The question “Where is moe?” is queer. If asked “Where is love?” or “Where is anger?”, I’d be consternated and profoundly confused what was being sought for, given lack of context. (Given right context, any arbitrary set of words could make sense.) Failing to establish one, shooting in the dark would be necessary. “In the courtyard” doesn’t seem admissible. “In the meetings between people” might work, but is false. “In the world” is perfectly true though uninformative. Whatever the answer, it’d be all metaphor and poetry, which of course is very much fine. Understanding does grow through it, if one seeks not to put too much stock in it. And it would naturally be wrong to interpret it literally, per definition.

But here it is meant in a quite literal sense. Here the danger lies – moe is used as the name of an object. Objects, of course, ordinarily have places. One can see this sometimes helpful metaphor pop up again in Cuchlann’s language: “the space around the text“. Herein the hazard. It is perhaps the most persistent delusion that language primarily names things. Should one pause to consider the actual use of language, hopefully soon this delusion would disperse – unless one has already a theory of language. I was an earnest semiotician (something I cannot quite regret – Hoffmeyer, who showed me the power of biosemiotics, also led me to nearly all interests I have which cannot be traced back to Warhammer or Biggles).

The notions behind Cuchlanns endeavour are at times clear, in spite of the queerness of the question he answers. And I believe,that he is essentially correct. It is certainly true that moe lies mostly in a reaction to an artwork rather than in itself (as opposed to colours, or story elements, or pacing). But it also certainly does not hang suspended by nothing; I do not think that moe pops up propped by a person’s sensibilities, and the culture around her, with the work having nothing to do with it. In that case we wouldn’t find a character moe – we would indeed not necessarily feel moe in connexion with anything at all in any anime or manga or anything, much less any specific character. We’d find a spectral endearing sensibility snooping up on us as a result of having associated with the anime subculture. Cuchlann does not hold this weird view, of course: “Certainly there are typically markers in the text on which moe is built, but those markers are not, in themselves, moe. “

I am moe for Tiaki here because of what she does. (Neither do I feel the desire to protect her; and would be baffled if this led someone to. Protect from what? Mamoruism is not moe, I’m very much with what Ubiquital says in the comments here.)

To accommodate Cuchlann’s metaphor of “we read into a text the moe we feel”, I would say, certainly: but we do so through very real cracks. We aren’t in the business of drilling holes.

But surely, moe is also use in another way: that of the moe ‘genre’. Even if someone feels no moe while watching K-On!, given a familiarity with the term, she could likely readily identify it as belonging to that genre.

But again, all of this is futile if we cannot define “moe”. There’s no point in figuring out its relationship to attraction if we cannot understand “moe” in itself. (Ubiquital [->])

Si: the first claim is false, the second is true but lacking in connexion to the first. For it is certainly not futile to talk without definitions (we do it all the time!), and it is certainly futile to talk without understanding – but understanding is not really a matter of definitions.

What is a definition? (Metatastic.) It could be said to be a limited list of descriptions for what a term covers. It could also be said to be an indication meant for a competent speaker to see how the word is used. In the earlier sense, I do not think moe has a definition – most words don’t. In the latter sense, moe certainly must have a definition. Not that there is any specific definition in that case, just that there are manners in which we can clear up misunderstandings.

A definition comes in several flavours. A certain distinction therein which is very important here is the difference between a constituting and descriptive definition. In the case of mathematics and similar areas of inquiry definitions can be the be-all and end-all of a specific term. It is also very frequently used for a temporary stipulation of what a certain person means at a certain time. Most words, however, have a natural meaning by being used in life. While perhaps possible to define some of these, it would be quite presumptuous and ultimately futile to seek them. We do not learn these words by definitions. We cannot well exchange them with definitions. Definitions of this kind are pointers to how the word is used. By that it is meant, they are not the usage themselves. Needless to say, words with constitutive definitions are rare and technical, or in the case of context-specific stipulations, exactly context-specific.

For example, the seemingly popular notion of moe as a wish to protect: this is wrong. I would like to protect many people from the ills of the world, say the homeless from homelessness, or whatever idealistic notion have you, but I am certainly not moe for them. Perhaps the core notion sought for is that a moe character seems to be in constant peril – I’d contest this too, as many of the more moe things I know of are so not of weakness. On the other hand, I would never find Olivier Mira Armstrong or Ryougi Siki moe, however much I fancy both characters – so something is certainly in this emphasis on weakness. Too strong a character can be hard to find moe. The danger is to let the definition rule the word, instead of vice versa. The definition is the roadmap. Once you are at the road, it’d be dangerous to rely on the map rather than your eyes. And if you were at the road all along, certainly the map would not be of use to you.

Well, I think there are two ways we might go about “defining” moe. Firstly, we could come up with a functional, temporary definition based on how a number of people seem to use the word, with the understanding that our definition would be specific to whichever population we’re mining. And secondly (and this may be the same as the first, essentially), we can come up with a theoretical definition, test it against the common use of the word, hang on to it as long as it’s productive in terms of fueling thought, and throw it out when we don’t need it anymore. So, even if moe is technically undefinable, I don’t think trying to define it is necessarily a pointless endeavor. (Pontifus [->])

The first way is the only way we need, thus. The second, theoretical definition, would be by nature wrong. Since it precludes describing the actual word and how it is deployed, it will not be about that word nor with any likelihood that meaning, even if sufficiently close a replica.

So how to go on? Wait until confusion arises. It might be good to think of obvious, striking things about it.

Obvious: Moe is an adjective.

Obvious: Moe is particular from other adjectives in that it describes an emotion, and/or attitude.

Obvious: Moe is particular from other emotions in that it also can describe a certain genre, set of tropes, and so on.

Obvious: Moe is particular from other adjectives in that it lends itself well as an exclamation; “MOEEEE!” works far better than “VIOOOOLET!”. It is also particular in that it is close to “HNNNG!”, which is close to an imagined pleasant heart-attack. (The picture of the old man grabbing his chest in contortions of pain is how moe looks like.)

Obvious: Moe has something to do with protection instinct, but is not the same thing.

Obvious: Moe is particular from many other emotions in that it can scarcely describe intrapersonal relationships. It may be used as grounds for one, much like shared æsthetic appreciation of artwork may. But it cannot describe the relationship. (As opposed to loving, angry, bored…)

Obvious: Moe is used in fandom. What is easily forgotten when one defines, is exactly how a word is entrenched in our life, the ‘usage’ of a term doesn’t only mean the frequency of the term next to other terms, it means in what contexts, and most importantly, what we do – both with and around it. Here lies the essence of a word.

To thus describe some facets of the use of our beloved term is merely an exercise to preclude the dangers of confusion, and they function as decent signs to it.

(In altogether a side note I note with trepidation the clause “fans view moe as something in the text that they decode”, which I find dangerous as it is an entirely empirical statement but without any supporting research – it’d be nigh impossible to carry out -, and I also strongly suspect it is wrong – specifically the decode part.)

Reading material

For a finer exposition of this view of language, try Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. And since he can be obtuse, Oswald Hanfling has written some marvelous exegesis (Wittgenstein and the Human Form of Life, Philosophy and Ordinary Language: The Bent and Genius of our Tongue). And for topic-relevant reading, try Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts (eds. Allen and Turvey). That last one should be compulsory reading for students of humanoria :v

If you wish to figure out what may be wrong with this radical Wittgensteinism, and a possible road to defining everything, try, for example, Anna Wierzbicka’s Semantics: Primes and Universals, which is an ingenious summation of very much, and very serious scholarship.

Bear witness to something which may be more GAR-exuding than the relative inactivity lets on:

you know the drill.

Now I could say a lot about how they reinforce their already probably incredibly huge egoes by repeating eachothers’ names (also positively establishing their respective identities against eachother in a discourse of power, to do a lolpseudolelangirism). Suffice to say, they aren’t doing any thing which is very rich in GAR quality, but… It’s still there. Hiding.

The proliferation of As are allusory to them being the First, the Best. A is first in the Latin alphabet, α in the Greek, and of course あ/ア in the kana syllabary. Interestingly, elder futhark began on f, despite being the writing system of some of the most stereotypically GAR badarses there ever was. One is forced to conclude that, indeed, the Germanic tribes were simply too busy burning Rome to do anything better with something as nerdy as ordering their letters, and the Vikings were too busy being Vikings for inventing a properly ordered alphabet themselves. Either that, or they prolonged their voiceless labiodental fricatives. Or in other words, FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

So, essentially, THEY ARE THE ALPHA. Note also that Yukimura roars O sufficiently, soI can pun about them being OMEGAR too (sorry, sorry, won’t do that again). That is more non-consequential since O does not have any particularly interesting position in the kana syllabary.

More seriously: Why is this GAR-like? What makes us feel such a tinge of GAR from… well, two men senselessly, a bit machomoerotically (sorry, sorry, won’t do that again) screaming eachothers’ names in their respective faces?

Let’s ponder animals. Why are roars so frightening? Well they are for two reasons (I am no biologist, so I may well be way off mark here):

1. It alerts you to a danger. A lion roaring to get you to back off from its cubs is drawing your attention to it, and to the fact that it is here and it will kick your ass.
2. Something which has the energy to spare to scream in your face is probably quite sure it can get you without using near all of its power. More complex sounds to create mean it is more in control. If Bob has the time to form KTRGRAAA (harsh, plosive consonants are often somewhat hard to form -  especially in conjunction – while vowels are easy, though heavy on air), then what could he do with that breath if he focused it on beating you up? There is a perhaps a simple reason M and N are quite rare in shouts and screams of some gar quality- they are neither hard to form nor expensive on oxygen.

GAR, being a weird mix of a newly constructed, social response, and primal adoration of the Alpha (fe)male of the pack, will likely draw power from this. Sounds carry meaning. And all of these, they say, “I am big. I am strong. I can waste my energy despite being in a supposedly perilous situation. And I am on your side.” Cue us falling over and becoming the proverbial crying girlchildren, in lack of less sexist words.

Look at this mix of cheese, memes and GAR:

Now what do they have in common except being seen as GAR? Well, SOUNDS. Nonsensical, they don’t carry much semantical weight at all. A lot of them. AND LOUD. It is all there. The harsh (plosive) consonants, the alveolar trill, the long vowels, specifically the [aː] . Selective sampling, you can prove anything with it, of course. But look what sounds can make GAR…

…Really now, you found even this a bit GAR didn’t you? At least I did, though I may be a major abberation. It might be because it is Wakamoto. And this produced by sounds.

There are no conclusions here, just silly ideas on the phonosemiotic qualities of GAR, which no one should take seriously.

ghostlightning’s classic, groundbreaking study into the matter of GAR rhetoric is essential [->]

The Animanachronism’s papers on GAR have been quite a tone-setter in the debate, and lelangir has extended them [->]

-Bertrand Russell, some of the very few lines he ever wrote on aesthetics

Heinrich Runge approves of... Something.

In the past, I would have wholly agreed with the above Russell quote. I was more or less an avid subjectivist: what you liked was good. The more you liked it, the better. I have, more or less, abandoned this position in favour of another – quite like Russell did on almost all opinions he ever held, too. So, in light of Pontifus’ current excavations on what art is [->], I figured that it was a good time to write this post, which has flown around inside my skull like a crazed bat on speed for quite some time, but not had the confidence to write.

This will be a perhaps tad too personal post; I don’t like it more than you do, but such is the narrowness of my mind as to preclude any other way this post could have looked like. I’d suggest not reading it at all. And yes I namedropped Russell solely because comparing myself with him implicitly compares me with sheer genius.

Beatrice, for example, is always art and beautiful. Objectively so.

My original opinion (slightly hinted at in this [->] mostly self-satirical account of how and why we rate) was as follows:

1. There is no ontological grounding for what good and bad is.
2. Thus there is no standard against which we may judge good and bad.
3. Thus any and all utterances pertaining to quality are “true”, if any truth-value at all can be assigned to them. If anything, it should go by enjoyment.
4. It is wholly pointless to argue, think or talk about.

I still hold 1 as true. Propositions 2 and 3, once I inspected them closer, fell down. And 4 took the dive later on.

Needless egocentric ramblings follow. Do skip them.

I spent the last year and a half in a depression; while I’d doubt to call it particularly deep, it impaired me socially as well as creatively. For with it came a crushing conviction nothing I wrote or did could possibly be of any value to anyone, not even myself. Or perhaps vice versa, this conviction led to the depression. They were certainly tangled into eachother, though distinctly seperate -  the bad confidence persists beyond the death of the depression, though weaker. Naturally, being human, I was simultaneously convinced I was certainly capable at writing and philosophizing, so those mutually incompatible thoughts clashed incessantly. As a result, I could barely do anything, being an insufferable perfectionist.

How can you doubt the quality of what you do if you think that quality as-is consists of mere whim and subjective enjoyment? Well, for a while, it was mostly that I figured that I was incapable of doing anything intelligent, something I ascribed far heavier objectivity to. But, ultimately, after a strong dose Wittgenstein, I began figuring that “good” and “bad” are used very differently from how enjoyable is Even I myself did so. There must be a definite divide inbetween them, I thought. Not an ontological one, but definitely an experential one. But what on Earth could that be? I pondered this, covered in more falafels than healthy, because I had nothing better to do than to ponder a philosophical area I at the time found profoundly useless while eating massive amounts of falafel. Chewing on them did little to help my pondering.

What is good, I concluded, would be what seemed to require a lot of talent, skill and energy. I felt sheepish for taking that long time to reach such an obvious conclusion – “good things are what people who are good at doing those things do”, to put it borderline tautologically. What saves it from being tautology is, of course, that  Still I find it rather stupid to at all require to spell it out for myself. It did little to assuage my despair or even get me writing/drawing/playing anything. Thus did propositions 2 and 3 fall to simple thinking, though they persisted in modified form – naturally, we are not all equally good at judging what takes talent or not, since we do not all know equally what is hard to do or not due to differing experience. A level 50 dragon is pretty much as hard for a level 1 warrior as a level 100 jellyfish is, a level 50 warrior has better perspective at the whole business. It made sense then that I was generally very concerned about story and directing, while more or less ignorant on music and art, when judging quality – that was simply what I had even the slightest clue what to judge on.

So as I progressed in this “how the hell can I judge on whether or not I or anyone else is capable of anything” I reached the rather obvious point of differing aesthetical goals. We all want different things with our art; some of us make very detailed programs for it. One might well consider that while both Mies van der Rohe and Josep Maria Jujol were at least level 75 architects with a lot of grinding behind them, they likely would find each other’s buildings outright horrible. Or more relevant to the purpose of this site to be nerdy¹, some hardcore Gamist roleplaying game constructors would likely find hardcore Narrativist constructors – forgive me all that forgespeak – merely churning out crap and vice versa, despite both being, let’s suppose at least, talented and generally very good at doing what they do. Aesthetic programmes, what of them? Should I find them mere chauvinism?

I did not think I could. I do not think I can. Not wholly, in any case. Nay, for one question arose here, when proposition number 4 reared it’s head - what use is aesthetic judgments anyway? Are they merely to give respect where respect is due? Well, partly, sure, but the whole business seems so removed from the artists, so close to the fans and non-fans of the artists. I can argue for hours about how great Legend of the Galactic Heroes actually is, regardless that I have not even the slightest belief that anyone involved in creating it will ever catch on to what I am doing in their honour. Obviously aesthetics has a deep personal value, somehow.

Is it just pride? “I must be right”? Well, that’s a very superficial answer. There are reasons behind pride, and while I am not entirely certain, I deem it most likely it’s a matter of identity. A question of whether it is right or not right to be as you are (like what you do); a question of distinguishing yourself from other people.

Naturally, I figured, aesthetic programmes are all about what kind of art you like. Enjoyment had joined in again, full circle. But, more than that, aesthetic programmes are a goal for (forgive the cheesy word which means very little) self-realization. To justify the pride we have in our own judgments and enjoyments, and to distinguish them. And furthermore, it is a sort-of-formalisation of how you work, and how you want to work. Being wholly absorbed by questions of what I could do to at all make my creative works worth the while – that is, appreciated and thought of as at least decent – I concluded that aesthetics at least for me was vitally important to, at all, live. So I wrote a tractate (which is likely too boring to read; I shall spare you). I am most temtped to say, that because it is slightly meta-aesthetic, it is closer to be meaningfully called true than any other aesthetic programme, but that is surely chauvinism and nothing but chauvinism. Suffice to say – aesthetic had gone from being something I scoffed at to philosophy of life, mayhaps higher than ethics. Proposition 4 had weakened and nearly died. So it goes.

Summarum: What is good is judged after what we think requires talent, and after how well we think it meets our own aesthetic criteria. I am neither quite an objectivist nor a subjectivist regarding aesthetics anymore. It is objective what meets our criteria, which are in turn subjective, but grounded in objective facts (that is, whether or not something really is hard to do).

Needless egocentric ramblings are mostly over here. Yeah the whole post was a “boohoo I had it so bad bros” post. Nevermind.

In conclusion – have this good helping of pure sex.

Because there cannot be too much Umineko in one post.

Notes

¹This supposing architecture isn’t nerdy. …Is it?

I’ll respond on three seperate points I thought I had something at least semi-worthwhile to utter comments about. Being steeped deep in analytical philosophy is interesting in an environment veering more towards continental theory. It is quite giving, since it’s long been a desire of mine to join the two once again, finding the divide unnecessary, harmful even. This’ll also mean that my viewpoints will be at times quite… incongruous to the discourse the others are in (as opposed to disagreeing), but nothing is more beautiful than the harmony of dissonance. Oh and at times (read: most of the time) I won’t respond at all, but only go on about my view on things without really addressing theirs.

First Response-point: On Plot and Metaphor

Ghostlightning and lelangir touch upon what relationship plot and metaphor has; specifically in the case of Kannagi.

lelangir: I think the fanservice superficial plot is more vehicular to the metaphorical content

Ghostlightning: consequence of conflict: complication of ordinary high school life

lelangir: in the anime, what we see first and foremost is Nagi years ago

Ghostlightning: the metaphorical content does not equal plot

lelangir: clad in traditional clothing as goddess

hmm

Ghostlightning: plot can be ‘bad’ but metaphorical content can be awesome

kannagi’s metaphorical content is awesome imo

plot is ordinary

not a value judgment

lelangir: but the metaphorical content is so well lined up that I dont think it cant be anything but plot

To clarify: I don’t use plot in the way Ghostlightning and lelangir does; I use ”plot” for the presentation (”narrative” – Ghostlightning does point this out), and ”story” for the content, their ”plot”. Plot(Use)_l+G = Story(Use)_k.

To further elaborate, unlike the poststructuralists, I think that it is possible to discern between signified and signifier: in this case, the signifier is the plot, hiding within itself the story – the events as they ”actually” are in diegesis. It gets very interesting when one adds in metaphor as being plot – I agree more with lelangir there than I do with Ghostlightning, not that I’d ever thought of making the equation myself – since metaphor in itself is a signifier of the signified material, the -phoros. (While I am using Sausserean terminology, I have a good deal of Pierce in me – it’s just that his triad is not necessary to make clear what I mean here and I believe Saussures terms are more well-known.)

Without the story, the metaphor doesn’t work. The story as a vehicle for the metaphor establishes soundly that it is a signifier/signified relation. Words are ”vehicles” for meaning – meaning being, as I’ll get into later, a reference to an object (quite possibly another sign).

So the fictional work is a lattice-leaf within the greater semiotic complex-lattice of anime (which is part of the different fields of Western otaku subculture and Eastern, each part of their own greater complexes of nerddom and fiction, which are ultimately part of the semiosphere – the totality of all signs and sign-systems in use). They are all great masses of signs and their ordinary, accepted and controversial relations, all a bit skewed since they lie in the heads of different people, all with slightly different intra-sign relationships due to differing interpretations and experiences.

I have gay colours in my diagrams and schematics because no one else does and I think that’s a shame.

Putting this into a hierarchy and schematizing it (you can atomize it a good bit more – I stop at the objects of metaphor since I won’t adress lower-level signs) as I did above, one might think that they are separate entities, but they are quite inextractable from eachother. Or at least, down to the metaphor – it is not a necessary subdivision of a story. Note, though, that as we go lower down the hierarchy, we also go closer the fictional world and its reality – is perhaps the metaphor-plane where this stops and the false reality again gazes up at ours, slowly becoming more and more part of what is again, to culminate in the signifieds of the smallest signs? Perhaps a fictional world is trapped inbetween the larger social construct from whence it originated and the elements of that construct – or is it a mirage, that the real lies only in the smallest of propositions, and as we craft larger and larger semiotic webs, we lose reality¹?

Whether this applies to Kannagi, I am not quite sure myself yet – so while I am defending the viability of lelangir’s original thesis being a viable model for some fiction, I am not arguing that he shouldn’t have abandoned it when it comes to Kannagi in lieu of the two-coexistant-stories view. At least not yet.

Second Response-point: On Genera

I find genera (proper latin plural, biatches, because it looks better, which generoi doesn’t) to be a self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating and harmful practice. The way they originate is wholly arbitrary: while fantasy and sci-fi are named after the elements that appear in the stories, tragedy and comedy are named after what emotional effect they have, and ‘slife after what situations the story is about (yes, Lucky Star has a story. Shock ain’t it?). We could just as well have a genre which went after if there are cellphones or close analogies and an associated set of tropes/clichés – after all, we already have mecha series, with their associated tropes and clichés. That is, unlike the hierarchy of Work-Plot-Story in a signifier-signified sense, genre is a set, with elements being some of the atoms of story.

lelangir: and that’s where I thought the heirarchy of plot/genre was upset

Ghostlightning: particular to specific works

lelangir: ok

yeah

Ghostlightning: yeah

lelangir: so which form does kannagi utilize

I’m just having a hard time articulating this

Ghostlightning: i can imagine

lelangir: the first case is how plot is a glue that connects genre

the second is how everything is already cohesive in the first place

but it’s not visible

it takes something more to realize it

Rather than ”genre” being part of the hierarchy of narrative fiction, it’s an overlapping, intrusive set. It overlaps the whole area of fiction but only contains certain elements – tropes, clichés, conventions, emotive effects. Unlike the internal hierarchy of the work in question, genre only makes sense when it’s an comparison between several works. It is not extractable, not an atom, within a work, as narrative form, events, signs and so on are. But I’d still not say that it is higher in the hierarchy – as I’ve implied, it’s not on the same ”plane” of sign-relations, instead of signifier/signified-relations it is about similarity (belonging to the same set). When a large enough amount – relatively speaking – of signs belong to genre X, the work is now called being a X-show.

Genera give birth to themselves through the prevalence of their cells within a work.

Ghostlightning: use sets

^ The man’s got it all down.

Of course, they are still members of the field of narrative art. They work on the plane of intertextuality, being inplicit, inexact references to a wealth of other work sharing the same interreferences and elements. They are not much different from, say, Neon Genesis Evangelion‘s endless Judeo-Christian references or the whole of Ulysses.

lelangir: so there’s a distinction here

between style and genre

style is romance

genre is mecha

mecha romance

slice of life romance

mecha comedy

’slife comedy

And here I’d sort-of-disagree sort-of-totally-agree: styles are pretty much the same as genera. Since genera are defined by elements that fall under the umbrella term, works have small doses of genera here and there, of all manners and types. Style is simply renaming; a different kind of similarity cross-works-in-the-discourse.

The harm of pidgeonholing art into genera is the effect it has on the production of it. In further establishing that ”if element A appears, so must element B since they are both members of the same genre”, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Acidic on creativity, and worse, it leads to snobbism of the worst kind (”genre fiction” vs. ”literary fiction”).

praetera censeo genera esse delendam

Third Response-point: On Art and What it Means

Or just ”Meaning”, since I do not fancy aesthetics and go hard for Wittgenstein/Russell/Pierce.

lelangir: things have no meaning until it is represented

representation is CONSTITUTIVE of meaning

Ghostlightning: YES

lelangir: there is no “thing” before it is represented

representation MAKES the thing

Ghostlightning: there is NO KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT LANGUAGE

Total agreement here. Just had to say that. Or well, ”refer” is a bit different than ”represent” (and the theory of meaning I mostly adhere to is referring), but not by many nontechnical shades.

Pontifus: art has no intrinsic value, which makes it infinitely valuable

Same thing again. I’d extend it to ”everything”.

Cuchlann: Answers, though, real quick: does a book have content if no one reads it?

[...]

Cuchlann: You’re unaware of the social mores concerning books.

Pontifus: well, then the book might mean firewood, but we’re talking about the text, i guess, lol

A text, can it mean anything when it is not read or thought of? Once again, I agree with their conclusions (in some sense). I agree too much. Must be my nationality.

Because what does ”mean” mean²? Being the generous semiotician I am, to ”mean” something is to be a referrant relevant to a certain decoding system. Languages are decoding systems, our base cognitive functions are decoding systems (sorted into fear-recognizing areas routing impulses to the amygdala, arousing-specific centra responsible for getting things in order for lovin’ and so on), RNA is the language that decodes DNA into a full human being and so on.

Is the mere possibility of being possible for a decoding system to ”extract” meaning from sign-complex A enough to give A a latent meaning? No, and here Pierce makes an entrance – the interpretor is a necessary part of the sign.

This ”referrant”, the property of referring, is pretty much an atom. It cannot, at all, be described in lower terms, cannot be made an atom.

Of course, this makes the distinction between all possible sorts of meaning sort of fuzzy – the text is meaningful in being decoded by an automaton, prior to that it has still meaning though – it still has an effect on our vision, on our thinking and our relating to the thing, even if we can’t read the pertinent alphabet.

Cuchlann: Discourse is about making meaning. Art makes no meaning on its own, and cannot take part in discourse, as discourse is a two-way street.

Here I’ll disagree on a technicality. Meaning isn’t made – it is decoded after a set of rules. We do not, once in possession of a text, see to the creatio ex nihil of a signified complex. Nay, given the rules for decoding it we have, we conclude the meaning that is decodable by the given set of rules. This is of course possibly a misinterpretation on my part given semantics. Suffice to say, I do not see the reader as ”active” in creating the meaning , and that is what I disagree with – she is on the other hand definitely necessary, no sign without an interpretant. (I need to learn some reader-response and phenomenology, I blame Husserl for being incomprehensible enough for me not to want to get deeper into it).

This is a bit similar, but stated in a very different terminology, to this:

Cuchlann: Art can be considered a product of discourse.

lelangir: but the aesthetic experience can be discursisve

Cuchlann: True.

Pontifus: insofar as discourse is one person agreeing with himself…is, i think, the idea, correct me if i’m wrong, o mighty cuchlann

[...]

Ghostlightning: the discourse with the self

is between one’s memories

lelangir: nice

Ghostlightning: and the idea at hand

lelangir: your habitus

oh shi-

your habits

your consciousness

[...]

lelangir: because

your identity is not stable

Ghostlightning: does the idea at hand, FIT?

lelangir: always morphing

being changed by external forces

Imagination is a bitch though, I am still not quite sure it has any semiotic language per se, even if it works with signs and nothing but signs. I am therefore forced to admit a leeeway there that allows for the active creation of meaning.

And what is more important in fiction than imagination?

Notes

1) Just me rambling. Seeds of thought, probably already rotten, to be tossed to fat birds, or for the connoisseur with sharper eye than I to breed into a lively and vital tree. (Ooh, metaphor in a discussion about metaphor. How meta).

2) …Sorry, I felt as if I had to ; . ;

I should really just have trailed off into something fun and entertaining now. It’s my first post after all, and first appearances count. Yet I’ll have to disappoint you – hereafter follows no such thing, but a theoretical foundation for my writings – when my writings follow my theoretical foundations, that is, which is seldomly the case (I prefer writing something entertaining – brainservicewise – than actually writing something I think might be true, as that’s often more boring). Stay till the end for bewbs.

Justifying my Hedonism

One of my main interests is how we affect culture and vice versa. This is, of course, a rather large thing to tackle, so it’s useful to have some kind of restrictions that limit the effort needed without lessening the accuracy of the models you develop by any significant degree. One simple thing to do, then, is to choose a subculture as an object of study, which has led to me trying to observe what is produced that nerds in common digest, and how nerds react to it, et cetera. That’s just a rundabout justification for being able to watch anime days on end and buying Exalted supplements (me desires the First Age book), of course, but that is irrelevant¹. The means justify the goal.

A small problem is of course deciding exactly how nerds think, act and feel. We’re no longer a homogenous group of spectatles-bestowed, shirt-wearing, borderline-sociopathic stereotypes (well, we never were, and I still am one). The anime-watchers, the otaku (a loose definition of that word do I carry), claim membership of all from emo body-builders to spectatles-bestowed, shirt-wearing, borderline-sociopathic stereotypes. Luckily, such diversity applies to all cultures, be they sub-, ultra-, post-, de- or proto-. There will possibly still be a leeway of very common values, weltanschauungen and socially codified behaviour. As an extra bonus, this subculture is the one I’d wager is the most internationally communicating one, by grace of our beloved intertubes and their magnanimous² gifts, and the possibly still far-too-prevalent real-life social maladjustment. Exactly how I’d utilize the web for these sociological pursuits is the topic of a later³ post; now is not the time for escapades in the land of empiricism. Nay, it is time to look closer on the exact definition and nature of culture, and the parts of it that are of interest.

Dissection

Culture stems, like oh so many other hard-to-define words of some intellectual pretention, from Latin – cultura, which in turn comes from colere, which means to cultivate or worship⁴. This is still a rather apt metaphorical definition, allow it to in your minds eye cast The Culture as a vast holy garden, with pines in peculiar shapes there, beds of starkly coloured flowers there, and mazes of hedges there. In this garden we walk, and the plants mutate and change for every step, we grow new ones, tend to old ones, sometimes we burn down a whole swath of The Culture and use the nutritious ashes to grow something very new. We also eat and live from it, and in the end, many of us blindly worship it, as it is all we know and can think of. Well, no time to wax lyrical, we’ve got places to go to, people to meet (again metaphorically).

Culture is profoundly human. It’s the height of our cognitive processes – a massive organic machinery of meaning, semiotics. It’s through culture symbols, such as words and letters, attain a mutable meaning. It’s through human processes culture come into being, and it’s culture that determines what those human processes mainly are. The process is deceptively simple – whenever a symbol is used in a certain context, the symbol attains a certain amount of attachment to other symbols used in that context. When this happens in large scale – which is the case with mass culture – meaning can mutate very fast. Simple examples of this process could be, say, how the cross went from an execution device to a symbol for a particular religion, and now also denotes death, a casualty. But symbols are not only words and pictures – symbols are patterns (I might pick up that another time) – and as such clichés, archetypes and stereotypes applies.

The important thing here is that these meanings permeate our thinking. Human thought is, I believe, largely or at least significantly symbolic in nature – symbols pointing at (I’ll have to brush up my Lacan but here I think signifiant/signifié would be better words to adopt – or symbols to hijack and mutate in meaning) which means that as the meaning of the symbols mutate – originally merely pointing at an observed fact or thought – so does the worldviews and possible actions of people affected by the culture. This makes culture into something moral and weighty – it is not merely entertainment or distraction, it is what decides large parts of our mass psyche, actions we take, ideas we have.

End Thesis (and some gratuitious fanservice)

In short – humans associate meanings with symbols. A symbol is a vehicle for meaning – a symbol is largely unchanging but invariably contains meaning. At their most base level, they have a single thing they symbolize – the original meaning of the symbol. Meaning is a metapattern – how this pattern is made to interrelate with others. When this happens at a large scale, that’s culture. Because at least a significant part of thinking is decided by symbolic (or at least uses it as a tool, a vehicle), culture is responsible for how communities work. That also means we are responsible for culture, of course, as it’s not an autogenerative phenomenon – it might be unavoidable, but it certainly is not independent of us who create us (that’d be pretty stupid).

If you’re familiar with memetics, you have probably already noted the rather significant similarities. You could say this theory is a combination of, in part, Baudrillards and Ecos postmodernism/structuralism, semiotics (which again Eco is rather deep into), and said memetics. Of course, bastardized and made cuddly. For dissecting meanings and the like, maybe Derrida is a good way to go.

This has been a boring post.

This has been a long post.

You know that you deserve it.

So here she is.

Kyou.

Only 35% away from naked.

A good way to earn instant friends is to end your posts with women-objectifying imagery. It also justifies the 13+ rating we, after all, have.

Notes

¹A lie, in my first post? I pray you look the other way, madame.

² I love how this word clashes ever so slightly in its hyperbolic antropomorphing of the simultaneously dead and very cultural Web.

³ Highly eventual. Mainly because this does not interest me as much as the other part.

⁴ Don’t believe in the me who believes in you, believe in the Wiktionary which believes in you!