The semiotic phenomenology of inverse alteroception

Abstract

Alteroception is the virtual experience of another person’s bodily movement centered in the perspective of the other person. In face-to-face interactions, human beings tend to assume a special mode of alteroception by mutually but tacitly recognizing that ‘your right is on my left and your left is on my right’. Researchers of neonatal cognition and early childhood development describe this mode of alteroception as “reverse” or “inverted”. Inverse alteroception goes beyond mirror-image mimesis to chiastic (crisscrossing) mimesis in acts of intersubjective sense-making; but the cognitive and cultural affordances of this inverse reciprocal ability are largely untreated in the literature. I argue that this unique aspect of human phenomenology deserves closer attention since it enables a broader palette of diagrammatic contrasts that extend far beyond face-to-face interaction. In this paper, I apply insights from Peircean and Greimasian semiotics to argue that salient features of the human lifeworld originate from imaginative mappings of inverse alteroception onto other domains. From diagrams of gesture space and contemporary visual design to the structures of the Proscenium stage, from historic heraldry to Aristotle’s logical square of oppositions and beyond, many visual/spatial designs and their reciprocal interaction with human experience are linked to this ability – an ability that owes its origins, in turn, to the evolution of upright posture.