Sites of Sign-Production and Interpretation; T.S. Eliot’s Semiotic Aesthetics-Poetics | Chapter 1 | Selected Topics in Humanities and Social Sciences Vol. 6
“Who is the third who walks continually with you?” T.S. Eliot's question in The Waste Land can be considered to sum up the hermeneutic position of any language act, whether sign production or interpretation. While traditional expressionist topoi such as the artist's subjectivity, empirical psychology, truthfulness, intentionality, and so on have become irrelevant in the heteroglot discourse of the most famous dirge on the decaying West, Eliot's awareness of the matrical role of cultural semiosis allows us to place him among the founding fathers of semiotic aesthetics. Based on the ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce and Martin Heidegger (“Destruktion,” 1920), and expanded by postwar authors like Roland Barthes (Mythologies, 1957, [1], Umberto Eco) (Trattato di semiotica generale, 1975) The semiotic approach to art is based on a mediating third (Peirce: the Interpretant), which is variously related to context, regime of signification, episteme, schemata, and triangulation of des...