Frontiers in semiotics

349 Pages·1986·10.207 MB·English

by  John N. Deely

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Edited by John Deely,

Brooke Williams, and Felicia E. Kruse

FRONTIERS
in
SEMIOTICS
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington
Copyright ® 1986 by John N. Dccly
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, cleitrnnit or mcihnnual. in­
cluding photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions (onstiiutes
the only exception to this prohibition.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Main entry under title:
FRONTIERS IN SEMIOTICS
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
I. Semiotics—Addresses, essays, lectures.
I. Deely, John N. II. Williams, Brooke. III. Kruse, Felicia E.
P99.F76 1986 001.51 85-45982
ISBN 0-253-34605-3
i ISBN 0-253-20371-6 (pbk.)
1 2 3 4 5 90 89 88 87 86
This collection is dedicated to
the editors of
Speech Surrogates: Drum and Whistle Systems
( = Approaches to Semiotics 23; Den Haag: Mouton 1976)
William Blake marvelled
at those able to see the world in a grain of sand;
we marvel as well
at those able to see a grain of sand in the world.
The philosophers speak of universal reason;
the linguists, anthropologists, folklorists, and their kin
speak rather of infinite detail,
while the physicists confirm both.
In medias stat virtus:
ab ambos et ad invicem dedicatur sequelus scriptus.
CONTENTS:
EDITORS’ PREFACE Vll ‘‘Pars Pro Toto”
vii A. Fad versus Revolution
xi B. Attaining the Being
Proper to Experience
xiv C. Structure of the Volume
Description of Contributions
XVlll
and List of Permissions
I. The Name and Its Context
JOHN LOCKE 3 Coining the Name
JOHN DEELY 5 The Coalescence of
Semiotic Consciousness
THOMAS A. SEBEOK 35 The Doctrine of Signs
II. Semiotic Systems:
Anthroposemiotics, Zoosemiotics, Phytosemiotics
DONALD PREZIOSI 44 The Multimodality
of Communicative Events
JACQUES MARITAIN 51 Language
and the Theory of Sign
UMBERTO ECO, 63 “Latratus Canis”
ROBERTO LAMBERTINI, or: The Dog’s Barking
COSTANTINO MARMO,
ANDREA TABARRONI
THOMAS A. SEBEOK 74 The Notion of Zoosemiotics
THOMAS A. SEBEOK 76 “Talking” with Animals:
Zoosemiotics Explained
MARTIN KRAMPEN 83 Phytosemiotics
JOHN DEELY 96 On the Notion of
Phytosemiotics
vi
III. Developing Themes
T. L. SHORT 105 Life among the Legisigns
FLOYD MERRELL 120 Structuralism and Beyond:
A Critique of Presuppositions
IV. Reshaping Traditional Spheres:
Some Regional Applications
EUGEN BAER 140 The Medical Symptom
UMBERTO ECO 153 On Symbols
IRENE PORTIS WINNER 181 Semiotics of Culture
MICHAEL HERZFELD 185 Disemia
ROBERTA KEVELSON 191 Prolegomena to a Comparative
Legal Semiotic
RICHARD LANIGAN 199 Semiotics, Communicology,
and Plato’s Sophist
BROOKE WILLIAMS 217 History in Relation to Semiotic
LUIGI ROMEO 224 Heraclitus and the
Foundations of Semiotics
V. The Name and Its Direction
JOSEPH RANSDELL 236 Semiotic Objectivity
< <
THOMAS A. SEBEOK 255 Semiotics” and Its Congeners
JOHN DEELY 264 Semiotic
as Framework and Direction
272 Notes
289 References
290 Explanation of Reference Style
(Historical Layering)
323 Index
vii
EDITORS’ PREFACE
c c Pars pro Toto

C <Pars pro toto”—a part taken to represent a whole—is familiar as an ex­
pression used to name the literary device of synecdoche, as when the proud youth
pulls up to a friend’s house in a new car, and asks the friend what he thinks of
her “wheels”.
Here, however, we are using this ancient expression to name rather a fallacy,
one that is in many respects distinctively modern (a byproduct, as it were, of
overspecialization), namely, the fallacy of mistaking the part for the whole, or
of treating some part as if (“practically speaking”) it were the whole.
A. Fad versus Revolution
Wray Herbert, writing in a recent issue of Humanities Report III. 1 (January 1981),
4-9, rightly pondered whether semiotics is a fad or a revolution. Our answer is
that it is indeed both, but the fad should not be taken for the revolution.
The “fad” aspect of semiotics is well-represented in the recent collection of
essays edited by Marshall Blonsky, On Signs (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1985). In his “Preface”, Blonsky, with wistful nostalgia, refers
two of the three parts of his collection to “the heady days” of “the seventies”
(VII), days of which “probably it will be difficult for the reader to form a con­
cept” (VIII). Even the third—and final—part (VIII-IX) looks forward only to
carrying the “clean theory” of the “heady days” into “turbulent application”,
to realizing “a desire for a new life for semiotics” in the wake of the deaths of
Foucault, Lacan, and Jakobson. In short, Blonsky sees semiotics as a retrospec­
tive development (“Introduction”, L), applying to it Hegel’s metaphor of the
Owl of Wisdom who only flies toward evening.
The perspective of the present collection of essays is just the opposite. We see
semiotics as a radically prospective development. It is a phenomenon of dawn
rather than twilight. We agree with Blonsky that we have reached the point “when
a period is ending”. We agree that the fad for semiotics is part of that ending.
;i Where we disagree is in our assessment of the fad’s fading. The problem is not
11
to revive it somehow. The fad is passing. It is time to get on with the revolution.
Semiotics in popular consciousness is misleadingly identified with structuralism
I
and literary criticism, with exclusively cultural concerns. Such a view both distorts
the actual state of semiotics today* and conceals the breadth of possibilities that
the development of a doctrine of signs provides. Arthur Berger, for example (1982:
* Sebeok describes it as follows (1977: 182): “The chronology of semiotic inquiry so far,
viewed panoramically, exhibits an oscillation between two seemingly antithetical tenden-
viii
EDITORS' PREFACE LX
14, 17), writes that “semiology” is “also sometimes called semiotics”, and that
“the essential breakthrough of semiology is to take linguistics as a model and apply
linguistic concepts to other phenomena—texts—and not just to language itself.”
In representations such as this, the part is not only mistaken for the whole, but
actually conceals it. Thomas Sebeok, writing for the International Semiotic Spectrum
(No. 2, June 1984), puts the matter bluntly:
Terence Hawkes recently informed his readers [1977: 124] that the bounda­
ries of semiotics “are coterminous with those of structuralism” and that “the
interests of the two spheres are not fundamentally separate . . Nothing
could be a more deluded misconstrual of the facts of the matter, but the spe­
ciousness of this and associated historical deformations are due to our own
inertia in having hitherto neglected the serious exploration of our true lineage.
This assessment is harsh as well as blunt, but, in this regard, the actual develop­
ment of semiotics in our time provides a number of clues which should not be
neglected in our attempts to interpret what sort of phenomenon we are dealing
with.1 “While every contributor” to semiotic matters, Sebeok remarks below (p.
256), “may indulge his personal taste when attaching a label to the theory of
signs”, the terminology within the same piece of discourse will not oscillate ad
libitum, for the “initial selection will have signaled” to the sophisticated readership
with what tradition the author in question has chosen to align himself or herself.
It is well known that semiotics as we find it around us today is a highly diver­
sified and vigorous intellectual phenomenon whose dynamics and nature are far
from well understood, but which traces itself back to two contemporaneous
pioneers, one in the field of linguistics, and one in the field of philosophy. The
first of these, Ferdinand de Saussure, envisioned the possible developments under
the label of semiology, a term he adapted from existing usage, fashioned of course
from the Greek semeion. The second, C. S. Peirce, chose rather the name semiotic,
also fashioned from the Greek, but not of Peirce’s own coining. Peirce derived
his vision of the possible development we now see being actualized, as he himself
tells us, from the text with which Locke concludes his Essay Concerning Human
Understanding. Though often regarded and treated (e.g., Parret 1984) as opposed
and competing factions, these two sociologically distinct traditions are better
understood under a “part-whole” analogy, inasmuch as the Poinsot-Locke-
Peirce2 tradition is inclusive of, rather than in opposition to, the more limited
glottocentric perspective developed out of Saussure.
For Saussure, the “science” of signs was to be a branch of social psychology,
and linguistics a subspecies within that branch, albeit the most important one.
Of this “possible science”, of course, Saussure himself did not say a great deal.
cies: in the major tradition (which I am tempted to christen a Catholic heritage), semiosis
takes its place as a normal occurrence of nature, of which, to be sure, language—that para­
mount known mode of terrestrial communication which is Lamarckian in style (that is,
embodies a learning process that becomes part of the evolutionary legacy of the ensuing
generations)—forms an important if relatively recent component. . . .
“The minor trend, which is parochially glottocentric, asserts, sometimes with sophistica­
tion but at other times with embarrassing naivete, that linguistics serves as the model for
the rest of semiotics—Saussure’s le patron general—because of the allegedly arbitrary and
conventional character of the verbal sign.”
FRONTIERS IN SEMIOTICS
But he did wisely caution that, “since it does not yet exist, one cannot say what
form it will take” (i. 1906-1911: 33)—a wise caution largely ignored, it must be
said, by even the most brilliant of those in our own day who took their inspira­
tion from Saussure and proceeded to develop a “science” of signs centered ex­
clusively on literary texts and the other artifacts of culture which were always
treated on the patterns of language and almost as of a piece with it. Within this
tradition, it must be said, the possibilities of semiotic understanding, though very
rich and diversified, have always been restricted in highly artificial ways in terms
of what has been called—for present purposes indifferently—by some glottocen-
trism and by others logocentrism.
To this extent, semiotic development has undoubtedly been unable to free
itself from the coils of modern philosophy, and the work of the Kantian critiques
in particular, according to which precisely there is no world known or knowable
beyond the phenomena constructed by the understanding itself according to its
own hidden mechanisms and ineluctable laws. Writing within this tradition,
Terence Hawkes reminds us (1977: 18) that:
It follows that the ultimate quarry of structuralist thinking will be the per­
manent structures into which individual human acts, perceptions, stances
fit, and from which they derive their final nature. This will finally involve
what Fredric Jameson has described as [1972: 209] “an explicit search for
the permanent structures of the mind itself, the organizational categories
and forms through which the mind is able to experience the world, or to
organize a meaning in what is essentially in itself meaningless”.
This tradition, as noted above, originally flourished under the banner of
semiology, a term which today remains far from desuetude. It has, however, been
greatly and increasingly influenced in recent years by the other semiotic tradi­
tion, which develops not from Saussure but from Peirce and Morris and a number
of scientific workers. It does not seem too much to say that it has been under
the pressures of this influence that we have witnessed the coming into being,
alongside the term “semiologie”, the newer term “semiotique”, a term which,
without displacing “semiologie” entirely, has come to dominate over it and, to
a certain extent, replace it, without, however, so far removing the intractable bias
toward glottocentrism and philosophical idealism that has so far characterized
semiotic development, particularly in the Romance areas. We are dealing here
with something more than “the simultaneous multilingual interplay of polysemy”
described below by Sebeok (p. 254). We are dealing with that, but as indexical
in the circumstances of something more fundamental.
Martin Heidegger, for example, himself a German, is among modern
philosophers the one who struggled most against the coils of modern idealism,
and in the direction of a semiotic. His failure to free himself from the modem
logocentrism is a testimony to its pervasiveness in modem culture, to be sure,
and to the scale of the task semiotic in its fullest possibilities has to face (see Reading
23 below); yet in the debate between realism and idealism, he is the one (1927:
207) who perhaps most clearly brought to the fore the fact (highlighted in Section
II of Reading 3 below) that, whatever its drawbacks and “no matter how con­
trary and untenable it may be in its results,” idealism “has an advantage in prin­
ciple” over realism, by the simple fact that whenever we observe anything, that
EDITORS’ PREFACE xi
observation already presupposes a semiosis whereby the object observed came
to exist as object—that is to say, as perceived or known—in the first place.
No one, including Heidegger, realizes this fact better than the semiotician.
Indeed, it is the realization that the whole of human experience, without excep­
tion, is an interpretive structure mediated and sustained by signs, that is at the
heart of semiotics. So it is perhaps not surprising that much of the original semiotic
development in our times took place along the tracks and lines of a classical idealism
in the modem sense.
The structuralist analysis of texts and narratives is particularly comfortable
within such an environment and climate of thought. Yet we are entitled to wonder
if such a perspective is enough to allow for the full development of the possibilities
inherent in the notion of a doctrine of signs—to wonder if the “way of signs”
Locke concludes his Essay by suggesting does not lead outside of and well beyond
the classical “way of ideas” with which rather he began the Essay and which almost
exclusively influenced the classical formation of modern thought.
Such a development seems to be what is taking place in the larger tradition
of semiotics today, if we keep in mind that what we are faced with under this
label is not a purely contemporary development but, as Sebeok remarks (1976a:
272), “an ancient discipline” or stream of thought that winds backward from
Peirce to the remotest times, as recent work has begun to exhibit.
This development does not take its principal or almost exclusive inspiration
from human language and speech. It sees in semiosis a much more fundamental
and broader process, involving the physical universe itself in the process of human
semiosis, and making of semiosis among humans a part of semiosis in nature.
Abduction, the process whereby alone new ideas are seized upon, later to be
developed deductively and tested inductively, beginning again the cycle—or,
rather, spiral (see p. 29 below)—is first of all, as Peirce remarked (1898b: 30-31),
a phenomenon of nature. It works with constructed signs, but not only with con­
structed signs, and not with constructed signs first of all.
Consider the “two fundamental insights” on which the semiological side of
semiotics today rests (Culler 1976: 4): social and cultural phenomena “are ob­
jects or events with meaning, and hence signs”, and they “do not have essences
but are defined by a network of relations”. If it is a question of phenomena which
have a meaning, the discovery of evolution at every level of nature has long since
shown that nothing in the universe can rightly be excluded, if we but look long
enough and wait to see where things lead; and as to the matter of “essences”,
Culler’s negative assessment can just as well (if not better) be put positively: the
essence of a semiotic phenomenon as such consists in the network of relations
whereby one thing stands for and leads to another.
No matter how we approach the matter, in short, the study of signs cannot
be confined to the boundaries of the artifactual nor measured by the paradigm
of linguistic exchanges. To study the sign is to uncover a web as vast as nature
itself, a whole of which, to borrow Sebeok’s recent formulary (1984b: 2), “that
miniscule segment of nature some anthropologists grandly compartmentalize as
culture” remains but a part, even if, from our point of view, the most privileged
part—the part from which our interpretations always arise and to which, in­
evitably, they recur, in our asymptotic efforts to encompass by understanding
the web of nature in its totality and in all its implications for anthroposemiosis.
I
xii FRONTIERS IN SEMIOTICS
Even as a provisional sketch, many of whose terms are far from fixed, the follow­
ing diagram, deploying from Sebeok’s metaphor of the web, is useful as a measure
of the actual scope and potential development of the current semiotics movement:

THE"SEMIOTICWEB”

(TheStudyofSigns)
I
I
the Field of toward a Foundational
Signifying Phenomena: Doctrine of Signs:
SEMIOTICS SEMIOTIC
1
r r i

Non-LivingSystems LivingSystems Saussurean \ Peircean Neglected
(which signify to (organisms): Tradition: \Tradition Figures:

cSPoERgnMOizTIiOnEgTrRIoOCrig-Sn a nGise1mIn_es_r)_a:_l :__1B__I_O_ S_E__M|_IOTICS Coginn iTtiIvhee irL ife STelRxib(nteiUr"g.caSeuCope.im,msoT tltieiUahcot ellReoamodgrArg oyife"Ledrs)loeI,y lSmsM \ \\\\\i (K(R(cICvuneosnlstBLsihesounul hnlgb 1l wta19r1o989o828J1)1 .) c, ),
Internally inTheir \ I'oi mot
Considered: External AnimalOrganisms HumanOrganisms: \ (Deely1985),
ENDO- Relations ZOOSEMIOTICS ANTH ROPOSEMIOTICS \ Smart
SEMIOTICS SEPMHIYOTTOIC­S r 1 1 \\ (Esciohnh aUchtx k1u9ll7 8).
Systems Pre-Linguistic / language Post-Linguistic \ (Scbeok 1979).
Proper to Structures \1 (dependent upon Stuctures: \ m
Non-Human (overlapping \ understanding) Cultural Processes \
ofS pAenciimesa l ehxupmerainen acne:d saenei mcsapl. '\ \ and Artifacts \\
Scbeok 1972, 1975a) '\\L ArAtrchitIe ctFuorlek loLriet eraturRe itTual MuI sic FiTlm F-tc. \\|
T

CulturalPhenomenaconsideredas“Texts"

(byanalogytolanguage),

i.e.,partiallyconsidered

(inapuresemioticdimension

projectivclyfixed):

STRUCTURALISTANALYSES
("SEMIOLOGY”)
Attaining the Being Proper to Experience
The semiotic revolution concerns, first of all, our understanding of human ex­
perience itself, and therewith all of human knowledge and belief. What semiotics
at this point has shown is that the whole of human experience—the whole of it—
is mediated by signs. Root and branches, to borrow Descartes’ metaphor (1648:
14), knowledge and experience in their development and structure throughout
are a local product of semiosis.
For Locke, the first task of semiotic was to bring ideas along with words into
the perspective of the sign. In fact, unbeknownst to Locke, this task had already
been completed in a work published in the year of his birth by his older Iberian
contemporary, John Poinsot. Manifestly, with the idea or concept (the in-
traorganismic means of cognizing, let us say) established as a sign in its proper
being, interpretation generally, the whole of understanding and perception, in­
:
cluding its “transmission” in communication, had been identified as a semiotic
phenomenon. Sensation itself* might still arguably lie outside the prospectus of
;
* particularly the “simple sensations” of the Empiricists or “proper sensibles” of the
Aristotelians—the bedrock of experience and ultimate referent of understanding for all but
the partisans of innate ideas (but innate ideas, being ideas, are already within the orbit
of semiotic).