The process of semiosis and the engineering of consent as parallel trajectories

C. S Peirce’s evolving theory of signs takes a significant turn in 1907 when he defines semiosis as the cooperation of the sign, object and interpretant and identifies the dynamic object of the military command ‘Ground arms!’ as the will of the officer, a theoretical decision which makes the dynamic object the locus of, amongst other things, intentionality and persuasion. A year later, in a letter to Lady Welby, his British correspondent, he described the six-correlate process of semiosis as the sequence (SS 84): Where Od, Oi, S, Ii, Id and If are, respectively, dynamic object, immediate object, sign, immediate interpretant, dynamic interpretant and final interpretant, and where the arrow signifies ‘determines the following correlate to be such as it is’. Earlier that year he had also identified as potential objects: ‘… a living consciousness … the life, the power of growth, of a plant… a living institution, —a daily newspaper, a great fortune, a social "movement."’ (CP 6.455, 1908), from which it follows that the sources of intentionality capable of functioning as a sign’s dynamic object is virtually limitless. Now, in 1947 Edward Bernays, a counsellor in social relations, published a pamphlet entitled ’The engineering of consent’, in which he claimed that the Bill of Rights implicitly allowed for the possibility to persuade at all levels – in advertising, social affairs, government, et cetera. Such persuasion requires mediatization in order to be perceived, mediatization which requires planning, decisions concerning the form the persuasion should take, and, finally, the mediatization itself on some support or other. Since both the engineering of consent and the dynamic process of semiosis involve ‘trajectories’, the paper examines the potential of Peirce’s six-stage semiosis for the modelling of this type of persuasion and the mediatization it requires, first in a number of conventional intention-based signs (traffic signals, appeals for missing persons, advertisements) to illustrate the problem and methodology, before examining in depth a case-study taken from the Guardian-online series ‘How we made’, in which songs, films, documentaries, et cetera, are described in detail by their conceptors and producers, and include information concerning audience response, i.e. information as to how the end products were received – in other words, information concerning what interpretants they determined. References: Bernays, E. (1947). ‘The engineering of consent’. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, (250), 11 3-120. Peirce, C. S. (1931-1958). The Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Vols. 1-8). C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, & A. W. Burks, (Eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (CP) Peirce, C. S., & Welby-Gregory, V. (1977). Semiotic and significs: The correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, C. S. Hardwick, (Ed.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (SS)
Pays: 
France
Thème et axes: 
Les fondations et les fondements logiques de la sémiotique
Sémiotique de la médiatisation
Institution: 
University Of Perpignan Via Domitia
Mail: 
tony@univ-perp.fr

Estado del abstract

Estado del abstract: 
Accepted
Desarrollado por gcoop.