Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Motiekaitis, Ramunas

Titel

The individual, kata and the arts: semiotic considerations on cultural identity

Ist Teil von

• Semiotica, 2022-11, Vol.2022 (249), p.95-126

Ort / Verlag

Berlin: De Gruyter

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This article is a semiotics-based attempt to explain artistic creativity of traditional East Asia and the Romantic West. Invoking the Greimas-Tarasti model, in which the modalities of “will,” “must,” “can,” and “know” are considered as a semiotic system, the author tries to examine how these modalities are manifested in discourses that define artistic subjectivities and actions. The concepts of the sublime and , authenticity and , formal communicational standards and , conventional beauty and are discussed side by side from a comparative perspective. However, the article tries to reveal cultural creative patterns not so much in terms of qualitative difference as in terms of a particular configuration of a universal system. In the subject–object conjunction-oriented metaphysics of Buddhism and Confucianism, the immanent subjectivity is treated as constituted through the body and social mediation. For this reason, as we will see from the analysis of theater performance principles, individual can hardly be distinguished from impersonal . In the Romantic paradigm, longing for an initial (or final) subject–object conjunction is expressed in the ideal of organic synthesis, and artistic creation is considered as the best manifestation of such synthesis. However, this conjunction functions in most cases as an immanent aesthetic vision, and symbols can hardly become the “complete representation of true spiritual life.”