Cognitive Semiotics: A New Path for Rethinking Literature and Art

Regarding the theoretical terms “sign” and “semiotics,” Zhao Yiheng has offered a careful and precise analysis. With a broad vision he surveyed and compared the definitions of scholars both Chinese and foreign, and on that basis stated his own view: “A sign is a perception that is held to carry meaning. Meaning must be expressed through signs; the function of a sign is to express meaning.” Correspondingly, he defined semiotics as “the study of meaning-activity.” Compared with earlier scholars, Zhao Yiheng’s definitions of the sign and of semiotics are more apt and concise, effectively clearing away various misconceptions. We endorse these views, and in particular his reference, within the definition, to “the perception of meaning,” which goes to the very essence of the sign. Yet in his overall account Zhao Yiheng appears to place greater weight on the sign’s use in “expressing meaning” within the process of communication. It is precisely here that our view differs somewhat from his. We take the sign, first of all, as the medium by which human beings relate to, grasp, and perceive the world; only on this basis can the communicative use of expressing meaning be generated. From this angle, the semiotics we propose considers the problem of the sign chiefly from the standpoint of cognition; it regards sign-activity at a more fundamental level, and should be called “cognitive semiotics,” drawing more nourishment from the semiotic thought of Thomas Sebeok.

Within the field of semiotics there are two principal research paths. The first is that of Ferdinand de Saussure, who took language as the paradigm for thinking about the sign—the linguistic model of semiotics. The second is that of C. S. Peirce, who, grounded in phenomenology, treated sign-activity as a triadic construction of sign (representamen), object, and interpretant—a logical-rhetorical model of semiotics. Saussure’s thought on the sign has been enormously influential: structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction all grew from it and flourished. From the 1970s and 1980s onward, Peirce’s semiotic thought has gained ever wider acceptance and gradually become the mainstream of Western semiotics. Thereafter, Chinese and Western semiotics have largely proceeded along these two paths, deepening research into existing sign theory but, more often, applying that theory concretely to various fields, extending the use of semiotics across different disciplines.

Beyond Saussure and Peirce, Thomas A. Sebeok took yet another path. Although Sebeok inherited Peirce’s semiotic thought, his point of departure had shifted significantly. He no longer placed the sign solely within the process of communication to examine sign-representation, nor confined sign-activity to human interpretation. Rather, at a more basic level, he first regarded the sign as the medium through which an organism deals with the world—as the way an organism builds a “model” to grasp the world. That is to say, he examined the generation of sign-systems from the standpoint of cognitive development. His principal theoretical position was no longer phenomenology but cognitive science; sign-representation and interpretation, in turn, rest upon the foundation of symbolic modeling. Regrettably, although Sebeok himself is held in great esteem within semiotics, his core ideas have not become an important part of the semiotic legacy. On one hand, amid the intellectual current criticizing anthropocentrism, his proposed “global semiotics” has circulated in a misread form; on the other hand, the development of neuroscience and brain science has driven cognitive science and semiotics apart, leading them to grow ever more estranged.

I.

In Western academia, cognitive science has become a much-coveted frontier discipline. With the remarkable achievements brought by the development of neuroscience and brain science—especially the substantive breakthroughs in brain-imaging technology—cognitive science has shifted from its former reliance on semiotics and increasingly turned away from it, concentrating on scientific-experimental means to probe the human brain and investigate “how the activity of neurons gives rise to subjective perception, thought, and emotion.” This, it must be said, is a great advance that contemporary technology has brought to scientific research; yet it is at the same time a theoretical regression. Neuroscience and brain science have indeed revealed the secrets of the brain’s operation, making the once-hidden, mysterious workings of the brain “visible,” displaying them intuitively on a screen and letting us know just what connections the neurons establish during cognitive activity. But for revealing human experience, perception, the unconscious and consciousness—and especially for literary and artistic activity, aesthetic activity, and cultural practice—there remains an immense, scarcely surmountable gulf.

Neuroscience and brain science can provide only important empirical material for theoretical research. To truly understand human experience, perception, the unconscious and consciousness, together with literary-artistic activity, aesthetic activity, and cultural practice, we cannot confine ourselves within the brain or the body; we must place human activity within a broader space, widening our theoretical vision to examine the process of interaction between human beings and the world, so as to understand how the two establish their connection. In fact, this connection is not direct but mediated—and within it, symbolic modeling plays the mediating role. It is precisely symbolic modeling that links human beings and the world and enables us to grasp the world. We must therefore understand just how the sign exercises its dynamic constructive function; only thus can we truly understand human experience, perception, the unconscious and consciousness, and go on to explore the mysteries of literature and art, aesthetic activity, and cultural practice. In And the Robe of Life Is for Living Things, Alva Noë points out that experience, perception, and consciousness cannot be explored from within the brain alone. As he says: “No brain-scanning technology can reveal the nature of conscious activity, because the nature of consciousness does not occur inside the brain. … Sayings such as ‘the brain alone suffices as the sufficient condition for the emergence of consciousness’ are like incantations in sorcery, not to be credited.” To break this magic spell, we must once again place the human being within the world to think through the mutual construction of the two. The sign is, first of all, a “relational model”: it is both the product constructed in the process of mutual interaction between human and world, and that which shapes the human being’s inner and outer worlds, determining the relation between the two and governing the various activities of the senses. From this we may then go on to explore literary-artistic and aesthetic activity, and indeed all cultural practice. The contemporary achievements of cognitive science will still be valued by us; they become an important resource for our theoretical inquiry and a practical fulcrum for verifying theory. This is precisely why we advocate cognitive semiotics.

Sebeok’s semiotic thought is the foundation on which we construct cognitive semiotics; at the same time, we absorb and synthesize the semiotic views of Peirce and Saussure. This is no arbitrary theoretical patchwork. In fact, what they discuss are problems at different levels: Sebeok thinks, at the most basic level, about how an organism establishes a relational model in its dealings with the world, and thereby constructs the entire system of symbolic modeling; Peirce thinks chiefly about the “triadic structure” of human sign-activity and its characteristics; and Saussure focuses on the synchronic analysis of the structure and system of linguistic signs—his “concept / sound-image” (signified / signifier), though it can also be understood as “object / sign,” is in substance examined as the “sign” as a whole, with object and interpretant bracketed off. We are therefore fully able to refine and fuse the views of these various schools. Concretely, our approach is this: we draw on Sebeok’s semiotic line of thought to discuss the genesis and evolution of modeling activity; we use Peirce’s triadic sign-structure to define sign-activity; and we use Saussure’s view of the sign to explore the distinctiveness of linguistic signs, going on to absorb J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory to elucidate the characteristics of linguistic sign-activity.

Sebeok set out from all organisms to think through the problem of symbolic modeling, expounded the symbolic-modeling system as a whole, and proposed the conception of “global semiotics.” Within it, “modeling” (imitation) is the basis on which modeling occurs. In truth, this emphasis on “imitation” still thinks the problem of the sign within a dualistic framework. Unlike Sebeok, we do not take “imitation” as the basis of symbolic modeling; rather, we directly regard modeling as a “relational model”—the organism continually adjusts its own “behavior” to adapt to the environment, thereby establishing a particular relational model, which we call “behavioral modeling.” This is a crucial correction: it lets us avoid the trap of dualistic-oppositional thinking and fundamentally changes our theoretical point of departure. We hold that an organism must rely on behavioral modeling in order to grasp its world. The close linkage between the perceptual and motor systems discovered by cognitive science confirms this very point. Only after human consciousness has been generated, within the framework of consciousness and the object of consciousness, can “imitation” in the true sense occur. It is from here that we not only diverge from Sebeok but also arrive at many new findings: we attend both to the continuity between the modeling activity of humans and that of other organisms, and—more—to the essential differences and even ruptures between them; we explore the roots of such differences and ruptures, analyze in greater depth the causes and distinct characteristics of the various signs, and on this basis set out to elucidate the profound connections between different kinds of symbolic modeling and experience, perception, intuition, cognition, consciousness, and the unconscious, and so go on to investigate the construction of the human world, human cultural practice, and literary-artistic creation. Only by grasping the developmental process and sequence of organismic modeling can we truly understand the continuity between humans and other organisms, understand what essentially distinguishes humans from animals, understand the extremely complex inner mechanisms of literary-artistic activity, aesthetic activity, and cultural practice, and offer them an entirely new interpretation.

II.

We divide the genesis of human modeling activity into three successive, mutually interpenetrating sequences: behavioral modeling, language modeling, and symbolic modeling. Behavioral modeling is the basic way every organism adapts to nature. The organism relates to nature through its own behavior, adjusts its behavior to adapt to nature, and in continual repetition constructs behavioral patterns—this is behavioral modeling, which has no need, as Sebeok would have it, to take “imitation” as its basis. In this process the organism accumulates unconscious experience and thereby forms instinct. Behavioral modeling joins the organism and its natural environment into one; the environment becomes the organism’s “biological field” or “life-field,” a natural extension of the organism’s body.

On one hand, human beings inherited and developed the behavioral modeling of organisms; on the other, owing to the distinctiveness of their own activity and the explosive growth of experience—and especially the need for collective communication—language modeling emerged. Language modeling developed on the basis of behavioral modeling: it is the classification, condensation, and abstraction of the unconscious experience shaped by behavioral modeling. It originates from behavioral modeling yet differs from it; the two are incommensurable. The move from behavioral modeling to language modeling is a leap. If behavior is necessarily bodily behavior, unable to exist independently of the body—able only to take the world into the body itself and construct an integrated “non-objective relation”—then language, by virtue of its relative independence, distinguishes the human being from the world and constructs an “objective relation” between them.

From this point on, the world begins to present itself before the human being in the manner of the human being’s objective world; a clarified world is born. At the same time, human consciousness is also born. Language, consciousness, and the object of consciousness (the objective world) are generated simultaneously.

Cognitive science, using brain-neural experiments, has made important contributions to the study of human consciousness. Speaking of consciousness, Stanislas Dehaene proposed the view that “consciousness is the sharing of information across the whole brain.” He points out that when brain-neural activity exceeds the threshold of perception, it is like a sudden avalanche, seeming to gather strength as it propagates. This process is no longer confined to point-to-point synaptic connections with neurons in neighboring regions; more importantly, it also establishes connections with neurons that have long axons—neurons that, via the corpus callosum, cross the two cerebral hemispheres, project onto one another, link tightly together, and form a whole-brain communication system of shared information. “When all the information converges, conscious perception arises. The cell assemblies encoding this conscious content are distributed throughout the brain, and the fragments of relevant information refined by different brain regions can be integrated because all the neurons, through long-axon neurons, remain synchronized in a top-down manner.” Dehaene’s “whole-brain information sharing” is, to be sure, a momentous scientific discovery, yet it still remains at the level of a neural description of conscious states; to truly crack the riddle of consciousness, deeper discussion is required. We hold that the key factor causing different brain regions to establish long-distance connections and information to converge upon one another is “language.” In the process of language’s formation, on one hand the subliminal sensory experiences from different brain regions are projected onto and condensed into language; on the other, the brain’s language-function areas are simultaneously formed. Thus the human brain not only establishes manifold links with language—which possesses materiality and externality—but also, through the corpus callosum, establishes long-distance internal connections between the left and right hemispheres, converging all information into “whole-brain information sharing” and rising to the threshold of consciousness. The process of language modeling is also the process of generating consciousness and its object. The conception of cognitive semiotics can explain not only the relation between consciousness and “whole-brain information sharing,” but also, very well, the “split-brain experiments” that Dehaene’s theory of consciousness finds hard to explain: a “split-brain” patient, having lost most of the neural conduction between the left and right hemispheres, still possesses the capacity for consciousness, precisely because language assumes the projective function of whole-brain information sharing.

The human sensory and motor nervous systems are closely interrelated. Suppose the information received by the senses remained only within the interaction of the sensory and motor nerves, without forming a connection with the language area; then such sensation would still be fragmentary, still below the threshold of consciousness, and behavior would belong to unconscious instinct. Only language possesses the function of classifying, condensing, and abstracting experience; only it can, through either the brain’s internal or external channels, form whole-brain information sharing and construct human consciousness. Language is the core element that condenses and regulates all kinds of information; it becomes the indispensable basic condition of conscious and cognitive activity.

Consciousness is consciousness about an object. Language won for human beings the capacity for objectification, and thereby endowed language itself with the capacity for symbolization. Language can not only set various things up as objects to be regarded, but also attempts to offer an interpretation of the meaning of things, so that the thing too becomes a sign expressing meaning. Language can further take human behavior itself (action, posture, expression) as an object of consciousness to be interpreted; and because behavior constructs unconscious experience, it necessarily embodies unconscious experience and becomes a representation of it—becomes a distinctive sign-activity, which we call “behavior-language.” “Language is regarded as the coding that turns behavioral potential into meaning potential; or, it is the means of expressing what the human organism ‘can do’ in the process of interaction—a means that turns what one ‘can do’ into what one ‘can express.’” From this angle, although language modeling is indeed founded on behavioral modeling and is the accumulation, condensation, and sublimation of the unconscious experience obtained through behavioral modeling, behavior as a sign in the true sense—namely, behavior-language—is precisely something that arises after the birth of language (or consciousness); it is the fruit of the speech-act’s objectification and symbolization of behavior. Human beings thus simultaneously enjoy sign-activities of every kind: speech-act, behavior-language, and all other sign-activities.

In fact, at the very moment language objectifies and symbolizes a thing, behavioral modeling has long since established a relation between self and thing. To be precise, behind any thing’s transformation into a sign lie two kinds of modeling activity: behavioral modeling and language modeling. For just this reason, all other sign-activities can be explained through the coordinated operation of behavior-language (behavioral modeling) and speech-act (language modeling). We therefore call behavior-language and speech-act “primary signs,” and the other signs “secondary signs.” At this point we should also make an appropriate correction to Peirce’s triadic relation of sign, object, and interpretant: the “interpretant” is not, as Peirce held, single; rather, two interpretants of utterly different natures coexist—namely, speech-act and behavior-language—which together constitute an irreducible field of tension.

Speech-act and behavior-language are the two most proper, primary modes of human sign-activity; between them there is both continuity and rupture. Only when we bring the whole relation between human and world into our field of study can we truly understand the essence of the sign and its characteristics; and only when we regard the sign as the medium of the mutual relation between human and world can we understand the human unconscious and consciousness, and discover the link between unconscious experience and behavioral modeling, and between consciousness and language modeling. Between human and world there exist two most basic relational models: through behavioral modeling the human deals with the world and constructs a “non-objective relation” (the fusion of self and thing), shaping and sedimenting unconscious experience for itself; through language modeling the human deals with the world and constructs an “objective relation” (the distinction of self and thing) and human consciousness. These are the two ways in which humans grasp the world: the former manifests as experience, intuition, and apprehension; the latter as observation, analysis, and cognition, and on this basis reflection, upon which the human spirit and reason are founded. The relation between human and world is at once monistic and dualistic.

Between human and world, then, two modes of connection coexist—mutually distinct yet interwoven, mutually influencing and mutually convertible. Behind sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, both these kinds of modeling activity are simultaneously implied. All the other manifold signs are founded upon behavioral modeling and language modeling; they are the fruits of a twofold construction, and can be interpreted through the two-dimensional tension structure of these two primary signs. From this, human beings use all kinds of signs to grasp and interpret the world, and likewise rely on all kinds of signs to engage in cultural practice and create the aesthetic world of literature and art. Sign-activity builds a bridge between human and world; we can not only study sign-activity itself, but also, by means of the various signs—especially the primary signs—explore all human practical activity, explore the human inner and outer worlds, and explore the myriad possible worlds.

III.

The “Autumn Floods” chapter of the Zhuangzi tells this story. Zhuangzi, seeing fish swimming in a stream, exclaimed with feeling: “The minnows swim out so leisurely—this is the joy of fish.” His companion Huizi disagreed and retorted: “You are not a fish—how do you know the joy of fish?” The two argued without resolution. In truth, Zhuangzi was using this story to show that human beings have different ways of regarding things. For our part, we hold that behind these two different ways of looking lie sign-activities of different orientations: behavior-language and speech-act. Anyone simultaneously enjoys these two primary modes of signification: one can both fuse with the fish to experience the fish’s joy, and take the fish as an object to observe, keeping a rational distance from the object; and the two ways can interpenetrate, their emphasis shifting freely. One both experiences and cognizes, and so grasps one’s world. This is a two-dimensional structure of perpetually shifting tension, at every moment in a state of mutual transition.

Culture is the fruit of human sign-activity. Because all signs are doubly constructed by behavior-language and speech-act, all cultural activity can ultimately be interpreted through the coordinated operation of these two. John R. Searle once offered a penetrating analysis of the structure of human civilization. Setting out from the “declarative speech-act,” he elucidated just how “institutional facts” come to be constructed, thereby revealing the inner mechanism of the development of human civilization. Searle’s exposition, it must be said, is rigorously logical and exceedingly incisive. He proudly remarks: “Once you understand the power of declarative speech-acts to create institutional reality—the power to create governments, universities, marriage, private property, money, and all other institutional realities—you can see that social reality, like the language used to create it, has a simple and ingenious formal structure.” Yet the picture of human civilization that Searle expounds seems more like an institutional cage built out of cold reason. In fact, Searle falls into precisely the malady of linguistic centrism. The declarative speech-act, with its dual tendency whereby “discourse adapts to reality and reality adapts to discourse,” does indeed play a leading role in the process of creating institutional facts; but the institutional fact itself cannot do without custom. The earliest institutional facts were customs. An institutional fact is not established out of nothing merely by a declarative speech-act; it is built on the basis of rational reflection upon custom—and custom is ritualized, structured behavior, that is, behavior-language. Therefore any institutional fact is inseparable from the joint operation of both behavior-language and speech-act; only, as the human capacity for reason develops, the declarative speech-act comes to play an ever more important role. In the evolution of human civilization, custom is continually eroded and reshaped by institutional facts, and behavior and behavior-language are also continually disciplined and remolded by institutional facts. This, however, is only one aspect of the development of civilization. The creation of institutional facts cannot but weigh the relation between external interest and self-purposiveness. The mark of a society’s degree of civilization is that the establishment of institutional facts leans ever more toward the human being’s own purposes, becoming ever more humane, ever more simplified, ever more conducive to the unfolding of human potential—and behind this, behavior-language plays a corrective role. From this we are not hard put to discover the inner mechanism by which, in the construction of human civilization, behavior-language and speech-act act upon each other.

The two-dimensional tension structure between behavior-language and speech-act, though its relation shifts continually, nevertheless exhibits different dominant tendencies for different peoples, thereby producing national cultures of distinct character. One could say that the structure of the relation between behavior-language and speech-act is the “cultural gene” of a particular people; the tension and dominant tendency between the two fundamentally determine the distinctiveness of a national culture. Take, for instance, the family and clan ideas of the Han people, their emphasis on interpersonal relations and customs, the extraordinary, lofty significance they accord to “ritual propriety,” the way they place “doing” before “knowing,” their habit of “crossing the river by feeling for the stones” (intuitive experience), and the notion of the “unity of heaven and humanity”; whereas the individuality, rational subjectivity, logical-thinking tendency, scientific spirit, and contractual spirit pursued by Western peoples—all such differences cannot but be closely related to the characteristics of the two-dimensional tension relation built by behavior-language and speech-act. Cultural particularity is determined by its dominant tendency.

The distinctiveness of literary-artistic activity lies in this: it is the deep fusion of behavior-language and speech-act. In literary activity, when a work adopts what Searle calls the “fictive speech-act”—bracketing the vertical link between utterance-intention and reality, and constructing an imagined, fictional world by horizontal convention—the repression of real life is annulled, the potential slumbering in the deep unconscious is released, the memory of behavior-language wins the occasion to gush forth freely and fuses deeply with speech-act. Thus an aesthetic realm that goes to the heart of human existence and lived experience—one in which we are immersed and by which we are deeply enchanted—is displayed in an instant. What people call the poetic, the literary, the aesthetic, springs precisely from this deep fusion. In literary activity, the distinctive relation between behavior-language and speech-act—deeply fused yet opposite in nature—has already destined literature itself to a multiplicity of facets. Other kinds of artistic activity can be understood in the same way. When we examine the problems of literature and art from the standpoint of cognitive semiotics, their self-contradictory, both-this-and-that distinctive qualities, the mysterious creative power of the activity, and the hard-to-fathom flavor, spirit-resonance, atmosphere, empathy, synesthesia, the a priori, the sense of the common—and even the distinctive forms of classical Chinese literary theory—can all be more clearly interpreted.

As for literature and art constructing a possible world: this world runs parallel to the real world, and literature and art thereby enjoy independence and autonomy. But because all signs—especially behavior-language and speech-act—are themselves produced from human social activity, the need for interpersonal communication compels them to follow “social conventions,” which inevitably stamp them with a social imprint. Social convention stands at the intersection of historical inheritance and social relations, forming an extremely complex relational network that cannot but be shaped by complex and changing social relations; conversely, the established social convention in turn distinguishes different groups and constructs the social order. Social convention most fully embodies the structural features of a particular society, and also profoundly reveals the historical content within an individual’s character. It is precisely this that becomes the inner bridge connecting the possible world of literature and art with the real world, and through this bridge reacts upon social reality. The long-standing disputes over the independence and the sociality of literature and art, the aesthetic and the utilitarian, the spiritual and the bodily, the rational and the sensuous, can at last be resolved within the theoretical horizon of cognitive semiotics.

The normativity to which a sign, as a sign, is subject is often not single but plural, encompassing the two poles of the natural and the social. Even a natural sign obeys not only natural normativity; once a sign enters social communication, it cannot but bear a social brand, cannot but accept, to some degree, the discipline of social convention. “Meaning is a social act, conditioned by social structure. Our habits of expression refer to the habits of expression of a group of people similar to ourselves, and this group is the reference group that defines our semiotic society. Anyone who, in the course of a single life, moves within the same city from one social group to another—for example, from a middle-class family to the working class, or the reverse—knows that in this process he must gradually learn to express different things.” M. A. K. Halliday correctly points out the relation between sign-meaning and social structure; here, the “habits of expression of a group” of which he speaks are in substance what we call “social convention.” Social convention is formed within social groups; it is precisely the medium among social structure, social order, and individual behavior—both constraining individual behavior and the expression of meaning, reflecting particular social relations, and in turn influencing and adjusting social structure and order. Louis Pierre Althusser’s “ideology” and Michel Foucault’s “cultural power” operate chiefly by way of altering social convention so as to covertly manipulate the various sign-activities and reshape the human body and behavior. In particular, once we attend to the complex relation between behavior-language and threefold normativity—the normativity of life, social convention, and intellectual normativity—we gain not only a deeper understanding of the special connection between literature-and-art and social reality, of the riotous multiplicity of the possible worlds of literature and art, of the historicity of literature and art themselves, and of the evolutionary laws of the literary-artistic world, but we are also able to offer a new analysis of the forms of human social life and culture. Realist fiction, romantic fiction, fairy tale and fable, the literature of the absurd, gods-and-demons fiction and science fiction—the particularity of the possible worlds they construct is rooted precisely in the structural relations of the three normativities and the shifts in their dominant factors.

Cognitive semiotics opens a brand-new path of thought for inquiry into literary-artistic activity, aesthetic activity, and cultural practice, and lays a more solid interpretive foundation. The leap Western academia made from a theory of language to a theory of the sign originally offered them a most favorable opportunity to shake off linguistic centrism and dualistic thinking. Unfortunately, the nightmare of language still entangles them: in their eyes, linguistics is the paradigm of semiotics, and any sign can be interpreted in a single, language-based way. Giorgio Agamben says: “The semiotic and the semantic are not, in essence, two realities, but two transcendental limits, both defined by human infancy. The sign is nothing other than the pure language of nature before the human being babbles—a language humans share in order to speak, yet the Babel of infancy forever eludes them.” It is precisely this one-sided emphasis on the continuity between sign and language—a misreading—that holds them firmly confined within the cage of language. Even when they wish to break out by way of the “body” to escape linguistic centrism, rational centrism, and dualistic thinking, in practice they are bound to fail, because the body of which they speak still belongs to the “object of cognition” and needs language to interpret it. In their eyes, language is the omnipotent “meta-sign” that can interpret everything single-handedly. This is in fact a castration of the body, a maiming of life, a disregard for the richness of experience. The body can only be a body situated within the world; life is, first of all, an active, acting body. It is precisely behavior that links body and world, that creates life and shapes the human body, that shapes the human inner and outer worlds. And it is precisely among the ancient philosophers of the Han people that we see the effort made, and the insight attained, to break through the cage of language—which also offers important inspiration for our construction of a new cognitive semiotics. Setting out from here, we will more clearly discover the roots of the differences between Chinese and Western culture and the distinctiveness of Chinese aesthetic culture. At the same time, it also offers a path for extracting and fusing the essence of Chinese and Western culture and constructing a new aesthetics, a new poetics, and a new hermeneutics.