Semiotic Analysis Rhinoceros - Book Report/Review Example

Semiotic Analysis Rhinoceros This paper encompasses an examination of Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros. More specifically the discussion will investigate and provide a seminiotic analysis of the play. Seminiotic analysis can be thought of as the or semiology is the study of sign processes. This is known as semiosis, or signification and communication, signs and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems. This It includes the study of how meaning is constructed and understood and this is the concern of this particular analysis. When a rhinoceros charges across the town square one Sunday afternoon, Berenger thinks nothing of it. Soon, however, rhinoceroses are popping up everywhere and Berenger's whole world is under threat. What will it take for him to stand up to the increasing menace of rhinocerisation Ionesco's play is one of iconic satire based on apathy and conformity. (http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/files/downloads/pressrelease-royalcourtdoc.pdf Ionesco's 'Rhinoceros' was first staged by The Royal Court in 1960, directed by Orson Welles and starring Laurence Olivier. Dominic Cooke has revived it in a new translation by Martin Crimp. The action takes place in an unspecified French provincial town, where the Sunday morning calm is shattered by a rhinoceros stampeding down the street. Gradually the town is taken over by the pachyderms, as one by one all the townsfolk discard their human forms. The play is a satire on the dangers of mindlessness and conformity, following the herd instinct without due thought. Ionesco may well have been referring to Nazism or communism. In present day terms, with people's relentless drive towards fashion and acquisition, it is equally apt for consumerism. At the start of the piece, people are shocked and repulsed by the transformations into these 'big, ugly animals' as one character describes them, but eventually it is seen as the right and natural way to be. One of the most chilling moments comes when Dudard, a law student, after defending the right of individuals to be whatever they want to be, himself succumbs and joins the pack. Ionesco was probably referring to the intellectuals and artists who, through power of their reason, allowed themselves to be drawn into the Nazi/fascist horror. The set also reflects the general dishevelment. At the start, it is elegant, bright white slatted houses. As the animals start roaming, bits of wood start dropping off it and it acquires a dingy air, resembling a squat by the end. The rhinoceros action happens mainly off stage, apart for a memorable moment when they peek in from all corners watching Berenger, the central character who stands firm against the invasion. The group scenes are very slick, funny and well choreographed. When a woman's cat has been trampled, she proffers the corpse for inspection with everyone recoiling in horror and trying to give sympathy at the same time. However, I found there wasn't enough emotional depth to sustain the running time of over two hours. Berenger (Benedict Cumberbatch) was high energy but didn't elicit very much sympathy. Jasper Brittan as his friend Jean undergoes a greater transformation, literally into a rhinoceros in front of us, but also discarding his uptight fastidiousness; 'We need to rediscover our primordial wholeness.' In Erfarung und Urteil, Husserl analyzes 'passive predata' as they originally present themselves by abstracting from all qualifications of the known, from all qualifications of familiarity with what affects us (thanks to such qualifications, passive predata subsist at the level of sensation and are already known and interpreted somehow). We find that at this level similarity also plays an important role. In fact, if, by way of abstraction we prescind from reference to the already known object that produces the sensation (secondness, indexicality), and from familiarity through habit and convention where what affects us subsists as already given (thirdness, conventionality, symbolicity), and, as much as it is unknown, already known in some way (the rhinoceros or Eco's platypus), we do not end up in pure chaos, in a mere confusion of data, says Husserl (1990 [1948]). When color is not perceived as the color of a thing, of a surface, as a spot on an object, etc., but as a mere quality - that is, presenting itself, as Peirce would say, at the level of firstness, at the level where something refers to nothing but itself and is significant in itself - this something presents itself, all the same, as a unit on the basis of homogeneity and against the background of something else, that is, against the background of the heterogeneity of other data (for example, red on white). Similarity at the level of primary iconism is homogeneity that stands out against heterogeneity: 'homogeneity or similarity', says Husserl varies in degree to the very limit of complete homogeneity, that is, to equality without differences. In a relation of contrast with similarity, there most often subsists a certain degree of dissimilarity. Homogeneity and heterogeneity are the result of two different fundamental modes of associative union. Husserl discusses 'immediate association' in terms of 'primary synthesis', which enables a datum, a quality to present itself, specifying that an 'immediate association' is an association through similarity. We might claim that similarity is what allows synthetic unification in primary iconism. (IN: Indiana University Press) Another particularly interesting aspect in the phenomenology of semiosis constituting predicative judgments is connected with the abductive process in the form of 'proto-abduction'. It is a question of the fact that, in the explicative process, the subject assumes given determinations 'as-if', as hypotheses, on the basis of which it may continue its explicative operations (cf. Husserl 1990 [1948]: 167-171). This is the 'as-if' position of imagination. Obviously, perception 'as-if' implicates similarity and therefore iconism. It is an embryonic metaphor. Insofar as it is founded on the modeling capacity called language by Sebeok (thanks to which human beings, unlike other animal species, are capable of producing infinite possible worlds), predicative judgment may escape the limits of the real world and wander in the world of the imagination. Nonetheless, the 'as-if' relation does not only concern the possibility of constructing imaginary objects and worlds. Predicative judgment cannot avoid availing itself of metaphorical procedure to the point that it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between the literal and the metaphorical. As Welby says (1983[1903]), even literal expression is metaphorical and enables us to speak of the verbal as if it were writing. The 'as-if' relation enables something to be determined on the basis of something else that may act as its interpretant precisely in the 'as-if' form. Therefore, 'as-if' is a constitutive part of predication. (http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/files/downloads/pressrelease-royalcourtdoc.pdf) The concept t of ground as the point of departure for that interest which gives rise to semiosis turned toward a dynamical object. In the light of what has been said so far, we can now make the claim that the ground is, in fact, the point of departure of the perception and explication of an undetermined substratum through the explicative coincidence of this substratum with one or several of its determinations. Once it has transited from the substratum to its determination and eventually to further determinations, interest turns toward the substratum once again, but enriched in sense as a result of the comprehension of its determinations. We then reach the phase where the substratum is explicitly considered as the substratum of a determination; consequently, the object-substratum assumes the form of a predicative subject. What has happened is that the terminus ad quo (according to [Eco 1997: 4], although this same expression was also used by Husserl to describe the process we are considering) has been transformed from a ground into a theme-subject; from this point predicative activity proceeds toward determination, the predicate, as the correlative terminus ad quem. The dynamical object is the object which, departing from the ground, manifests itself in its different determinations or in the different predicative judgments that concern it. In iconicity may be found the basis of abduction in a double sense: abduction is founded on the icon and, in terms of inferential processes, it begins from the icon. Perception in its passive form is an implicit or unconscious abductive process. Abduction is the nucleus, the cell from which the inferential network is formed. In other words, in the phenomenology of the genesis of predicative judgment as well as of the predicative world from ante-predicative life (the precategorial level, the lowest level of perceptual activity, that of affection, of passive predata), we find that abduction is connected to the problem of the genesis of the utterance, of predicative judgment: abduction is the generative cell in the text of inferential argumentation. Abduction and linguistic experience Before concluding we also wish to refer to another sphere of the semiotic universe in which the role played by abduction is of central importance. We are referring to the question of the relation of experience to competence in language learning. Chomsky (cf., in particular, 1986) alludes to this issue as Plato's problem, given the focus on the relation of asymmetry between linguistic experience, from which the learning process of a given language begins, on the one hand, and competence concerning this language, on the other: experiential data are very limited with respect to the capacity of the competent native speaker. As we know, Chomsky solves the problem with his proposal of innate and universal grammar. Chomsky justifies his choice of biological innatism as the solution to the problem of the gap between linguistic competence and linguistic experience through his criticism of behaviorism: he shows that recourse to the stimulus-response theory does not offer an explanation for this gap. However, Chomsky refers to a particular trend in behaviorism, a trend that is especially vulnerable because it is mechanistic. In fact, his main reference is the behaviorism of B.F. Skinner. But, as observed by others (cf. Ponzio 1991: 87-104), it would be interesting to verify the validity of Chomsky's criticism and measure its tenability in relation to another trend in American behaviorism. Here our reference is to behaviorism as developed by Charles Morris, which mainly derives from George Herbet Mead and is connected with Peirce's pragmatism. Works Cited Ionesco, Eugene. RHINOCEROS. translation by Martin Crimp. 2007. As viewed on the world wide web at URL http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/files/downloads/pressrelease-royalcourtdoc.pdf Global Semiotics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (2001). Read More