Page 178 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

The Donkey 153

the semiotic, as a principle, stays retrenched and independant from any
reference. The semantic level is identical to the world of enunciation and
the universe of discourse’ (Benveniste 1974: 64).
3. Linguistics considers only systems of units devoid of proper meaning, each
of them defined only in terms of its difference from all the others. These
units, whether they be purely distinctive like those of phonological articu-
lation or significant like those of lexical articulation, are oppositive units.
The interplay of oppositions and their combinations within an inventory of
discrete units is what defines the notion of structure in linguistics (Thompson
1981: 153).
4. Like every linguistic entity, myth is made up of constitutive units. These
units imply the presence of those which normally enter into the structure of
language, namely, the phonemes, morphemes and semantemes. The con-
stituent units of myth are in the same relation to semantemes as the latter
to morphemes, and as the latter in turn are to phonemes. Each form dif-
fers from that which precedes it by a higher degree of complexity. For this
reason, we shall call the elements that properly pertain to myth (and which
are the most complex of all) large constitutive units (Lévi-Strauss 1968:
210–11; Thompson 1981: 154).
5. ‘The constitution of the self is contemporaneous with the constitution of the
meaning.’ On the one hand, self-understanding passes through the detour
of understanding the cultural signs in which the self documents and forms
itself. On the other hand, understanding the text is not an end in itself; it
mediates the relation to himself of a subject who, in the short circuit of im-
mediate reflection, does not find the meaning of his own life. Thus, it must
be said, with equal force, that reflection is nothing without the mediation
of signs and works, and that explanation is nothing if it is not incorporated
as an intermediary stage in the process of self-understanding (Thompson
1981: 158–59).
6. ‘Appropriation loses its arbitrariness insofar as it is the recovery of that
which is at work, in labour, within the text. What the interpreter says is a
re-saying which reactivates what is said by the text.… I shall say that appro-
priation is the process by which the revelation of new modes of being … gives
the subject new capacities for knowing himself. If the reference of a text is
the projection of a world, then it is not in the first instance the reader who
projects himself. The reader is rather broadened in his capacity to project
himself by receiving a new mode of being from the text itself’ (Thompson
1981: 164, 192).
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7. The narrative, classified Vdr-02 in our Corpus of Marat . hī Katha, was
collected by Jayraj Rajput at Khed Shivapur (taluk Haveli, district Pune,
Maharashtra) in October 1992 from elders of the local community of Mati
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Vad . ars.
8. The narrative, classified Vdr-17, was collected by Datta Shinde in June 1996
from Shivalinga Vadekar, at Sonari (taluk Paranda, district Usmanabad,