Semiotics and such

[Ryan Buchanan]

Hello all, 

I apologize for sending a message such as this at the off-hour of 2 A.M., but I am a bit of a night owl and so this is my nature.

I am immersing myself into the semiotic lore, and one of the things I am attempting to understand is the meaning-making processes of "disturbed" (i.e., Schizophrenic, Autistic, ...) individuals. In order to achieve this goal, we first need a good idea of what the semiotics of intrapersonal interaction looks like: i.e., how does a mind communicate with itself? What forms does the mind use for conceptual representation, and how are these processes of representation disrupted in psychotic individuals?

So far, the best conclusion I can come to is that the discursive and stylistic media of the Schizophrenic mind are markedly different than that of the "neurotypical;" for instance delusions of reference, thought insertion, etc., all lend themselves to different interpretation of the same "corpus experientia." I know Dr. Bristol is a philosopher of science, but I wonder if he is interested in the philosophy of "folk science" as well. In what ways can the philosophy of science be applied to the layman's M.O.? 

I would be exceptionally interested in hearing an application of philosophy of science (as opposed to philosophy of mind) to, i.e., Schizophrenic thinking.

I apologize if my thoughts are rather unorganized; I am writing in haste.

- Ryan Buchanan

Roseburg, OR

[kirby urner]

Good to hear from you Ryan.

I first started tuning in semiotics when my high school friend and later Jersey City housemate, Glenn Baker, went into film studies at Temple U. He was an archivist for the Center for Defense Information (CDI) in DC, however in getting a film + TV degree, he was eligible for promotion to their editor in chief of their cable TV program. This was back in the day. CDI was a non-profit founded by retired admirals and generals who wanted to take pot shots at their peers still on the inside. Glenn would help them organize trips to Cuba to have fun in the sun and to carouse with their career enemy, Fidel Castro.

My own intellectual journey, the way I tell it, started in 8th grade with Siggy Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. I didn't know how to pronounce his name. "Whatcha readin' there sonny?" Me: "Frood". By the time I got to college I'd been down several rabbit holes in that connection, most notably Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, and from there to Love's Body by Norman O. Brown, one of my favorites of all time. [1]

In my readings of psychoanalytic literature, I came across R. D. Laing. Heard of him? Now that Youtube exists, I have a lot more access to taped interviews and so on. Added to my queue.

Where I've come to in my late 60s is I'm more interested in mental pathologies at the community and societal level, more than even just the family matrix, which is where a lot of practitioners took their practice (I'm not running a practice obviously). 

I see the push to locate mental illness in "the individual" to, in many cases, be a convenient dodge as it keeps analysts from focusing on the bigger picture.  For example I see outward war as mental illness incarnate, yet usually the media is being mobilized to encourage the fear the loathing necessary to sustain war hysteria i.e. is more a part of the problem than of the solution. 

My attitude is made clear by this blog post of 2016:

https://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2016/08/drug-pushers.html

The influence of Freud is still in the background of course. We've all heard of Edward Bernays by now, his nephew or something. As a public relations move, he renamed propaganda to "public relations" (PR), a lesson in itself on how to be a wordsmith or spin doctor. 

I was involved with something called the Hunger Project in the 1980s which hoped to use Bernay's style mass media campaigns to end world hunger (death by starvation) by the year 2000, the idea being we could use the very tools that promote wrong-think, to promote right-think. Fight fire with fire as it were.  Obviously, our project failed, although a slow downward trend in death by starvation is evident nevertheless. [2]

I'm still interested in the power of multimedia to assist people who consciously choose to "brainwash themselves" e.g. to get a PhD in something. Accelerated learning, such as of languages, is abetted by technology, although we're not at the level portrayed in The Matrix yet.  At some level, PR is nothing more than pedagogy / andragogy in action. In that sense, I do consider myself to be a spin doctor (effective teacher), who still has a lot to learn (there's much room for improvement). 

Kirby

[1]  https://flic.kr/p/2rurZUs

[2]  https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment

--
"Science would be ruined if it were to withdraw entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are wanderers-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines." Benoit Mandelbrot
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