An integrational approach to colonial semiosis

Brokaw, Galen. 2021. "An Integrational Approach to Colonial Semiosis." In The Routlege Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492-1898), edited by Yoland Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias, pp. 99-116. London: Routledge. 5 AN INTEGRATIONAL APPROACH TO COLONIAL SEMIOSIS Galen Brokaw Introduction The reconceptualization of literary studies as cultural studies that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s expanded the field to include “non-literary” texts under the umbrella concepts of text and discourse and more general cultural products and practices. For Latin American colonial studies, Peter Hulme articulated this shift away from the strictly “literary” most explicitly in Colonial Encounters (1986) with his definition of colonial discourse as “an ensemble of linguistically-based practices unified by their common deployment in the management of colonial relationships” and that combines “the most formulaic and bureaucratic of official documents … with the most non-functional and unprepossessing of romantic novels … .” Subsequently Walter Mignolo proposed a further expansion from “colonial discourse” to “colonial semiosis” in order to reflect an even broader field to include signifying practices that take place through any given medium or sign carrier (1989; 1995). This includes Mesoamerican scripts, the Inca quipu, and other indigenous media. With the exception of Maya logo-syllabic script, indigenous American sign systems are usually classified as “not writing” along with all other sign systems that do not fit the traditional definition of writing as a representation of oral language. Societies that do not employ systems that qualify as writing are relegated to the speciously homogenous category of the oral (see Ong 2012; Goody 2000). Sign systems developed by so-called “oral” societies demand a theoretical reconceptualization that is attentive to the material specificity of the media upon which they do rely and their socio-economic, political, and cognitive effects. Approaching other sign systems from the perspective of materiality is particularly important for two reasons. First, all sign systems are inherently material. Even the sound waves that make up oral communication are material phenomena. Second, the material conditions under which we live and operate inevitably shape the dialogue between the way we think and the cultural, socio-economic, and political institutions that we construct. The dialogical model of media (Brokaw 2010B) provides an alternative to the orality-literacy binary. This model acknowledges the significance of the cognitive patterns and tendencies that derive from our relationship to alphabetic writing and that structure our thought; but it also provides the basis for a more nuanced understanding of the nature and effects of other types of media. But other types of sign systems also require a reconsideration of systematicity itself. Drawing on integrational linguistics, here I argue that the grammar of a sign system is the effect of communicative practices rather than the other way 99 around. Approaching sign systems from this perspective sheds new light on the true nature not only of other media but also of our own. Mesoamerican iconography One of the defining characteristics of the Mesoamerican region is the use of iconographic scripts. Mesoamerican scripts vary in many respects, but they share certain aesthetic qualities and semiotic conventions derived in many cases from common origins and/or the common cultural practices with which sign systems were integrated (Prem and Riese 1983; Urcid 2012). The mimetic nature of iconographic writing is much more accessible than the more esoteric signs of phonographic systems, but this accessibility is misleading: the mimetic imagery contains many nuances that remain either undeciphered or possibly even unrecognized as semiotic conventions. We do know that Mesoamerican societies developed a number of different iconographic genres that recorded detailed narratives, rituals, calendars, and geographic space. All signifying systems, whether alphabetic or iconographic, deploy their signifiers in particular ways that in and of themselves have significance. In the case of alphabetic script, for example, letters, newspaper articles, poems, novels, etc. all employ different formats associated with their genres independent of their content. For example, take the following pseudo-text that substitutes all letters with a generic “x”: Xx xxxxx xxx xx xxxx x xxxxxxx xx xxxxxxx xx xxxxx xx xxxxxxx xxxxx, x xxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxxx, xxxxxxx, xxxxxxxx xx xxxxxxx x xx xxxxxxx; x xx xxxxx xxx xx xxxxxxx, xxx xx xx xxxx xxx xxx xx xxxxxxx, xxx xxxxx xxxxxx, xxx xx xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx, xxxxxxxx, xx xxxxxx xxxxx, xxxxxxx x xxxxxxxxx: xxxxx xx xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xx xxxxx xxxxx, xxxxx xxx xx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxx xx xxxxx xx xxxxxxx xxxxxx. Xxxxxxxxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxxx xxxxxx, xxxx xx xxxxxx xx xxxx xxxxxx xxx xx xxxxx xxxxxxx xx xx xxxxxxxxx. This pseudo-text is modeled on a sonnet by the sixteenth-century Spanish poet Garcilaso de la Vega (Rivers 1966, 37–38), and is easily identified as a sonnet based merely on its format without the need for the actual words. For alphabetic texts, the format conveys the genre or type of text rather than any specific content. The conventional differences in format between different Mesoamerican iconographic genres is analogous to those between different alphabetic genres. Mixteca-Puebla-style ritual books such as the Codex Borgia are divided into sections that deal with different topics and exhibit unique formats. The calendar section (Figure 5.1), for example, is immediately distinguishable from that of the section on “marriage” prognostication based merely on the layout of the pages (Figure 5.2; see Anders, Jansen and Reyes García 1993, 309–322). Similar to the 100 Figure 5.1 Page from the calendar section of the Códice Borgia. Códice Borgia.Vatican Library (1993), p. 3. pseudo-poem above, these formats announce the nature of the content even without the content itself; and they condition the way the reader understands the text. Both alphabetic and iconographic scripts also employ structures to convey more specific information, but they do so in very different ways dictated by the nature of their sign systems. Aside from the layout created by line length, paragraphing, etc., the phonographic nature of alphabetic script necessarily requires the remediation or transpositioning of the temporality of oral speech into the spatiality of the material text. Alphabetic script essentially attempts to remediate individual sounds from the medium of oral speech to that of graphic signs.The relationship between the graphic signs and sounds is completely arbitrary, because sounds have no visible shape or form that can be reproduced graphically. These individual sounds convey no meaning in and of themselves, and this means that the material conventions convey no meaning either. Alphabetic texts do organize their contents according to higher level sequences (words, sentences, sequences of sentences, sequences of events, etc.), but the material form of the text does 101 Figure 5.2 Page from the marriage prognostication section of the Códice Borgia. Códice Borgia.Vatican Library (1993), p. 58. not encode these sequences. In other words, the discursive conventions at that level are not transpositioned into the material conventions of the medium. The iconographic mode of Mesoamerican scripts, on the other hand, inherently remediates the natural and social world by virtue of its mimetic nature, and it also employs multiple conventions and codes, what I have called polygraphy or semiotic heterogeneity (Brokaw 2010a, 120– 123; 2010b, 118–120; see also Marcus 1992: 17–27). The heterogeneity of iconographic writing results in a different type of semiosis with different effects. Mesoamerican narrative histories such as the Mixteca-Puebla-style Codex Nuttall, for example, rely upon units of signification that correspond to places, people, and events. The first page of what is known as the 8-Deer narrative (Figure 5.3), illustrates the nature of this genre of iconography. The narrative begins in the lower right-hand corner, and follows a vertical boustrophedon pattern indicated by the red lines.The first scene establishes the place where the narrative begins: the black and white checkered base of the temple is the signifier for Tilantongo.The next scene represents the marriage of 102 Figure 5.3 First page of the 8-Deer narrative. Códice Zouche-Nuttall. British Museum, Ms. 39671 (1992), p. 42. Lady 9-Eagle/Wreath of Cacao Flowers and Lord 5-Lizard/Rain-Sun. In this scene, the position of the figures seated and facing each other, and perhaps the hand gestures, indicate that they get married.The following three figures represent the birth of this couple’s children. In the final figure on the page, another woman named Lady 11-Water sits on a stool similar to that of Lady 9-Eagle.This is Lord 5-Lizard’s second wife followed by their children on the next page (Códice Zouche-Nuttall. British Museum, Ms. 39671 (1992); The Codex Nuttall 1975, 42–43). Each of the marriage and birth scenes are dated using a day glyph and a series of small circles corresponding to a calendrical number between one and thirteen. In some cases the year is also specified with a glyph and number superimposed over what looks like the letter “A” intertwined with a rectangle. The day sign and number function both as the date of birth and as one of the names of the individual. Other styles of Mesoamerican iconography, such as that evident in the Codex Xolotl (Figure 5.4), employ different conventions and demonstrate the highly versatile nature of this sign system. These iconographic texts convey meaning through both conventions specific to the sign system and conventions transpositioned from the social and/or natural world represented.The boustrophedon format of the Codex Nuttall, for example, is a medium-specific innovation developed in a dialogue between the message conveyed, the nature of the sign system, and the material constraints of the codex form. The people and objects represented are highly conventionalized, but to some extent they are transpositioned from the socio-political world which has its own conventions. The mimetic iconography remediates these social conventions in combination with 103 Figure 5.4 Lámina 1 of the Códice Xolotl. Biblioteque Nacionale de France (1996). media-specific conventions. The spatial configuration of the two figures conveys the marriage, and the simple presence of individuals following this marriage all make evident the meaning of the text even without the specific identity of the individuals involved. In other words, the configuration and order of the images constitute an iconographic morphology and syntax that encodes semantic information within the structure itself. If we were to create a pseudo-text based on the page from the Codex Nuttall as I have done above using a sonnet by Garcilaso de la Vega, the reader could actually glean some of the content as opposed to merely the genre of the text. Andean Quipu Andean societies also developed a number of different sign systems that conveyed different types of information, but the knotted string device called quipu (also spelled khipu) has garnered the most attention as a medium that functioned in a way analogous to writing (Figure 5.5). This device consists of a relatively thick main cord to which thinner cords are attached and organized into groupings that correspond to information categories and organizational structures (Murra 1975). These cords were made primarily from dyed or undyed cotton or camelid fiber. In most cases, knots tied into the cords of Inca-era quipus consistently employ a decimal place system to record numbers. But some quipus or sections of quipus also exhibit knots that do not conform to the regular conventions of the decimal place system (Urton 2002, 184–191). 104 Figure 5.5 Inca Quipu. Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú. The quipu clearly exhibits a high degree of semiotic heterogeneity: we know that Inca quipus relied upon the decimal system, colors, and cord configuration; they also may have employed cord attachment direction (Conklin 1982, 266; Urton 2003, 69–74) and knot direction (Urton 1994, 2003, 74–88), which Sabine Hyland has documented in a quipu board from late colonial times (Hyland et al. 2014). We could create a representation of a pseudo-quipu analogous to the pseudo-poem given above, but as in the case of Mesoamerican iconography, the format of the cords on a quipu is not merely ancillary. It would certainly indicate the genre of the quipu, but for at least some types of quipu, it may also inherently reveal the content which appears in an order dictated by a hierarchy of ethnocategories (Murra 1975). Similar to iconographic morphology and syntax, the format itself encodes information rather than merely packaging it. A media-studies approach to the orality-literacy binary These indigenous American sign systems challenge what we think we know about the nature of representation and the semiotics of secondary media, and they demand a reconceptualization that deconstructs the writing/non-writing and orality/literacy binaries. The role that colonial Latin American literary/cultural studies plays in this project was announced by Mignolo’s call to expand and reconceptualize our field as colonial semiosis; but long before this shift from literature to discourse to semiosis, orality-literacy studies, and more specifically media studies which arose from it, drew attention to the importance of the materiality of the medium of communication. The distinction here is not between the material and the non-material, because strictly speaking oral language is also a material phenomenon. The essential idea that informs the field of media studies is that the material nature of the medium affects the nature of human cognition. 105 However, the nature of the medium does not necessarily take into account the nature of the practice or practices associated with it. The thought, language, and discourses of “oral” societies exhibit certain characteristics by virtue of their primary orality. And the thought, language, and discourses of “literate” societies tend to exhibit different characteristics that are attributed to the cognitive effects of literacy. However, Brian Street has argued that at this general level, this distinction homogenizes both oral and written traditions in ways that obscure differences between diverse oral and literate practices which are determined in both cases more by ideology than the nature of the medium (Street 1984). I would argue that this does not mean that such dichotomies and categorizations are always unjustified but rather that they must be understood as contingent and heuristic rather than essential and definitive (Brokaw 2010b). Keeping this contingency in mind, the heuristic validity of the orality-literacy dichotomy is not based merely on the difference between oral discourse and alphabetic writing per se. First and foremost, it is based on the fundamental difference between ephemeral, dynamic media on the one hand and more or less static and permanent media on the other (Harris 1995, 43-4).The field of media studies recognizes that the nature of any given medium has cognitive implications, whether ephemeral or permanent. In other words, even different types of ephemeral media such as radio and television have implications for both individuals and societies. Ephemerality and permanence are qualities with effects or tendencies that can be generalized in many, if not all, cases. This perspective does not deny the significance of alphabetic literacy as opposed to so-called primary orality, but it places this difference within a much broader context rather than a narrow dichotomy. The development of phonography, particularly alphabetic systems, has important implications that often justify a conceptual distinction for certain purposes. But defining writing strictly as phonography creates a binary opposition between phonographic writing and nonphonographic sign systems that obfuscates the significance of the latter.This is particularly problematic, because it corresponds to, and is the basis for, the value-laden distinction between so-called oral cultures and literate civilizations. It is for this reason that Elizabeth Hill Boone argues for a much broader definition of writing that includes scripts like Mesoamerican iconography (Boone 2000, 29–30). Even with this broader definition of writing, we still need a theoretical model that would account for the observable differences in function and effect of different sign systems. Elsewhere, I have argued for the extension of the media-studies model to other societies that have been considered to be oral in spite of the fact that they employ communicative media (Brokaw 2010a). Descriptions of indigenous American societies (and many other non-European cultures) tend to emphasize difference over similarity, and descriptions of other cultures commonly rely upon the perceived presence or absence of writing as one of the primary bases for this difference. But the dichotomization of societies into the oral and the literate fails to acknowledge the important functions and effects of other sign systems and their media. The identification of a society as “oral” defines it in terms of what it is not rather than in terms of what it is (Brokaw 2010b, 121). The media-studies approach avoids this problem as well as the implied value judgments identified by Boone, because in principle it gives equal weight to all sign systems. Sign systems other than those traditionally defined as writing have an interest in and of themselves for epigraphers, anthropologists, sociologists, and media-studies scholars, and even for “literary” scholars insofar as they constitute a form of discourse broadly conceived. For “literary” scholars who conceive of their field based on the fact that “literature” derives etymologically from the Latin “littera” (letters), this means that technically anything recorded using letters falls within the realm of “literature.” The essential idea behind the notion of “literature” as opposed to other forms of written language was at least in part that form is somehow more important or central to literary works (i.e., novels, poems, stories). Some literary works certainly 106 foreground form in ways that other genres of discourse do not, but this is not always the case. Conversely, form often functions in literary genres in the same way as any other “non-literary” genre. To put it another way, all uses of written language are in this sense literary, because they must rely upon form. And other sign systems are just as inherently dependent upon formal conventions. Any given medium has numerous features or characteristics that are available for use as formal signifying conventions. Even differences between oral languages illustrate not only the variability of formal conventions but also the variability of the resources available that can be formally conventionalized in the medium of oral speech. Tonal languages like Chinese and Zapotec, for example, avail themselves of tone in ways that non-tonal languages do not. In addition to the more formalized conventions of verbal language, communicative practices integrate a variety of paralinguistic conventions that qualify, supplement, and in some cases replace, verbal language. The use of these paralinguistic conventions creates a dynamic that impacts the way language functions. The remediation of oral language into alphabetic script eliminates some of its linguistic and all of its paralinguistic conventions and practices, because they are either impractical to transposition into graphic inscription or incompatible with this medium. The elimination of these paralinguistic conventions isolates verbal language from all of the other elements of the communicative operation that worked in conjunction with it.The verbal discourse that remains after this isolation is not able to convey meaning with the same level of efficacy. Thus, alphabetic writing attempts to compensate for what was lost through the development and use of mediumspecific conventions in order to meet the needs of the communicative functions that it is designed to perform. For example, the consistent spacing between every word in alphabetic writing does not have an analogous oral convention in regular speech. To run most words together with intermittent spaces to indicate pauses would better reflect the conventions of normal oral discourse; and early manuscripts often do not separate words using spaces in a regular way. The convention of word spacing resolves possible confusions that may arise in written script precisely because it is visual instead of auditory. Furthermore, the emic nature of word spacing facilitates more rapid comprehension, because it better reflects how readers conceive of the semantic units of language in their heads. Additionally, the disembodied nature of alphabetic writing requires written language to be more thorough and explicit than the verbal language of oral communication because meaning cannot be created and negotiated as part of the communicative interaction itself. Rather, the writer must create meaning independently from, and prior to, the act of reading and in such a way that the reader can recreate more or less the same meaning based solely on the written text. In the European medieval and early modern periods, most of these conventions had not been standardized in written script. Word spacing, capitalization, and punctuation all occurred often in free variation, particularly in notarial documents. Print conventions inherently involved a move toward a more standardized set of conventions both in terms of page format and the other non-semantic conventions of spacing, capitalization, and punctuation. Print facilitated the creation of a much larger reading public, but the nature of the printing process also concentrated the production of texts in fewer hands.The size of the reading public had an inverse relationship to the number of text producers. The material nature of printing already standardizes alphabetic script across a large number of texts eliminating the idiosyncrasies of individual scribes. The concentration of text production in the hands of printers resulted in even further standardization of textual conventions. Today these conventions have become explicit rules that are learned as an inherent part of reading and writing, and once learned they feel natural. They do not convey information in the 107 Galen Brokaw same way as words, sentences, or entire texts, but they serve to shape or condition the meaning of these semantic conventions. The layout of a text such as the pseudo-sonnet given above creates a certain disposition in the reader to identify and interpret it in a particular way. Punctuation can change the meaning of an entire sentence in any kind of text. The popular meme “Let’s eat, Grandpa” v. “Let’s eat Grandpa” is a humorous example. But missing or misplaced commas have been at the heart of more serious communicative interactions as well. In one recent lawsuit, drivers for a dairy in Maine won a judgment based on the absence of a comma in Maine’s law governing overtime pay (O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy 2017). The role of these conventions demonstrates the way in which alphabetic writing attempts to compensate for the impoverishment that takes place when language is remediated into alphabetic script. Interpersonal communication is a multi-dimensional activity that integrates not only different media (e.g., verbal language, facial expressions, gestures), but also different features of these media (e,g., tone, rate of speech). Alphabetic writing compensates for what is lost in oral communication to the extent that it can through the use of conventions such as the standardization of discrete sentence structures and punctuation. The potential need for such compensation arises whenever a sign system is remediated, that is to say transpositioned from one medium (e.g., orality) to another (e.g., writing). We witness this same phenomenon in the digital age. Anyone who communicates by email or text message knows that it is often notoriously difficult to interpret the intended meaning of alphabetic texts because tone and other contextual indicators are lost. This is in part what drove the development of emojis. A sentence with a smiling face at the end often conveys a very different message than one without this emoji. This development occurred not just because alphabetic writing was insufficient. The advent of electronic media moved, or extended, a lot of interpersonal commu-nication that used to take place in face-to-face or phone conversations into emails and text messages. This new medium was not only conducive to new conventions but also actually required innovations and adaptations in order to effectively transposition previously analog communicative tasks into the new digital media. This reference to “transpositioning” or “remediation” should not be understood to mean that alphabetic language merely recreates more enduring versions of ephemeral oral discourses. Alphabetic writing may certainly transcribe the strictly verbal component of oral discourses, but that is not what it was originally designed to do. The impetus and development of writing arose from the need to communicate or remember information across time and space. But the initial objects and activities that would eventually give rise to alphabetic writing were not representations of language at all (Schmandt-Besserat 1992; Daniels 1996, 3). And when they began to represent language, the communicative functions that writing fulfilled would have been new and unique to the medium. The record of numerical data inscribed in early writing systems, for example, had no corresponding oral counterpart. To take a more modern example, letter writing had no oral equivalent. It is a genre of written discourse that was made possible by, and is unique to, the alphabetic sign system and the medium of ink and paper. Text messaging has a much more direct oral counterpart, but even so this communicative practice inevitably develops its own unique conventions specific to the medium. In this discussion I have attempted to maintain a distinction between sign system and medium or what Mignolo calls sign carrier (Mignolo 1995). In many cases, these are two separate things: alphabetic writing, for example, is a sign system that is not necessarily bound by a particular medium. The qualities mentioned above of ephemerality and permanence are features of media rather than sign systems. Alphabetic writing can be performed on a computer, in the sand, or in the air using gestures or smoke. Thus it is not the sign system that makes writing more or less permanent. It is the medium or sign carrier. The term orality refers metonymically to oral 108 An integrational approach to colonial semiosis language, but the more literal meaning of orality as medium is actually more appropriate from the theoretical perspective of media studies. The nature of the sign system is also significant, but it must be understood in the context of the medium that supports it. In the same way that different c onventions o f o ral d iscourse h ave different effects, not only different media but also variations of the same medium have different potential effects independent of the sign system. This is the essential idea of Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum “The medium is the message” (McLuhan 1994, 7–21). So in the move from handwritten manuscripts to printed books, the sign system remains the same, but the medium undergoes changes that have important effects (Eisenstein 1980) inflected by ideology (Street 1984). In the recent past, the advent of computers transformed the way alphabetic texts were written and read; and more recently, cell phones and tablets have led to an even more radical transformation in the nature of alphabetic communication. Unlike traditional alphabetic genres, one can argue that text messaging has a counterpart in interpersonal oral dialogue. Nevertheless, they are not the same. Texting is a kind of digital version of an oral conversation, but it is a unique genre specific to the digital medium with its own conventions. Writing or printing on paper disembodies language and separates the addresser from the addressee in both time and space. Texting also disembodies language, but it separates the addresser from the addressee in space, not necessarily in time. The temporal immediacy of texting induces the development of a genre analogous to the oral genre of interpersonal dialogue. As in the case of written and printed language, it must compensate for what is lost when the language is disembodied, but the immediacy of the communication and the materiality of the digital medium lead to compensations very different from those that characterize graphic inscription and print. A bbreviations such as “lol,” “rofl,” “lmao,” for example, are not digital expressions of actual laughter in an analogous interpersonal dialogue. They are unique texting conventions that serve a phatic function and convey the positive disposition of the addressee toward the content of a message. Even for the period prior to the digital age, the distinction between the sign system of alphabetic writing and the medium of graphic inscription is important. The acknowledgment that the medium must be considered independent from the sign system allows for an analytical model that can correlate variations in the medium (e.g., handwriting v. print) with different effects; and this is one of the b ases for the fi eld of book history. Th e shift from hand-written manuscripts to printed books has effects that go beyond efficiency and practical utility; and the more recent development of computers and smart phones further transforms communicative practices with corresponding effects. The transformation that has been occurring in the modern digital age brings with it certain ironies. Pictography played an important role at an early stage in the development of the first writing systems (Schmandt-Besserat 1992, 120–121), and modern text messaging returns to a partial reliance upon pictography in the form of semojis as one of the techniques that compen-sates for the disembodiment of language. In a sense, some emojis reembody language pictorially in order to convey meaning, intent, or attitudes that are not normally communicated through, or are more efficient than, verbal language. So digital media begins incorporating pictorial imagery as a way of increasing the communicative effectiveness of the sign system. Rational and aesthetic modes of communication We might characterize the original move from pictorial representation to phonography as a move from a more “aesthetic” to a more “rational” mode of representation. And the incorpora-tion of pictorial imagery in modern text messaging constitutes a partial move back to a more aesthetic mode of communication. The distinction drawn here between aesthetic and rational 109 should not be understood as hierarchical or value laden; and these are not absolute descriptors. “Rational” in this context refers to the predetermined, codified semiotic conventions that convey meaning or intent. Roy Harris argues that “conceptions of human rationality vary according to the view of language adopted” (Harris 2013b, xiv); and the dominant modern view of language as a codified system of rules is the product of a rationality that derives from alphabetic literacy (Linell 2005). On the other hand, “aesthetic,” which derives from “aesthesis” meaning “sense perception,” refers here not to the question of beauty but rather to communicative practices that constitute their rules and conventions (for lack of better terms) in the act of communication. The theoretical but non-existent absolutely rational system would be an absolutely codified system that exhibited no free variation and no extraneous elements. An absolutely aesthetic practice, on the other hand, would have no predetermined rules or conventions, and would be limited at best to invoking feelings or intuitions. All sign systems lie somewhere on the continuum between these two extremes and have both rational and aesthetic dimensions. Even predominantly “rational” signing practices never exhaust the resources that their media make available. More importantly, they never operate in a completely logical and consistent way. They exhibit features that users can play or innovate with either for purely aesthetic effect or in order to modify, add to, or expand the meaning or intent that they wish to convey. This means that communication is never reducible to the rational dimension of the sign system. What I am calling the aesthetic mode of communication involves inherent and inevitable innovations that modify or add to the meaning that is constructed, even with the predetermined rules of “rational” systems. All communicative practices rely to one degree or another upon what can be described after the fact as rules and conventions.The essential question is the extent to which they operate in an aesthetic mode and constitute those rules in the act of communication versus a rational mode that relies on predetermined ones. A sign system such as alphabetic script that is based on the representation of the individual sounds of oral language must rely heavily on predetermined rules. At the most basic level, readers must learn through prior instruction the arbitrary relationship between letters and sounds. Furthermore, as explained above, the remediation of European oral languages into alphabetic script, particularly with the advent of printing in the early modern period, induced the formalization of grammatical rules and stylistic conventions that serve as the basis for the modern concept of language as linguistic system. The claim here is not that oral language employed no grammatical structures prior to writing and print but rather that such structures did not have the same force or linguistic ontology that they acquired through the formalization of official grammatical rules and conventions. Systems of grammatical rules can be abstracted from any language, but these abstractions do not feed back into linguistic practice in the same way prior to their explicit formalization as rules and conventions. Language did not exist in the same way prior to this formalization. Integrationist linguists such as Roy Harris claim that no such thing as a language exists in the first place (Harris 2013a, 25–28), but the institutionalization of grammar and style induces a change in linguistic practice. The transpositioning of oral language into alphabetic writing took the semiotic functions of communication, which had been dispersed, and concentrated them in verbal language. The isolation of the verbal component of communication induced a formalization and standardization of linguistic practice that came to be understood as a priori rules and conventions. The formalization and standardization of these rules and conventions was then projected back onto, and attributed to, oral language. This projection then serves as the basis for the metaphysical conceptualization of language as a system of rules (Linell 2005, 142–146). This perspective on language is thoroughly conditioned by alphabetic writing, and it induces the expectation that other sign systems will be similarly rational rather than aesthetic (Linell 2005, 122–123). 110 From this perspective unfamiliar sign systems present several difficulties for decipherment. Approaches to decipherment are based primarily on the assumption that communicative practices are reducible to fixed codes. In other words, they focus on the rational, analytic dimension of a sign system, and they ignore the aesthetic dimension. The first step in this process is to determine which features are “rational” or conventional and thus need deciphering and which are merely aesthetic and thus can be ignored in terms of decipherment.The assumption that the communicative practices of a sign system must conform to predetermined rules and conventions is a perspective characteristic of societies with more or less strictly codified rules and conventions. In contrast, the social, economic, and political institutions of many societies do not depend upon such strict codification. The codification of grammatical and stylistic rules that occurred with alphabetic writing might inevitably occur with any sign system that relied upon an asynchronous secondary medium that disembodied the communicative act under the same socio-economic and political conditions. But the nature of the codification would vary with the nature of the sign system, the particular nature of the disembodiment, and the social nature of the production and reception of signs. Any communicative interaction must rely to some extent upon a kind of agreement between the addresser and the addressee with regard to what signs mean and how they relate to each other. In direct, primary, or synchronous communicative interactions (e.g., face-to-face conversations), this agreement is constantly negotiated and renegotiated. The rules and conventions that can be abstracted from communicative practices are often more tendencies and inclinations than rules. It is only when institutions of power such as schools, newspapers, and publishers begin imposing and enforcing official rules that grammatical and stylistic systems take on their rigidly predetermined quality. And typically, some form of secondary medium facilitates the development of these institutions. Then the strength of such systems leads us to project back onto language a rigid systematicity that was only constituted as such by the process of abstraction and institutionalization. The more enduring nature of secondary signing practices may be more conducive to the development of more codified sign systems and their accompanying institutions, but the nature of the medium and the ideological practices associated with it contribute to the degree to which this happens. Phonographic writing is particularly prone to such codification, because it isolates the sound system at a level of specificity that requires its own differential logic independent from any meaning. In modern alphabetic societies, socio-political institutions impose rigidly codified rules of grammar and style that regulate the negotiation of meaning. This results from the interaction between the socio-political institutions, their particular ideologies, and the media through which they perpetuate themselves. In so-called more traditional societies, what signs mean and how they communicate meaning are often less determined because the institutions that regulate semiotic functions tend to be less monolithic. The signifying practices of such societies are inherently more aesthetic in the sense that they allow for more originality: they simultaneously negotiate meaning and the practices that produce it. Their communicative practices are not always as strictly governed by a priori rules; they are often more free to constitute the rules upon which communication is based in the communicative act itself. Aesthesis and rationality in indigenous American sign systems Insofar as iconographic sign systems transposition the reality and the communicative acts of everyday life, they will inherently involve aesthetic practices to a greater extent than sign systems such as alphabetic script.The mimetic nature of iconography makes it inherently more aesthetic because the relationship between signifier and referent is determined by the mimetic mode.This 111 is not to say that iconographic scripts may not have rules and conventions, whether explicitly formalized or not. The process of transpositioning the natural and social world into mimetic images will necessarily induce a certain level of reflexivity conducive to more formalized conventionalization. Elsewhere I have argued that iconography relies upon and further develops the cultural codes inherent in the images that it transpositions in ways analogous to how alphabetic script relies upon and further develops linguistic codes and conventions (Brokaw 2010b). But the mimetic nature of the medium allows for the introduction of signs and relationships between signs without necessarily the same kind of propaedeutic instruction required by sign systems in which the relationship between signifiers and referents are arbitrary. An iconographic sign system will still engage in practices that potentially can be abstracted into rules and conventions, even highly complex ones; but the nature of mimesis and the intuitive relationship between iconographic signs and their referents allow for a much more aesthetic mode of communication that maintains a role for innovation rather than relying strictly upon predetermined rules. This is one of the reasons why Mesoamerican scribes were so easily able to adapt iconographic scripts for new purposes in the colonial period. Figure 5.6, for example, presents a bill of sale in iconographic script from 1562 for a plot of land near Tomatlan, Mexico (Brokaw 1998). This particular genre did not exist in pre-Hispanic times; but even without previous familiarity with the conventions employed (which are based on pre-Hispanic practices) a basic understanding of the cultural context makes the document relatively easy to read. The plot of land is marked by four stakes at each corner. The hand icons extending from the posts on the lower and left edges signal the size of the plot. The heads of a man and a woman inside the boundaries of the plot represent the buyers.The circles represent the purchase price of ten pesos. The eight smaller circles within each peso represent tomines, the unit of currency equal to an eighth of a peso. These tomines help insure the identification of the larger circles as pesos. To the left of the plot, the first head presents the owner of the land, and the fact that his eyes are closed indicates that he is deceased. The head below him connected by a dotted line to the pesos represents the community official who administered the sale and received payment.The eight heads on the other side of the road on the right side of the page indicate members of the community who served as witnesses to the sale. This document combines pre-Hispanic conventions such as the closed eyes to represent death with colonial-era innovations that create new signs and conventions to represent new objects and phenomena such as the pesos and the principle of private land ownership. Iconographic scripts inherently lend themselves to this type of aesthetic mode, but abstract systems can do so as well. Frank Salomon has identified precisely this type of phenomenon in the staff code of the Andean village of Tupicocha (Salomon 2001). The minor political office holders in the community of Tupicocha are selected by the community for one-year terms of service. Each of the offices is associated with a staff created each year specifically for the office holder and inscribed with an identifying inscription made up of three possible symbols that can appear individually or in groupings. At community events where these office holders play a role, they lay out and organize their staffs prior to the event in order to determine the hierarchy appropriate for that particular context. Both the combination and sequence of symbols or symbol groupings corresponding to each office and the hierarchy in any given situation is highly variable. Salomon argues that contrary to the nature of most sign systems which consist of a fixed code that can produce varying messages, the Tupicocha staff system employs a variable code to produce a fixed message: the general social structure of the message will always be the same, but the configuration of signs that produce that message may vary depending on the socio-economic and political context at the time (Salomon 2001, 12–13). Salomon emphasizes the fact that the official acceptance of individual staff inscriptions at the beginning of the year 112 Figure 5.6 Tomatlan bill of sale. Lilly Library, Indiana University. and the arrangement of the staffs for specific events occur with little to no verbal language (2001, 9–11). The staff-code practice plays out in a socio-political context in which the participants are all present. As such, the nature of the practice is an interesting example of a material medium integrated into the social interactions that it is designed to support and facilitate. The Tupicocha staff code differs significantly from other sign systems, but it also demonstrates on a smaller scale the primordial nature of any given practice of signification. Essentially, signifiers are resources for the communication of intention. These signifiers originate in a 113 process that negotiates meaning. The initial innovation that produces successful communication may set precedents that develop into conventions. Institutions of power may then convert these conventions into rules; but all rules and conventions of communication (the meaning of individual words, grammar structures, stylistic conventions, and so forth) necessarily originated in a primordial conversion of pure aesthesis into semiosis.The conventionalization and institutionalization of the original practice disguises that origin, but it remains nonetheless. An understanding of the primordial nature of communication as an integrated practice as opposed to the deployment of an autonomous fixed code and the various ways in which such practices can develop (including into fixed codes) has important implications not only for approaching the work of decipherment but also for understanding what decipherment even means. Traditional epigraphy approaches decipherment under the assumption that sign systems function as fixed codes. Semiotically homogenous and asynchronous systems such as modern alphabetic script inherently tend toward the development of fixed codes, and therefore they would be highly susceptible to epigraphic analysis. And to some extent all signifying practices have “rational” elements that can be understood at any given moment as a fixed code that lends itself to an epigraphic methodology. But communicative practices that rely upon more aesthetic modes of communication are not susceptible to epigraphic analysis in the same way precisely because they are not fixed.Thus if a particular medium or sign carrier with its associated signifying system operates on the aesthetic end of the continuum, then epigraphic analysis must acknowledge the inevitably limited, incomplete, and contingent nature of its findings. This argument does not set up a strict opposition between the “rationality” of European alphabetic writing and the “aesthetics” of indigenous American signifying practices. All communicative practices and signifying systems exhibit both rational and aesthetic characteristics. The quipus employed by the Inca state appears to have functioned in a highly “rational” system. And Maya logo-syllabic script inherently involves at least in part a fixed code by virtue of its phonographic nature. Even the iconographic scripts of other Mesoamerican societies employed standardized conventions to one degree or another. Furthermore, literacy in Mesoamerica and the Andes was almost certainly as complex, if not more so, than it was in Europe in the sixteenth century. In modern societies with universal education, literacy tends to be seen as an either/or phenomenon. This is less true than we tend to think, but a basic knowledge of reading does give one a certain level of access to any text. This was not always the case with Mesoamerican iconography or the Inca quipu. The various genres of these media would have employed conventions in distinct ways or even different sets of conventions. Mesoamerican scribes may have been well-versed in all aspects and levels of their respective sign systems, but the masses would have exhibited different levels of literacy depending on their particular role in society. All levels of society may have understood to some extent the iconography built into public architecture, but a thorough and detailed reading of ritual books would have required more specialized knowledge. In the case of the Andes, we cannot talk about the quipu as a monolithic system either: the evidence suggests that different levels of quipu literacy operated in a wide array of social, economic, and political spheres, from shepherds who maintained records of their flocks to imperial historians who recorded histories of the Inca rulers (Brokaw 2010a, 121–23). Conclusion An understanding of both the nature of indigenous American media (their rational and aesthetic dimensions) and the nature of their particular literacies has important implications for our understanding of pre-Hispanic and colonial contexts and the methodologies that we use to 114 study them. Any project that involves “reading” an indigenous sign system must necessarily attempt to understand the interplay between rational and aesthetic practices. At the very least, it must keep in mind the difference between these two modes and the limitations of traditional epigraphic approaches. The aesthetic nature of many indigenous American signifying practices may mean that we will never be able to completely decipher them; and acknowledging this may at least help avoid both mistakenly reductive and speciously authoritative readings. Moreover, this theoretical perspective must inform our understanding of the way in which indigenous American discourses interacted with alphabetic script in the colonial period. Both European and indigenous discourses were transpositioned into the sign systems and media of the other. Mesoamerican iconographic and Andean quipu-based histories were transcribed into alphabetic script (Brokaw 1998, 2003, 2010a, 127–163). European genres such as the bill of sale (carta de venta) and the title (título) were produced in iconographic script alongside alphabetic versions (Brotherston et al. 1997; Brokaw 1998). And confessions and religious prayers were encoded on quipu (Harrison 2002; Charles 2007; Brokaw 2010a, 226–234). This transpositioning from one medium into another always results in a transformation.Thus, we must be attentive to the shifts that occur when this happens and to the socio-cultural and political contexts that inform the processes of both production and reception of such texts. Equally important, however, is the way that such an understanding sheds light on the true nature of our own signifying practices. The codification of conventions into rules induced by the nature of alphabetic writing and the institutionalization of literacy was not merely a benign transpositioning of the material phenomenon of oral language into the materiality of ink and paper. The voluminous scholarship on literacy, print, and other kinds of media elucidates the powerful interplay between material forms on the one hand and human cognition and socioeconomic and political institutions on the other. 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