Athens Institute for Education and Research ATINER ATINER ' s Conference Paper Series LNG 2017-2395 (original) (raw)

In what ways does the study of sounds allow for a revisiting of questions regarding Peirce's (1975) semiotics and its implications for the philosophy of language? This essay is an attempt to rethink the relationship between mimesis and semiosis through a research on how the process of hearing relates to sounds and meaning. To draw a map of what we call an audible field, Peirce's triadic logic is used to obtain a double articulation of Jacques Rancière's threefold method of distributing the sensible (ethical, poetical and aesthetical) with Michel Chion's three ways of hearing (reduced, causal, semantical). Peirce's three logical categories (firstness, secondness and thirdness) enables a number of triadic combinations between Chion's three ways of hearing, Rancière's threefold way of distributing the sensible and Peirce's own triadic ontology of the sign. These combinations allow the audible field to unfold according to the following partition: reduction to the ethical dimension of a strict regulation of its own volume and pitch variations; representation according to mimetical criteria of causal attribution of sounds to its supposed sources; and linearization into a signifying sequence of organized coded sounds. The final result is a semiotic understanding of the audible field as an organized gap between sounds and signs, a gap that can be rendered only through a positional diagram displaying the conceptual criss-crossing between Chion's and Rancière's triads, when these are simultaneously applied to sounds and hearing. The resulting diagram of the audible field shows how human hearing articulates itself with any kind of language around specific sound objects-such as human voices and musical patterns.