New highlights added November 25, 2025 at 8:40 AM
- Tomlinson adds that culture is essentially semiotic and—in my interpretation of his thought—that transmission cannot be eliminated from meaning in a cultural system. (Location 511)
- The symbolic bond or “function” is the basis of the well-known Lacanian slogan that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” (Location 550)
- The symbolic has often been taken to authorize French theory’s “linguistic turn,” the sense that language predominates in the order of signs and even in cognition itself. (Location 553)
- The philosopher Bernard Stiegler, who holds that humans are the technical animal, that there is no humanity without technology, has recently argued that digital technologies are a form of simultaneous “grammatization”—making continuous orders discrete—and “proletarianization” (making nonlabor into labor). What he calls the “automatic” or “control” society is a deployment of the symbolic order that engenders a symbol-specific “misery” in which “the user becomes a function of the system he is using.” (Location 561)