What’s left of immanence. The organization of mediations and the handling of heterogeneity

Abstract

Discourse, just as perception, seems to allow an epistemological perspective that is well engaged in the immanence of observations and in the constitution of a referent, which is totally dependent on established configurations. On the contrary, the handling of meaning encourages efforts to translate different plans of immanence in order to propose commensurability between the values managed by various practices, discourses and experiences. Consequently, the semiotics of practices appears to be involved in the reinstatement of a transcendent perspective that is capable of negotiating cultural identities beyond the different “rootedness” of their manifestations. After all, theory is a practice and one of its ordinary tasks is to manage heterogeneity and indeterminacy inside its linguistic environment, filled with cultural objects of unrelated origin and production. So, what can be done with an immanent approach to meaning? Is the recognition of the intimate relations between the observer system and the environment the ultimate possibility to save a consistent role of immanence in semiotic theory? Naturally, this question requests a thorough review of semiotic tradition; arbitrary linguistic mediations, as thirdness, do not pretend to be the term ab quo or the term ad quem of an estimated homogenisation of values. On the contrary, mediations are historical agents attesting the never-ending dialectic between immanence and transcendence: identity is the local result of a constructive work of individuation facing up to the insoluble heterogeneity of any scenery.