STREET SCHEMA (6)
By:
April 8, 2024
One in a miniseries of posts — within SCHEMATIZING — via which Josh Glenn will share photos of manhole covers, the diagrammatic design of which he sometimes finds useful to his thinking — in his role as a consulting semiotician — about how to diagram a “semiosphere.” (Here’s an example of Josh’s proprietary “G-schema”; it appeared in his 2021 book The Adventurer’s Glossary, from McGill-Queen’s University Press). Josh is grateful to Rob Walker’s Art of Noticing provocations.
A pleasingly uniform concentric-circle design, inspected here by HILOBROW friend Mimi Lipson’s dog Mackie. In ancient religions, concentric circles tend to represent wholeness; a systemic view of nature and universe; and layers of meaning — the notion that the reality we experience has hidden depths. None of which is incompatible, exactly, with the G-schema. Where I balk is at the depiction of a fixed “center” from which all things emanate and to which all things are tied. For me, this sort of schema represents what Sartre calls a “totalizing totality.”
Sartre: “A totality is defined as a being which, while radically distinct from the sum of its parts, is present in its entirety, in one form or another, in each of these parts, and which relates to itself either through its relation to one or more of its parts or through its relation to the relations between all or some of them.” Yes — this certainly is true of a semiosphere. Typically associated with social and cultural formations, totalization defines the processes by which disparate and unrelated phenomena are understood in connection with a larger complex totality. Again — no arguments here.
From Hegel forward, so-called Western Marxists regarded totality and totalization as a utopian ideal — bringing an end to fragmentation, alienation, atomization, and reification. For others, especially poststructuralists and postmodernists, totality and totalization represent an imperializing or mystifying authority that attempts to annihilate difference. A semiosphere is, inherently, a non-totalizing totality — it unites disparate and unrelated phenomena, but without annihilating difference. So a schema depicting a semiosphere can’t simply be a series of concentric circles….
MORE FURSHLUGGINER THEORIES BY JOSH GLENN: SCHEMATIZING | IN CAHOOTS | JOSH’S MIDJOURNEY | POPSZTÁR SAMIZDAT | VIRUS VIGILANTE | TAKING THE MICKEY | WE ARE IRON MAN | AND WE LIVED BENEATH THE WAVES | IS IT A CHAMBER POT? | I’D LIKE TO FORCE THE WORLD TO SING | THE ARGONAUT FOLLY | THE PERFECT FLANEUR | THE TWENTIETH DAY OF JANUARY | THE REAL THING | THE YHWH VIRUS | THE SWEETEST HANGOVER | THE ORIGINAL STOOGE | BACK TO UTOPIA | FAKE AUTHENTICITY | CAMP, KITSCH & CHEESE | THE UNCLE HYPOTHESIS | MEET THE SEMIONAUTS | THE ABDUCTIVE METHOD | ORIGIN OF THE POGO | THE BLACK IRON PRISON | BLUE KRISHMA | BIG MAL LIVES | SCHMOOZITSU | YOU DOWN WITH VCP? | CALVIN PEEING MEME | DANIEL CLOWES: AGAINST GROOVY | DEBATING IN A VACUUM | PLUPERFECT PDA | SHOCKING BLOCKING.