Dear Adrian,
In addition to Edwina's just remarks. For a discussion on art works it is better to use the semiotic terms, instead of the categories. However it will be the question whether you need semiotics for the purpose of your teaching students. It will depend on your educational goal. In my experience with art students the service that semiotics can render to art students is to make them conscious about the different aspects or dimensions that can be distinguished in any sign, including works of art. a. To let them think about the sign (work of art) regarded in itself, in its relation to its object and in its relation to its intended interpretant thought. b. Thus enabling, after some teaching, a structured discussion about whether the intended effect could be realized. (It was my task to teach them to talk about their design processes.) See http://www.tte.nl/semiotiek/theorie/egganalyse/ediagramtheorymain.html for my use of it. c. However, this does not cover the experiencing part of your dealings with art. For that you would need 1. the interpretants Peirce developed later in his life. 2. Together with the idea of an interaction between a sign and an interpreting system (regarded as a semiotic sheet). See figures 10 and 11 for the first part. http://vip.iva.dk/signs/Articles_Signs_International_Section/2009/JanosSarbo (2009)paper-breemen-sarbo.pdf a. Is usable in a course. c. demands a course of its own, but is very helpful for students. c. is to demanding to deal with in technical terms with your students. Best, Auke van Breemen Van: Adrian Ivakhiv [mailto:[email protected]] Verzonden: dinsdag 9 februari 2016 17:34 Aan: Peirce-L <[email protected]> Onderwerp: [PEIRCE-L] How do Peirce's categories best fit the study of the arts? Dear all: I'm struggling with a way of tying Peirce's categories down to the 3 main elements by which we can make sense of art works: their materiality, our experience of them, and their meanings. Putting it that way suggests one ordering, but a deeper thinking through of the process (and nonlinear) nature of the categories suggests another. I'm interested in gauging what Peircians may think. I'd appreciate any comments directly on the web site below: http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2016/02/09/rethinking-the-3-categories/ Thanks! Rethinking the 3 categories February 9, 2016 by <http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/author/aivakhiv/> Adrian J Ivakhiv I've been struggling with how my triadic framework for interpreting art works relates to C. S. Peirce's <http://www.textlog.de/4254.html> categories. When I first developed my triadism ( <http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2014/12/29/emis-cinematic-materialism-a-respon se-to-reviews/> fleshed out in <http://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Catalog/ivakhiv.shtml> Ecologies of the Moving Image) into the non-Peircian terms of <http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2014/03/08/rethinking-the-three-ecologies/> materiality, experience, and representation - which I did in the context of teaching a course on the environmental arts - I loosely considered the first of these to be analogous to Peircian firstness, the second to secondness, and the third to thirdness. The point, in my teaching, was not to adhere strictly to Peirce, since my students weren't studying him, but just to have a handy triadic formula that would be useful for making sense of the eco-arts in ways that get beyond the customary overemphasis on representation in favor of experience (including affect) andmateriality. Materiality deals with the stuff that's just there (one element); experience involves a second - the artist, the reader or viewer, et al. (two); and representation makes sense and meaning of the stuff and its shapers and perceivers in real-world contexts (three); thus Peirce's categories loosely fit. Whether students got the Peirce or not, they could follow that. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this way of ordering the three may be un-Peircian. Or at least that there was a second way of connecting it to Peirce that was sufficiently different from the first and had important consequences. Let me break it down here. To continue reading, go to http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2016/02/09/rethinking-the-3-categories/ ____________________________________________________________________________ __ Adrian J. Ivakhiv Professor of Environmental Studies/Environmental Thought & Culture Rubenstein School of Environment & Natural Resources University of Vermont, Burlington VT 05405 U.S.A. Tel 802.656.0180 Fax 802.656.8015 Email: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://vermont.academia.edu/AdrianIvakhiv http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv http://www.uvm.edu/~aivakhiv
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