Paper short abstract:

This paper extrapolates from anthropological research on the semiotic, and therefore material and temporal, character of moralities. On this basis, it relativizes the histories, purposes, and outcomes of universities, museums, and libraries, and reframes their virtues in a pragmatic fashion.

Paper long abstract:

This paper extrapolates from anthropological research on moralities as semiotic processes, by definition material and temporal. The point of departure is that qualitative distinctions of worth shape human understandings, practices, and sensibilities, and that these distinctions are enabled by dynamic systems of symbolic forms and associations. Symbols are material forms—perceptible matters such as images, sounds (including speech), sensations, smells, objects—that "mean something" because people associate them in various ways with other forms. The symbolic deployments that constitute moralities are citations, that is, historical and contingent reproductions. They simultaneously effect the imperfect transmission of cultural forms in time and provide persons with subjectivity-constituting or subjectivity-shaping pictures of what kinds of subject they are, can be, and should aspire to be. Viewing institutions such as universities, museums, and libraries from this perspective, this paper relativizes their histories, purposes, and outcomes, and generates doubt about their teleologies; however, it also offers an opportunity to frame their virtues in a pragmatic fashion.