A Latin expression meaning “something that stands in place of something else”.
From ancient times to the present day, the function of one thing standing in place of something else has been accepted as an essential characteristic of the sign. A respectful formulation of this view is found in the treatise of Augustine De Doctrina Christiana: “The sign is something which, according to the impression reproduced on the senses, makes something else come to mind as a consequence.” One can hear the sound of Florence or Firenze and think of a city, or see smoke and think of fire.
The ability of sound to convey the concept of a city and of sight to suggest the cause of a visible appearance illustrates what the wording aliquid stat pro aliquo means to the interpreter of these signs, who have assumed that something stands for something else.
But the status aliquo (instead of the sign) has been controversial since ancient times. In our time, this contradiction has intensified. On the one hand, there are those who maintain that language and, more generally, signs of all kinds provide us with access to an extralinguistic and extrasemiotic world (a world that exists independently of language and all other sign systems). Therefore, language and signs reveal to us what is beneath them.
On the other hand, there are those who believe that insofar as the only access to reality is possible through one or another type of sign, what we call reality is nothing more than an interpretation. More precisely, it is the sum of our most probable and reliable interpretations.
“There are no facts,” according to Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), “only interpretations.”
In this way, the status and nature of what the signs stand for are open to conflicting interpretations, to such an extent that the “stand for” function itself is sub-superficially put to the test.
From this point of view, the function of signs is to generate other signs, and the function of newly born signs is to generate even newer signs and so on ad infinitum (to infinity).
The image of signs that give rise to signs other than extrasemiotic ones has had a profound effect on modern thinking.
Semiotic systems, such as that of language or literature, are not transparent glasses through which we look at reality; they are labyrinths, perhaps even labyrinths, leading to other labyrinths from which there is no way out.
According to their critics (such as Frederick Jameson), this view turns language and other sign systems into a prison that does not point to an exit to the “real world.” For its defenders, the requirement that the structure of signs (signifiers) obey something that is not in itself a sign is rooted in the tyrannical impulse to stop something that could never be caught – the dynamic and self-sufficient generation of signs. Perhaps there is a healthy impulse to maintain each of the two rival positions – on the one hand, the impulse to use language simply and clearly, so that such things as sight, violence, injustice, rudeness, and the like do not take root in the miasmas of the signs, and, on the other hand, the impulse to use language as imaginatively as possible, so that its abilities and forces can reveal themselves in ever newer and more astonishing ways.
In short, the function of the sign according to the classical concept is representative, and according to newer approaches – productive. For the first, the sign has its raison d’etre in the representation of something extrasemiotic (something that is not a sign itself), while for the second the signs are mechanisms for generating other signs.
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