Making Sense, Making Science

7Challenges of Non-logocentric Semiotics of Cultures: Explorations Based on Music and the Notion of Significativity

The logocentrism of the entire Western philosophical tradition, from which arises, among other things, the textualism of the second half of the 20th Century initiated in particular by Genette and Barthes, has often been taken for granted. It is striking, however, that most of the authors who constitute the reference basis of cultural sciences today have defended a non-logocentric approach. Whether Leroi-Gourhan, Simondon, Cassirer or even Saussure – to mention only a few major figures – each time we find the same critical distance from logocentrism, i.e., sticking to a minimal definition, the definition of the fundamental nature of the human being essentially through verbal language.

This critical distancing of logocentrism takes different forms each time: in Leroi-Gourhan’s work, what primitively constitutes a human being is bipedalism and the liberation of the hand for the construction of tools, leading to the development of the cerebral capacity to remember and anticipate in an increasingly distant way (thus developing exponentially what F. Rastier calls the “distal zone”, the zone of the absent, characteristic of human brain functioning), verbal language being one tool among others to move in this zone. According to Simondon, it is the extreme refinement of a technical thought that characterizes humans; according to Cassirer, it is the ability to historicize ...