5.9

The interpretative function requires a system to be doubly articulated.  As Benveniste explains

la langue comporte à la fois la signifiance des signes et la signifiance de l'énonciation.  De là provient son pouvoir majeur, celui de créer un deuxième niveau d'énonciation, où il devient possible de tenir des propos signifiants sur la signifiance. (65)

verbal language is comprised of both the signification of signs and the signification of enunciation.  Which explains its great power for creating a second level of enunciation from which it becomes possible to make significant statements about signification.

Verbal systems are not the only ones to possess double or multiple articulation (n1).  Metadiscursivity is not merely metalinguistic, it may well be an effect of narrative and narration.

5.9

5.10

From a cybernetic perspective, metadiscursivity can be considered as a specialialized form of feedback capable of converting noise into information.  Within "the economics of cognitive organization", human elements as components of a communication system according to George Miller discover new ways to transform, or to recode, received information (Miller 13;49).  Miller calls this practice "chunking" or "recoding".  Basically, a bit of information is tagged or labelled.  A set of tagged bits can itself be grouped and tagged.

5.10

5.11

Just as sets form sequences, cybernetic recoding generates the possibilities of metadiscourse.  The theoretical space between recoding and metadiscursivity is occupied by narrativity or the potential conversion of sequence into story.  In this space, verbal signs and their enunciation are on par with other types of signs and their presentation.  The linguistic need not be privileged.  Once tagging itself becomes taggable, the possibilities of metacommunication emerge.

5.11

5.12

Metacommunication involves comparison and as such the recoding it performs is a type of transcoding.  Fredric Jameson likens transcoding to mediation:

as the invention of a set of terms, the strategic choice of a particular code or language, such that the same terminology can be used to analyze and articulate two quite distinct types of objects or "texts," or two very different structural levels of reality. (Jameson 40)

Jameson in this passage from The Political Unconscious goes on to stress the stakes in making comparable what a hegemonic discourse and ruling apparatus does not wish to be so.  It is possible to translate the spirit of Jameson's remarks into the current discussion of the bodily sources for narrativity.

5.12

5.13

When the discrete compartmentalization of the sensory modalities is questioned, the limits of sentient being become problematic for the connection between CONSCIOUSNESS and VERBAL LANGUAGE becomes tenuous when exclusive control over metacommunication is no longer a linguistic affair.

5.13

5.14

Just as recoding operates within a same semiotic system, transcoding operates between different systems.  Once one treats the individual perceiving body as a social entity, it becomes evident that cross-modal encoding serves metacommunication.  For example, imagine visual and aural objects transcoded by tactile sensations.  The body with its multiple sensory modalities is a great comparator and arguably a storyteller even before the speaking subject arises.

5.14

5.15

In the realm of the human, whatever else it may be, the need to compare is a social need.  Anywhere signifying practices are open to rereading and to question, interpretive relations abound.  Jerome Bruner lists a striking range of such behaviour:

The perpetual revisionism of historians, the emergence of "docudramas," the literary invention of "faction," the pillow talk of parents trying to make revised sense of their children's doings ­­ all of these bear testimony to this shadowy epistemology of the story.  Indeed, the existence of story as a form is a perpetual guarantee that humankind will "go meta" on received versions of reality. (Acts of Meaning 55)

Of course, all the moments here are verbal.  Other modes exist for ordering, sorting or transmitting sequences.  As Bruner tells the story, these other modes are fundamental for human linguistic development:

Once young children come to grasp the basic idea of reference necessary for any language use ­­ that is, once they can name, can note recurrence, and can register termination of existence ­#173; their principal linguistic interest centers on human action and its outcomes, particularly human interaction. [Bruner's emphasis] (Acts of Meaning 78)

Bruner's tale suggests that abstract powers such as the recognition of sequence and variation are the necessary precursors to a phase of anthropo-centrism.  Indeed, he earlier stakes a claim that "[n]arrative structure is even inherent in the praxis of social interaction before it achieves linguistic expression" (Acts of Meaning 77).

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5.16

The parallels with Greimas's generative trajectory are striking.  For the Paris semiotician, the generative trajectory is the equivalent of an anthropomorphic investment in the fundamental structure of signification and its semic positions.  For both Bruner and Greimas, narrative need not be linguistic.  When human interaction is recognized as the ground of cognition, then not only is narrative structure non-verbal, certain narratives are non-verbal.

5.16

5.17

A case for the separation of narration from verbal language can also be made on neurophysiological grounds.  Howard Gardner in Frames of Mind offers the conjecture that "sensitivity to narrative, including the ability to communicate what has happened in a series of episodes, seems more closely tied to the pragmatic functions of language (and thus proves more fragile in cases of right-hemisphere disease) than to core syntactic, phonological, and semantic functions" (89).

5.17

5.18

Pragmatic functions relate to bodies in motion.  Such functions and dimensions point to systems other than the linguistic.  Sources of non-linguistic narrative are rich and varied.  One can consider the Javanese shadow puppets and the Inuit string games that appear as narratives in Kay Armatage's film Storytelling (1983) or how in Australian aboriginal culture visual design becomes song.  Wherever there is marking and action, notation and performance, there is some capacity to predict pattern and this pushed to the limit is the core of narrative.  Narrative occurs where there is the reproduction of a sequence.

5.18

5.19

If the core of narrative is reduced to sequence, reproduction and reportage meld.  For example, the repetition of a performance of nonsense syllables or tapped rhythms certainly displays the ability to "communicate what has happened in a series of episodes".  But narrative is not solely reproduction.  Narrative is also a redoing.  It involves sequence and variation.

5.19