The landscape of cultural history
This reading of McKenzie and Marin suggests a different landscape of practices than that implied by the metaphor of the edge of the cliff. In my opinion, the topography of culture history has more in common with the rolling plains of the upper Midwest or Ile de France than with the sublime coastlines of California, Brittany, or the Cote d’ Azur.
To establish this alternative topography, I begin with the assumption that the entire field of human practices is characterized by Marin’s semiotic heterogeneity, in the double sense that human practices are always semiotic(that is, meaningfully constructed and therefore available for interpretation) but also manifest diverse forms of semiotic logic (linguistic, iconic, ludic, gestural, performative, etc.). I take this as equivalent to a radical interpretation of MeKenzie’s proposal for an open-ended extension of the model of the text. Written language of the sort that makes up literal texts is but one kind of semiotically generated social product, and the logic of written textuality can claim no privilege over other forms of semiotic logic. I also assume that these logics are interpenetrating and overlapping or, to put the same point differently, that they are not isomorphic with given realms of practice. This implies both that a linguistic model might indeed help one make sense of a gestural or disciplinary or iconic practice and that one might find gestural or iconic logics operating in a text.