semiotics of mixed signs (excerpt)

The following is an excerpt from Livitnyi's ,Imponderabilia Semiotica, a bilingual Latin-Spanish edition of which was prepared by Hélène Gordon-Szábo, appearing first as a commemorative pamphlet for a workshop on parapractical and laptic semiology held at the Faculty of Letters of the Universidad de Buenos Aires in December 1963.

1.13

We deem it unnecessary to dwell here on the nature of the error, having it been already amply discussed in analytic philosophy. However it may be important here to acknowledge the centrality of this issue to the research of communications both among human and non-human elements. It has been established previously in the foundational debates of the emerging discipline of cybernetics that the greatest challenge in systems-creation is the fabrication of hodologies facilitating errors of the greatest margin possible. In this context it has been noted by the eminent mathematician and cybernetics proponent, the late Dr Neumann that "... natural organisms are constructed to maker errors as inconspicuous, as harmless, as possible. Artificial automata are designed to make errors as conspicuous, as disastrous, as possible." (Neumann 1958.) Failure to do so endangers the sustainability of a communications- and hence decision-producing system.

As students steeped in belief of the human, the proponents of so-called structural linguistics (particularly the French school) have not really paid attention to the problematic overtures advanced by the error as an analytic site. Indeed, if the French school has concentrated on the meaning of the error, it has been in terms of how the error disrupts the possibility of communication. The twin disciplines of parapractic and laptic semiologies take as their object the ways in which these seeming errors generate new possibilities of understanding despite, besides, or in ignorance of such errors; how seemingly fatal near-misses are bridged in the abyssal linguistics of the misunderstanding.