We are most happy to have with us in Lund Prof. Jamin Pelkey, who is second term President of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics (IACS), and one of the most prominent researchers in our field! As seen from the abstract, his guest seminar will deal with the interplay of presence and absence (a central topic in phenomenology), with focus on the latter. All are warmly welcome to the room or the zoom link, from 15:00 so that we can present ourselves to our guest (and to each other). As usual, the talk will be about 60 minutes, followed by discussion. If you wish to join the post-seminar at Valvet, please send Jordan and email by March 16!

Qualia and emptiness, firstness and zero, tone and lack, iconicity and imagination, aesthetics and absence, phenomenology and relation: this list of analogous pairs identifies a network of interrelated concepts that can be summarized in the aggregate as “absential feeling”. While discussions of feeling are familiar in cognitive semiotics, discussions of absence are not. My argument is that neither can be understood without attention to the other. 

Embodiment theory and enactivism are complementary approaches to human cognition that develop out of phenomenology (Gallagher 2018, Johnson 2017). Both pay close attention to the roles of body schemas and body memories in perception, memory, movement, action, and interaction. Such accounts are helpful for understanding the nature of consciousness, but as theories of meaning, or semiotic cognition, they are incomplete. An adequate cognitive semiotics must move beyond the feeling of what happens (a la Damasio 1999) to the feeling of what’s missing. My thesis is that bodily experience becomes meaningful only when oriented to something lacking or indeterminate and ceases to be meaningful to the degree that it is oriented to something given or certain. 

My talk will develop related insights from Terrence Deacon (2012), Kalevi Kull (2022), C. S. Peirce (1898), and Iain McGilchrist (2021), in addition to my earlier work (e.g. Pelkey 2018, 2021), while turning ultimately to the thought of Laozi (c.500BCE) and Zhuangzi (c.300BCE) for illustrations of the pervasive usefulness, or necessity, of what is missing to clarify the nature of meaningful feeling as those modes of experience that are primarily oriented toward what is missing (vs. desire for certainty or effort to achieve on their own). These connections prefigure dynamics that are systematized in C. S. Peirce’s first rule of logic, which insists that meaningful thought and action can only begin and proceed with “a sense that we do not know something” (Peirce 1898: 48). In other words, meaningful information relies on absential feeling, the feeling of what’s missing. 

Deacon, Terrence. 2012. Incomplete nature: How mind emerged from matter. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Gallagher, Shaun. 2018. A well-trodden path: From phenomenology to enactivism. Filosofisk Supplement. 14(3). 42-47. 

Johnson, Mark. 2017. Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason: How Our Bodies Give Rise to Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Laozi c.500BCE. 道德經. Daode Jing. Online 溫故知新 wēn gù zhī xīn: http://wengu. tartarie.com/wg/wengu.php.

McGilchrist, Iain. 2021. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva Press.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1898[1998]. The first rule of logic. In The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. Vol. 2. (Peirce Edition Project, eds.), 42–56. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Pelkey, Jamin. 2018. Emptiness and desire in the first rule of logic. Sign Systems Studies 46(4). 467–490.

Pelkey, Jamin. 2021. Zhuangzi, Peirce, and the butterfly dreamscape: concentric meaning in the Qiwulun 齊物論. Chinese Semiotic Studies. 17(2). 255–287. 

Zhuangzi. c. 300 BCE. The Zhuangzi. Chinese Text Project. Online: https://ctext.org/zhuangzi.