Circuits of Meaning and Proportioned Reality: Towards an Ecology of Rootedness
Circuits de sens et réalité proportionnée : pour une écologie de l’enracinement
Résumé
This paper starts with a reference to the structural tradition when
reality was primarily approached as an isotopy from the perspective of veridiction,
potentially in competition with other isotopes, for example, that of the aesthetic
gaze with its ‘excessiveness. However, the question of reality cannot be reduced
to isotopic passages between rationalities or regimes of meaning. Reality-for-itself
opposes any attempt to assert a reality-in-itself. Furthermore, the latter is semiot-
ically mediated and reconstructed within institutional frameworks according to a
specific discursive epistemology. As for enunciative practices, the cooperation be-
tween a writer and his reader, like other interactions, seeks to provide a plan of
reality, which should be as comfortable and as acceptable as possible. Thus, the
question arises here, how do contemporary semiotics coherently meet these mul-
tiple demands of accounting for reality? Semiotic mediations do not seem to be
exploited to construct exclusive and self-referential horizons of reality; rather,
they are used to explore participatory or translatable realities. This paper then
aims to semiotically conceive reality as an ecological framework of modal trans-
positions through which proportions are chosen to allow an interweaving between
differentiated circuits of meaning (subjective, interactional, and institutional). Se-
miotic mediations help compose reality but also reveal, in negative, the scenariza-
tion of meaning, in which the real is far from being domesticated and mapped.