It seems useful to remind ourselves at the outset that
semiotics is already a historical and historicized methodology.
Which is not to say that semiotic inquiry is categorically
suspect, but rather that attention to its conspicouous
historical relations might yield some useful insights. For
example, linguistic semiotics, as pioneered by Saussure,
emerges from roughly the same intellectual climate as
Kandinsky's attempts to articulate a formal system for visual
art. The work of neither can be said to go in fear of
abstraction. Likewise, in _The Visible Word_, her study of
modernist typography, Johanna Drucker usefully establishes the
anti-materialistic biases of early semiotics and structural
linguistics; the critical history she offers there seems
relevant to any attempt to outline a visually/materially
inflected SGML schema.
Jerry asks how "linguistic" are SM's semiotics. Visual
semiotics, I would argue, is not linguistic but cognitive. SM
writes, "the mechanisms of *perception* have a preponderant
function in apprehending the visual work. This distinguishes
topological semiotics radically from the process of decoding
alphabetic verbal language. The process of perception is, in
fact, a motor activity which engages the sensory, affective and
intellectual levels of the organism." It's worth pointing out
that contemporary cognitive science rarely speaks of the mind
in linguistic terms, as a symbol-processing machine. Rather,
the metaphor of choice is that of the neural network which, in
ways too complicated to lay out here, side-steps the whole
issue of symbolic representation. Artificial intelligence is
less sought after today than artificial *learning*, reliant on
self-sustaining feedback/response loops. The abstractions now
threaten to overwhelm, but I wonder if these issues might not
ultimately have some relevance to the more mundance task of
codifying a DTD.
--Matt
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Matthew G. Kirschenbaum University of Virginia
mgk3k@virginia.edu Department of English
http://faraday.clas.virginia.edu/~mgk3k Electronic Text Center