ABSTRACT
As a student of semiotics, you are exploring a process in which everybody is actively involved. You participate as author and reader of texts. This involves understanding semiotic context, especially your position in the semiotic world (Chapter 11). But first you have to be able to distinguish between what is and what is not a text. For example: (1) is that signal from space a message from an alien or an astronomical phenomenon? (2) did Yahweh send the ten plagues to Egypt or did nature? (3) is that a wink, or a facial tic? Answers depend on cues given by letness and context. Reading a sign as a text presupposes the existence of an author. Whether the author is visible or not, you have to construct an author: let this event in this context stand for a message for me from someone/something. Framing (Bateson): a concept suggesting something like letness, particularly ‘meta-messaging’—understanding (by framing) the difference between a genuine and a simulated mood-sign. Frameworks (Goffman): principles of organisation (schemata of interpretation) applied to experience, answering the question ‘What’s going on here?’ Frameworks are not created or generated by cognition, but are ‘something that cognition somehow arrives at’. Letness again?
