Volver a signos y formas: de ficción, antropología y literatura

We might understand fiction as a way of rationality that is not limited to what we take to be literary texts. Fiction is also installed in some knowledge disciplines since the nineteenth century. To talk about anthropological fiction involves analyzing some sort of rationality tied to anthropology, one of whose elements has to do with where and how we trace limits between human and non-human beings. In the face of a planetary environmental crisis, there is an anthropological quest quest to expand, or transform, the limits of the human, or least to acknowledge different ontologies or what Descola calls mondiation. An example is Eduardo Kohn's research, who uses the Peircian sign to rethink relations between humans and non-humans. Attending to Peirce's classification of iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs, Kohn attempts to dismantle the idea that the only existing representation is a symbolic one, typical of human language. If, as he argues, there are other semiotic and non-symbolic relationships, which are nevertheless forms of representation, we come up with an alternative anthropological semiotics that is based on amplifying the idea of representation to the non-human. Having said that, the notion of fiction has at least two dimensions that we would like to explore: an anthropological one, close to the concept of the imagination, and a literary one that is tied up to the production and circulation of texts that the Western tradition has linked to the written culture and to the book. This article explores
those two dimensions of fiction theoretically through concepts of
signs and forms. Rather than a naïve return to the traditional sign
(a concept questioned by authors like Gumbrecht in the
humanities) or a revisiting of semiosis in anthropological or
literary fictions this article brings up the question of signs as
pertaining to a semiosis that involves humans and non-humans.
Forms, in turn, are useful as ways of analyzing the emergence of
imagination and representation, or that which is visible or
readable as fiction in contemporary worlds.
What forms do imagination and representation take within the
anthropological dimension of fiction? What other forms do they
take in fiction’s literary dimension? Why is such a distinction
worthwhile? Does it entail an amplification of the idea of
representation? This article begins with an analysis of the
ontologies proposed by Philippe Descola and semiosis as
understood by Kohn, and proceeds to approach literary fictions
through signs and what we call forms (in its anthropological and
literary dimensions).