(CCA Bookstore, summer 2005)
Aberrant presupposition & Aberrant decoding, Umberto Eco
Eco reworks the standard communication model by expanding the message as a text subject on the side of the addresser to presuppositional influences (private biases, orienting circumstances, ambiguities relating to the encoding of expression and content planes, the influence of subcodes, suppositions of shared knowledge) and for the addressee to 'aberrant' presuppositions (private biases, deviating circumstances, aleatory connotations and interpretive failures, as well as the appeal to subcodes and the actual depth of the addressee's knowledge), all of which are further subject to uncoded external influences.
As Fiske explains: "Aberrant decoding results, then, when different codes are used in the encoding and decoding of the message." [See Note 3] He continues: "This is encoding [by the young man] that fails to recognize that people of different cultural or subcultural experience will read the message differently, and that in so doing they will not necessarily be blameworthy." Aberrant decoding is the exception in narrowcast codes, but the rule in broadcast codes since the range of subcultural experiences is simply too great to guarantee any univocity of meaning.
Kuwayama's taxonomy of logos and logotypes & Weckerle's 9x9 taxonomy. Sadly very little of either of these people's work is findable online. I'll have to go back to the bookstore.
Peirce: representamen, triadic relations.
A Sign, or Representamen, is a First which stands in such a genuine triadic relation to a Second, called its Object, as to be capable of determining a Third, called its Interpretant, to assume the same triadic relation to its Object in which it stands itself to the same Object.
Fasces. Good to know.
