Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“On another level, the originary hypothesis enables us to account for the endless variety and unpredictability of sign use in the myriad situations in which it takes place: the sign (and, by “sign,” we can, with Peirce, refer to a sentence, a discourse, a discipline, a person) must defer some concretely apprehended threat of cataclysmic violence and it must provide some means of communal appropriation of the object (or world of objects) in question “fairly,” which is to say in some way that ensures the continuity and effectivity of the sign. And, of course, we could have no way of limiting in advance all the ways in which these tasks could be accomplished, which means an irreducible margin of freedom also attaches to such an originary conception of semiosis. Perhaps most important for our purposes here, the originary hypothesis implies a model of knowledge making that wishes to stay as close to the tacit, the everyday, the contingent and the ephemeral as to the explicit, elaborated, permanent and canonical without being obliged to privilege one over the other as a source of knowledge. All semiosis contains both dimensions, as the disciplinary inquiry into those texts worthy of unlimited scrutiny generates tacit rules of reading and knowing which then in turn open up avenues of attention into hitherto neglected texts and regions of semiosis. Our criterion for knowledge becomes the construction of disciplinary scenes capable of generating disciplinary events as our attending to what has so far remained tacit generates a new (to draw upon Michael Polanyi) tacit dimension that might at any time emerge as our new object of inquiry.”

— Adam Katz, Composition Pedagogy · Mar 2008 · GABlog