Intermaterialità

Abstract

As an element presupposed by Hjelmslev's sign function, matter has long remained excluded from semiotic analysis, understood as an undifferentiated continuum prior to semiotic organization, a substratum of meaning before its formal configuration. However, the idea that an elemental semiotics is possible, that is, that matter and materials can be observed as languages and simultaneously as objects of social discourses, forces one to rethink matter outside the apparent opposition between its constitutive unknowability and its inescapable concreteness. Water, for instance, is commonly understood as a raw material; it is the element of the natural world par excellence. But in the Greimasian view, the natural world is not extralinguistic: it is already semiotic and therefore the relationship between language and the world is nothing more than a relationship of intersemiotic translation. So when we talk about water, what water are we talking about?