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“Sémiotiques et Rhétorique” 2008Patrick J. Coppock

Department of Social, Cognitive and Quantitative Science,

Faculty of Communication and Business,

University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy

patrick.coppock@unimore.it

http://game.unimore.it

Theme and Title

Theme: “Rhétorique del l’image et économie d’Icones”

Title: “One picture is worth a thousand…??”: Rhetoric and Economy of Images in Interactive Fictional Possible Worlds

Possible Fictional Worlds

Three questions: How do we conceive of/ experience Possible (Fictional)

Worlds? How do we conceive of/ experience the Actual (Real) World? How do our conceptions and experiences of Past, Present

and Future Possible and Actual Worlds interact in different Rhetorical communication genres/ contexts?

+(Language) Games and Fiction

The culturally constructed reality and symbolic efficacy of all kinds of language (or other) games (or play) depends on our ability to make-believe - to create, narrate/ enunciate, relate to and interact meaningfully with past, present and future fictional possible worlds

This requires, amongst other things, “bracketing”, suspension of belief, and a good deal of cooperative good will (c.f. Husserl, Eco)

i.e. successful management of the dynamic transposition and interplay of meaning and action across the boundaries of actuality and possibility

+Interaction, inference and interpretation of texts Eco: “Six Walks in the Fictional Woods”

Inference and interpretation permit construction of relevant/ meaningful “walks” through “lazy” narrative texts

Plot - deployment of characters, events in time and space Fabula - a succession of textual states Narrative possible worlds and subworlds are brought into

play as an effect of interaction between reader, plot and fabula

+Fictional possible worlds

Eco: “Small worlds”, “furnished” with actors and objects with

certain “properties” “… alternative ways things might have been, not

descriptions of these ways.” “… states of affairs … described in terms of the same

language as their narrative object “Finite, enclosed”, “handicapped”, “parasitic on the real

world”, must be “taken on trust”

+Possible fictional worlds

Are translatable into “world matrices” that … “provide the possibility of comparing different states of

affairs under a certain description” and “making clear whether they can be mutually accessible or

not and in which way they differ.”

+Possible and impossible worlds

“We explore the plurality of possibility to find a suitable model for realia” The Actual/ Reference world as we experience it is also a

cultural construct, and thus a possible world Fictional worlds (of texts), and subworlds (of their

characters) activate Doxastic worlds & subworlds (of desires, hopes, beliefs etc.

on the part of empirical readers)

+Transworld Identity

The problem of transworld identity: How to single out what “persists” over the course of

different states of affairs in, and between, different possible worlds?

Shared textually essential properties (s-properties) are a condition for determining the potential for mutual accessibility between possible worlds.

Fictional necessity differs from logical necessity. Fictional necessity is an individuation principle.

Rhetoric

Some classical and more contemporary definitions of Rhetoric: Aristotle: “the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the

available means of persuasion.” Cicero: "speech designed to persuade.” George Campbell: “that art or talent by which discourse is adapted

to its end. The four ends of discourse are to enlighten the understanding, please the imagination, move the passion, and influence the will.”

Sonja and Karen Foss: “an action human beings perform when they use symbols for the purpose of communicating with one another . . , a perspective humans take that involves focusing on symbolic processes.”

Lloyd Bitzer: “a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action.”

Rhetoric as persuasion

A. N. Whitehead: “The whole question of the symbolic transfer of emotion

lies at the base of any theory of the aesthetics of art.” (Symbolism, its Meaning and Effect, 1927)

“The art of a free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly, in the fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enightened reason.” (Symbolism, its Meaning and Effect, 1927)

“In its most general sense, the commerce of mankind involves every species of interchange which proceeds by way of mutual persuasion.” (Adventures of Ideas, 1933)

Persuasion, between possibility and actuality

“The creation of the world–said Plato–is the victory of persuasion over force. The worth of men consists in their liablity to persuasion. They can be persuaded by the disclosure of alternatives, the better or the worst.” (Adventures of Ideas, 1933)

“Civilization is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however, unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilisation, either in general society, or in a remnant of individuals.” (Adventures of Ideas, 1933)

+Reality: continuous, autonomous, creative process

A.N. Whitehead: “Cognition is the emergence, into some

measure of individualised reality, of the general substratum of activity, poising before itself possibility, actuality and purpose.”

“The principle that I am adopting is that consciousness presupposes experience, and not experience consciousness. It is a special element in the subjective forms of some feelings. Thus an actual entity may, or may not be conscious of some part of its experience.”

(… (Past((Present))(Future) …)

Each moment of experience confesses itself to be a transition between two worlds, the immedate past and the immediate future. […]

This immediate future is immanent in the present with some degree of structural presence (AoI 192)

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Self(hood): Feeling Subjectivity Other(ness)

World: Reality/ Novelty/ Satisfaction/ Actuality

Actualisation:

Processual realisation of possibility

Process/ Being/ Cosmos/ Evolution/ Possibility

Relationality of Being, Self(hood), Other(ness)

Rhetoric as transworld mediator

Rhetoric uses the meaning potential inherent in the interplay between aspects of past possible and actual worlds that merge with aspects of our subjectively experienced present possible and actual worlds, to construct and advance (more or less) persuasive visions of future possible and actual worlds.

In doing so, it seeks (amongst other things) to create conditions for cultural and material change.

+Second Life

+Columbine Game

+Columbine Game

+Semiotics and the Real

Eco: “Kant and the Platypus” Aristotle: “Being is/ may be spoken/ said/ speaks itself

in many ways” “Lines of resistance in Being” However, we must “take” Being/ the Real World as a

cultural (cognitive, emotional, sensory etc.) construct, since we cannot really “know it” in any other way

Our meanings and actions “emerge” throught our myriad cultural practices

+Semiotics and the Real

Eco:

“Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken to be a sign”

“A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else.”

“Semiotics is […] the discipline that studies everything that can be used in order to lie.”

Ideological discourses tend to “narcotize” certain aspects of reality, and “blow up” others at the expense of a wider, more “truthful”, view of things.

+Negotiating between Actuality and Possibility?

Turner, Fauconnier:

Conceptual Blending (in Parable): To accept the actantial role of a talking duck in a

parable, cartoon, game or other fictional narrative world requires the ability to see the significance and coherence (within the possible world and subworlds offered by the given narrative framework) of specific blends of semantic and pragmatic meanings between (at least) two experiential spaces or fields, as a basis for the establishment of some degree of transworld identity