Documentarian-Sensoriality (DS)

Abstract

This chapter shifts the emphasis to what Kant refers to as intuition—or, on another level, the empirical, a posteriori aspect of recognizing the documentarian. In many respects, this chapter aims to expand the principal assertion of the book as a whole by arguing that a quadruple semiotic extension of the documentarian based on the innovative model and methodology of the documentarian-as-extended-sign (DES) cannot become truly meaningful, discursively or existentially, without direct consideration of the concrete sensorial evidences that these real-life mega-documentarians created for their own documentarian-subjectivity—and which, as such, stand as a fundamental concept in our journey toward a philosophy of the DES.

Whenever someone, on seeing something, that that which he now sees wants to be like some other reality but falls short and cannot be like that other since it is inferior, do we agree that the one who thinks this must have prior knowledge of that which he says it is like, but deficiently so?

—Plato, Phaedo (1997, 506–557)

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

—Immanuel Kant (1998, A51)

The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary…I mean that it is unmotivated, i.e., arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection with the signified .

—Ferdinand de Saussure (1959 [1915], 67–69).