The term ''seriation''
ise en sériewas proposed for use in
semiotics
Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes ( semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something ...
by
Jean Molino
Jean Molino is professeur ordinaire at the University of Lausanne and a semiologist. His former students include Jean-Jacques Nattiez
Jean-Jacques Nattiez (; born December 30, 1945 in Amiens, France) is a musical semiologist or semiotician and ...
and derived from classical
philology
Philology () is the study of language in oral and writing, written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defin ...
. Seriation "invokes the idea that any investigator, in order to assign some plausible meaning to a given phenomenon, must interpret it within a ''series'' of comparable phenomena." One cannot interpret what philology calls a ''hapax''; that is, an isolated phenomenon. Art historian Erwin Panofsky has explained the situation in very clear terms:
*'Whether we deal with historical or natural phenomena, the individual observation of phenomena assumes the character of a 'fact' only when it can be related to other, analogous observations in such a way that the whole series 'makes sense.' This 'sense' is, therefore, fully capable of being applied, as a control, to the interpretation of a new individual observation within the same range of phenomena. If, however, this new individual observation definitely refuses to be interpreted according to the 'sense' of the series, and if an error proves to be impossible, the 'sense' of the series will have to be reformulated to include the new individual observation' (1955, p. 35)" (1990, pp. 230–231).
A seriation is determined by the
plot
Plot or Plotting may refer to:
Art, media and entertainment
* Plot (narrative), the story of a piece of fiction
Music
* ''The Plot'' (album), a 1976 album by jazz trumpeter Enrico Rava
* The Plot (band), a band formed in 2003
Other
* ''Plot' ...
.
Sources
*Molino, Jean (1974). Cited in Nattiez (1990).
*Nattiez, Jean-Jacques (1990). ''Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music'' (''Musicologie générale et sémiologue'', 1987). Translated by Carolyn Abbate (1990). .
*Panofsky, Erwin (1955). Cited in Nattiez (1990).{{full citation needed, date=December 2021
Semiotics