Aesthetics. This was decided decades ago in the ‘First World’. But the question is what the constraints on or values of those aesthetics will be.

Meaning may have a larger existence as a direct product of its have no existence beyond individual mental associations. Symbols may exist as fuzzy isomorphisms across minds, transferred to verbal, textual or other forms then reconstituted. Below a given threshold of accuracy, many minds will identifiably share a concept. Above a given level of accuracy, none will. Miscommunication, ambiguity and other edge-cases don’t falsify the existence of meaning: the fact that they are identifiable strengthens the case for meaning.

This does not give us timeless or metaphysical meaning, but it does give meaning that will last as long as humanity and its media do, and beyond the arrogance of any given individual or group. Which is as much as is possible given a non-deistic worldview.

Semiotics must quantise this mental fuzziness to grep symbols, otherwise it has nothing to work with. Once we have a system of quantised symbols, these can be mapped into another system, assuming that that system is sufficiently powerful (pace Godel or Turing). Communication is therefore possible, unless this won’t work, in which case semiotics is impossible anyway.

Quantising an already quantised system can result in loss of information, so this makes communication problematic. However it also introduces the possibility of *generating* meaning, as the system being mapped into must extend or create new structures to allow isomorphism. Blah blah blah metaphor blah blah blah.

Any reduction of art, or indeed language, to an unambiguous, discrete system will make it tractable to theory but have none of the expressive power of the system supposedly being studied. I would further state that any attempt to do so is unlikely to ethically survive historical or psychological deconstruction.

What does this have to do with aesthetics? Aesthetics is concerned with the surplus value of symbol systems, with the interrelation of the structure rather than the arcs of the structure. Semiotics is concerned with the structure (allegedly). Semiotics is an aesthetic, a way of seeing the world. It produces symbols from symbols, it has a stopping problem like deconstruction. Its structures need analysis in terms of their interrelations. Semiotics needs aesthetics.

Forget semiotic aesthetics. What’s needed is aesthetic semiotics.

The existence of a penumbra does not cause light and dark to wink out
of existence. Ordinary language philosophy’s obsession with edge-cases
fills lonely evenings but ignores the break-out strategy of
*generating* language.

I don’t know what the opposite of bootstrapping is (self-obviating?),
but linguistic arguments regarding the limit of language have an
obvious and fatal flaw, as do attempts to communicate on the limits of
communication…

Most people don’t care how language works. It usually doesn’t fail to
in some way. History and fiction are full of examples of the failure of
language and communication both tragic and amusing, the limit of
language is not a stunning philosophical insight. What is stunning
about philosophy is the failure to get with the program and accept
fuzziness, poetry, or any other continuous, combinatorial idea of
language rather than wallow in late Modernism’s dreary fascination with
pathology and bogus exactitude. Language is not discrete, and if it was
you’d hit Godel anyway. There is a signal in the noise. Get used to the
static, or ironise it into signal like Trip Hop did.

Language (and art) is (potentially) infinite. It is possible to
characterise and show the limits of infinite series (or whatever, you
can work with them anyway), but given that human experience and lives
are finite, this is unlikely to be a serious problem. At worst we have
to accept that meaning is fuzzy and lazily evaluated. Which is
potential, not limit.

If there are no ideas, no concepts, no language and no communication,
or they are broken, or we are deluded in our understanding of how they
work or that they work, something very strange is going on. That would
be an interesting focus for philosophy, and since it involves
appearance(s), aesthetics.

Linguistic enamourment is masturbatory, and linguistic reflexiveness is
historically deconstructable…

The lead pencils often have coloured erasers on the end, even those with integral erasers.