second negative consequence lies in the way in which linguistic models of text have been used as models of embodied meaning-making activity ~ activity which is embedded in its ecosocial environment. Textual products and records are produced and/or used in different kinds of social activities (see Lemke 1984a: 78-80; Thibault 1991a: chapters 2-4, 1994, 2003a: 58). The more funda- mental notion in the theoretical framework of the present study is that of activity. Texts are integral parts of activities in particular ecosocial contexts, yet they have a secondary and derived status with respect to the activities in which they are made and in which they participate, Activity is primary in the present framework (sce also Goodwin 1996a, 1996b; Lave 1997). Activity extends beyond the individual into the ecosocial environment. Meaning-making activity is a wajectory-in-time. In saying this, | am adapting the notion of an ontogenetic trajectory in the work of Salthe (1998: 181-5). The locus4 BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY of meaning is not the organism. It cannot be reduced to the semiotic forms that are co-deployed in a given meaning-making activity or their physica-material substrate. Nor is it the object text that may result from this activity. Rather, the locus of meaning is the trajectory. It is useful to consider meaning-making activity as a semiogenetic trajectory that reaches back in time as well as forwards into the future. The relevant viewpoint here is that of the selves who joindy engage in such activities and the perspectives that they implicate. Furthermore, semiogenetic trajectories can be seen as embedded in much larger-scale historica-biographical (ontogenetic) and ecosocial-cultural trajectories at the same time as they integrate the much smaller scales of the neural and sensor- motor dynamics of the body-brain to their own largerscale dynamics and timescales. A trajectory is a persistence-in-time that arises through the organiza- tion of processes. A meaning-making, or semiogenetic, trajectory is, therefore, an organization of semiotic processes that persist on some timescale. The existence of the trajectory on its level is dependent on both higherscalar contextual constraints and lowerscalar affordances, or enabling conditions, as well as on meaning which is stored within the system (e.g. the biological organism which supports the trajectory) as biological initiating conditions (Salthe 1998: 107). ‘A semiogenetic, or meaning-making, trajectory does not require pre- established plans or rules locked within the central nervous system of the organism that govern, cause, or otherwise specify from the outset what meanings can be made and how. All that is required to get things started is a motivation or intention which provides the initial impetus. The selforganizing processes that enable a semiogenetic trajectory to emerge in time during the course of the activity will do the rest. That is, the reentrantly correlated neural groups that are built up from diverse sources of information both within the brain, in the environment of the agent, the agent's past history of interactions, and so on, constitute attractors, These attractors interact with the motivation or intention (see Juarrero 1999: 199) in ways which open up possibilities in the individual's neurally organized semantic state space. Attractors, by definition, enact con- strained pathways or trajectories through this state space. Given the recursive nature of cerebral organization as a network of network of networks . . . etc., as discussed by Kinsbourne (2001: 244-5; see below), more specific networks are nested within more schematic ones. A vague motivation or intention to do something, as Juarrero (1999: 199) shows, is embodied in a very broad, shallow attractor. A broad or shallow attractor allows for very many lowerlevel possibilities for its realization in motor behaviour, depending on which sub-networks of neural patterns are activated. If, for example, a linguistic strategy for realizing the intention is activated - e.g. an imperative utterance directing someone to bring about the desired state of affairs — rather than, say, a strategy based on direct physical action such as reaching for the desired object and grasping it in one’s hand, then some neural pathways and motor processes rather than others will be activated. These patterns of activation do not require conscious planning or deliberation on the part of the agent. Being an agent does not entail this. Rather, being an agent depends on the overall context of the activity: the activation ofINTRODUCTION 5 one pathway rather than some other sets up particular patterns of constraints on various levels of organization in the overall context as it unfolds in time. The agent's initiating conditions include a body-brain habitus of dispositions and ways of orienting to and being ‘in’ particular kinds of situations that the agent has accumulated over time, how the agent feels about them, the agent's perceptual- motor abilities at a given point in time, and the categories — perceptual-motor, conceptual, and semiotic - that the agent has established in his or her neural dynamics on the basis of previous engagements with the environment. Once a particular trajectory has been activated through the agent's neural dynamics such that a given motor process - the neuromuscular activity of vocal- tract articulation - is entrained to the patterns of activation of the agent's neural dynamics, then higherscalar contextual constraints come into play. Context- sensitive semiotic constraints provide global principles of organization whereby the action-trajectory is given a determinate organization and is modulated by both higherscalar ecosocial constraints and lower-scalar (e.g. biological) enabling conditions as it unfolds in time towards its completion. The discourse genres and social activity-structure types which are characteristic of a particular social network are context-sensitive constraints in this sense. They are not fixed recipes for action, but systems of higher-order contextual constraints which cross-couple and entrain semiotic-discursive and physical-material processes to their principles of organization (see Andersen 2000). In so doing, they skew the probability distributions of the semiotic-discursive selections and their cross- coupling to physicabmaterial, including bodily, processes, such that some outcomes are preferred and hence are more likely than others. It is in this way that meaning-making activity is given a determinate shape and vectoriality as an instance of an act of a given type. Rather than relying on an intuitive and common-sense appeal to intentions, wants, desires, and so on, as internal mental states that are prior to self: organizing meaning-making activity, intentions are emergent properties of this Agents, in their meaning-making activity, attribute intentions to themselves and to others as a way of regulating and interpreting the contribu- tions of each other to the co-construction of the activity itself. In this view, intentions, rather than belonging to an epistemically private inner mental realm, are emergent discourse constraints and meanings that agents deploy in order, dialogically, to co-ordinate their respective contributions to the evolving discourse as it unfolds in realtime. The semiogenetic wajectory, therefore, affords the integration of the body-brain’s material interactivity with its here-now environment with past events and occasions of interacting with others, as well as with anticipated possible future outcomes. For example, a near-six-month-old child's high-pitched squeak is contextually integrated with the perceptual pick- up of information about an environmental event (the scattering of some pigeons), the child’s turning towards and attending to this event, as well as the parent's response to the child's vocalization (Halliday 1993: 95-6; see chapter 4, section 10, pp. 202-5, for discussion). The child’s vocalization is itself an envi- ronmental event, which the mother both hears and interprets. She interprets the vocalization as a meaningful act that requires a response from her. At the same time, the child’s high-pitched squeak is contextually integrated with previous6 BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY experiences of the child’s vocalizations and the parents’ history of interpreting them in contextspecific ways. The notion of the meaning-making (semiogenetic) trajectory thus provides a way of conceptualizing how body-brains contextually integrate information deriving from different perceptual modalities (e.g. seeing, hearing, moving) in the here-now of their own and others’ bodily activities to events, activities, and so on, on other space-time scales, both in the actual past and in the anticipated future, involving either the same or other participants (see Thibault 2000a: 303-6; 2003b). It is in this way that infants are integrated, through their active participation in such events, to the higherscalar ecosocial processes and dynamics where semiotic entities such as, for example, ‘wants’, ‘beliefs’, ‘intentions’ and ‘desires’ are recognized and used as the basis both for adjusting to and accounting for the behaviour of others qua selves to whom we attribute such things as wants, beliefs, intentions, and desires (see Matthiessen 1993; Thibault 1993; see also Zelazo 1999). On this view, intentions are not, as I pointed out above, epistemically private mental states that belong to an ontologically distinct domain of ‘mind’ with inde- pendent causal powers. Instead, they are meaning-making resources that belong to the higherscalar system of interpretance of some ecosocial semiotic system. As such, agents use them for the purposes of interpreting and orienting to each other in discourse, in the process adjusting their own activity on the basis of the belief in our culture in the notion that persons are in possession of intentions qua epistemically private mental states that can be read off behaviour as evidence for the existence of a private mental realm that language simply serves to reveal. This account is essentially a realist one: intentions have a separate existence in the mind with respect to the signs that refer to them. In my account, intentions, desires, wants, and so on are semiotic categories that agents appropriate from the interpersonal moral orders in which their actions are recognized, understood, and accounted for (Harré 1983). As such, they are not independent of the semiotic resources that we use in discourse to construe and enact them. They function in meaning-making activity to interpret and orient our own and others’ activities, Semiosis is also a physical-material phenomenon. That is, semiosis is enacted and materially supported by the biologically based physical interactions that occur between individual organisms and their physical-material environments. From this point of view, semiosis is integrated with the material processes of our bodies and brain in interaction with their external environments. Semiotic activity both originates in physical-material (e.g. biological) interactions and, at the same time, has material effects on the environment, including other indi- viduals and their bodies. In particular, meaning-making activity, or semiosis, is cross-coupled to physical-material processes which constitute the substrate of semiosis. By the same token, the activity is guided and modulated along its trajectory by higher- scalar semiotic constraints that arise in the symbolic (e.g. semantic) neural space of the individual until the activity’s completion. Semiotically mediated activity (meaning-making activity) always has both a semioticdiscursive and a physicalmaterial dimension (see also Hasan 1999: 245, who points out thatINTRODUCTION 7 context can ‘never be dissociated from the material and institutional aspects of a culture’). Meaning-making is a semiotic-discursive phenomenon in the sense that its dynamical processes enact meaningful patterns and relations that integrate the particular occasion or situation to the systems of semantic and other semiotic categories that the members of a given community or social network recognize and interpret as meaningful. Furthermore, these categories serve to link the particular event and the particular individuals who participate in that event to other activities, other practices, other individuals and social insti- tutions on diverse space-time scales that go beyond the particular here-now event. These linkages are possible because the relevant systems of categories have evolved in historical time and have been adapted to the diverse needs and purposes of the individuals who constitute a particular community or social network. Those who argue in favour of formalist models of language maintain that language is autonomous with respect to both its physical-material basis in the body-brain complex of the individual organism and the wider social and cultural practices and meaning systems that characterize and constitute a given human community. In this book, I shall emphasize the continuity between semiotic processes and our other embodied resources for integrating organisms to their environments. Thus, perception, non-linguistic conceptual thinking, reasoning, sensori-motor exploration, memory and many forms of pre- or non-linguistic consciousness can be seen to be components of a much larger, phylogenetically older, complex of resources whereby organisms are integrated with and engage in meaningful transactions with their inner and outer environments on diverse space-time scales. Language and other semiotic resources (e.g. depiction, movement, and gesture) are not discontinuous with, or even necessarily qualita- tively distinct from, these other systems in all respects. On the other hand, this does not mean that there are no differences between these older cognitive resources and social semiotic ones. Instead, our symbolic resources for making meanings with others in social contexts have evolved as. part of this larger, older complex. The symbolic categories of language and other semiotic systems can be seen to be the further specification of these prior, non- cultural systems. This position is not dissimilar to the recent arguments advanced by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002) that the ‘language faculty in the broad sense (FLB)’ is shared with other species, whereas the ‘language faculty in the narrow sense (FLN)’ ‘may be unique to humans’ (Hauser et al: 1578). Aside from the question of recursion, which these authors argue belongs to the FLN, their position argues for considerable continuity between animal communica- tion and human language with respect to the FLB. I shall discuss in more detail later in this book the reasons why the mentalist discourse for talking about notions such as ‘cognition’, ‘mental representation’, and ‘internal symbol manipulation’ (Schank and Abelson 1977), cannot serve as a useful or adequate conceptual framework for understanding the ways in which individuals are integrated to their material and semiotic environments on many different scalar levels of organization. The mentalist discourse starts with the assumption of an individual mind which must solve problems and so on, in an external environment ‘out there’. Early cognitive science focused on the internal8 BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY mechanisms of cognition, especially on the role of the information-processing strategies, the mental representations, and the computations performed on these representations. There was little or no interest in the neural processes that formed the physical substrate of these cognitions. The prevailing view was that neural processes merely provided the physical medium through which cognition was implemented. Cognition was seen as independent of the physical medium and its workings. This view was based on the models and metaphors of human cognition that the digital computer both inspired and made available. However, the body brain complex, unlike the digital computer, is a dynamic open system which is both sensitive to and constrained by its contexts. In this book, I take the view that the biology of the body-brain complex cannot be separated from the structure and function of meaning-making activity. Furthermore, the discourse of mind has remained silent about the larger-scale ecosocial systems in which individuals and their activities are embedded and which mediate and link the activities of individuals together as component subsystems which function in larger-scale, systemically organized wholes (see Thibault 1986a). Quite aside from the individual-centred, even ideologically charged, assumption of a mind which is separated from a body and an individual actor who is separate from society, the causal and ontological priority assigned to that reified entity that we usually refer to as ‘mind’ leads us into ways of thinking and acting that are inconsistent with theoretical assumptions of this book. In the first place, no ‘entity’ exists independently of some context. Individual organisms are integrated to and are constituent and functioning parts of larger-scale systems and processes at the same time as they themselves are the integrating contexts for entities and processes on still smaller scales. Rather than a constitutive separation of mind, body, and environment, the focus of the present study will be on the ways in which individuals and their interactions with both their inner and outer environments are mediated by higherscalar systems of interpretance and the social practices in and through which these systems of interpretance are deployed in particular contexts. Individuals, on their particular scale, are consti- tutive parts or subsystems of these higherscalar environments. They do not simply exist ‘in’ an environment which is external to them (Salthe 1998: 20). Rather, the semiotically mediated activities in which they engage actively constitute their environments by virtue of the continuous exchanges of matter, energy, and information-meaning between organism and environment (see also Bateson 1973a: 285-91; Gibson 1986 [1979]: 8). 2. The Conceptual Framework of the Ecosocial Semiotic Perspective The conceptual framework of the present study is an ecosocial semiotic one. This term derives from and is a further development of the concept of ecosocial dynamics proposed by Lemke (1995b). Human socio-cultural systems, Lemke points out, are systems of social practices (actions, activity formations) linked to socially and historically specific meaning formations (thematic and axiological) in which the former are construed as meaningful (Lemke 1988, 1985; Thibault 1986b, 1989, 1990, 1991b, 2003a). Furthermore, every social practice ‘is simulta-INTRODUCTION 9 neously also an instance of some material process’ (Lemke 1995b: 106). Social practices of all kinds are simultancously material processes in a complex, hierar- chically organized, developing and evolving ecosocial system. Socio-cultural systems are not, then, comprised of meaningful human practices alone. They are also material-physical processes. From the perspective of an ecosocial dynamics, there is a dialectically dual relationship of complementarity between the semiotic and the material dimensions of the couplings of the two that are enacted in social meaning-making activity. These couplings form the basis of the dynamics of an ecosocial system. Lemke has formulated the fundamental unity of these material and semiotic couplings in the constitution of a unitary ecosocial system as follows: Such systems are hierarchically organized at many different scales through complex couplings of processes which feed back to one another to produce entirely surprising, emergent phenomena (self-organization). In the dynamics of complex, tightly coupled systems with strong multiple feedback loops, even small local changes can produce surprising global effects Semiotic formations, which slightly bias the linkages of material processes according to their semiotic meanings for a human culture, are essential elements in the material dynamics of human communities. There cannot be two systems here, one material and the other cultural, each changing according to separate laws, relatively independent of one another. There can only be one unitary ecosocial system, material and semiotic, with a single unified dynamics. (Lemke 1995b: 107; italics in original) In other words, there are the dynamics of the meaning-making (semiotic- discursive) practices of the community; there are also (and simultaneously) the material-physical dynamics of the material resources and the matter and energy processes and flows which embody, constrain, and, in part, organize the former. Ecosocial semiotic formations are actions-formations-cum-material-processes that are organized in terms of their semiotic relations and salience as social practices in a human community. Only some of the many possible cross- couplings between the semiotic-discursive and the physical-material are regularly and typically made and recognized in a given community. The dialectically dual character of these cross-coupling relations also means that neither component is privileged or viewed as dominant. Nor is the one reducible to the other. Social meaning-making practices are not, therefore, uniquely or one-sidedly contextualized in relation to the paradigmatically organized sets of potentially meaningful differences that are typically recognized as being semiotically salient ina given community. Equally important, socially meaningful acts are contextu- alized in and through their relations to what Lemke (1984b: 113-21; 1995c: 166-75) has called the Interaction System of the community. That is, the material, eco-biological and physical relations to other system processes in a given ecosocial system. It is only through the attempt to understand the consti- tutive inseparability of these semioticdiscursive and physical-material cross- couplings and dynamics that we can adequately theorize our own and others’ embodiments, our subjective experience of our ecosocial environments, our10 BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY perceptions of our inner states and sensations and the meanings we attribute to these both in our internal dialogues in ‘inner’ speech activity, as well as in our interactions with others, and the materiality of the body as playing a central, not marginal, role in social meaning-making. In the perspective that I have outlined above, one of the central questions is the following: how does patterned meaning-making activity, or semiosis, emerge and evolve in time? The fundamental importance of time and process is now becoming clearer after decades of theorizing and research which privileged plans and/or causal mechanism that were assumed to be in the organism from the beginning and which could be postulated as the driving forces of cognitive, developmental, and semiotic processes (see Thelen and Smith 1994). Meaning- making activity involves very many heterogeneous elements, on many different space-time scales, ranging from the neurological processes in the human brain to the persistence in historical time of an entire culture's ways of making meaning and the resources for doing so. As we saw above, meaning-making arises from the cross-coupling of both physical-material and semiotic-discursive processes. The time-bound nature of these cross-couplings is fundamental. As Thelen and Smith show, the time-bound cross-couplings of elements from very many different levels of organization are development and cognition. The possi- bilities of combination of the two domains are seemingly endless: there are very many degrees of freedom. However, the cross-coupling of the two gives rise to pattern and organization because the many heterogeneous elements that are involved self-organize around fewer, simpler, more global principles of organiza- tion that give the resulting whole coherence along its temporal trajectory. As we shall see, the reduction of the many degrees of freedom to produce the pattern and organization that we recognize and interpret as meaningful according to our particular observer perspectives is the result of very complex, nonlinear interactions among the processes and relations on the many different scalar levels of organization that are involved. Ecosocial systems are stable, farfrom-equilibrium dynamic open systems. Contrary to our expectations, based on the behaviour of closed systems, stable, far-from-equilibrium systems increase their organization and complexity in time. The farfrom-equilibrium conditions that are necessary for this increase in organization and complexity are maintained through continuous transactions of energy, matter, and information between the system and its environment. Such systems were called dissipative structures by Prigogine and Stengers (1985 (1984]: 12-14, 143-4; Salthe 1993: 106-11) because they maintain (and increase) their own order and complexity by obtaining needed energy, matter, and information from the environment and then dissipating back to the environment some of this waste energy in the form of higherentropy outputs that export entropy or disorder to the environment. Ecosocial semiotic systems and the human individuals who participate in these are, on their respective scalar levels, dynamic open systems. Such systems - physical, chemical, biological, social - are comprised of very many interacting components on different scalar levels that interact in nonlinear and heterogeneous ways. Moreover, they are dissipative structures: their existence-in-time and their structural integrity are maintained by their constant transactions of matter,a You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookm BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY in their environment’ (Grene 1990:18). Gibson places the emphasis on the exploratory activities of embodied, active participants in their material environ- ments. For instance, the participants in human social dyads are dialogically oriented both to significant others and the environment (the nonself), as constituted in and through the dyad. The active and embodied nature of perception, as defined by Gibson, accords with this view. In dialogically orienting to the other and/or to the environment, the individual learns to orient him- or herself, to localize, and to converge upon relevant distinctions, or semiotically construable differentiations, in its Umioelt. In the process, the individual does not so much give meaning to these as receive meaning from them in and through the exchange processes which constitute both. Thus, the ‘intentional’ and active orientation to this principle of alterity represents a predisposition to receive relevant meanings from the outside. At the same time, the autopoetic (i.e. self-organizing) nature of these processes mean that in the making of more and more relevant differentiations, the members of the dyad both develop to higher levels of organizational complexity and at the same time expand their Umwelt (Harré 1990: 300). Gibson has rejected the notion of perception as a passive neural representa- tion in the form of a data structure which is stored wholly in the brain. Instead, he has written of the ‘mutuality’ of animal and environment (Gibson 1986 [1979}: 8). The relation between the two terms — animal and environment - is one of complementarity: the one implies and could not exist without the other. The environment of an animal, Gibson points out, cannot be reduced to or explained in terms of the physical environment. The environment of living things is also informationally constrained, although for reasons that are explained in section 8, pp. 34-9 below, it is more appropriate to rethink the concept ‘information’ in terms of the ‘meaning’ or the ‘significance’ of the envi- ronment of a given animal. The reductionist view that the environment consists of physical constraints per se ‘neglects the fact that an environment is ambient for a living object in a different way from the way that a set of objects is ambient for a physical object’ (Gibson 1986 [1979]: 8). As Gibson also points out, the animal is both a perceiver and a behaver in its environment. Gibson's theory of affordances is built on this premise. The affordances of a given animal's environment are what it offers or affords the animal. Again, the complementarity, or mutuality, of animal and environment is crucial here. The environment is not the same for different species of animal. Animal and environment are mutually adapted to each other so that different species orient to different environmental affordances. According to Gibson, the perceptual pick-up of information about environmental events provides the animal with information about that event and what it affords the animal for action or behaviour (Gibson 1986 [1979]: 127). In this way, the perceptual information which is picked up provides the organism with information about environmental events and how the given environmental event can enable the organism to act or behave in particular ways. The importance of Gibson's theory for our present purposes is twofold. First, it shows that organisms perceive the environment in ways that closely and internally relate to the ways they act or behave in the environment. Secondly,INTRODUCTION 13 the particular affordances to which the animal has co-adapted provide the animal with information which is already an intrinsic part of its environment. The perceptual pick-up of environmental stimulus information is already primed by the ways in which perception mediates action. There is no requirement here that all of the relevant information be stored in the animal in the form of passive and behaviour-neutral databases that the animal consults in order to infer or reason about the appropriate course of action to undertake. Instead, the envi- ronmental stimulus information which is ambient to the organism provides information that is directly constitutive of the animal's action repertoire. That is, the organism does not process information or data about an objective environ- ment ‘out there’ and then infer an appropriate course of action. Rather, the affordances of the environment directly specify possible courses of action for the organism. In specifying what an environmental event is, they also specify what the animal can do in relation to that event. We need not worry about all the details of Gibson's theory to understand the main point for our present purposes. Perception and action are closely linked to each other at the same time as they implicate, online, and constantly respond to, neural, motor, and contextual (environmental) factors. The traditional conception of the brain as a central processing unit that ‘represents’ or ‘models’ an external world has no place here. Rather, the brain is primarily concerned with the regulation of sensori-motor activity. That is, the brain regulates relations between the body and the environment at the same time as these body- environment transactions act on and shape body-brain functions. The brain is then a contextual organ which regulates the organism's engagements with its environment. Gibson's theory helps us to see that brain, body, and environment are interlinked as functioning components in a larger-scale system that cannot be explained in terms of or reduced to any one component part of the larger whole. Gibson's notion of affordances is important here for two reasons. First, affor- dances are environmental phenomena (objects, events, and so on) that are ambient to or surround the animal in some way that is potentially significant to the animal. Secondly, the affordances of an animal's environment are a functional component of the trajectory that extends from the organism's central nervous system through its bodily (sensori-motor) activity and into its environ- ment and then loops back again to the organism. The point is that affordances are functional components of a trajectory that extends beyond the biological organism and which selectively imports features of the organism's environment back into the organism’s internal dynamics. The notion of the trajectory is a fundamental one in this book (see Salthe 1993: 181-8). Trajectories, as we shall see later, occur on many different space-time scales. In the present context, both cognition and meaning-making activity can be thought of as time-bound trajec- tories that extend from the body-brain complex into the environment only to loop back again such that the information- or meaning-potential of the environ- ment is selectively re-contextualized in the internal dynamics of the individual (see also Bateson 1973a: 285-91; Juarrero 1999: 212-13). Now, the traditional model of the brain as the source of reason and rational- ity and hence as the central executive or governor which oversees and controls behaviour does, of course, require that brains make contact with the external14 BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY world. The difference between the approach I am proposing here and the tra- ditional one can be explained as follows. First, in the approach I am arguing in favour of here, the brain per se is not the sole locus of cognitive activity, as in the traditional approach. Instead, cognition and/or semiosis are a distributed activity implicating a trajectory which links brain, body, the available semiotic resource systems, and ecosocial environment. The seat of cognition and semiosis is the trajectory; it is not the brain per se. Meaning-making activity is not unilat- erally caused by a central executive inside the brain, Rather, it is the emergent consequence of the ways in which both the intrinsic dynamics of the organism — eg. patterns of neural activation, neuromuscular activity, cognitive capacities such as memory, attention, and so on — interact with contextual factors, relevant intertexts, the available material and semiotic resources such that both intrinsic and extrinsic factors are jointly recruited and co-deployed in the real-time assembling of the meaning-making trajectory. Secondly, Gibson's theory of affordances is one theory which shows that the environment of an animal is meaningful for the animal in non-trivial ways. That is, meanings are located and stored at the higherscalar level of the environment which surrounds the animal, rather than being located in or caused by lowerscalar biological mechanisms that are entirely within the organism. In this way, we can begin to glimpse the need for a theory which can discuss different scalar levels that are implicated in the organism's transactions with the affordances in its environment. Salthe points out that, for most purposes, a basic three-level system is ‘minimally needed in order to preserve the complexity’ (1993: 46). The three-level system therefore avoids the temptation of reducing all levels to a single, privileged level at the same time as it preserves the recogni- tion that there are processes taking place on different scalar levels. Higher-scalar levels provide the integrating contexts for lowerscalar ones. They act as contextual constraints or boundary conditions on the lower levels. Lowerscalar levels constitute enabling conditions of higherscalar ones. Generally speaking, the intermediate level is selected as the focal level. The interactions between the organism and some affordance can be taken as the focal level in the present account. Below this level, there are the biological properties of organisms and the physical-material and possibly biological properties of the affordances that organisms interact with and which predispose them to some kinds of organism-affordance engagements rather than others. ‘Above the focal level of these organism-affordance transactions, there is the envi- ronment of the organism. Importantly, it is in the environment of the organism that the meanings of environmental events are located and interpreted. This is so because meanings, in the extended sense I am using the term here, are not solely located in the individual organism, but are distributed across an entire population and its environmental niche. It is the environment as repository of meanings that mediates and brings into relation an individual organism qua member of that species and a particular environmental affordance in a given time and place. But it is the environment of the animal, as defined above, and, therefore, the possibilities of perception and action, in the first instance, that it affords the animal which mediates this relation and which makes possible its interpretation for the organism. To paraphrase Bateson (1973b: 392), there isINTRODUCTION 15 contextual redundancy (see section 6, pp. 26-30) in the organism-plus- environment system such that the morphology and behaviour of the organism provide information concerning the environment that the organism inhabits. In the processes of co-adaptation and co-evolution that create the organism-plus- environment system, the environment is imported into the organism's internal dynamics such that it entrains these to its own dynamics (see above). The relevant system of relations is hierarchically organized in terms of three levels. The three-level hierarchical system which I have derived can be formalized as follows: L+l; Environment of animal qua system of interpretance which brings into relation (mediates) animal and its affordances and provides the higher- scalar principles whereby these affordances and their relation to the animal can be interpreted in ways that afford perception and action; L: The focal level of the animal's engagements with the affordances that it encounters in its environment; L-1: The biological and other physical-material properties of organisms and environmental affordances that enable them and predispose them to engage in transactions with one another and selected aspects of their environment. The system of relations that I have outlined here provides a synoptic description of a cognitive and/or semiotic process that extends beyond the individual organism and into its environment. The three-level scalar hierarchy view shows that the organism's transactions with the affordances it encounters and interprets are embedded in and mediated by a higherscalar environment which cannot be defined in terms of any given individual per se. Furthermore, the lower- scalar neural processes in the brain and central nervous system, along with the body’s sensori-motor activity, are neither the source nor the ‘cause’ of meanings and their interpretation. Instead, the physical properties of body and brain and the dynamical processes which these enable on their timescale are integrated to and contextualized by processes occurring on the still larger timescales of the progressively higherscalar levels L and L+1. This also means that lowerscalar neural and bodily dynamics are entrained to the dynamics of the higher scales and their processes. It is only when such entrainment to a higherscalar semantic or other meaningful property takes place that we can say that bodily activities and the physical properties of objects gua artefacts are involved in the instantiation of operations that are meaningful on higher levels. In other words, it is only when such activities and properties are functional in the processes of enacting, storing, and transmitting information which the organism can construe as meaningful in the service of its particular goals that we can say they are performing cognitive and/or semiotic functions. The focal level L is the level on which the individual's agency is manifested and enacted in specific encounters with environmental affordances and the actions they enable the agent to carry out. The agent is not the biological16 BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY organism. Rather, the agent represents the integration of the lowerscalar neural and bodily (sensori-motor) resources of its organism on level L-1 co the per- spective of the self and the agency which manifests its selfness on level L. The individual is an agent in its own processes of individuation because it can deploy and change its knowledge, experience, and perspectives through its own activity. The agent can use its own neurological and bodily processes, as well as those of others, as a tool or an affordance in its own activities. The agent is not defined in terms of its neurological processes or its sensori-motor activities. These are lower-scalar (L-1) phenomena whereas the agent is a higher-scalar phenomenon on the focal level L. The lowerscalar phenomena are sub-personal with respect to the agent. Agents contextually integrate these lower-scalar affordances to their own level, in the process completing them by integrating them to the personal perspective of a determinate self (Salthe 1993: 49; see also Prodi 1989). At the same time, the agent and its activities on level L are constrained and mediated by the higher-order system of interpretance on level L+1. The agency which is manifested on the focal level L is an emergent phenomenon which results from the complex, non-linear relations between (1) the ‘upwardly’ emergent affordances of the body-brain on level L-1 and how these are contextually integrated to the next higher-scalar level (L) and (2) the ‘downwardly’ acting system of contextual constraints on the higher level L+1 of the system of interpretance which is in operation. Thus, the agent and its agency on the focal level are constituted by the ways in which higher-order constraints and lower-order enabling conditions (affordances) give rise to an emergent intermediate level of organization which is a consequence of the ways in which the semiotic and material processes in the observed system of relations are organized on the intermediate (focal) level. Thus, bodily activities such as gaze orientation, pointing, gesturing, speaking, facial expressions, body movement, neural dynamics, and so on provide resources which afford joint social meaning-making with others. The extension of these possibilities to extra-somatic artefacts such as texts qua material objects, tools, toys, calculating machines, and so on, means that typological semiotic resources not only spread throughout the ecosocial environment and colonize it, as Lemke (2000a: 203) has put it, but they also adapt to and colonize the brain itself (Deacon 1998 [1997]: 827). The brain is not the ‘cause’ of these processes; rather, it is a functional participant in a semiotic-material trajectory that extends across potentially many diverse space-time scales. It is by virtue of his or her being embedded in a higherscalar ecosocial environment and the meaning- making trajectories which this enables that we can say that the individual, in the sense of the person who participates in social meaning-making with others, is not the biological organism, but the trajectory-in-time. This trajectory extends from the neural dynamics of the individual in ways that regulate, entrain and modulate motor dynamics so that the meaningful content of the neural dynamics is transduced into an instance of a given acttoken. Writing on how intentions organize and channel action trajectories that originate in semantic neural space, Juarrero has formulated this question as follows:INTRODUCTION 17 Thinking of prior intentions as self-organized dynamics within conscious semantic space, of proximate intentions as control knobs governing that space, and of acttypes as attractors through that space allows us to conceptu- alize act-tokens as individual behavioural trajectories within that semantic space. These trajectories originate in intentional dynamics that both activate and then channel and regulate motor processes top-down such that the latter preserve and execute the invariant relations that embody the intention’s meaningful content. (Juarrero 1999; 212) Semantic neural space is itself the result of the ways in which the higher-scalar systems of interpretance emanating from the ecosocial level have entrained the brain's neurological processes to their own dynamics. In this way, the body-brain is contextually integrated to the dynamical (ecosocial semiotic) processes of the higher-scale. Kinsbourne (2001: 246) argues that meaning and experience in the brain are not assembled piecemeal fashion from smaller bits that are aggregated into larger wholes, bottom-up fashion. Rather, the global network of neurons, of which the newborn has a full complement, progressively differentiates out of a less differentiated whole into an increasingly more differentiated network of networks of networks . . . (Kinsbourne 2001: 246) by virtue of the ways in which the brain is functionally embedded in and entrained by ecosocial dynamics, as well as by its own internal dynamics. The brain is then sculpted by the dynamics of the topological and typological functions of the body and its extra-somatic, artefactual extensions and the ways these operate across different space-time scales in the ecosocial environment. This approach suggests that we need to develop a new discourse for talking and thinking about the ways in which brain, body, and ecosocial semiotic envi- ronment are embedded in and are functioning participants in higher-scalar systems that link all three components in complex, hierarchically organized and non-linear interactions across the many levels of relations and space-time scales that are involved (Togeby 2000). Such an approach needs to be combined with an ecosocial theory of meaning-making activity. This also suggests that the shape = the inuinsic patterned organization ~ of our semiotic resource systems constitute principles of environmental organization that can be seen as funda- mental components of brain organization itself. Neural dynamics and neural architecture will thus be seen to be in tune with the dynamics of the body and the ecosocial environment. Consider in this respect the following observations made by Kinsbourne on the left-right hemispherical organization of the brain: We learn that most people’s left cerebral hemisphere is concerned with language, their right with spatial orientation. More broadly still, the left caters to sequential analysis and the generating of action sequences, the right to setting such activities into a spatial framework. Most general of all, the left hemisphere controls motivated approach sequences (handling, eating, and so on), progressively focusing and acting upon the target; the right hemisphere is more involved with the person's movement through the intervening space and the spatial background of the target. The left hemisphere’s activities can be context free, whereas the activities of the right are context bound. Thea You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this book20 BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY someone are distinguished. Only the latter’s trajectory, Juarrero (1999: 191) points out, originates in and takes place in semantic space. The main point here is the role that meaning plays in regulating and bringing about the given motor behaviour qua acttoken. Neurological processes therefore do not cause meaningful action. Rather, they are affordances in the sense that they constitute an information potential which is selectively reorganized on higher levels as “meaning’, in the broadest sense of the term, in the perspective of a self. As we shall see in more detail later in this study, the information potential of the lowerscalar neurological and sensor-motor dynamics (level L-I) are reor- ganized by the nexthigher level (level L) as semiotically salient differences or relations - typological or topological ~ that are recognizable and interpretable for the relevant system of interpretance on level L+1. Strictly speaking, it is not pace Juarrero (see above) a matter of whether the neurological processes ‘transmit’ a meaningful content or not. Rather, it is a question of whether lowerscalar neurological processes constitute information which is able to be reorganized in ways that are meaningful to higher-scalar levels of organization. The principles which I have outlined here have been formulated by Lemke (1999) as the Principle of Alternation. We shall see later that Lemke’s principle is a powerful and elegant theoretical tool that plays a key role in building the theoretical bridges between brain, body, meaning, and ecosocial environment. Furthermore, it fits perfectly with Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection. There is no homunculus or other ultimate causal or executive factor in the brain which directs the process of meaning-making. Rather, neural dynamics, on their timescale, interact with and provide support to events on other timescales. Meaning is the emergent outcome of the interaction across these processes on diverse levels. The crucial factor here is the operation of different timescales on the different levels that constitute the given system. Salthe points out: ‘Processes at different scales change direction, cycle, or go to completion at different rates (have different rate constants), with lower-scale ones behaving faster and having smaller relaxation times than higherscale ones (which, however, can travel at greater absolute speeds)’ (1993: 46). Salthe’s observations pertain to the organ- ization of scalar hierarchical systems (see section 3, pp. 14-16). With respect to the physical brain processes that realize it, a mental content is a higher-scalar process; it has a slower, larger timescale with respect to the much faster scale of the neurological processes that are its substrate. The latter occur beyond the level of our awareness, whereas mental contents on the higherscalar level constitute the phenomena of awareness. This suggests that faster, lower-scale neurological processes are reorganized across different scalar levels as perceptual and mental contents that are salient to and congruent with the timescale on which the self experiences and interprets meanings of all kinds (see also Finnemann 2000: 300). Again, we see here the impossibility of insulating one timescale from the other, for the very fast timescale of the neurological processes, say, is not isolated from the slower, higher-scalar level of phenomenal awareness and experience, but is integrated to it such that no insulation of the dynamical relations and processes on each level can be postulated. This integration across levels suggests that the emergence ofa You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this book22 BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY mean that cerebral architecture is hard-wired for universal principles of linguistic organization. Rather, it reflects the way in which neurological processes are entrained to higherscalar attractor states such as the meanings that derive from the ecosocial level. Specifically, it reflects the way in which the brain is entrained to principles of linguistic organization that are shared by very large numbers of people on the much slower, larger timescale of the historical evolution of a language community of many generations. Boundary conditions are established by higherorder, more schematic categories which set the parameters within which more specific categories and their instantiations in behaviour are meaningful. Thus, Patients with focal brain lesions do not violate the rules that governed their premorbid performances. They remain guided by preexisting parameters but become less specific, slower, and less stable in their responses. (Kinsbourne 2001: 243) Patients with focal brain lesions can be said to recede further ‘up’ the scale of instantiation such that the broader, shallow systemic properties are retained in ways which constrain behaviour in some more schematic domain whereas the more delicate, more context-specific properties are impaired, compromised, or lost in ways which adversely affect the patient’s ability to make very fine-tuned contextual adjustments to more specific domains. This suggests that the neural networks for language and those for other domains are organized according to similar principles of recursive organization. In each case that Kinsbourne describes, the patient regresses to more schematic, hence less specific, categories that regulate behaviour and specify its meaningfulness in increasingly broader, shallower ways. These observations of Kinsbourne suggest that the information that is potentially afforded by lower- scalar neurological processes and the reorganization across progressively higher scalar levels of organization is what enables linguistic forms to ‘differentiate out of less-specific preconscious precursor states, with the word order implicit in the precursor state. The brain models and remodels until the utterance is perfected in its analytical detail’ (Kinsbourne 2001: 244). In terms of the Principle of Alternation (Lemke 1999), we can say that the brain organizes and reorganizes topological pre-semantic states on lower levels of neural organization until the typological-categorial linguistic form emerges. Rather than a bottom-up assemblage of parts into whole, language in the brain is a result of the cross- scalar reorganization across levels of the information potential that is afforded by lower levels as meaningful patterns on higher levels. Kinsbourne expresses the matter in the following terms: While no truly apt metaphor for how the brain works comes to mind, ‘crys- tallizing out’ seems more fitting than ‘assembling together.’ Interestingly, brain development proceeds according to similar principles. The newborn has a full complement of neurons; further development proceeds by selective cell death and elimination of synaptic connections. The biological chisel prefigures the microgenesis of brain states. (Kinsbourne 2001: 246)a You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this book24 BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY 19-21). The former, Bateson argues, is concerned with ‘patterns and contingen- cies of relationship’ (1973c: 337, 1973b: 388). The latter solves the problem as to ‘how to be specific about something other than relationship’ (1973c: 337). Bateson (1973b: 387) also argues that human verbal language is not derived ‘in any simple way’ from the iconic-indexical semiotic modalities of, say, ‘kinesics” and ‘paralanguage’. In my view, this means that human language, with its typologicalcategorial grammatical and semantic categories, did not simply emerge, bottom-up fashion, from these evolutionarily prior modes. Nor does it mean that language is a unique, one-off result of a language gene that distin- guishes us from all other animal species. Both of these accounts, in their different ways, are reductionist. The first account is reductionist because it assumes that lower-level enabling conditions such as the motor processes of the body are building blocks which can be assembled into human language in bottom-up fashion. The second account is reductionist because it invokes explanations based on innate genetic factors existing on the lowerscalar level of the organism (not the person). In this account, privileged sub-personal causal agents that originate from within the biological organism are primary whereas environmental factors play no more than a subsidiary or ‘triggering’ role. Language is an emergent intermediate level of organization that is the result of the interaction between both higher- scalar ecosocial constraints and lowerscalar biological (neurophysiological, genetic) affordances. The fact that the (phylogenetically and ontogenetically) prior topological semiotic modalities that are concerned with relationship are not transcended by language, but are integrated to and reorganized by it, requires explanation. In the Darwinist view, lowerevel processes bring about effects on higher levels through a process of bottom-up emergence. In this view, the whole is an aggregate of its component parts. But this view has nothing to say about how higher-level processes act on and bring about constraining effects on lower-scalar levels. How can our systems of meaning-making (L+1) and the agents (L) who deploy them act upon and bring about effects on lowerlevel (L-1) biological processes? (see also Finnemann 2000: 281). The old dichotomies, though still persistent, between ‘biology’ and ‘culture’, or between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’, are both useless and irrelevant. As the previous discussion of Gibson's ecological theory of perception emphasized, both the information afforded by the envi- ronment and the neurophysiological characteristics of the biological organism are component levels of a single system comprising many different levels and their dynamic interactions in time. What is important is not the reduction of one level to the other, but an account in which social semiosis, or meaning-making, is explained in terms that are consistent with what we understand about the biological basis of semiosis without, however, reducing all of semiosis to biology per se. Rather than explanations based on one-way efficient causality and the models and metaphors derived from the digital computer, the emphasis will be on a conceptual framework of complex, dynamic, open, adaptive and goalseeking systems which share certain fundamental thermodynamic properties with all living systems, as well as with some abiotic systems such as ponds, eddies, anda You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this book28 BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY gestures, just as the redundancy of the words and gestures are metaredundant with context C. To return to our example involving the perceptual pick-up of stimulus infor- mation, we can postulate the existence of symbolic information in neural impulses for interpreting the significance of the firs-order redundancy relation between stimulus information and environmental event. Once again, higher- order contextualizing relations define the significance of the first-order relations and, at the same time, the latter create patterned relations that constitute the former. This is so because contexts are enacted, created, and defined by the patterned combinations of items on the level of first focus at the same time as the higher-order context operates as a frame of reference in which the relations on the first level are interpreted, or given meaning for the observer. In the present example, the orders of relations involved may be represented as follows: stimulus information / environmental event // interpretation: response /// SI in central nervous system . . . More concretely, we can imagine a scenario such as the following by way of illus- tration, A monkey encounters a species of venomous snake in the tropical rain forest. In so doing, the monkey, in detecting the movement of the reptile through the debris of the jungle floor, picks up stimulus information (visual, auditory, and so on) about the given environmental event, i.e. the presence of the snake, its movement, its location relative to the monkey, and so on. The stimulus information which is picked up provides the monkey with information about a material event in its environment. Stimulus information and environ- mental event constitute a first-order redundancy relation. The monkey's reaction is one of fear and he withdraws from the scene so as to avoid the danger posed by the snake. The monkey possesses in his central nervous system a model as to how to behave with respect to snakes. That is, his central nervous system constitutes a higherscalar system of interpretance which enables the monkey to interpret the lower-order redundancy relationships in the appropriate way — danger! — as well as to adopt an appropriate course of action (flight). In this case, the levels of contextualizing relations involved may be approximated as follows: stimulus information / presence of snake // danger: flight /// Sl in central nervous system . . . Thus, the monkey's physiological reaction (‘fear’) and its behavioural response (‘flight’) are second-order redundancy relations which are redundant with the redundancy between the stimulus information and the environmental event on the first level, In this example, a third-order relationship shows the presence in the monkey's central nervous system of a system of interpretance which enables it to interpret the firstorder relation in the appropriate way and therefore to adopt an appropriate course of action. Now, the symmetrical or two-way nature of (meta)-redundancy relations does not assume a determinate or fixed relationship between levels in the meta- redundancy hierarchy. Such an assumption would mean that, for example,a You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this book32 BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY a system of constraints in which all levels operate on and constrain all others. The failure to understand the essentially contextual nature of experience, mental states, and so on, is evident in those accounts of the.mind-brain relation that try to account for this in causal terms. For example, Bhaskar, in order to uphold the causal relation between ‘mind-states’ or ‘belief’ and neurophysio- logical states or ‘matter’, argues that: ‘. . . such causality as holds between beliefs and matter must be conceived, in the absence of any connecting mechanism, as transcategorial’ (1979: 132). Earlier in the same book, Bhaskar had pointed out that this criterion is needed so as to overcome the objections that (1) cause and effect must be embodied in a common medium or share common properties; and (2) the absence of any such medium constitutes an arbitrary break in the chain of cause and effect (1979: 131). Psychologists and others often use such criteria to justify an independent science of psychological or mind states on the grounds that this constitutes an autonomous domain of cause and effect. For example, they may argue that P-states (intentions, wants, etc.) CAUSALLY ACT UPON/AFFECT N-tates (neurophysiology). Why is it seen as so important to justify an autonomous psychology? According to Bhaskar (1979: 108), the social meaning of an action — e.g. greeting someone ~ is recognizeable as being an act of a certain cultural type. This is seen as inde- pendent of the occasion-specific intention whereby it is performed by a given social actor. This then allows for a causal chain to be reconstructed such that the reasons (beliefs) which lead the actor to want or to intend to perform a particular action may be postulated. The causal chain runs like this: (1) SOCIAL ACTION is caused by (2) ACTOR'S INTENTION is caused by (3) BELIEFS/REASONS LEADING TO INTENTION. Two separate dyadic series are thus postulated. But rather than say that 1 is caused by 2, and that 2 is caused by 3, we can say, following Halliday and Lemke, that 1 redounds with the redundancy of 2 and 3, in a given context of culture, let us call it 0. Note that Bhaskar wanted to separate this out from the intentional action performed by the actor. When we put the ecosocial system back into the picture we can see that: 0 redounds with the redundancy of (1, 2, and 3). For Bhaskar, agency emerges from the psychological links between actors and the locally defined resources they use to interpret each others’ intentions. This meets his criterion of synchronic emergence, which correctly recognizes that the higher-order principles cannot be completely explained in terms of the lower-order ones (Bhaskar 1979: 125). Agency, then, is a psychological phenomenon, not reducible to neurophysiological states. But this causal way of reasoning struggles, as we have seen, with the problem of finding some linking mechanism - transcategorial or otherwise — which can relate cause and effect. With the notion of meta-redundancy, the problems of form-substance dualism from which this derives are irrelevant. Let us now see why. Earlier, I referred to the complementary dual nature of the relations between the semiotic-discursive and the physical-material domains. Bhaskar attempts to overcome the problem of reductionism with the notions of transcategorial causality and synchronic emergence. His attempt to do so relies on the onto- logical stratification of the domains of the social, the psychological, and the biological. The resulting localization of these domains, along with Bhaskar’sa You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this book36 BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY Now, the phenomena that we are discussing here are very general in nature and are common to all biological and social systems. This is indifferently so whether we are talking about two molecules, A and B, in a reciprocal relation to each other, two amoeba, or the two members of a parent-infant dyad in a human social system. The basis of this reciprocal adaptation — the exchange of energy and the establishment of material correspondences between A and B — is the same in all cases. What is different is the level and degree of the complexity involved, as well as the extent of the socio-historical processes, in the case of human, and other, social systems which have further elaborated the dynamics of the exchange processes involved and the ways in which these cross-couple physical-material and semiotic-discursive processes. The prerequisites of this process are as follows. First, there must be two material objects which interact. In so doing, they are transformable. It is not the case that two objects happen to interact by chance, as it were. Again, we can note the principle of the contextual redundancy of the organism-plusenvironment system that Bateson pointed out (see section 6, pp. 26-31). The three-level hierarchy is useful in sorting out the levels of relations involved. Thus, the A and B parties to the interaction are on the focal level L. This level is subordinated to some higher-order principle of correspondence, or of complementarity - cf. Prodi’s interpretive ‘key’, or some higher-scalar system of interpretance - on level L+1. Such a principle is a contextual relationship which specifies that in a given context-type, A and B select each other as a function of that context. There is, in other words, a contextually governed relation of complementarity between A and B, which, in selecting each other, remain indifferent to other potentially available information in their environment. That is to say, the resulting A~B dyad discrim- inates and selects contextually relevant information from its environment in species-specific ways, which are relevant to its further development and survival. Secondly, whatever principles of ‘order’ or ‘structure’ are derivable from such a metastable complex of relations are completely immanent in them. These do not simply reside in either A or B, taken ‘separately’. Rather, A and B are con- textually organized in relation to each other. This obviates the need for some extrinsic metaphysical principle of order (intention, purpose, or plan) which the structure simply contains. Thirdly, the relation of complementarity between A and B is always regulated by material forms (substrates) and thermodynamic potentials which constitute the intrinsic dynamics of A and B and which make the exchange process physically possible. Such material substrates and thermodynamic potentials are the affordances on level L-1 that I discussed in section 3 (pp. 11-18). The general principles discussed above can be extended to the human case. To illustrate this, I shall now discuss the dyadic interaction that characterizes joint mother-infant semiosis in the phase that Trevarthen has defined as ‘primary intersubjectivity’ (1978, 1987, 1992). Trevarthen (1987: 184) describes the way in which newborns seek out eye contact with significant others (parents, caretakers). For Trevarthen, these activities constitute the very earliest stages of dialogic interaction. Such expressive movements on the part of the newborn ‘trigger’ reciprocal and cor- responding acts on the part of the caretaker, who construes the newborn'sa You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this book48 BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY (see Halliday’s 1978a notion of language as a form of social semiotic; see also his distinction between the ‘intra-organism’ and ‘interorganism’ perspectives on the study of language in Halliday 1978: 10; see also Wells 1999: 10-11). Biological discourses have not played a prominent role in the development of systemic- functional theory (see, however, Halliday 1995; McKellar 1987, 1990; Lemke 2000a; Thibault 2000a). This may be due to the conviction — perfectly correct ~ that social semiotic phenomena are not reducible to biological phenomena. However, more recent developments in the theory of complex dynamic open systems show the importance of developing a theory of social semiosis in which the socio-cultural and the biological domains of inquiry are brought into a new dialogue with each other (see also Wilson 1998). It is now becoming possible to make a start in the process of building the theoretical bridges between the ‘intra- organism’ and the ‘interorganism’ perspectives on meaning-making activity such that there is no contradiction or dichotomy between the two. I define my own starting point in the present study as follows. The purpose of language and other semiotic modalities is to guide and co-ordinate our interac- tions with the non-elf and to integrate us with our ecosocial environment across space-time scales that go beyond the here-now scale of the biological organism's material interactivity with its immediate physical environment. Given this premise, it seems logical to say that the intrinsic organization of language has evolved in the species (phylogenesis) and develops in the individual (ontogene- sis) so that it crosscouples both with the biological architecture of the body- brain system and with our ecosocial semiotic environment in ways that closely relate to the kinds of social activities that humans perform and the meanings they make in and through these activities. The functional and contextual basis of systemic-functional theory will prove to be an ideal conceptual and analytical tool for developing these links. Rather than the frozen ‘syntactic islands’ that are studied by formal theories of language, the emphasis here is on discourse as a form of activity that is richly constrained by both society and culture, on the one hand, and by the language system qua meaning-making resource and by the emerging constraints of a particular discourse context, on the other (Halliday 1978a; Beaugrande 1997: 48). Rejecting the view that a universal grammar enables language users to represent the world through relations of ‘truthful’ correspondence between the syntactic forms of a language and an objectified external world, the importance given in systemic-functional theory to the interpersonal and textual dimensions of meaning in discursive activity, in addition to the experiential dimension, draws attention to the role of discourse in mediating and enacting body-world relations, rather than seeing language as a symbolic-referential means for revealing and transmitting disembodied ‘inner’ thoughts, intentions, and symbol tokens. The metafunctional basis of meaning-making activity and the semiotic resources that are co-deployed in discourse contexts therefore suggest a number of parameters in terms of which both body-environment transactions and body-brain functions are co-ordinated and organized without in any way suggesting that either bodyenvironment transactions or body-brain functions are explanatorily or causally reducible to principles of semiotic organization or formal structure per se.a You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this book52 BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY motor) activity and into its ecosocial environment and then loops back again to the organism. Meaning-making is distributed among all the components of this trajectory-in-time. Participants in meaning-making activity must lock into and draw on the resources afforded by texts in order to co-ordinate their activities across a diversity of space-time scales. ‘When Saussure points out, in his famous discussion of linguistic value, that ‘the purely conceptual mass of our ideas, the mass separated from the language system represents a sort of unformed cloud’ (1993: 362), he is showing how a system of typological-categorial differences - i.e. the terms and their values in a given language system - emerge from and, in turn, reorganize and give more specified meaning to the topological-continuous substrate of what he calls ‘ideas’ (see Thibault 1997a: 164-73). The principle of value therefore has the potential to contextualize the phenomena of human experience in and through the system of semiotically salient differences that characterize a particular language system. However, Saussure did not take the further step of showing how signs contrast with each other in ways which also depend on the discourse contexts in which they function in the making and negotiating of meanings in human life. Saussure’s observation is not unlike those made by Edelman and Kinsbourne that the primitive state of the brain in the infant is a richly interconnected network of neurons that differentiates or ‘crystallizes’ into a more clearly defined set of functional distinctions through processes of activation and entrainment of neural networks into more highly specified functional sub-regions by virtue of the initial value-biases that set these processes in motion in the first place. Edelman showed that the values placed on early infant behaviour lead to some activities being preferred rather than others. It is these biologically inwinsic values which, in the first instance, motivate infants to attend to their surroundings, to cry when some need has to be satisfied, to seek warmth, food, and affection, to orient to and discriminate faces, to lock into and to engage with adult meaning systems, and so on. Thus, babies attend to the faces, the sounds, the movements of adult caretakers, in ways that enable them to integrate their activities with those of more senior others. They do so, in the first instance, on the basis of their sensori-motor capacities for interacting with and integrating with their immediate material environment. The resulting dialogic closure (Braten1992; Thibault 2000a) of the human dyads so formed leads, in time, to the transformation of the infant's body-brain system and the building up of increasingly more specified and differentiated semiotic takes on the world. Johnson and Morton (1991) have postulated that the initial value orientation that infants have to faces is based on an initial discrimination between a number of contrasting ‘blobs’, corresponding to the location of the mouth and eyes (chapter 4, section 12, pp. 209-12; see also Thelen and Smith 1994: 315). This primitive distinction is based, initially, on topological-continuous variation, rather than on the typological-categorial distinctions of the kind that are found in the lexicogrammar and semantics of natural languages. The discriminations that the newborn begins to make are motivated in the first place by a value on the infant's self-organizing activity such that the infant's intrinsic dynamics are biased towards preferring to orient to his or her caretaker's face. This preferen- tial bias occurs in synergy with the dynamics of other interacting subsystems sucha You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this book56 BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY which I postulate between recent work on mirror neurons and interpersonal meaning. The chapter concludes by extending these observations to inner speech and its relationship to higher-order consciousness. Chapter 6 begins by emphasizing the unity and continuity of the physical- biological and the social-cultural dimensions of our existence, This initial emphasis forms the backdrop for an extended discussion of Flohr’s (1991) theory of phenomenal awareness. Flohr is interested in overcoming the prevailing dualism between the physical and phenomenal dimensions of brain states. In my view, Flohr’s description of ‘activity-dependent self-organization of neural nets’ shows that contextualizing relations are relevant on the diverse scales of neural organization that give rise to phenomenal awareness. The principle of meta-redundancy operates here as well. I then show that the Principle of Alternation provides a further crucial perspective on the brain as meaning-making organ. Thus, the transformation from discrete, local neural firings to global configurations of neural networks on higher scales of brain activity and the transformation of such global configurations to objects of conscious experience within the brain constitute a semiotic transformation, such that conscious experience emerges in the perspective of the self.a You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookRETHINKING THE EXPRESSION PLANE OF SEMIOSIS_ 61 perceptual stimulus, on the other hand, is an efficient cause insofar as the appli- cation of energy will stimulate a receptor. However, a perceptual stimulus does not specify any information about the source of the stimulus. As a material cause relevant to the organism’s behaviour, perceptual information is a relevant or salient aspect of the environment with which the individual interacts in meaningful ways. In this Gibsonian framework, it is possible to re-interpret Saussure’s distinc- tion between ‘sound’ and ‘thought’ in the following terms. The semiotic entraining of the body's many degrees of freedom, whereby the indeterminate flux of sound is re-construed as articulate speech, is a way of putting the individual into contact with relevant aspects of its ecosocial environment, including his or her conspecifics. Articulate speech and other semiotically entrained motor functions or gestures of all kinds constitute bodily activity whereby socially shareable ways of interacting and integrating one’s bodily activity with others are projected into the environment. At the same time, in viduals pick up relevant perceptual information by means of their perceptual systems and then semiotically elaborate or re-construe this in their Innenwelt according to the categories of their stored langue intérieure. In the first instance, this information provides indexical information about certain relevant aspects of the environment, as perceived by the individual. However, the emergence of a language system between ‘sound’ and ‘thought’ means that the indexical rela- tionship of necessity between environmental events and their perceptual pick-up is severed. That is, their semiotic re-construal in and through the resources of a shared language system is based on the fact that the individual's stored langue intérieure provides a means for both producing and interpreting such environ- mental events as symbolic possibilities, rather than as indexical necessities (Salthe 1993: 176). The existence of this capacity presupposes, of course, the ability to recognize that other organisms also share the same system of symbolic possibilities whereby environmental events are interpreted and acted on as signs, rather than as indices of physical events per se in the here-now relation between the organism and its immediate physical environment. In this way, the many degrees of topological freedom of the phenomena of experience ~ cf. Saussure’s ‘thought’ - are themselves entrained to the semiotic categories of a given ecosocial system. Thus, the sensori-motor functions of the body must be harnessed and co- ordinated so as to cross-couple with and function in relation to the extra-somatic world of perceptual information. By the same token, the semiotic activity of construing the world as meaningful ‘content’ must be crosscoupled to and matched up with the dynamics of the agent's bodily activity. If this were not the case, then there would be no way in which body-brains could be co-ordinated and synchronized through jointly made interaction procedures for the purpose of social meaning-making. Furthermore, this co-ordination of body-brains shows that motor activity, perception, and meaning-making are all of a piece - they are all heterogencous dimensions of the one overall self-organizing system in and through which meanings are made in ecosocial space-time. As Saussure and Hilemslev understood, a language system entails the progressive differentiation and entraining of both sensori-motor activity and its products (‘sound’) and thea You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookRETHINKING THE EXPRESSION PLANE OF SEMIOSIS 65 progressively revealed during the historical emergence of the individual in terms of the way the agent interrupts and interfaces with both the expression and content strata in semiosis. Agents individuate and have effects in meaning- making activity by virtue of the ways in which both their bodies and the ecosocial environment are mediated by the expression and content strata. Table 2.1 models the robustness of the agent in relation to the two strata of expression and content. Phonologically entrained and habituated vocal-tract gestures enact specific trajectories in the ecosocial environment of speaker and listener. This is a result of the history of the use of such gestures both on the scale of the individual language user and that of an entire speech community. It is because of this history that there has been reentrant mapping of specific gestures with specific perceptions and categorizations of the world, These gestures are, then, more than just body movements per se. As a result of the history of their use, they create expectations which are based on an understanding of the correlations between these and other events in the world. The continuous experience of using phono- logically habituated vocal-tract gestures in relation to some classes of perception and action rather than others leads to the emergence of stable attractors. Thus, the same patterns of vocal-tract activity used by different speakers on many different occasions will lead to the same kinds of consequences in the world - approximately the same kind of awareness and categorization of objects, events, and so on; the same kind of interactional routines; the same kinds of integration of cross-modal correlations into our unified understanding of the resulting whole as a socially stabilized meaning. There are no stored internal representa- tions of external events in the world which are then matched with the former and interpreted. Rather, patterns of socially entrained bodily activity are stable attractors for the multimodal integration of events and actions, including internal ones in ‘thought’, as emergent, context-specific occasions of social meaning-making. This requires us to take into account what Lemke (2000a: 181) has discussed as ‘scale heterogeneity or scale-mixing’ in dynamic systems. In other words, the very different scales of what Hjelmslev revealingly calls the ‘phonetico-physiological sphere of movement’ (1961 [1943]: 54; my emphasis) in the vocal tract of the speaker and higherscalar ecosocial systems of meaning relations and practices are strongly cross-coupled to each other. The cross-coupling of the two cuts across and reveals the inadequacy of those views which artificially separate the biological and social-cultural dimensions of meaning-making activity. Rather, meaning-making activity emerges from the interaction in time of a wide variety of diverse elements on different space-time scales, The cross-coupling of expression and content is what makes this scalar heterogeneity - the continuity of time scales - possible in meaning-making activity. Importantly, Hjelmsley, like Saussure before him, also notes the fact that the expression plane of semiosis functions in ways which are precisely analogous to the content plane. Typically, there has been a division of labour between those sub-disciplines - phonetics and phonology - which concentrate on the expression plane of spoken language and those which focus on lexicogrammatical and semantic relations on the content plane ~ semantics, grammar. Hjelmslev’s approach grasps the necessarya You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookRETHINKING THE EXPRESSION PLANE OF SEMIOSIS 69 share, i.e. to relevant aspects of their environment ~ their Umuelten — and their selective internalizations of this as their respective Jnnenwelten. In such a view, the individual’s langue intérieure, as Saussure called it, is rightfully restored as consti- tuting possibilities for action and interaction with others relative to a shared ecosocial environment. Thus, signs are assembled in the Jnnenwelt from the resources of one’s stored langue intérieure and then projected into the environ- ment as possibilities for social interaction with others. The reciprocal and dialogic orientation of the participants is, then, subordinated to the forming of an emergent, higher-order metastable complex such as, at the very least, an interactive dyad. This occurs on the basis of standardized and reproducible patterns of bodily movement whereby the reciprocal orientation of the partici- pants emerges and is distinguishable from the analog flux of Saussure’s pre- semiotic ‘amorphous nebula’ (1971 [1915]: 155-6). That is, semiotically entrained body movement transforms the coming together of body-brains in interaction into a process of the selective and adaptive modification of the one in relation to the other. In the midst of the indeterminate — indifferent? - flux of things in general, the body-brains reciprocally engaged in meaning-making selectively orient to each other for the purposes of enacting their jointly made meaning-making activity. Bodily movement is, then, at the basis of the matter- energy exchanges which make semiosis possible. Insofar as such movement conforms to a semiotically formed ‘expression-substance’, as Hjelmslev would put it, this means that the semiotically formed and entrained movements of participant A are perceived as being complementary to those of participant B. The newly emergent semiotic properties consequently alter and entrain the prior topological dynamics of the interacting biological organisms along socially organized lines. 3. The Stratified Model of Semiosis: The Problem of Conceptual Abstractness and Scalar Homogeneity ‘Typically, the stratum of expression-form is considered to be ‘below’ that of contentform. In other words, lexicogrammar (morphosyntax) and semantics are assumed to be strata which are ‘above’ that of the ‘lower’ level of expression- form (phonology, graphology, etc.), as shown in Table 2.2. According to proponents of the stratified view of semiosis, each stratum has minimal units which are specific to that stratum, These combine to form larger Table 2.2: Stratified model of language, showing vertical hierarchy of different levels of abstraction Semantics CONTENT FORM Lexicogrammar Phonology; graphology EXPRESSION FORM.a You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookRETHINKING THE EXPRESSION PLANE OF SEMIOSIS 73 levels of, for example, the ecosocial system in which such behaviour takes place and in relation to which it has the meanings it does. This view may also lead to the conclusion that the ‘formal’ structure of a language is not required to change ‘when “translated” from one modality to another’, as Marshall (1980: 277) puts it. In Marshall's view, syntax is formal and autonomous in accordance with the Chomskyan tradition, Thus, Marshall argues that the ‘(peripheral) medium imposes no constraints upon the (central) syntactic structure of messages’ (1980: 276). The latter is autonomous with respect to the former and is in no way shaped by it. In other words, sound and visual images are the physical medium of language, but that understanding language has litde or nothing to do with understanding the physical character- istics of the peripheral activities which realized it. Marshall’s claims are premised on the view that there is a language faculty which is constrained by universal principles and parameters which are independent of sensori-motor modality of execution and reception. Even allowing for the observed fact that language and gesture are coordinated when people interact with each other, Marshall concludes that this is due to ‘some central mechanism that keeps mouth and body working together to the same communicative ends’ (1980: 284). Marshall's argument is a species of downwards reductionism to lowerscalar causal mechanisms which are blackboxed and located in the mind or brain of the individual. One problem with such a view is that it fails to explain that modality- specific interactional dynamics are shaped by the activity as it unfolds in ecosocial space-time and that particular semiotic modalities have co-evolved through their joint use in the making and interpreting of particular social occasions of meaning-making by embodied social agents. In effect, Marshall’s argument is representative of that species of view according to which that which needs to be explained in socio-cultural activity is located at the level of the individual biological organism. Thus, meaning-making activity is a mere secondary happenstance - cf. performance ~ which does not significantly impinge on the structure and functioning of semiotic forms. In other words, there are no significant constraints from higherscalar levels than that of the individual body-brain complex. There is nothing which might suggest how ecosocial factors have contributed to the emergence of meaning-making activity and its structure and function as an intermediate scalar level which links the individual body-brain to the ecosocial environment of which the individual is a constituent and functioning part. The notion of a central processing and governing mechanism for the co-ordination of ‘talk’ and ‘gesture’ assumes a Cartesian-Euclidean-Newtonian model of the world. That is, a unique and absolute space-time in an objective world which is represented in the brain independently of human action and movement. Yet, sensori-motor processes are oriented to action in taskspecific ways. The combining of various sensori-motor modalities of action is not controlled by a single principle of the Cartesian-Euclidean-Newtonian type. Instead, diverse sensori-motor modalities may be variably cross-coupled in the production of a movement which is directed towards a specific goal. The various sensori-motor subsystems and their neural substrates are local with respect to their integration into some more global corporeal schema. Rather than universal and absolutea You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookRETHINKING THE EXPRESSION PLANE OF SEMIOSIS 77 ‘imaginary’ and ‘executed’ movement. The one always implicates the other; execution implies internal simulation (Berthoz 1997: 232). To perceive one’s body in the world is to imagine the actions which implicate its use. 6. The Symbolic Possibilities of Bodily Movement Salthe (1993: 97) discusses how the secondness of friction, from the point of view of the production of a specific phenomenon — thought, in his example - may be the energy required ‘just to keep the neurons alive, because that is only indirectly relevant (because at a lower-scalar level) to the product of interest (here, ideas).’ Friction requires the productive focusing of energy to obtain the right relations between means and end. By the same token, the energy consumed is greater than that which is productively focused on for the attainment of the desired goal. The regulation of degrees of movement in the production of vocal and other gestural activity means that only some of the energy consumed by the brain-body is construed as semiotically salient activity relative to an observer. Such an observer, from our social semiotic perspective, is physically, biologically and semiotically constrained. It is in this way that we can distinguish the meaningful from the meaningless in the body's articulation of a particular (semiotic) project. Thus, some movements (e.g. vocal-tract gestures) are more strongly cross-coupled to the symbolic possibilities of lexicogrammar whereas others are more weakly cross-coupled. Relative to an observer perspec- tive, the expression plane construes, entrains, and motivates the neurophysiology of body movement as symbolic possibilities for social meaning-making without, however, transcending the materiality of the body. It is important to insist on the symbolic possibilities of bodily movements. Symbolic meaning is not inherent in the movement or gesture per se. Rather, social agents harness the meaning-making possibilities of the body in the service of their own projects. Yet, the body is not a passive medium through which meanings are transmitted to others. The body does not only transmit a force or energy to another body, though it also does this (section 7, pp. 78-81). This would reduce meaning-making to indexical necessity. Symbolic possibility means that others take up and transform the articulatory labour of my body and rework it according to their own projects. In the process, the symbolic possibilities of bodies are continually modified by others who take up and adapt these possibil- ities for their own purposes. Somatic resources for meaning-making, as distinct from extrasomatic resources, maximally foreground difference, negotiation, and instability (ledema 1997: 11, LO8ff., 222). They are the raw materials out of which social agents fashion the techniques whereby bodies are harnessed and entrained for the purpose of creating and perhaps sustaining associations with other bodies. In this way, as Latour has shown, the social body is a contingent and constantly remade result of the harnessing of such somatic resources for the forming of associations with others (1986; 277). Such associations may be as fleeting as a single dyadic exchange between two individuals or as seemingly enduring as the millions of associations which sustain the social body itself on much larger space-time scales.a You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookRETHINKING THE EXPRESSION PLANE OF SEMIOSIS 81 It does not matter whether sensori-matter activity is simulated or imagined, as in inner speech, or peripherally executed as in audible speech sounds. The same neural structures underpin both forms of sensori-motor activity. Inner speech is still internally simulated motor and hence gestural activity even though this activity is not peripherally executed. Thus, the brain may ‘imagine’ or simulate inner speech precisely because the motor activity may be inhibited at different levels without, however, suppressing the closed loops in which such activity is simulated (Berthoz 1997: 230). The point is that inner speech is still gestural activity which the ‘speaker’ performs even though the motor systems responsible for the peripheral execution of the skeletomuscular systems of vocaltractlip- mouth-face-skin kinaesthesis are inhibited. 8. Inner and Outer Body States and Social Semiosis The issues discussed in the previous section raise questions about the ‘etc.’ function, the unspoken, the background, and so on, which have to do with all those material and bodily processes that defy categorical specification in a semiotic system of typological-categorial differences per se. As I indicated in chapter 1 (section 5, pp. 23-6), any such limitation of our inquiry to the typological-categorial is a restriction on the notion of semiosis which needs to be lifted so that we can take on board a much wider set of phenomenal states and processes and their cross-couplings with the semiotic. How does one talk about the ‘inner’ visual experience of reading a poem, for instance? Some hints are provided by the earlier work on synaesthesia, but we can probably go further. The kind of experience I am referring to would be a nondinguistic order of contextualization ‘above’ the denotative level of the linguistic text — a type of non-linguistic ‘connotative’ semiotic. Needless to say, more work needs to be done on how this is established. Is the evocation of visual imagery when one reads the poem an attempt to create or invent a multimodal coherence for integrating in (internalized) space-time the experience of reading the text? That is, is ita higher-order (‘connotative’) contextualization which functions to find a solution to the problems of local coherence posed by the text? In this way, the visual imagery which is internally stimulated and experienced in the silent reading of a poem would be seen as internally stimulated perceptions at very abstract cortical levels whose function is to provide solutions to sensori-motor incongruities and incoherences - the ‘inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation of motions in our own brains’, as Coleridge (1967: 77) expresses it ~ which the text generates. The work of Shepard (1984) is suggestive in this regard. I would say that problems of this kind only foreground what is in fact a more general phenomenon whenever we read a text of any kind. Reading is an activity which requires the space-time integration of the reader with the text. It is an ecosocial activity even though (1) physical movement is slight, being limited, perhaps, to the scanning by the eyes of the written notation on the page and the turning of pages by means of a synergy of hand-armjoint- eye kinaesthesis; (2) it is often ‘silent’ and contemplative insofar as one does not read aloud either to oneself or to others; and (3) much of the reading activitya You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookRETHINKING THE EXPRESSION PLANE OF SEMIOSIS 85 units of information. That is, bodily processes are both integrated into and mediated by lexicogrammatical and discourse semantic factors on the content stratum (see also sections 18 and 14, pp. 94-100). The following short analysis serves to illustrate the structure of the tone group. Following Coulthard (1992), tone units’ boundaries are marked by a double slash; the tonic segment is in upper case: Dion: // what's he SPILLT it // alREADy? // \ook at the MESS // PAUL // you're gonna have to CLEAN UP // in HERE // it's a PIG STY // Paul: // it is RATHer a PIG STY // /Dion: / YES // WELL // it’s YOUR ANimal // The breath group is the major phonological unit which carries both intonation and rhythmic periodicity. Lieberman points out that rhythmic periodicity ‘follows from the fact that we can generate a steady subglottal air pressure function throughout most of the expiration’ (Lieberman 1984: 119). It is necessary, a8 Lieberman (1984: 119) further points out, that this subglottal air pressure be stabilized in order to avoid ‘uncontrolled variations in perceived pitch and amplitude’. Neonates are unable to achieve this degree of control when they cry because of their inability to control the fundamental frequency of phonation during the cry. At the age of around three months children begin to learn to control ‘their subglottal air function throughout the duration of the expiratory phase’ (Lieberman 1984: 119). This occurs as the infant becomes more attuned to the intonational and rhythmic regularities in the ambient speech of parents and other caretakers. For example, Vihman and de Boysson-Bardies (1994; see also Vihman 1991) have shown that phonological structure is an emergent effect of the dynamic interaction of many different factors on different scales — the neuromotor and perceptual systems, individual experience with language, and the ambient linguistic influences of caretakers and others. The child acquires new habits as the stored information in this newly emergent level increases. In this way, the child’s motor activity is entrained to and becomes more specialized to the requirements of a given phonological system. But I do not see this process as one of learning abstract and formal phono- logical rules. Rather, I see it as one principle among others for constructing those global and potentially shareable principles of coherence which allow us to dialogically co-ordinate our bodily activities with those of others. Thus, a phono- logical system is a system of categorial, rhythmic and other regularities in the speech practices of some community which, as seen from the expression plane point of view, synchronize both peripheral and imagined speech motor activities with those of the other or the non-self — real or imagined - in the Umwelt. It is a means of harnessing friction to productive semiotic ends, This occurs against a bodily background of those primal vagaries and indexical necessities that are nota You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookRETHINKING THE EXPRESSION PLANE OF SEMIOSIS 89 events with their social semiotic values is only a further elaboration of this same basic principle. Values - biological and semiotic — together selectively channel, entrain, and motivate meaning-making activity in certain preferred directions rather than others. In recasting the expression plane as an ecosocial event, it is not difficult to postulate that articulatory act and perception are functionally complementary. There is information which is specific to both. This follows from the fact that such events ‘face two ways’, viz. to the body of the articulator, as well as to the environment in which they are perceived, including, of course, the perceiver. The information specifying the articulator and the information specifying the perceiver are not opposed. Instead, they are simply two facets of the one overall phenomenon. In this sense, they are complementary. There is no need to resort to two separate descriptive languages to talk about the two as would be the case in the various forms of neo-Cartesian mind-body and subject-object dualisms. Carol Fowler (1986) shows in her discussion of phonetic articulation as distal events that are directly perceived that the perception of such an event entails the apprehending of the invariant structure of phonetic gestures as the vocal tract undergoes spatio-temporal change during articulation. The further question that arises concerns how the spatio-temporal co-articulation of vocal-tract articu- lators and the acoustic information that results give rise to specific ecosocial semiotic effects. What are the meta-redundancy relations (chapter 1, section 6, pp. 26-30) among these ecosocial meanings, the sensori-motor action potential of the body, and their co-articulation on some particular occasion of interaction? This last question suggests the need to find a unified conceptual framework for explaining the relationship between bodily processes and the social semiotic significance and purpose of these. All forms of gestural articulation have spatio-temporal properties. They exhibit properties of both temporal succession and spatial adjacency. A gesture, seen as an ecosocial event, exhibits a change in adjacency structure — viz. the spatial overlap of articulators — as well as the successive ordering of gestures in time. How, then, in the face of such spatio-temporal variability, are structurally stable forms recognized? What about seemingly ‘static’, object-like sign systems such as writing? The predominantly spatial character of writing suggests minimal or no change of adjacency structure in time. However, the bodily activity of scanning and orienting to the marks on the page or other treated surface necessarily requires movement as an integrating activity (see also Harris 1995b: 46). In my view, the extra-somatic character of the treated surface on which written notation is inscribed only conceals the event modulation which takes place when a reader engages with the written text. Writing is not an exception to this general point, but, perhaps, a limiting case. I would suggest that bodily movement in one form or another is the fundamental organizing principle whereby interacting bodies are integrated into both semiotic action perform- ances and their textual records and products. The sensori-motor activities of the articulator are constrained to informational invariants-in-change by the perceiver’s ability to respond to these. Both articulators and perceivers must learn to distinguish between those forms of event modulation (change) thata You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookRETHINKING THE EXPRESSION PLANE OF SEMIOSIS 93. These rhythmic periodicities have their basis in the respiration cycle and are, for this reason, based on specific rhythmic patterns which are engendered by bodily processes and functions. Rhythm may also be modulated and the principal modulating factor would appear to be velocity or change of rate of, say, breathing in the case of speech, acceleration along a movement vector of a hand or an arm in the case of gesture, and walking, and so on, in the case of locomotion. Change of rate applies to some dimension of the spatio-temporal parameters of articulation of the perceptual event in question. Here, I am assuming that the expression plane of semiosis is always a perceptual event in some sensorimotor modality. This is so from both the execution and reception points of view. In other words, it is the expression plane of semiosis which cross- couples the semiotic act to the perceptual and motor activities of the participants to the act in question. Semiosis is always embodied in this sense. No act of semiosis floats free from or transcends this somatic dimension of its execution and reception because it is the expression plane which serves to integrate embodied participants into the meaning-making act itself. This is so in the sense that the expression plane is the interface which cross-couples the sensori-motor activities of the body (firstness) to the environment or non-elf (secondness) in and through the higher-order systemic resources of some semiotic resource system (thirdness) (see chapter 1, sections 3, 8, pp. 11-18, 34-9). Finally, the logical metafunction is based on the principle of interdependency. Its structuring principle is that of recursion. This follows from the spatio- temporal character of articulation. Probably the simplest form of interdepend- ency is that of succession in time. In speech production, the articulation of phonetic segments is characterized as ‘overlapping sets of coordinated gestures, where each set of coordinated gestures refers to a phonetic segment’ (Fowler 1986: 11). This view obviates the requirement that a priori planning or control procedures existing in an ontologically distinct mental realm act as the formal causes of articulation. Instead, planning occurs as part of the online and context-sensitive production of phonetically structured articulations. The breath group is an example of an event simplex. However, event complexes may also be built up from such simplexes through processes of nesting, addition, co-ordinating, subordinating, repeating, and so on. For example, rhythmic periodicities of different temporal duration may be nested the one within the other (Martineé 2000). Again, a movement sequence may be nested inside a still larger sequence, and so on. The co-articulation of articula- tors in the vocal tract in the performance of a given gestural score involves the co-ordination of various articulators which are independent of each other. Other event complexes may involve the sequencing of one event after another. For example, one flips the power switch before the computer boots up ready for use. The question that arises in all cases is how and to what extent the information which specifies the event is preserved under such conditions of temporal and causal wansformation. Lindblom (1991: 19) emphasizes, with his principle of ‘sufficient contrast’, the plasticity of phonetic gestures rather than fixed criterial properties, which are based on the contrary principle of ‘maximal contrast’. As Lindblom points out, the latter notion has dominated in the discussion of thea You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookRETHINKING THE EXPRESSION PLANE OF SEMIOSIS e action. At the same time, the transitivity role of Goal (cf. Longacre’s Patient) is conflated with that of Experiencer in clauses of this type. The Goal (or Patient) is the participant that undergoes some kind of change as a result of undergoing the process. It seems necessary to make this three-way distinction in order to describe the transitivity relations in such clauses. Matthiessen (1990: 7) also characterizes prosodies in terms of the direction- ality of, say, the pitch movement. I would go further. This movement is the dynamic energy which is exchanged, and, in part, experienced as a moving force, whenever a linguistic act is uttered. The giving form to a linguistic act also entails a dynamic relationship between this energy and the other strands of meaning which are configured in the linguistic form (see Cremonini and Frasnedi 1986: 23). Interpersonal prosodies are just one parameter of linguistic meaning that shows the scalar heterogeneity of the bodily and semiotic processes involved. This would not be so if meaning were no more than an abstract form- content relation. Meaning-making has an undeniable material and sensual quality, which, I think, can be explained by the relations between the energy that is released in the production of the linguistic act as well as by its materiality. This energy, as Cremonini and Frasnedi (1986) point out, has ‘directional vectors’, which both extend beyond the utterance and into its environment and feed back into it, producing thereby a resonating density of significance. These authors also point out that this energy, in order to be effective, and not merely redundant and ‘empty’, must be brought under control so that it be effectively harnessed and synchronized with the other dimensions of an utterance’s meaning. This is the task of rhetoric; rhetoric has the task of both giving direc- tionality to and anchoring this energy in the dialectic with the other strands of the utterance’s meaning potential. Lack of such directionality and control would seem to suggest emotional or other disturbances, pathology, or disorientation in the communicative ecosystemic environment of agents. It is this energy which contributes to that ‘making present’ of an embodied subjectivity that I mentioned earlier. It is the interface between expression and content whereby meaning comes into contact with the materiality of the body, and its neuroanatomical, neurophysiological, and neuropsychological levels of organization. In so doing, the energy of the utterance gives both presence and force to an immanent subjectivity/agency through this co-articulation of the phenomenal-material and social semiotic domains. It is in and through the dialectically dual and complementary nature of the relation between the two domains that body rhythms, physical pain, and so on, exchange energy with the semiotic, and in so doing they give presence and energy to the social semiotic voicing of our subjectivity and agency (Bakhtin 1990 [1924]: 292). The energy and vectorial directionality of interpersonal prosodies endow our meaning: making with the presence of a temporal event and a spatializing value. This is one concrete illustration of the principle that the matter-energy which is harnessed and channelled in meaning-making constitutes a forceful interaction with the other. Human meaning-making activity is a hybrid phenomenon: we do not understand and respond to it solely on the basis of the semiotic relations that we construe between the different parts of the activity in relation to the systems ofa You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookRETHINKING THE EXPRESSION PLANE OF SEMIOSIS 101 In other words, the acoustic array which the listener samples specifies the envi- ronmental event - eg. the speaker's vocal-tract gestures — to the perceiver. In this way, the listener uses this information to orient to the speaker for the purposes of dialogic interaction, It is not the physical properties of the acoustic signal per sewhich are relevant to the listener. Rather, the linguistically motivated character of the speaker’s vocal-tract gestures ~ i.e. the physical properties of the distal event itself - is itself revealed to the listener in and through the information which is structured in the acoustic array. This means that the perceiver directly accesses the gestural properties of the distal event of speaking through the information structured in the array. Fowler and Rosenblum (1991: 36) cite evidence on the perception of intonation (among other factors) to show that the listener's perception of intonation peak corresponds not to a perception of the ‘objective’ or ‘absolute’ rate of opening and closing of the vocal folds during the production of the intonational melody, but to those modulations of the rate of opening and closing brought about by gestures which the speaker intentionally uses to modify the intonational melody. The point is that listeners selectively sample the acoustic variables in the acoustic array as a guide to the linguistically organized and semi- otically motivated gestures of the speaker. There would also appear to be a value component in this process (Edelman 1989: 152). The selective nature of this orientation to the array suggests that the listener’s response to these variables is an adaptive one. In establishing specific links between categories of acoustic variables and their linguistically motivated gestural values, the activities of speaker and listener are reciprocally modified and co-ordinated. For proponents of the motor theory, the abstract control structures which are hypothesized correspond not to the speaker’s articulatory movements but to his or her intentions (see above). This leads to the ‘encoding’ view of the relation- ship between the control structures and the co-articulation of phonetic segments in articulation (see Fowler and Rosenblum 1991: 47 for critical discussion). The view of articulation-as-encoding-ofphonetic-segments assumes that speech sounds are segmental. On the other hand, the boundaries between discrete (phonetic) segments are distorted by their encoding into the continuous and overlapping movements of the articulators in real-time vocal-tract activity. In the gestural view of linguistically motivated vocal-tract activity, on the other hand, co- articulation is seen as the functional cross-coupling of articulators which are temporally heterogeneous. Rather than the presumed homogeneity of a serial ordering of phonetic segments which is then distorted by its encoding in co- articulation, there is a complex layering of gestures that sometimes overlap and sometimes do not in time (Fowler and Rosenblum 1991: 47). The lowest scalar level of phonetic organization, in this view, is not comprised of abstract phonetic primitives. Instead, it is comprised of gestural prosodies which are modulated by higher-scalar levels in the ecosocial semiotic system that speaker and listener share. This is implicit in the following criticism of the motor theory of phonetic gestures made by Fowler and Rosenblum: Do listeners need an innate vocal tract synthesizer to recognize acoustic reflections of phonetic gestures? Although it might seem to help, it cannot bea You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookRETHINKING THE EXPRESSION PLANE OF SEMIOSIS 105 17. The Metafunctional Basis of Space and of Bodily Movement in Ecosocial Space-time All gestural activity unfolds in space. The notions of space and of spatial relations are crucial for our understanding of the ways in which the body relates to, orients to, and is integrated to its ecosocial environment. I believe that this is so both of gestural activity which is executed, as well as ‘inner’ gestural activity, of which inner speech is but one specific case. All modalities of human social meaning-making utilize, or in some way depend on, the movement - simulated or real — of bodily articulators. Thus, the receptors which are implicated in gestural activity coincide with those which take part in our sense of movement. These are (1) the visual receptors; (2) the vestibular receptors in the inner ear; (3) the muscular and the musculararticulatory receptors, both of which measure movement of the various parts of the body; and (4) the cutaneous receptors of the skin which measure changes in pressure or temperature caused by contact either with the parts of the body or with phenomena in the (extra- corporeal) external world (see Berthoz 1997: 33). Space is, then, a fundamental organizing principle which may well underpin the metafunctional basis of semiosis itself. There are typological-categorical spatial categories (e.g. in front, behind, up, down, and so on) which enable us to perceive as invariant certain relations between objects and the parts of our body. There are also topological-continuous relations such as spatial distance from the body, which are quantitative and variable rather than invariant and categorical. Kosslyn et al. (1995) propose that the two kinds of relations are coded differently in the neural architecture of the brain. But there is no direct or causal relation between these lower-scalar neural arrangements and higher- scalar ecosocial semiotic ones. We can see in these two different kinds of relations a possible lowerlevel integrative constraint on the ways in which semiotic modalities are themselves organized. Categories such as ‘in front’, “behind’, and so on are digitalized units of information which specify the given object system relative to an observer perspective. In terms of the body's spatial relations to its environment, it defines the informational co-ordinates of the system appropriate to the scale of its interactions with its environment. Thus, the conceptual categorization of these spatial relations takes place on the level of the sensori-motor samplings the body makes of its surroundings. On the other hand, topological-continuous factors such as spatial distance raise two orders of questions. First, spatial distance raises the question as to which resources are best harnessed in meaning-making activity so as to overcome the problems - perceptual and physical - that distance poses for human interaction. Both visual and auditory resources for interaction are subject to constraints imposed by the material environment on their efficacy (see also StuddertKennedy and Lane 1980: 37). For example, visual gestures require close face-to-face contact between interactants as well as an optimal level of ambient light; acoustic signals decay with increasing distance. Secondly, spatial distance between bodies functions as a lowerlevel integrative constraint on social and interpersonal relations (cf. closeness or intimacy versus distance and remoteness). We may see here an analogue with the metafunctionala You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookBODY DYNAMICS, MEANING-MAKING, .. . 109 system. Secondly, there is the sequential unfolding of events in real-time, the logogenetic selecting and deployment of semiotic options and their cross- coupling with specific external events, as well as changes in cross-coupling strengths in moments of transition from one phase of the activity to another. Thirdly, there are the sensori-motor reactions of participants to what they see, hear, feel, touch, grasp, point to, and so on, in their spatio-temporal purview at any given moment. With these general considerations in mind, this chapter will focus on the question of how the organization of language as expression and content functions to embed the body-brain in its ecosocial and bodily environments. As we shall see below, this requires us to examine the diverse timescales and their cross-couplings that are implicated in the intrinsic organization of both expression and content. 2, The Expression Stratum and the Principle of Alternation Lemke’s (1999) Principle of Alternation is a useful tool for theorizing, in terms of the threedevel scalar hierarchy, both how semiotic functions are mapped onto dynamical scalar levels, and the reorganization of continuous variation into discrete variants. In the act of speaking, for instance, continuous quantitative variation in sound is related to continuous quantitative variation in the sensor motor activities which produce speech sounds in the process of articulation. However, the processes of both producing and comprehending speech sounds require that speakers and listeners are able to articulate and perceive those features which are salient or criterial for determining which words are uttered and/or heard on a given occasion. In other words, the continuous topological variety of the sounds produced at level L-1 of the perceptual-motor activities involved in the production and perceptual pick-up of speech sounds is reorgan- ized and interpreted as discrete phonological categories, which are typological in character, at level L+1. In the case of speech sounds, this level is the phono- logical system of a given language. In Table 3.1, I suggest some ways in which the expression stratum of spoken language can be reconceptualized in terms of the Principle of Alternation. In accordance with this Principle, the emergence of a ranked scale of phono- logical units and their structural-functional relations in a given language consti- tutes a new intermediate level N which functions semiotically to reorganize the continuous quantitative (topological) variety of units and interactions at the level (L-1) of sensori-motor activity in articulation as discrete, typological- categorial phonological units and relations for level (L+1). Level L-I inter- actions are the material, topological ground of the typological distinctions which emerge at higher levels. Level L+1 comprises the system of phonologically salient distinctions which function in a given language to symbolically construe differ- ences in lexicogrammatical form on the content stratum. These distinctions develop and are conserved in the long-term memory of individuals as a system of phonological values or differences on the basis of the material and semiotic interactions of individuals with their ecosocial environ-a You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookBODY DYNAMICS, MEANING-MAKING, .. . 113 Rhyme ail moraicity: yes ALIOIVUOW 2 TIME Figure 3.1: Syllable structure of ‘sail’, showing moraic and non-moraic elements trajectory of vocal-tract activity which, in English, results from the periodic (cyclic) assignment of salient and weak stress to syllables such that each cycle — each foot — consists of one stressed syllable and an unequal number of unstressed ones. 1/ bought this / Vee Jay / * and / sailed it In the above example, the feet are marked off by slashes; the syllable immedi- ately following the slash is the salient syllable, or the Ictus. The carat sign ‘*” indicates a silent Ictus. Figure 3.2 shows the wave trajectory of the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables as the syntagm unfolds in time. The highest scalar trajectory that I shall consider here is that which is concerned with the creation of tonic prominence or tonicity through changes in major pitch. This trajectory is concerned with intonation. The intonation trajectory consists of a cycle which alternates between ‘switching tonicity on and off’, as Cléirigh (1998: 39) expresses it. In our example, the intonation cycle is instantiated as follows: //: 1 bought this / Vee Jay //: and / sailed it // The wave trajectory of tonicity in this example is shown in Figure 3.3. In this way, we see phonology as consisting of time-bound trajectories on different scalar levels. Each scale has its own characteristic temporal cycle or rate of completion and its own characteristic entities. Furthermore, the trajectories on theira You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookBODY DYNAMICS, MEANING-MAKING, .. . 7 In systemicfunctional theory, the content stratum is internally stratified into discourse and lexicogrammar (Martin 1992a: 14-21). Discourse, which is linguistically realized social action and text, is realized by co-patternings of lexicogrammatical selections. Discourse is a higher-level reconstrual of lexicogrammatical patterns so as to realize thematic patterns, interactive modes, and cohesive relations in texts. Following Halliday (1978a: 108-9), text is defined as either spoken or written instances of language-in-use. Discourse and lexi- cogrammar belong to the content stratum because they are based on various types of semantic-pragmatic meaning and social (inter)action. I take a view similar to that originally espoused by Firth (1957c [1951]: 220), viz. meaning cannot be defined in terms of any single stratum: Language text must be attributed to participants in some context of situation in order that its modes of meaning may be stated as a series of levels, which taken together form a sort of linguistic spectrum. In this ‘spectrum’ the meaning of the whole event is dispersed and dealt with by a hierarchy of linguistic techniques descending from social contextualization to phonology. (Firth 1957 [1951]: 220) In some respects, the terms expression and content are unfortunate ones for they may suggest the idea of a material means of expressing meaning, seen exclu- sively in terms of content. In my view, such a conception reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of Hjelmslev’s notions (see chapter 2, section 1, pp. 59-67). The stratal organization of language into expression and content reflects diverse principles of semiotic organization on different levels. Meaning is made through the contribution of all the levels involved in the logogenetic process of producing text or discourse. In the case of language, this means that the phono- logical or graphological, lexicogrammatical, and discourse levels of organization all simultaneously make their distinctive contributions to the overall meaning- making event. The expression stratum is based on sensori-motor activity. An example is the vocal-tract activity whereby speech sounds are articulated. Expression is internally stratified in terms of phonetics and phonology. I shall use the term phonetics to designate language-specific classifications of articulatory reper- toires independently of their linguistic function, Phonology, on the other hand, refers to the higher-level organization of such repertoires into language-specific functional systems and structures. As we shall see below, this means that phono- Jogical units and relations, in the logogenetic process of creating discourse or text, are both integrated to and constrained by higher-order discourse and lexicogrammatical patterns of organization on the content stratum. Moreover, phonology is not simply a vehicle whereby such content is ‘carried’ or ‘conveyed’. Instead, it is a full-fledged level of linguistic organization whose functional structures and systems make their own specific contribution to the meaning and organization of the discourse event. This contribution will be discussed in the following section in terms of the iconic, indexical and symbolic functions of phonological forms in the meaning-making process. The phenomena of experience that are construed on the content stratum area You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookBODY DYNAMICS, MEANING-MAKING, .. . 121 53). The initiating and terminating boundaries of a syllable on level L cannot be reversed because the principles which relate the boundary conditions of the syllable to its internal organization are irreversible. The initiation of a syllable cannot be reversed to become the terminating position for each has conse- quences for the instantiation of paradigmatic features in the asymmetric temporal flow of articulation (Cléirigh 1998: 53). At the same time, the direc- tionality of the phonogenetic field of articulation is constrained by boundary conditions operating on level L+1 of some phonological SI. Vocal-tract activity is integrated to and entrained by this level such that particular phonological units and relations are recognizable. Semiotically, the field perspective refers to the phase space, the organized field, which affords the emergence of the wave and particle perspectives. Waves and particles are organizations of quantum field processes (Bickard and Campbell 2000: 331). The vocal tract is a topologically organized continuum in which vocal-tract gestural activity takes place. It is the material ground in which this activity takes place. As such, the topological-continuous space of the vocal tract is a phase space or an organized field in which certain kinds of organized process perturb this field so as to give rise to various principles of organization. ‘These diverse principles interact during the temporal unfolding of vocal-tract articulatory activity. Meaning-making is a probabilistic system for construing and acting on the phenomena of experience. Cléirigh (1998: 41) has shown how the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics can be applied to phonology, interpreted as a wave/particle complementarity in terms of probability, The application of this interpretation to phonology ‘means interpreting waves of moraicity, stress and tonicity as measures of the probability of the observer - speaker or hearer - finding the respective syllable, foot or tone group particle at that particular point’ (Cléirigh 1998: 41). For example, the syllables comprising the Ictus and Remiss phases of the foot are comprised of clusters of vocoids and contoids. Abercrombie (1967: 85) points out that vocoids and contoids are phonetic segments which occur in particular articulatory environments. These entail a good deal of phonetic variation that is not phonologically salient and which is consequently filtered at the phonological level L+] where phonetic segments are construed as instantia- tions of particular phonemes. Such bundles of features correspond to the phoneme type-categories of a given phonological system. Phonemes specify phonological type-classes of consonants and vowels which are specific to a given language system. Phonemes categorize discrete regions of the articulatory flux as particles. A particle corresponds to a point in the unfolding wave to which a specific packet of paradigmatic features is assigned such that the region of the wave movement corresponding to the particle is construed as an instance of a particular phoneme type-category. Thus, phonemes paradigmatically specify a given region of the flow of articulation = i.e. the muscular movements involved ~ as invariant irrespective of variations in pitch, loudness, and duration (Gibson 1983 [1966]: 93). As Gibson points out, ‘the stimulus information for detecting them (phonemes, PJT] is invariant under transformations of frequency, intensity, and time’ (1966: 93). Phonemes therefore construe articulatorya You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookBODY DYNAMICS, MEANING-MAKING, 125 strong beat occurs — i.e. the Ictus — as determining the location of the foot. This makes the foot seem to be more determinate than it actually is because of this perspective’s emphasis on static segments or points, rather than on the dynamic, temporally unfolding phases of a process and the fuzzy or blurred boundaries between segments (Pike 1967; 1982: 12-13). Again, the focus is on the proba- bilistic assignment of the foot in relation to the point where stress is strongest. Moreover, the particle perspective privileges a model of linguistic structure which is based on the notion of a constituent hierarchy. That is, largersize particles are comprised of smallersize particles (see section 8, pp. 134-9). On analogy with partwhole principles of organization in the grammar (e.g. the experiential structure of the clause as a figure consisting of functionally related roles {cf. particles] such as participant and process), the foot can be seen as consisting of lower-level syllabic constituents which function as parts in the larger whole defined as the foot on the level above that of the syllable. Thus, Ictus and Remiss are particles of, respectively, strong and weak stress. Experientially, the foot is defined as the functional relationship between particles of strong and weak stress which are realized by lower-ranking syllables. These particles of stress are integrated to the higher-ranking foot in which they function as parts in this larger whole, Stress is produced in the vocal tract by varying and modulating factors such as loudness and duration. Loudness and duration are quantitative values, based on difference in degree or topological-continuous variation. Degree of stress is therefore iconic with respect to degree of loudness and/or duration. From the perspective of articulation, both loudness and duration are iconic with respect to (1) ‘the degree of force with which air is expelled from the lungs by the pulmonic airstream mechanism while the vocal cords are in vibration’ (Abercrombie 1967: 95) in the case of loudness; and (2) the temporal duration of segments, depending on factors such as the length of time that a particular vowel posture is maintained (Abercrombie 1967: 82). At all levels of organization - syllable, foot, tone group - phonology is structured in terms of waves of vocal-tract activity. Waves of strong-weak rhythmic pulses constitute a fundamental organizing principle of the expression stratum, Furthermore, rhythmic waves at the level of the foot interact with waves at other levels of phonological organization such as the syllable and the tone group. The fact that periodic, wave-like behaviour is a fundamental organizing principle of the expression stratum of speech suggests that it is adapted to the generating of highly patterned flows of behaviour which cross-couple with the flows of other systems (other speakers) in ways that synchronize with each other in stable ways during interaction. Thus, the feeling of ‘phonetic empathy’ or of being phase’ or ‘out-of-phase’ with one’s interlocutor for the duration of a conversa- tional event, or some part of it, is a product of the ways in which interacting wave variables at many levels of organization are attuned to the many micro-level fluctuations in the wave-like behaviour of one’s interlocutor. These fluctuations may be amplified so that they have larger-scale effects on the organization of the flow of meaning-making activity. This further suggests that interaction is an emergent property of the interaction of the waves produced by the interactants (e.g. speakers).a You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookBODY DYNAMICS, MEANING-MAKING, .. . 129 position in the overall wave. In the clause, this means that waves of ‘thematicity’ and ‘newness’ are interpreted as indicators of the probability of the language user finding the respective quantum corresponding to Theme, Rheme, Given, or New at a given point in the clause. It is in this way that the waves of Theme- Rheme and Given-New flowing through the clause can become quantitized as localized particles occurring at, say, the beginning and end points of the clausal wave. For example, the thematicity wave in the English clause consists of two peaks, corresponding to Theme and Rheme, respectively. These two peaks represent the most probable points in the clause for the assignment of the functional elements Theme and Rheme. In the following example, the Themes are indicated by bold type; the Rhemes are underscored with a double line. maybe his fears came out so he opposed it violently and . . . but mum saved some money up and she lent me some money to buy a boat Figure 3.6 models the thematicity wave in this syntagm. ‘opposed it violently - TIME Theme: Rheme ‘Theme: Rheme interpersonal + textual + topical topical Figure 3.6: Thematicity wave in the English clause complex, showing Theme and Rheme as two peaks of information quanta 7.1.3 The Interpersonal Metafunction The prosodic or scopal character of interpersonal meanings can be explained in terms of the general tenets of field theory. In physics, a field is ‘a region under the influence of some physical agency’ (Pitt 1977: 149). On the content stratum, an interpersonal field is the domain surrounding a given interpersonal selection — e.g. mood or modality in the clause ~ such that the given selection syntagmat- ically extends over and in some way modifies or deforms (influences) some other feature within the given syntagmatic domain, which it holds in its scope. The given interpersonal feature influences and shapes (deforms) the given syntag- matic domain in order to achieve a particular interactive purpose. In this perspective, the process of meaning-making can be seen as one of continually assigning quanta of interpersonal meaning to some syntagmatic domain so as to ‘energize’ it for specific interactional purposes and effects. Thus, a givena You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookBODY DYNAMICS, MEANING-MAKING, . . . 133 particular distinctions (cf. Saussure’s values) occur that a given lexicogrammati- cal form can operate in very many different contexts rather than being tied to a given context. For example, the Head element in a nominal group, e.g. @ very good sailor, symbolizes an experiential type-category of Thing, viz. [SAILOR] in the present example. It does not refer to a specific sailor in a particular real-world context. Similarly, the adjective good symbolizes a type-category of quality just as the determiner a symbolizes the deictic category ‘non-specific’. Each of these items derives its symbolic potential from its position in a system of contrasting terms whereby the value of each and every term is defined. For example, a contrasts with the in the sense that both are more delicate instantiations of the schematic category [DETERMINER]. The more delicate (specific) instantiations constitute a system of contrasting terms in which the meanings qua categorial distinctions between aand the are defined. Figure 3.8 shows this contrast. SPECIFIC the DETERMINER NON-SPECIFIC a Figure 3.8: Simplified determiner system, showing the categorial distinction between the values ‘specific’ and ‘non-specific’, as symbolized by English ‘the’ and ‘a’ More precisely, the linguistic form a symbolizes a category of determiner which can be more delicately subcategorized as [DETERMINER: NON-SPECIFIC; NUMBER: SINGULAR: COUNT]. Thus, a is used in the grammatical environ- ment of singular count nouns, as in the example above. The properties of a under discussion here are symbolic properties that derive from (1) the position of this lexicogrammatical form in a system of paradigmatic contrasts with other forms such as the; and (2) the possibilities of this form for operating in particular types of grammatical structure such as the nominal group. The nominal group is a particular subsystem in the language with grammatical units and structures which are specific to that level. These units and structures are specific to the functional tasks of the grammatical subsystem which is the nominal group. Specifically, the grammatical resources of the nominal group function to ground by deictic and other means the Thing element as an instance of the type-category which is symbolized by the Thing. In the nominal group @ very good sailor, the determiner a functions deictically to specify the Thing element as an arbitrary or non-specific instance of the type-category of Thing in question. If determiners such as English a and the were pure indexicals, then they could not be freely combined with other items such as, for instance, adjectives and nouns by virtue of the grammatical resources of the nominal group. That is, they would be necessarily tied to the specific contexts in which their indexed entities occur. However, it is the symbolic categorial-coding potential of these forms whicha You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookBODY DYNAMICS, MEANING-MAKING, . . . 137 example, the linguistic entity ‘sentence’ is seen as being supervenient on certain classes of lower-level constituents standing in certain kinds of relationships with each other. Formal models of language, for example, are not concerned with relations outside those between ‘sentence’ and its lower syntactic constituents and the formal rules for their combination. Such a system of relations is closed to the external environments in wl language operates. On the other hand, if language is seen as a form of dynamic open system, then itis, by definition, engaged in transactions with its environment over the time in which the system persists, In this alternative view, constituency (segmental organ- ization) is seen to be the consequence of a particular and partial way of relating to the wave. The wave is the organizing principle, rather than constituency as such. Without such system-environment transactions, the system cannot and does not exist. It follows from this that the characteristics which language has as a dynamic open system cannot be derived from closed-system properties and relations such as those seen as dependent on a supervenience base. Instead, such properties and relations can only be defined in terms of language qua dynamic, far from equilibrium system. In the terms of the present study, language, rather than being supervenient on a causal base of fundamental properties, persists in time and maintain its dynamical structural integrity and intrinsic properties and relations in time because of the transactions that occur between its internal organization and two environments, viz. the body-brain complex and the ecosocial environment, with which it is cross-coupled. There is no supervenient substance-base on which language is ultimately founded. The reason for this lies in the way both of the interfaces referred to above are themselves persistences in the organization of bodily (neuromuscular) and ecosocial processes. Instead of being explainable in terms of fundamental constituent particles, such local stabilities or patterns of organization are explainable in terms of the patterned nature of the organization of the relevant system - environment transactions that are constituted by the expression and content strata. The Principle of Alternation proposed by Lemke (1999) allows us to view this question in a different perspective. Quantum field processes relative to the space-time scales of the body and the phenomena of experience self-organize into higher-scalar semiotic levels, relative to the observer perspective in some SI, where they are construed as in some way semiotically salient or meaningful. For example, the topological-continuous space-time of vocal-tract activity on level L-l is an organized field (a phase space) of articulatory processes which are reorganized as complex interacting patterns of phonological particles, waves, and fields for level L+1 by virtue of the filtering or buffering function of the intermediate level L of phonological units and relations functions, In this way, emergent principles of phonological organization, themselves no more than a further reorganization of quantum field processes on their own level, are made meaningful for higher levels of organization, viz. lexicogrammar and discourse. Language and other semiotic system-processes are not supervenient. Their existence is dependent on a number of environmental factors which can be thought about in terms of Aristotelian causality. First, they depend on biological initiating conditions - e.g. neuromuscular processes - such as those which enable vocal-tract gestural activity and their effects to take place (efficienta You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookBODY DYNAMICS, MEANING-MAKING, .. . 141 obviously depend on the organism's time-bound perceptual samplings of the environment in the form of the extra-somatic outside world as well as the individual's internal milieu. I do not think there is a simple linking of sensori- motor routines to conceptual ones. Both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, the cross-linking of the two is always mediated by the higher-scalar ecosocial envi- ronment in which the organism’s perceptual sampling of the environment and consequent elaboration of conceptual structures is embedded. As Lemke (2000a: 210-11) points out, there is not a simple ‘upwards’ progression from simpler to more complex forms of organization. Rather, there is always already a higher form of organization, or an organized field of possibilities, on higher- scalar levels which mediates the body-brain’s transactions with its environment. Thus, the emergence of the content stratum of language as a recategorization of lowerdevel conceptual structures is the result of the emergent self-organization ofa more specified intermediate level coming between the concepual structures elaborated in the brain and the ecosocial environment. As I have argued elsewhere (Thibault 2000a), Edelman’s focus on the individual organism tends to downplay the ways in which the emergence of language, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, in the individual body: brain takes place in the context of higherscalar ecosocial systems which are themselves continually evolving. Edelman is certainly right to emphasize that the dynamics of language in the individual does not depend on a genetically endowed knowledge of language which predicts from the outset the ‘growth’ of language in the individual. Instead, the dynamics of language in the individual is entrained, in and through social interaction, to the dynamics of higherscalar ecosocial processes which themselves only have their existence along a time- bound trajectory. Precisely the same argument also applies to the sensori-motor routines mentioned above. These, too, only exist along a self-organizing time- bound trajectory of vocal-tract gestural activity. Such a trajectory is based on nondinear and irreversible cycles of neural and muscular activity, which are the micro-components out of which vocal-tract activity is flexibly soft-assembled along a time-bound trajectory (Kelso et al. 1986; Goldfield 1993: 53). The assembling in time of such micro-components leads to the emergence of a co- ordinative structure: many interacting functional variables behave as a single unit of activity. In this way, very many degrees of freedom ~ i.e. of continuous topological variation — on the lower level of the body are transformed into meaningful information for higher levels of organization. The self-organizing emergence of phonological systems and structures which recategorize vocal-tract activity is a more specified intermediate level between these sensori-motor routines and the higher level of the content stratum. On both levels, lower-level noise is amplified and transformed into information which is meaningful for higher levels. The quantal theory of phonology developed by Stevens (1989) constitutes one of the important pioneering attempts to explain how macro- scopic categories emerge from the microscopic detail of the articulatory and acoustic phenomena involved in the production and reception of phonological categories. The processes of recategorization discussed above depend on the system's capacity for discrimination or differentiation. For example, the sensori-motora You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookBODY DYNAMICS, MEANING-MAKING, .. . 145 relations existing on the ecosocial scale rather than being referable to lower- scalar sensori-motor dynamics per se, seen as their biological initiating conditions. These higherscalar phenomenal relations are not exogenous factors with respect to the body. Instead, in integrating the body to them, they become a part of the body-brain’s internal organization so that scalar heterogeneity is seen as a fundamental property of the meaning-making body-brain. Thus, we can see how, at all levels of organization, language is not composed of isolable functional components assembled ‘from below’. Rather, the metafunctional diversity that is attributed to unfolding acts of meaning-making in logogenesis reflects organismic and ecosocial constraints that influence the time-bound develop- ment of the system without recourse to pre-existing causal factors to explain the system’s behaviour. Expression and content co-evolve and co-develop in the sense that the neuromuscular dynamics of the body are entrained in and through their interaction, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, with higher-scalar contentstratum processes and their functionings in a still-larger- scalar ecosocial environment. At its particular level of organization, vocal-tract gestural activity can be described as a vector field having the properties of both direction and magnitude (Norton 1995: 50; Cléirigh 1998: 52). Relations both within and between the expression and content strata are non-mechanistic informational constraints. Final causality operates here because top-down relations between, say, the content stratum, comprising lexicogrammar and discourse, and vocal- tract trajectory function both to select and to constrain the lower level at the same time as they also act to entrain it into its future trajectory (Salthe 1993: 270). This is so because the cogent moment ~ the temporal cycle - of the higher level of meaning on the content stratum is greater such that the flow of meaning along its trajectory continues well after the completion of the much faster temporal cycle of the articulatory trajectory at the level of the syllable, say, on the expression stratum (section 2, pp. 109-16). Informational constraints also operate on the relations between levels within both the content and expression strata. The relationship between phonology and phonetics that I discussed above can be seen in this light: phonological systems and structures are macroscopic relations and dynamics; phonetics refers to microscopic relations and dynamics at the fine-grained level of articulation (Browman and Goldstein 1995: 180). The constraints do not operate in just one direction, but instead are reciprocal, acting in both directions. On the content stratum, lexicogrammar and discourse similarly operate a system of reciprocal constraints between the microscopic and the macroscopic levels of description. Moreover, the self-organizing properties of lower-level relations and properties such as those evident in articulation on the phonetic level give rise to emergent patterns of organization at higher levels such as the phonological level. By the same token, the emergent higher level downwardly constrains activity on the lower level. The realizatory relationship between content and expression can now be seen as a system of reciprocal linkages between dynamical relations and processes on a number of different levels of organization, ranging from the microscopic level of articulation on the expression stratum to the macroscopic level of discourse on the content stratum.a You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookBODY DYNAMICS, MEANING-MAKING, .. . 149 Stage 1: being Suage 2: fecing states; socio- jective dy Stage 3: conceptualizing categories and relating to Stage 4: microfunctions (indexical) Stage 5: metafunctions (symbolic) oO Figure 3.10: The integration of initial at-oneness with the world to the expansion of information-meaning at more specified levels of semiosis along an individuating trajectory perspective is a means of modelling the way in which the various dimensions of the system change in time. In logogenesis, the behaviour of the system as it unfolds in time is the changes it undergoes as the system changes from one state to another. At any given moment, the system is in a number of different states, corresponding to different overlapping metafunctional regions. The overall number of states in which the system is in at any given moment defines its state space. This means that the dynamical process of meaning-making can be seen asa You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookBODY DYNAMICS, MEANING-MAKIN! 153 Phonology Lexicogrammar | Inter- Fieldike Tone system in tone _| Fieldtike Mood, personal | prosodic and | group comprisinga | prosodic and | modality, scopal primary system of | scopal lexis as relations; five contrasting relations; categories of cumulative, | simple tones and two | cumulative, (interyaction amplifying compound tones amplifying and orienta- effects; effects; tion degree of degree of deformation, deformation e.g. pitch shift textual Waverlike peaks| Tonality and tonicity | Waveslike peaks of prominence | in tone group; of prominence defining rhythm in foot as | defining boundaries; | indexes of lexi- boundaries; begin-end cogrammar elements | begin-end structures; tran as units of informa- | structures; sitions; tion; transitions; culminative; | demarcation of word | culminative dynamic peri | boundaries; odicities of | word emphasis; tonicity, stress, | contrast between and moraicity | +stress/-stress; seen.as waves | +moraicity/~ of continuously] moraicity; +tonicity/- varying tonicity amplitude functioning as extension prosodies of variable length to integrate or concatenate lexicogrammat- ‘al domains Likewise, the experiential resources of the clause, say, must be able to model the constant flux of the phenomena of experience as instantiations, to varying degrees, of the categories which are intrinsic to a particular language system. The tripartite perspective on lexicogrammatical form as particle, wave, and field emphasizes the dynamical character of the system. Instead of discrete, static categories, the language system must be able to adapt to the continuous variation of the flux of human experience. The mixed-mode character of language shows that language embodies both discrete, categorial distinctions and continuous topological change and variation. A better understanding of language and its workings is obtained once it is understood that both continuity and discreteness are intrinsic to its dynamics. Table 3.3 sets out the properties of the expression and content strata of language in order to illustrate the mixed mode character of language.a You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookBODY DYNAMICS, MEANING-MAKING, . . . 161 prominence or tonicity. This process is intonation and consists in switching tonicity on or off. Each of these cycles occurs at a given rank in the phonologi- cal rank scale. Thus, the syllable is defined in terms of its relations to lower-level segments as well as to the higherranking unit, foot. In turn, the syllable is integrated to the level of the foot in the sense that it receives further levels of contextualization by being integrated to a higher-order unit, The foot itself is integrated to the still-higher-ranking unit, the tone unit. Each rank specifies a scalar level with its own temporal dynamics - faster on lower scales, slower on higher ones. Each rank in the scale may be seen as a level of specification integrated by the dissipative structure — the organism — that materially embodies the trajectory. That is, neuromuscular processes are contin- ually reintegrated under the increasing specification of phonological structure. It is this integration to increasingly higher levels of specification that provides the basis for the trajectory’s coherence over time (Salthe 1993: 261). The emergence of macroscopic phonological organization in the form of a ranking scale of articulatory, rhythmic, and tonicity cycles of vocal-tract activity from microscopic phonetic processes illustrates the principle whereby the lower-level physical embodiment of the trajectory self-organizes. What we have here is an illustration of the way in which articulatory activity qua bodily movement is organized on a diversity of timescales. Moreover, this reveals a fundamental aspect of embodied meaning-making: temporal body dynamics on different scales face ‘two ways’, viz. inwards to the faster temporal cycles of neural activity in the CNS and outwards to the slower temporal cycles of the other systems — the individuals ~ with which a given system interacts. Meaning-making unfolds in time and it is crucial that there are resources for attuning to the temporal dynamics of those with whom one interacts. Thus, the physical organism gua dissipative structure is semiotically connected to other organisms by virtue of their trajectories (Salthe 1993: 262). As we saw above, the organism is semiotically integrated to a trajectory in the first instance under the increasing specification of the expression stratum. The integration of neuromuscular potential to macroscopic phonological organization connects the organism to others’ meaning-making trajectories on the basis of potentially shareable articulatory, rhythmic, and tonic resources such that it can functionally relate to other organisms who make and recognize the same phonological dis- criminations. Compare this to the newborn child whose vocal gestures are, in the first instance, iconic of immediate body states and feelings in the mother—infant dyad. The infant can only access the lower integrative levels of topological- continuous variation in voice dynamics; he or she does not yet have access to the stored phonological information deriving from higher levels. To be sure, the infant can both produce and respond to articulatory, rhythmic and pitch dis criminations, but he or she can do so only on the basis of the lower integrative level of their iconic significance. The expansion in proto-language and later language of vocal activity into higher integrative levels where the indexical and symbolic distinctions of phonology are made thus entails an expansion of the child’s bodily potential to relate to the semiotic trajectories of others. A parallel observation can be made with reference to the content stratum. Before the onset of a lexicogrammar, the child’s semiotic content is restricted toa You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookBODY DYNAMICS, MEANING-MAKING, . . 165 language shows how language is internally related to the contexts with which it is integrated in use. Thus, context is not an external happenstance or epiphe- nomenon which has no systematic functional relationship to the organization of the content and expression strata of language. This has important implications for our understanding of how language is learned and embodied in neural networks. First, the contextual redundancies between language forms and their contexts of use mean that the learning of language incorporates the contexts of the meanings and forms learned. Secondly, neural networks embody the contexts, bodily activities, and social practices in which meanings are learned in the form of the meta-redundancy relations that connect, say, vocal-tract gestures, speech sounds, lexicogrammatical forms, discourse structures, and so on, in larger patterns of contextualizing relations. However, I shall now return to the far more primordial, pre-linguistic forms of interaction thatare the central focus of this section. Lakoff and Johnson (e.g. 1999) have discussed the relationship between our forceful sensori-motor interactions with the world and the emergence of guistic categories of goal-directed action. The primordial experiences of kicking, reaching, grasping, pulling, hitting, and so on, in early infancy involve the use of children’s bodies in order to bring some aspect of the world in line with their needs and desires. In so doing, the children must harness and reduce the many degrees of freedom of both their bodies and the world so that some kind of match is created between the two in a given context of action. In this way, children learn to generalize categories of embodied-action schemata which they can adapt and use across a very wide variety of different situations. A schematic category of the body's forceful interactions is abstracted from these diverse situations and correlated with a conceptual categorization. Moreover, Edelman, as we saw above, claims that the brain is a selective recognition system that recognizes events by its own activity, including its own activities of recognition. This is important because the recognition of a category such as ‘forceful inter- n with the world’ as a means of bringing about causal effects in the world entails, with the emergence of proto-language, a recognition that sensori-motor acts such as the vocal gesture discussed above can be used intentionally to cause someone else to act in a causal way, both physically and semiotically. In the above example, the child’s high-pitched squeak is an intentional act which is dialogi- cally oriented to causing another social agent - the mother - to provide an explanation of the perceived phenomenon (the pigeons). We can see here how the correlation of sensori-motor activity with a conceptual category gives rise to the schematic category [BODY-FORCEFUL INTERACTION-ENVIRONMENT], as described in Lakoff and Johnson (e.g. 1999: 270-6). This may be scen as a kind of Urexperiential category which paves the way for its further recategorization as more delicate linguistic categorizations in the way described above. The embodied schema described here may be analysed into its constituent parts, as shown in Table 3.5. The schema outlined in Table 3.5 shows that bodily activities such as reaching for, grasping, and hitting objects can function to explore and obtain information about some object through, for example, haptic exploration. By the same token, they can be used to cause the given object to behave in a given way such asa You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookPart IIIa You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookTHE SEMIOTIC BASIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS 175 symbolic representation maintains reference irrespective of indexical attachment to any particular experiences, when an idea or a narrative or someone's experience is reconstructed by another, it can be regrounded, so to speak, by interpreting it in terms of the iconic and indexical representa- tions that constitute the listener’s memory. Symbolic reference is interpreter independent, because each interpreter independently supplies the nonsym- bolic ground for it. (Deacon 1997: 427) Deacon adds to the standard account of ‘theory of mind’ the notion that this is made possible by the development of symbolic referential abilities. The various steps in Deacon's line of argumentation may be summarized as follows: 1, Each person's mind is separate from and independent of every other person's mind; 2. Access to another person's subjective experience ~ i.e. to that person’s mind ~ is limited and indirect; 3. Minds represent subjective experience; 4. Minds are possessed by self and other; 5, Representation is the means whereby we know about our own mind and the minds of others; 6. In order to have access to others’ minds, we must be in possession of a theory of mind which is based on symbolic referential abilities. Deacon assumes that representation is the key to unlocking the subjective expe- riences that are housed in someone else’s mind. Moreover, the level of first focus in this account remains that of the individual mind-brain. However, individual organisms are not separate from other organisms; they are constitutive parts of higher-scalar systems of interpretance. A system of interpretance is a means of deciding whether information deriving from either self or nonself is potentially meaningful to our own observational perspectives, as well as to others who potentially share these same observational perspectives. Individual body-brains do not exist as independent entities. They are always integrated with higher- scalar systems and, at the same time, constitute the interpretative framework for smaller-scale ones. This is so both biologically and socially. In such a view, the relevant focus of study is not the individual body-brain per se, but the way it is embedded in and is a constitutive part of its higherscalar ecosocial environment. The individual body-brain complex is a system of meaning-making potential relative to its higher-scalar environments. Moreover, other body-brain complexes with which the individual interacts are integrated to and embedded within the same overall supersystem. In such a system, the individual subsystems contribute to the meaning which is stored in a given subsystem through interaction with it. Individuals learn about other individuals who share the same system of relations when, on the basis of dialogically co-ordinated interaction between two individ- uals, the individual system's Innenwelt is changed. The individual subsystems do not directly interact with each other; the interaction between them is always mediated by and entrained to the dynamics of higherscalar systems ofa You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this book182 BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY time so that our consciousness of our selfhood is maintained and enhanced in spite of these constant changes to the organism. In the process, we encounter new historical contingencies, which provide us with new memories and experi- ences. Salthe poses the question as to the locus of selfhood and agency in this perspective. This locus is the entire ontogenetic trajectory of the organism, starting with birth and continuing until death. Any moment-by-moment action of the organism is no more than a local manifestation of this trajectory (1993: 181). To quote Salthe: It would be convenient for present purposes to describe our own ontogenetic trajectories from a scale delivering a cogent moment of about one of our lifetimes. In that case the entire trajectory is present simultaneously as a single object. This object can be taken to be the seat of selforganization, agency, and selfhood because these inhere in its ontogenetic trajectory rather than in the organism, which is continually changing (besides being at any moment merely a mechanism, which can’t have those properties). (Salthe 1993: 182) The entire trajectory is a ‘cogent moment’, as viewed from a still-higher-scalar perspective, with respect to the very different scale of the moment-by-moment existence of the individual body-brain complex. The latter is a lower-scalar entity whose lowerscalar dynamics operate on a much faster timescale than those of the higher-scalar dynamics of the trajectory as a whole. Each of the two scales has properties which are ontologically specific to its own scale and the respective entities and processes on that scale. It is symbolic or higher-order consciousness which makes the emergence of such a trajectory possible. Moreover, the organism which sustains the trajectory is a dissipative structure which is charac- terized by the historical emergence and accumulation of meanings along its entire trajectory. Increased dissipation to the environment goes hand in hand with increasing structural complexity such that fluctuation to higher-order states is increased, thereby allowing the evolution of new metastable states (Lemke 1984c: 29). The trajectory is a selforganizing system. Self-organizing systems are defined by the fact that they exchange matter, energy, and meaning with their external environments in ways which bring about the spontaneous emergence of order and pattern in the system (see above). Selforganizing systems have history and individuality (Prigogine and Stengers 1985 [1984]: 176, Salthe 1998: 143; Lemke 1995b [1993]: 112-13). Consciousness is, then, a trajectory-in-time. Its the trajectory which is the seat of selfhood and agency (Salthe 1993: 184). The trajectory of consciousness is both meaning-based and regulated by memory. The body-brain complex of the individual is the moment-by-moment realization of this trajectory. The two consciousness and the body-brain - exist on different scalar levels. The link between them is one of realization, rather than causality. The relationship of realization specifies (1) that the trajectory of consciousness is realized by the body-brain complex; (2) that the body-brain complex realizes, or embodies, con- sciousness, therefore the body-brain complex is a constitutive part of the context of consciousness on account of the fact that consciousness is always embodied in the body-brain dynamics of individuals. In other words, the body-brain is part ofa You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookTHE SEMIOTIC BASIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS 189 dialogical response to this situation from another point of view, i.e. from the point of view of the specific characteristics of gold as an instantiation of the schematic category ‘precious metal’. Symbolic thinking, in the form of, for example, ‘inner speech’, links the individual to the accumulated ways of thinking built up over many generations in the course of the constant and adaptive modification of thought on the part of all of those individuals who have contributed to it. Symbolic thinking, which is thinking mediated by a semiotic system of linguistic or other potentially meaningful differences in a given community, affords differentiated thought and thus extends and enhances our ability for active exploration and expansion of our Umwelt, In this view, thinking is a specific use of neuronal capacities for giving pattern and meaning to experience and for organizing one’s responses to events in both our inner and outer environments as specific courses of action. As Saussure demonstrated in his discussion of the mediating influence of the value-producing categories of a given language system on ‘thought’ and ‘sound’ (chapter 2, section 1, pp. 59-67), such mediation enables new possibilities of meaning to emerge from the vague and ‘amorphous’ flux of pre-semiotic ‘thought’ and ‘sound’. That is, we produce our world in and through our semiotically mediated interventions in and engagements with this vague and undifferentiated mass of possibilities, which we can never, in any case, know or experience directly, but always only mediately. The projection into the world of the highly delicate differentiations afforded by the sensori-motor activities of the hand and face-vocal-tract systems also means that we endow the phenomena of our experience with value, affect and motivational salience. That is, we assign them with value in terms of what they entail for us as action and interpersonal interaction (Thibault 1992b). 5. Language Functions and the Cortical Organization of the Brain: Implications for Higher-order Consciousness The human brain is organized in terms of two cortical hemispheres. The right hemisphere regulates our responses to the unknown; the left is more concerned with actions which are carried out in response to the known and familiar. Researchers such as Davidson (1984, 1992) have shown that the two hemispheres are differentially specialized as regards value and affect in connection with the way the individual orients to the world. Positive affect (e.g. attraction) correlates with increased neural activation in the left frontal cortex. Negative affect (e.g. repulsion) correlates with increased neural activation in the right frontal cortex. This suggests that the two hemispheres differentially regulate our affective and valueladen responses to the world. The right hemisphere regulates our responses to that which has not yet been assigned a specific value or motivational salience. The left hemisphere, on the other hand, is concerned with our orien- tation to that which has already been assigned a specific value and motivational salience. In the first case, the negative evaluation of the uncertainty and indeterminateness which the individual encounters constitutes the basis on which active exploration may occur. In the second case, we are on familiar, safea You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this book196 BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY the experiential resources of the clause construe some phenomenon ~ real or imaginary - as an instantiation of a given category of process-participant configuration in the clause. The term ‘construal’, as distinct from the notion of representation, therefore refers to the ways in which the phenomena of our experience, including perceived events as well as imagined, remembered, or hypothesized ones, are construed as instances, to varying degrees, of the categories of language or some other meaning system. A process-participant configuration is a semantic figure, as defined by Halliday and Matthiessen, which is realized grammatically by the clause. For example, the clause Two hundred years ago, rococo was all the rage in Europe consists of the ProcessParticipant- Circumstance configuration Circumstance: Time-Participant: Carrier Process: Attribution-Attribute: Circumstantial. Experiential categories such as the ones in this example symbolically construe the phenomena of our experience as instan- tiations of the categories that belong to a particular language system. The notion of representation may suggest that language represents something which is prior to it. For this reason, the term ‘construe’ is to be preferred. The experiential metafunction in language is concerned with the symbolic construal of experience as categories and relationships of experiential meaning. This metafunction interprets the phenomena of both inner and outer experience in and through the experiential structures and categories of the clause and clause complex. Halliday and Matthiessen have formulated this elation as follows: A phenomenon is the most general experiential category ~ anything that can be construed as part of human experience. The phenomena of experience are of three orders of complexity: elementary (a single element), configura- tional (configurations of elements, i.e. a figure) and complex (a complex of figures, i.e. a sequence) . . . (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999: 48) Sequences, figures, and elements are semantic constructs. As Halliday and Matthiessen point out, their typical realizations in the lexicogrammar are as follows: sequence ~* clause complex figure + clause element ~* element in structure of clause (group/phrase) Consider the following example: Sequence: When travelling to Fassifern by bus, buy a bus ticket to Fassifern. Figures: When travelling to Fassifern by bus buy a bus ticket to Fassifern Elements: when, travelling, to Fassifern, by bus, buy, a bus ticket, to Fassiferna You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookTHE SEMIOTIC BASIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS 201 other text. Moreover, it is important that the participants perceive the patterned contextualizing relations between the two as (situationally, generically) appro- priate or effective realizations of textin-context (Silverstein 1997: 270). 9. Experiential and Interpersonal Meaning in Gaze When we attend to someone else’s gaze vector, we can see how similar meta- functional principles operate at the lower, less specified integrative level of perceptual awareness. In attending to and attempting to interpret the target of someone’s gaze vector, perhaps in order to determine his or her interests or intentions with respect to the target, I implicitly analyse the structure of the other person’s gaze in terms of the person who is the source of the gaze (Gazer), the directional vector of the person’s gaze, and the Target or goal of the gaze vector, understood as the entity which the Gazer is attending to. In this perspec- tive, the gaze is analysed as a process-participant configuration on analogy with experiential meaning in the clause. Table 4.3 provides an analysis of this proto-experiential dimension of the meaning of gaze. Table 4.3: Proto-experiential meaning in gaze vector Process Directional vector of gaze The gaze is also related to the here-now ground relative to the observer (the self) who interprets the other person's gaze. In this case, the Gazer is the objective grounder or the actualizer of the gaze. The gaze vector that extends from the Gazer’s eyes to the target, on the other hand, subjectively grounds the gaze in the here-now of perceptual awareness and perceptual modality (visual); the Gazer’s current interests, as interpreted by the observer; distance from the Gazer; and the Gazer’s possible subjective orientations to the Target. For example, is the Gazer looking at a member of the opposite sex because of sexual interest in or attraction towards the Target? The Target, on the other hand, does not participate in these grounding functions, which are based on the Gazer-Gaze Vector nexus. Instead, the Target further specifies the overall process-participant configuration by specifying the specific entity that is the focus of the gaze. The Gaze-Gaze Vector nexus is, therefore, similar in function, though on a lower integrative level, to the Subject-Finite structure in the Mood element of the clause. However, gaze is much more immediately tied to its here-now ground in ways that language is not on account of the way in which the interpretation of someone's gaze depends on the interpreter’s here-now perception of the other’s gaze. Table 4.4 illustrates the grounding function of gaze, as discussed in this paragraph.a You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this book206 BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY a representation of a representation in the mind, respectively. There are many ways in which topics and comments can be represented ~ in perception, memory, thought, mental imagery, bodily posture, action, with or without language. (Bogdan 2000: 78) The idea of a pre-linguistic topic-comment structure, with its correlative of the subject's mental takes on the world, suggests that there already exists an at least weak classification of self as distinct from the world, including others. Further- more, it suggests that there exists a prior, predinguistic structure on which linguistic forms of predication are subsequently built. In the dynamics systems view, on the other hand, the differentiation of self and world depends on more than the prior existence of a topic-comment structure. Halliday’s notion of the interpersonal gateway to meaning draws attention to the initial primacy of pre- linguistic proto-interpersonal or dyadic engagement. The infant's earliest expe- riences of the world are topological and require a gradual and progressive differentiation from a less differentiated whole. The self is experienced as not yet sharply differentiated from the world, though in some kind of vague relationship with it. That is why I prefer the proto-interpersonal interpretation given above. If, on the other hand, there exist ‘prior topic-predication formats’ (Bogdan 2000: 78), then this would amount to saying that the child comes already equipped with a primitive means for segmenting the self/nonself relationship in terms of some target of selective focus in the world (internal or external) and one's propositional take or attitude on this in the form of a comment. Self and world would already be construed as different in this view. In my view, the construal of self and world (nonself) as different is not already given; instead, it is a form of developmental emergence (Salthe 1993: 244). Thus, the shift from the child's primordial experience of self-in-relation-to- though-not-yet-differentiated-from-the-world to the experience of self-as- different-from-world involves the forming or coalescing of a higherscalar entity ~ e.g. a dialogically organized proto-proposition - around a number of variables that now appear as the lower-order components - neural values, environmental stimulus information, visual tracking by head-turning, protolinguistic gestures and vocalizations, the presence of others, meanings from other conspecifics — out of which the new property has emerged. By the same token, there is also a corresponding shift in the observer/agent's attention to the typological- categorial distinctions belonging to the higher integrative level. This means that the newly emergent proto-propositional resources and attitudes mentioned above, with their typologizing of self/nonself relations, are now seen as closer to the observer's scale which is shared by other members of the culture, rather than to the vaguer state of initial topological non-differentiation. The latter, however, remains implicit at the lower scalar levels, which are now constrained by the higher ones. In any case, it is the dialogically organized and therefore socially shared act of proto-meaning which exists and which is most visible in the super- system transactions between self and other. Nevertheless, the mental and individual bias illustrated in Bogdan’s description of topic predication indicates the hankering after inferred objects - mental entities - once the observer's supersystem categories have been described with reference to their level.a You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookTHE SEMIOTIC BASIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS 2i1 ture of the system does not put a ghost in the machine, or if it does, it is the ghost of life itself, for similar biases are exhibited even in single cells. (Thelen and Smith 1994: 315-16) The initial orienting bias to the ‘blobs’ mentioned in the above citation indicates the purely iconic and topological-continuous nature of the child's initial orientation to the other. Thus, the values which favour the active attending to environmental events through the perceptual systems, the participation in dyadic exchanges with mothers, and so on, bias the self-organizing dynamics of the system. The infant participates in activities which pull the infant away from the initial attractor space of relative topological (iconic) non-differentiation between self and other towards the increasingly differentiated indexical and symbolic differentiations afforded by the mother’s access to the higher-scalar categorial (indexical and symbolic) differentiations of the ecosocial system. In doing this, the child's initial, less differentiated relations between self and other become progressively more differentiated. The child progresses from proto imperative followed by proto-indicative modes which are tied to the phenomena of experience to the full range of interactional possibilities afforded by the interpersonal systems of the adult lexicogrammar, Figure 4.1 illustrates this developmental emergence as a presupposition-cum-implication hierarchy of icon, index, and symbol with reference to the developmental emergence of interpersonal semiosis. This suggests that the interpersonal metafunction is concerned, in the first instance, with the vague, the unspecified. It deploys prosodic and scopal modes of realization so as to engage with and resolve, through dialogic negotiation (cf. Bakhtin’s concept of finalization), that which is not yet assimilated to some determinate classification. In the first instance, the interpersonal metafunction Figure 4.1: Integration-cum-presupposition hierarchy of iconic, indexical, and symbolic modes of grounding Icon Index Symbol Contiguity with selec- Perceptuabmotor tively attended to Entextualization grounding of body- contextual values in and contextual- brain in Umwelt here-now spatio- ization of deictic temporal purview of field addresser and addressee Physical-material Semioticdiscursive Vague, unbounded Specified, bounded topological-continuous typological-categoriala You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this book218 BRAIN, MIND, AND THE SIGNIFYING BODY movements of the muscles are the main objective’ (1994: 114-15). The difference between ‘motor functions’ and ‘motor activities’ lies in the fact that the former are part of language in the individual, whereas the latter are not related to language activity in the individual organism. Both motor functions and motor activities, as defined here, are performatory activities of the organism's executive systems (Gibson 1983 [1966]: 46). In the case of speech production, the motor functions which are involved in the articulation of speech sounds during phonation are semantically integrated with other facets of language in the brain of the speaker in order to produce a linguistic event. Motor activities are not semantically integrated in this way. Thus, the motor functions of phonation are integrated with informational invariants concerning (1) the sound shape of the word to be uttered, (2) their correct sequencing on the expression stratum; and (3) the lexicogrammatical form and semantics of the word on the content stratum (chapter 3, section 11). Peng points out that the motor functions consist of the mapping of these various components onto each other. To quote Peng: when the speaker wants to produce the sequence of sounds, /p/, /ae/,and /d/, the speaker must have the meaning of the word pad in the cerebral cortex first, for which the sequence of sounds is intended, before it is produced; then, the sequence of sounds must have the brainstem function, that is, going through the cortico-bulbar pathways, coupled with the extrapyramidal function and the cerebellar function, when it is being produced. In contrast, however, when the lips are to be closed for the purpose of mas- tication, in order to prevent food from coming out of the mouth, the closing of the lips is simply a part of the motor activities of the nervous system, distinct in nature from what I have called motor functions which are a part of the specific brain functions pertaining to language. (Peng 1994: 114) The use of the cortico-bulbar pathways in the production of human speech sounds entails a functional loop which connects the cerebrum or neo-cortex to the vocal apparatus through the cortico-bulbar pathways (Peng 1994: 117). It is this loop of functional connections leading from the neo-cortex through the cortico-bulbar pathways to the vocal apparatus which enables the speaker to make the very fine segmentations and distinctions necessary for the articulation of speech sounds. In this way, the speaker produces the invariants of stimulus information which listeners can discriminate from the topological-continuous variety of the acoustic signal. Therefore, the listener is able to tune into these same invariants even when the speaker, the time and place, and so on, of speaking and listening, are different from one occasion to the next (see Gibson 1983 [1966]: 278; this volume, chapter 3, section 2, pp. 148-53). The motor functions, as theorized by Peng, thus integrate the expression and content strata of language within the central and peripheral nervous systems of the individual. By the same token, the individual organism is semiotically integrated with space-time scales which extend beyond the material body. Stratified semiotic systems such as language and depiction face two ways, i.e. both ‘inwards’ to the body of the articulator of the sign and ‘outwards’ to thea You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this booka You have elther reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing lil far this bookTHE SEMIOTIC BASIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS 229 sented’ by linguistic tokens. In this respect, itis accorded the status of an ‘object’ which can be referred to and predicated of just like any other entity in the world. This is a realist view, which is based on the assumption that there exists a ‘really real’ world either ‘out there’ or ‘in here’, independently of the ways in which these entities are contextualized by the systems of meaning of a given ecosocial semiotic system. However, consciousness, no less than any other entity, is an entity in the supersystem transactions of some ecosocial system. It emerges and is contextualized as a phenomenon of experience in and through the systems of contextualizing relations of the ecosocial system. The meanings it has for the self (or for others) are meanings which are construable for the self in and through these same systems of contextualizing relations. Yet, consciousness is usually accorded a metaphysical status as something which exists independently of the possible ways it may be construed by a given meaning system. In ecosocial semiotic theory, the ‘reporting of or ‘referring to’ conscious experience, or even internalized reflection on it, is always part of a larger pattern of contextualizing relations which includes the experience itself. The notion that consciousness can be linguistically ‘reported’ implies a referential theory of meaning in which the objects that are ‘referred to’ are external to the (linguistic) act of referring. In this externalist view, consciousness is a content that exists in its own right and is external to the contexts in which we contextualize it. What is experienced, so to speak, is always imminent in supersystem processes which are selectively contex- tualized by the meaning system. In this point of view, consciousness is, therefore, a constitutive part of those contexts, rather than being external to them. It thus may be more appropriate to say that consciousness is, from the point of view of the insiders in some social situation, indexically invoked as locatable at a given source ~ e.g. first-person or third-person. At the same time, it is symbolically construed in terms of the experiential categories of the lexicogrammar of language. The point is that, in this view, consciousness is indexically invoked in the given context from the point of view of the insider-participants in the situation. The linguistic practices of construing consciousness in self and other make no such distinction between what is external to speech and lurking “behind” speech in the mind of each individual. Rather, consciousness is indexi- cally invoked as being internal to the speech practices themselves in the sense that any internal phenomenon inside the ‘head’ only has meaning if it is contextualized by the categories of some meaning system. Gibson (1986 [1979]: 255) has formulated a view of non-perceptual awareness which is useful here, Gibson points out how, in the older mentalist psychology, higher mental processes were opposed to sensations, and seen as the operations of higherorder faculties in the mind. In this regard, Gibson mentions such mental operations as remembering, thinking, conceiving, inferring, judging, expecting, knowing, imagining, dreaming, and rationalizing. According to Gibson's ecological perspective, these may be explained as follows: To daydream, dream, or imagine wishfully (or fearfully) is to be aware of surfaces or events that do not exist or occur and that are outside the limits of possibility. These three kinds of nonperceptual awareness are not explained, I think,