Showing papers on "Sign (semiotics) published in 1989"

when talk isn't cheap: language and political economy

Abstract: Although the classic Saussurean conception of language segregates the linguistic sign from the material world, this paper shows linguistic phenomena playing many roles in political economy. Linguistic signs may refer to aspects of an exchange system; differentiated ways of speaking may index social groups in a social division of labor; and linguistic “goods” may enter the marketplace as objects of exchange. These aspects of language are not mutually exclusive, but (instead) may coincide in the same stretch of discourse. Illustrations are drawn primarily from a rural Wolof community in Senegal. It is argued that linguistic signs are part of a political economy, not just vehicles for thinking about it. Only a conception of language as multifunctional can give an adequate view of the relations between language and the material world, and evade a false dichotomy between “idealists” and “materialists.”[language, political economy, sociolinguistics, semiotic theory, Senegal]

On the essential contexts of artifacts or on the proposition that 'design is making sense (of things)'

Abstract: 1) Part of this work was supported by the The etymology of design goes back to the Latin de + signare and design firm RichardsonSmith, Worthmeans making something, distinguishing it by a sign, giving it ington, Ohio, and Ohio State University, Columbus, while on sabbatical leave in significance, designating its relation to other things, owners, 1986-87 from the University of Pennsylusers, or gods. Based on this original meaning, one could say: vania, Philadelphia. design is making sense (of things).

Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750-1914

Abstract: In l750, half the population were unable to sign their names; by l9l4 England, together with a handful of advanced Western countries, had for the first time in history achieved a nominally literate society. This book seeks to understand how and why literacy spread into every corner of English society, and what impact it had on the lives and minds of the common people.

Text and textuality

Abstract: In recent years, the study of discourse has grown dramatically in anthropology and linguistics, generating a plethora of terms, concepts, and issues. A wide array of disciplinary orientations lies behind labels such as "text," "textuality," "discourse," "rhetoric," "narrative," and "poetic" (198). Here I focus on a limited range of issues in the organization and interpretation of text, working primarily with selected linguistic (34, 36, 54, 92, 118, 202), anthropological (17-20, 63a, 182, 188, 211), sociological (39, 76, 89, 90, 134), and critical (48, 73, 111, 123, 155, 161, 162, 205, 206) approaches. General overviews of these approaches, or collections of articles representative of them, can be found in the works just cited. Although research on text unavoidably touches on literacy and writing (38), language acquisition, education, and socialization (47, 89, 90, 153, 165), and political discourse and dispute (23, 29, 30), I do not address these topics directly in the following discussion. Rather, I concentrate on the status of text as sociocultural product and process, voicing in text, elements of textual organization, the relation of text to power in social contexts, some recent ethnographic studies of text, and certain further implications of this literature for social science. It is helpful by way of introduction to consider the relation between the two terms conjoined in the title. When used as a mass noun, as in "text is composed of interconnected sentences," text can be taken (heuristically) to designate any configuration of signs that is coherently interpretable by some community of users. As vague as such a definition is, already it commits us to a certain line of inquiry. The term "sign" raises issues of textual typology [iconic, indexical, and symbolic (59, 157, 170); dense, replete (77, 155)],

The Lyotard reader

Abstract: Foreword by Jean-Francois Lyotard. Und So Weiter: In Lieu of an Introduction. Acknowledgements. 1. The Tensor. 2. The Dream-Work Does Not Think. 3. Passages from Le Mur du Pacigique. 4. Figure Foreclosed. 5. One of the Things at Stake in Women's Struggles. 6. Lessons in Paganism. 7. Beyond Representation. 8. Acinema. 9. Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their Experimentation: Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity. 10. The Sublime and the Avant-Garde. 11. Scapeland. 12. Anamnesis of the Visible, or Candour. 13. Newman: The Instant. 14. The Story of Ruth. 15. Analysing Speculative Discourse as Language-Game. 16. Levinas' Logic. 17. Universal history and Cultural Differences. 18. Judiciousness in Dispute, or Kant after Marx. 19. Discussions, or Phrasing ‘after Auschwitz'. 20. The Sign of History. Select bibliography of English Translations of Lyotard's Writings. Index.

Laughter and Dialogue: The Social Significance of Laughter in Institutional Discourse

Abstract: This study is based interaction in institutional settings (job interviews, post-trial interviews with defendants, negotiations between high-school students, telephone conversations between social-walfare officers and parents) and examines the social significance of laughter in dialogue. As an example, two assumptions put forward by Jefferson (1979, 1984) are questioned—namely, that laughter is regularly triggered by something funny and that laughter always has a strong inviting character. The analyses show that, in dialogue, we often laugh alone and not always at things considered particularly funny. Mutual laughter is a sign of rapport and consensus. This is exemplified by the fact that in the job interviews resulting in a job offer there was more mutual laughter than in those involving applicants who were unsuccessful. Unilateral laughter is used to modify verbal expressions or attitudes and can help us in handling ambiguities and tension.

The Fate of Meaning: Charles Peirce, Structuralism, and Literature

Abstract: This succinct and lucid study examines the thought of the philosopher Charles Peirce as it applies to literary theory and shows that his concept of the sign can give us a fresh understanding of literary art and criticism. John Sheriff analyzes the treatment of determinate meaning and contends that as long as we cling to a notion of language that begins with Saussure's dyadic definition of signs, meaning cannot be treated as such any more than can essence or presence. Asserting that Peirce's less familiar position offers a way out of this difficulty, Sheriff first discusses the Saussurean-based theory of meaning and then argues for the advantages of the radically different triadic theory developed by Peirce.Part One of the work reviews and critiques the treatment of meaning in works by Jonathan Culler, Tzvetan Todorov, Stanley Fish, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida, among others. The focus of this section is on the treatment of meaning in structural and post-structural theories and their common basis in Saussurean linguistics. Part Two provides a readable introduction to Peirce's general theory of signs and develops comprehensively the implications of his semiotic. The substitution of his theory for Saussure's opens our eyes to new and cogent answers to many questions relevant to the meaning of texts.Originally published in 1989.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Chaucer's Pardoner: Relics, Discourse, and Frames of Propriety

Abstract: T HE RISE OF SEMIOTICS in the early sixties, like that of general linguistics, corresponded in part to a need of students to challenge pervasive models of a historicism (inherent in the structure of the university itself as a product of romantic culture) whose teleology could not be dissociated from such events of recent history as World War II. The semioticians' search for universals was not only transhistorical, but transcultural. The novelty and technicity of semiotic discourse fostered the illusion that semioticians could elude the determinations of national language, culture, and epoch, and unite in a new order of understanding. Perhaps during the Middle Ages, at a time when theories of sign and meaning preoccupied the best minds of Europe, such scholastics as Peter of Spain, John Duns Scotus, and Gregory of Rimini experienced a similar excitement as they convened in Paris or wandered from center to center. The modern semioticians' yearnings for transhistoricity-and even for a certain permanence-have been frowned on by Clio. As he published Du sens II, A. J. Greimas pondered the paradox of the simultaneous "desire for permanence" and the commitment to "progress."' Since 1970, the "narrow path" of semiotic thought, Greimas says, has not only been challenged by its own progress, but distracted by a philosophical and ideological "ambient episteme" that has constantly "displaced the topics of interrogation and transformed the status of its most assured formulations" (7). Greimas nonetheless clings to the specificity of his own semiotics as a discipline. He continues to insist on the constitutive role of the semiotic square in all semantic processes, on the primacy of modals to the syntax of stories, and on the adequacy of the Greimassian actantial model to decode the syntactic operations of any message or discourse. Thus, Greimassian semiotics, or what some still call the "Parisian school," is still alive, though more in diaspora than in Paris itself. Moreover, an enduring principle of Greimassian lucidity is its antihistoricism: not a refusal to deal with material from earlier ep

Proxy and Proximity: Metonymic Signing

Abstract: In Book II of The Mill on the Floss the narrator pauses to lament the association of intelligence with the ability to wield metaphor. "Aristotle! if you had the advantage of being the 'freshest modern' instead of being the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of high intelligence, with a lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without metaphor, —that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else?" In the context of the narrative, this critique of metaphoric privilege is a plea for valuing different ways of seeing things and saying things. George Eliot does not name this different perspective; I suggest it is a concern with the metonymic. In contemporary, post-structuralist criticism the scrutiny of metaphoric privilege has often meant a reconsideration or defence of the 'other trope,' metonymy. My interest in metonymy here is to consider what relationships exist between the various ways in which ...

Interart Studies and the "Imperialism" of Language

Abstract: Speaking Pictures? At a recent professional forum on the possibility of an art(s) discourse for the 1980s, one prominent art historian suggested that criticism of the visual arts had, if anything, already too much to do with discourse. "Why is it," he asked, "that art history has resisted, more than the study of the other, non-visual arts, the new interdisciplinarianism most evident in literary criticism?" (Kuspit 1986: 1). The virtue of resistance is implied in the question, for behind the peaceful overtures of the "new interdisciplinarianism" lurk "the colonizing, consumerist tendencies of English Studies, eagerly reducing art to text, visual art into linguistic art, vision into sign, in effect arguing the case for Derrida's [1973] assertion that 'the collusion between painting ... and writing is constant' "-if not for an even more insidious Derridean "attempt to bury painting in writing, or to suggest that painting is bad writing" (Kuspit 1986: 3). The "new interdisciplinarianism" turns out to be a new imperialism in disguise, and-as was to a large extent also true of the old imperialism-its weapon for colonizing, reducing, and ultimately burying the natives of the visual realm is language. Insofar as the speaker's views represent a current position among art historians, those of us in English studies may find in them a curious replay of the battle over theory in our own camp, now staged as a contest for dominion between two disciplines. In fact, the paragone between the arts, here reflected in the turf disputes of their academic exponents, is a venerable topos. As W. J. T. Mitchell (1986: 43)

Bombs and Other Exciting Devices, Or The Problem of Teaching Irony

Abstract: In the representation of power, the ironing board has long served as a sign of women's work, connoting the relegation of the female to the relative powerlessness of the home. Irony, on the other hand, has traditionally been discussed as a trope of the powerful, to be mastered by the rulers of language and the state. Fielding's irony, deployed at Mrs. Slipslop's expense, depends for its comic effect on our recognition of this fact, that is, on our recognition of the incommensurability of the domains of ironing and irony. Unfortunately, the hierarchical implications of this distinction are still with us, sometimes where we might not expect them to be. Specifically, in the college writing course-the course charged with teaching the rhetoric of reading and writing-one might expect students to be empowered culturally by learning to master the trope of the powerful. Yet this is all too obviously not what occurs. If our textbooks are any indication, few of us spend any-or any significanttime teaching irony. Those teachers who have presented an essay dependent on irony to their freshman writing classes probably already know how much difficulty students typically have in interpreting ironic meaning. Students may miss not only the "joke" of such essays, but also their critical force. Perhaps because of this, few of us encourage students to use irony in their own writing. Following Richard Ohmann's lead in examining the politics of what we do teach in the writing classroom, I would like to speculate on the politics of not teaching irony. For the decision to teach or not teach irony is a political gesture in a way that the decision to teach other tropes, such as metaphor, for example, is not. Irony is not simply a trope among tropes, not simply a neutral and purely formal device. Unlike other tropes, it defines a political relationship between the user and the audience being addressed or excluded. Even while provoking laughter, irony invokes notions of hierarchy and subordination, judgment and perhaps even moral superiority. It is subversive. And it challenges some of the principles of Lori Chamberlain has published articles on translation theory and postmodern literature. She is

Talking and thinking : the patterns of behaviour

Abstract: This book, written in the form of a conversation between a student of educational theory and a student of linguistics, brings out the relationship between talking and thinking Their discussion can be divided into three parts: the Saussurean theory of signs seen within different approaches to meaning; the implications of sign theory in accordance with what thinking implies in specific communities; and the way in which point of view can alter meaning within a particular community

Some Sub-Atomic Particles of Logic1

Abstract: I can best begin this contribution to the articulation of speech acts with a consideration of the Fregian 'assertion-sign', or, to speak more accurately, 'judgement-stroke'. This correction itself warns us that there is not just one kind of sign that has to be examined, but several, and that an elucidation of this difficult subject has to begin with a careful distinction between them. Only then can we see which of these signs are necessities, or even possibilities, for logic-that is, what we are to say about Wittgenstein's complete dismissal of Frege's sign in Tractatus 4.442 and subsequently as 'logically quite meaningless'. I submit this discussion as a penance for having failed to make the necessary distinctions clear in my first book The Language of Morals, in spite of being at least partially aware of them at the time.2 I later made some of them in print, especially that between what I shall be calling signs of subscription and signs of mood.3 In spite of this, the distinction is still often neglected; in particular, both Michael Dummett's and Donald Davidson's discussions would have been a great deal clearer if they had been more attentive to it.4 I should perhaps add that I have found Dummett's treatment of assertion rewarding, and agree with most of it. Let us then look at some of the different things that are done by what I called in that book the 'neustic'. I am going to start with the easiest customer. I do not think that anybody could, on reflection, deny that a logical notation needs a sign of mood, if it is to handle sentences or speech acts. or different kinds of things that are said. in different moods. This is

Dancing with "Faust": A Semiotician's Reflections on Barba's Intercultural Mise-en-Scene

Abstract: The first week of the I987 International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in the Salento region of Italy took place under the sign of Faust. Eugenio Barba brought together Eastern performers (Japanese and Indian dancers1 and musicians) and (Western) spectator-participants in a collective response to Faust-especially Goethe's Faust, but also Marlowe's as well as the whole Western tradition of the popular character and myth. The work, which lasted five mornings from 6 to Io A.M., was not supposed to lead to a finished performance nor was it to be presented to an audience outside the group. Was it then an exercise meant to explore a Western director's engagement with Indian and Japanese dancers? Or was it a Western production, however unfinished, which exhibited the characteristics of a miseen-scene? I tend toward the second hypothesis, although Barba carefully sustained the ambiguity of his work and claimed rather to present a "work in progress" trying out the possibility of a Eurasian theatre. In what follows, one of the participants-simultaneously judging and taking part and hence forever contaminated by ISTA and deprived of his cherished neutrality-offered the Bari roundtable2 not so much a description of the "B.A. BA" of BA(r)BA method as a way of imagining how his work on Faust might be described with semiotic tools. The anecdotal circumstance of this relazione was once again the challenge to semioticsissued by theatre anthropology-to give an account of the activity of the performers and the mise-en-scene. The (tactical) response to this kind of challenge consists in saying yet again: semiotics has no particular use; it is the artist who makes use of semiotics: let us merely describe this use by examining the reelaboration of Japanese and Indian gestural traditions through Barba's mise-en-scene. If, as I have suggested elsewhere, every (especially linguistic) translation is an appropriation of the source culture by the target culture (Pavis forthcoming), we might say, by analogy, that Barba appropriates oriental performance traditions by transforming and "rewriting" them on the stage for a Western audience. We could then identify a series of appropriations: (i) semiotic, (2) ideological, (3) narratological (in the broad sense). Nonetheless, the term appropriation opens the way to an unfortunate misreading

Culture, Art, and Literature in Chile: 1973-1985

Abstract: Chile has been under military authoritarian rule since 1973. During this time, new cultural expressions, both rich and complex, have appeared. Now, after 15 years, these developments can be evaluated from a broad perspective' and a synthesis can be offered. The present work is an interdisciplinary approach that examines some aspects of high, formal, or learned culture. In Chile, as in any other national case, cultural production implies a specific, professional, and autonomous field. The results of this research are presented and organized in different artistic areas that are to be understood as relatively autonomous fields within a larger social and cultural context. Each artistic area exhibits characteristic modes of production, exchange, and consumption of specific meanings.2 Culture is understood here as a continuous production of meaning by means of human activity. The symbolic levels of any society are constituted by a set of semiautonomous cultural fields that are nevertheless in interaction with each other. The actual agents of these cultural areas are the intellectuals who set in motion diverse institutions by means of communicational processes in which cultural and aesthetic signs are produced, exchanged, and consumed.3 Consequently, culture is defined here as a multidimensional phenomenon, as a way of life of a people, and as complex communication processes. There is no social experience outside the universe or domain of culture. Each national culture is a system of signifying systems.made up of several social codes containing already accumulated data. This polyphony of sign systems organizes the world for people. Culture, the collective self of a community, its social identity, is in a constant process of articulation and disarticulation. It functions as a multiple structure, a dynamic polyglotism in which each field (theater, painting, music, fiction, poetry) contains different modes of cultural and artistic production. Such is the case in today's Chilean social formation.4

Artificial Intelligence and Sign Theory

Abstract: Research in artificial intelligence is often regarded as pertaining to the fields of engineering or informatics. Intelligent robots, expert systems, automatic translators, so it is said, belong to the world of computer technology.But is this really the case? Even a cursory study will easily show that things are not that simple as a well orchestrated marketing would have us think. A deeper analysis of the problem would easily show that AI is much more an undertaking that pertains to formal and abstract discipline than to concrete and material technologies. The following essay will attempts to show that AI is in fact related intimately to abstract disciplines and, more specifically, to semiotics ;it is a applied semiotic venture.

Sign language as cognition for deaf people: Pitfalls and prospects

Abstract: With a tradition reliance on verbal paradigms cognitive psychology has repeatedly rediscovered the centrality of verbal processes in the cognitive representation of the world. Frequently it has been considered that non-speaking groups offer the proof of such psychological theories. Deaf people, because of their apparently poor memory, retardation in reading, relative lack of speech, yet cognitive viability, have offered an ideal test population for cognitive paradigs. Unfortunately deaf people turn out not to be a non linguistic control. We have now discovered sign language--a visual, spatial representation form used naturally by profoundly deaf people. This apparently offers the key the deaf people's cognition without speech. This paper describes some aspects of what we know of deaf people and their language, critically examines some of the evidence for sign representation in memory, and discusses the methodological problems to be faced by anyone searching for conclusive evidence on deaf people's working memory. Despite the attractiveness of 'sings for words' in cognition, this paper argues that the evidences is weak and signs may not be equated easily with words. Language: en

Charles Sanders Peirce: ciência enquanto semiótica

Abstract: The diagram of sign when applied to the understanding of science gives place to an original correation correlation of abduction or retroduction, deduction and induction. The conjunction of abduction and deduction consists of a general Form of logical possibility. Induction in its turn, establishes, in the long run, the ratio of frequency of the accomplishment of expected consequences of general representations in the universe of facts. As a formal construction, science as semiotics sustains itself even if it has as its object an universe of pure chance. Nevertheless, within Peirce s philosophical system, science retains its meaning only if it corresponds to the reality of Nature. The warrant of this statistically relevant correspondance would be the fact that human instinct belonged to the same stage of evolution as the whole universe.

Theatre by and for the Deaf

Abstract: At the Tenth Congress of the World Federation of the Deaf in Helsinki in July I987, I8 performance companies composed primarily of amateur deaf actors from Europe and Japan demonstrated a wide range of performance methods. The performances were part of a week of activities. Two thousand delegates from around the world participated in lectures and discussions on scientific, sociological, and cultural issues of deafness. The performances took place in the evenings, three or four a night, after a full day of scholarly sessions. Groups experimented with mime, formalized gesture, and sign language in performing everything from classical Japanese comedy to Monty Python-like satire to Euripides' Electra. With one exception, there was no accompanying spoken text; the focus was entirely on visual performance. Although some groups performed within fairly conventional constraints-translating a word-based narrative into sign or using traditional mime gestures-others experimented with narrative, sequence, and multiple images. The performances differed in a number of ways from the more familiar type of deaf theatre practiced in the United States. The most widely known technique for making performances accessible to the deaf in the U.S. is sign language interpretation of spoken texts. Through the placement of interpreters either at the side of the stage or within the performance space, deaf audience members are presented with a simultaneous signed/visual translation of the words of speaking actors. In this method, hearing actors and hearing interpreters include deaf spectators in performances that are largely created for the hearing. A second set of techniques creates performance opportunities for deaf actors. Best exemplified by the National Theatre of the Deaf, a federally funded touring company based at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center in Connecticut, these performances feature deaf actors who communicate through American Sign Language and "theatrical signing," that is, alteration or expansion of conventional signs for dramatic effect. The goal of theatrical signing is to create a more dynamic sign or one that incorporates miming of the concept behind the sign. The sign may be extended in a number of ways. Signs made with one hand may be made with two hands, and the path of the movement exaggerated. For example the sign "to view" is a "V" made with the index and middle fingers moving out slightly from the right eye. In theatricalizing the sign, one could use both hands to make "V"s coming from both eyes and move the "V"s well over

Unconventional Wisdom: Irreverent Solutions for Tough Problems at Work

Abstract: A collection of provocative essays that show how conventional management practices are often impractical and ineffective in solving tough managerial problems. Challenges many stereotypical management perceptions--such as the notions that indecisiveness is a sign of incompetence, that power corrupts all leaders, and that chaos in an organization is dangerous.

Sign and Meaning in Victoria Welby and Mikhail Bakhtin

Abstract: Abstract This essay reads works by Victoria Welby and Mikhail Bakhtin together with special reference to their theories of sign and meaning. Despite significant differences in their personal and intellectual biographies their work is easily related on a theoretical level, such that these authors can be placed in a tradition of thought that we propose to indicate as “semiotics of responsive understanding.”

Fictionality in Mantegna's San Zeno Altarpiece Structures of Mimesis and the History of Painting*

Abstract: and 1459 for the Benedictine monastery of San Zeno near Verona (fig. 1) has an important place in the traditional, style-oriented literature of art history. Above all, Mantegna is praised for his innovative composition, which uses linear perspective to fuse the three main panels of the altar into a single, illusionistic whole, a vista seen through the colonnade of the four carved columns of the frame.' This opinion rests on the assumption that the history of European art-at least into the middle of the nineteenth century-is concomitant with progress in the techniques of mimetic representation, that painting steadily improved in its ability to reproduce directly visual details of the external world. This naive view of the representational dimension of the image is supported by the concept of the iconic sign, first developed by Charles Sanders Peirce and propagated by Charles Morris. Here, the iconic sign is defined on the basis of its resemblance to an external referent. In the following study, I would like to examine pictorial mimesis as a phenomenon of fictionality, using a methodological approach based

The church: mystery, sacrament, sign, instrument, symbolic reality

Abstract: Summary The article starts with the observation that the sacramentality of the Church has gradually become a central issue in the ecumenical discussion. It is, for example, one of the three themes which the Vatican's response to BEM recommends to the Commission on Faith and Order for further study. Similarly, a recent text issued by this Commission, on the Church as Mystery and Prophetic Sign, asks for the elucidation of the terms “sign” and “instrument”. And a French text argues, that a fundamental difference between Catholics and Protestants opens up in the understanding of the Church's instrumentality in the economy of salvation (I). The insistence with which Roman Catholic church-leaders put forward this theme in the ecumencial dialogues, corresponds to the importance some Roman Catholic theologians (A. Dulles, H. Doring, L. Boff, D. Salado Martinez) attribute to the “sacramental model” (II). The article shows furthermore that a shift in approach to the sacramentality of the Church has taken place. Wh...

Astrological Symbolism in Spenser's the Shepheardes Calender: The Cultural Background of a Literary Text

Abstract: This is a detailed study that presents the hypothesis that Spenser fashioned his eclogues in accordance with the sign and planet governing each eclogue's month.

The Dialectic of the Sign in Claudio Rodriguez's Alianza y Condena

Abstract: In Alianza y Condena (1965), Claudio Rodriguez's third collection of poems, the poetprotagonist faces a dilemma that is at once semiotic and ethical: how is it possible simultaneously to participate in the world through language and to maintain one's critical vision of reality? The surrender of the self that, in all of Rodriguez's poetry, is the basis of a more authentic engagement with reality would appear to be incompatible with the search for the truth behind deceptive appearances. Alianza resembles Don de la ebriedad, Rodriguez's first book, in its more explicit concern with the problems of poetic language. As in Don, the poet attempts to overcome the duplicity of the linguistic sign in order to integrate himself once more into the world. The most significant difference, however, is that in the later book the poet's consciousness of the arbitrariness of the sign is irrevocable. The more innocent vision of reality to which he attempts to return is ultimately paradoxical. The task facing the poet-protagonist of Alianza y Condena, then, is to reconcile language with the world, but without sacrificing his critical vision of both language and reality. In his attempt to resolve this dilemma he explores the ambiguities inherent in the notion of the arbitrariness of the sign. Language, although it is essentially deceptive, can also reveal the truth: its capacity to deceive, in fact, is inseparable from its capacity to uncover deceit. The "truth" concealed or revealed in language, in turn, is itself a duplicitous sign. The stripping of illusions normally unmasks a negative, destructive reality, but this reality itself might also conceal another, more positive truth. These exceptions to a predominately negative view of language allow the poet to go beyond his critical vision and develop a more complete vision of the sign. A series of dialectical transformations of lan-

Mark: the Anointing at Bethany

Abstract: Mark is preoccupied with signs and with the problem of their indeterminacy. Jesus is repeatedly called upon to provide signs to legitimate his claim, and refuses to do so. When the Pharisees question him, ‘seeking of him a sign from heaven’ (8:11), he replies even with a degree of vehemence: ‘Why does this generation seek a sign? Truly, I say to you, no sign shall be given to this generation’ (8:12). Later, when the disciples ask what signs will precede the last days, Jesus delivers an apocalyptic discourse (13:5–37). I will deal more fully with apocalyptic writing in the chapter on Revelation: suffice it now to say that the genre flourished at the time of Christ, and basically offered visionary interpretations of the world’s end and of judgement whereby the elect would be separated from the damned, and would reign in paradise. The apocalyptic mood is especially intense in Mark’s gospel, whether in his distinctive depiction of human turmoil and confusion, or in the sense that in such strange times as he records we are urgently under the burden of portentous promises, and judgement is soon to come on our disoriented and amazed humanity. The so-called ‘little apocalypse’ of chapter 13 expresses this mood directly, as Jesus responds to the request for a sign. But we should notice how much of the discourse is taken up with warnings against false messiahs, rumours, and prophets who will ‘show signs and wonders, to lead astray, if possible the elect’ (13:22).