Monday 8 July 2013

Slide 57: The Social Origins of 'External' Consciousness As Agent


So, if sayers are brought into existence by prompters, then one way for sayers to become agents of their own saying, phylogenetically and ontogenetically, is to take on the rôle of the other: and play the part of prompter.

That is to say, one origin of the self as socio-semiotic agent lies in the imitation of others — ontogenetically, this means children imitating caregivers.

More abstractly, we might say that, through imitation — or mimesis — socio-semiotic agency propagates as a wave in meaning groups down the generations, like a disturbance through a medium, so to speak. 

We’ll come back to this point at the end.

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