SEMIOTICS OF ACTION: TEXTUALIZATION AND NOTATION

Abstract

Our essay focuses on some methodological issues concerning the semiotic that were not solved yet, mainly the questions related to the more or less pertinent instruments according to analysis of the semiotic practices. We will initially retrace the debate about the epistemological relationship between text and action, outlining the forms of enunciative praxis through different levels of pertinence analysis (e.g. utterance, enunciation). Secondly, we propose the concept of ‘textualization’ as mediation between text and action: Conditions of textualization (photographs, videos, notes) that organizes and represents practices which are in themselves ephemeral and elusive. Finally, it seeks investigation of knowing how the different textualization processes can be crossed mutually by means a “diagrammatized crossing” which produces other kind of mediatisation between practice and analysis that we call ‘notation’. This analytical form of mediation between text and practice does not have the same status of in vivo textualization, but it works like an ex-post reconstruction which highlights the main gestures and exchanges while performing their grammaticalization. A more general aim of this essay is an enquiry into the legitimate objects of textual semiotics by means this question: what are the objects that can analyze without betraying its principle of immanence, but also without being confined to it and, as a consequence, being unable to analyze practices and be able to respond to topical questions on social issues and on the research in the human sciences?