ABSTRACT
The Arts, the Humanities, the Social Sciences, have all paid attention to modes other than speech and writing in their distinct disciplinary fields. Each names the phenomena from the perspective of its concerns and its questions. The problem is not a shortage of ‘names’ but one of ‘fit’; and that problem has three aspects. One is how to bring all areas of meaning and all means of representation within one theoretical and practical frame, without introducing problems about compatibility, coherence and a sensible integration of existing terms. The second is that the newly integrated field will exhibit gaps which point to possible new kinds of relations that were not visible or did not exist in the formerly discretely framed and bounded areas. The third aspect is that questions arise about the ‘fit’ of the kinds of entities, relations and processes necessary to describe that unified, larger and yet, at some level still highly diverse field.
