Article published In:
Dialogue and EthicsEdited by Ronald C. Arnett and François Cooren
[Language and Dialogue 7:1] 2017
► pp. 100–119
Edited by Ronald C. Arnett and François Cooren
[Language and Dialogue 7:1] 2017
► pp. 100–119
A prelude to a semioethics of dialogue
The aesthetics of enchantment in a new key
This paper interrogates the phenomenological experience of enchantment as a sign process. I argue that our ethical intentionality in the world is significantly enhanced when we understand how the aesthetics of enchantment conditions the very possibility of such an ethic as a semiotic phenomenological event of dialogue. First, I discuss a key problematic of contemporary life – our culture of distraction and its impact on our dialogic relations. Next, I outline my thematic – enchantment as consequence of sign actions, both in what I call its “inauthentic” and “authentic” forms. Third, I interpret each form and their impact on the ethics of dialogic relations. Finally, I contend that authentic enchantment, as a semiotic interpretant, signifies an “answering comprehension” or unique expression that resonates with the greater whole, the greater good – demonstrating what Susan Petrilli describes as a productive or pragmatic semioethic.
Keywords: enchantment, semioethics, dialogue, aesthetics, semiotics, phenomenology, communicology
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Enchantment as a sign process
- 3.Authentic and inauthentic enchantment as habits of discourse
- 3.1Distinctions based upon phenomenological sign conditions
- 3.2Distinctions based upon mythical elements
- 3.3Distinctions based upon Heideggerian thought
- 3.4Distinctions based upon Communicological relations
- 4.Conclusion and implications
- Notes
-
References
References
References
Barthes, Roland
1972 Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bateson, Gregory
1972a Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books.
1972b “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory of Alcoholism,” In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 309–337, New York Ballantine Books.
1979 Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: E.P. Dutton.
1991 A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind. edited by Rodney Donaldson. New York: HarperCollins.
Bateson, Gregory and Mary Catherine Bateson
1987 Angels Fear: Toward an Epistemology of the Sacred. New York: Bantam Books.
Bennett, Jane
2001 The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 
Berman, Morris
1981 The Re-enchantment of the World. Ithaca: New York: Cornell University Press.
Buber, Martin
1958 I and Thou. 2nd ed. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958.
Carlsen, Arne and Lloyd Sandelands
2015 “First Passion: Wonder in Organizational Inquiry,” Management Learning 46 (4): 373–390.
Cassirer, Ernst
1946 Language and Myth. Translated by Suzanne Langer. New York: Dover Publications.
Crawford, Matthew
2015 The World Beyond Your Head: Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Eicher-Catt, Deborah and Isaac C. Catt
eds. 2010 Communicology: The New of Embodied Discourse. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (Rowman and Littlefield).
2013 “Peirce and Cassirer, ‘Life’ and ‘Spirit’: A Communicology of Religion.” Journal of Communication and Religion 36 (2): 77–217.
Heidegger, Martin
1962 Being and Time. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, New York: Harper Row.
1977 The Question of Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt, New York: Harper Row.
Hyde, Michael J.
1994 “The Call of Conscience: Heidegger and the Question of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 27 (4): 374–396.
1995 “Human Being and the Call of Technology.” In Toward the 21st Century: The Future of Speech Communication, edited by Julia Wood and Richard Gregg, 47–79. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton.
Jackson, Maggie
2008 Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. New York: Prometheus.
Jenkins, Richard
2000 “Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium.” Max Weber Studies 1 (1): 11–32.
Kant, Immanuel
1998 Critique of Pure Reason. edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Kim, Kyung Hee
2011 “The Creativity Crisis: The Decrease in Creative Thinking Scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking.” Creativity Research Journal 231: 285–295.
Lanigan, Richard L.
1988 Phenomenology of Communication: Merleau-Ponty’s Thematics in Communicology and Semiology. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.
1992 The Human Science of Communicology: A Phenomenology of Discourse in Foucault and Merleau-Ponty. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.
2000 “The Self in Semiotic Phenomenology: Consciousness as the Conjunction of Perception and Expression in the Science of Communicology.” The American Journal of Semiotics 15 and 16 (1–4): 91–111.
Levinas, Emmanuel
1998 Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Lofts, S. G.
2000 Ernst Cassirer: A Repetition of Modernity. Albany: SUNY.
Nussbaum, Martha
2001 Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders
1940a “The Principles of Phenomenology.” In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler, 74–97. New York: Dover Publications.
1940b “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs.” In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler, 98–119. New York: Dover Publications.
1940c “Abduction and Induction.” In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler, 150–156. New York: Dover Publications.
1992 “The Fixation of Belief.” In The Essential Peirce, Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 11 [1867–1893] edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, 109–123. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
1998 “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God.” In The Essential Peirce, Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 21 [1893–1913], Edited by The Peirce Edition Project, 434–450, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Petrilli, Susan
2010 Sign Crossroads in Global Perspective: Semioethics and Responsibility. edited by John Deely. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Rizer, George
2010 Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Continuity and Change in the Cathedrals of Consumption. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press.
Rothman, Joshua
A New Theory of Distraction.” New Yorker, June 16, 2015.
Saussure, Ferdinand de
1959 Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw Hill.
Savodnik, Peter
2003 “Ernst Cassirer’s Theory of Myth.” Critical Review 15 (3–4): 447–458.
Schiller, Friedrick
2004 On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Translated by Reginald Snell. Mineola, NY: Dover.
Schroeder, Ralph
1995 “Disenchantment and its Discontents: Weberian Perspectives on Science and Technology,” Sociological Review 431:227–250.
Sebeok, Thomas A.
2001 Global Semiotics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Turkle, Sherry
2011 Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.
2015 Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York: Penguin.
Turner, Victor
1974 Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Watzlawick, Paul, Janet H. Beavin and Don D. Jackson
1967 Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes. New York: W.W. Norton and Co.