Global semiotics

267 Pages·2001·7.805 MB·English

by  Thomas A. Sebeok

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ADVANCES IN SEMIOTICS
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Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
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This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA
http: //iupress.indiana.cdu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796
Fax orders 812-855-7931
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© 2001 by Thomas A. Scbeok
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
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publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on
Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog!ng-in-Publication Data
Scbeok, Thomas Albert, date
Global semiotics / Thomas A. Scbeok.
p. cm. — (Advances in semiotics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN o-253-33957-X (cl. : alk. paper)
1. Semiotics. I. Title. II. Scries.
P99 S323 2001
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00-143857
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Contents
Acknowledgments Vll
Introduction ix
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Global Semiotics
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The Evolution of Semiosis 17 1
3
Biosemiotics: Its Roots, Proliferation, and Prospects
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4
Galen in Medical Semiotics 44
5
Signs, Bridges, Origins 59
6
What Do We Know about Signifying Behavior in the
Domestic Cat (Felts cat us)} 74
7
“Give Me Another Horse” 97
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Nonverbal Communication
9
Intersemiotic Transmutations: A Genre of Hybrid Jokes ii5
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“Tell Me, Where Is Fancy Bred?”: The Biosemiotic Self 120
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The Cognitive Self and the Virtual Self 128
12
Some Reflections on Vico in Semiotics 135
13
Women in Semiotics 145
14
The Music of the Spheres 154
15
The Estonian Connection 160
16
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My “Short Happy Life” in Finno-Ugric Studies 172
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17
Uralic Studies and English for Hungarians at Indiana University:
A Personal View 181
Notes 185
References 199
Index of Names 229
Acknowledgments
Naturally, THIS work owes its existence in part to my genetic constitution,
for 50 percent of which I am indebted to my father, Dr. Dezso Sebeok. Born
in Budapest in 1891, he died in Washington in 1952. A jurist and practicing
lawyer, he had always hoped that I would follow in his footsteps; I take this
opportunity to apologize to his spirit for having taken another path. Among
his numerous publications, he wrote over fifty allegorical articles between 1919
and 1927, bearing the overall title “For my son Thomas.” From these I know
that, despite some perfunctory grumbling, he would in the end have supported
my choice of a calling. Our ideals were always as one.
“Culturally,” this work owes as much to the social environment in which
my genes find their phenotypic expression: the serenity of my working atmos­
phere was created and continues to be nurtured by my life’s partner, Dr. Jean
Umiker-Scbeok. Jean brings order into my chaotic existence—and that includes
the collection of essays that make up this book.
It is a crude mistake to oppose nature and culture, organism to environ­
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ment. “Culture,” so-called, is implanted in nature; the environment, or Um-
welt, is a model generated by the organism. Semiosis links them. We use the
term semiosis to refer to the ceaseless ebb and flow of messages, which are
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formal, insubstantial concepts, strings of abstract signs. Messages are copied,
handed down, from one generation to the next. Hence I think it befitting that
this book be also dedicated to our two daughters, Jessica and Erica. The me­
dium I have in common with them is not only our family habitat but, as well,
the pivotally transformative, if admittedly changeful, milieu of the College of
the University of Chicago. As Robert Maynard Hutchins said: “It’s not a very
good university—it’s only the best there is.”
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Introduction
A MERE THREE MONTHS before my eightieth birthday, and just about twenty-
five years after the appearance of the first edition of my Contributions to the
Doctrine of Signs (i976), I am racing to complete this introduction to what will
perhaps be my last book of a sequence of a dozen or so others in this genre
devoted to, broadly speaking, themes in general and applied semiotics. Between
1976 and today, most of these fundamental domains have radically metamor­
phosed along several dimensions. Global Semiotics tries to reflect upon some of
the more important reconfigurements.
In The Sign & Its Masters (i979b), I introduced my readers to a few of the
departed doyens of semiotics, especially ones who most fired my imagination;
in Semiotics in the United States (i99ie), I presented many more—but that was
not my point. What I tried to make clear was the fact, not then self-evident,
that each and every man, woman, and child superintends over a partially shared
pool of signs in which that same monadic being is immersed and must navigate
for survival throughout its singular life. I was groping to reformulate for myself
an observation by Niels Bohr, responding to a comment that “reality” is more
fundamental than the language that it undergirds. Bohr famously countered:
“We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up
and what is down” (French and Kennedy eds. 1985, 302). Evidently, I did not
yet grasp in 1979 the full implications of either Jakob von UexkuH’s Umwelt-
research—that is, his semiotic program of research in subjective universes—or
the Moscow-Tartu School’s early concept of “modeling systems.” I now discuss,
in amplified fashion, both of these critical notions in several interrelated parts
of this volume (especially in chapters 1-6). In addition, I explore them still
further (with my co-authors) in two other recent books: The Forms of Meaning:
Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis (2000, with Marcel Danesi); and
The Semiotic Self (forthcoming, with Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli; see
also chapters 10 and 11 below). For those who prefer to quaff their Semiotics
Lite, there are now also my Signs (1994a) and two new collections of my essays:
Essays in Semiotics: Culture Signs (2000a) and Essays in Semiotics: Life Signs
(2000b).
While, as I continue to insist, all human beings—indeed, all living entities
on our planet (see chapter 5)—modulate their environment by means of signs,
only a handful grow up to be professional semioticians (and a good thing too).
Classic figures in the long and ubiquitous history of this domain were other-
ix
x Introduction
wise occupied: for instance, Hippocrates, Galen (chapter 4), and their countless
medico votaries subsisted by interpreting (in their parlance, “diagnosing”)
symptoms and syndromes, which are special kinds of indexical signs akin to
the detectival clues sought, observed, and interpreted by the likes of Sherlock
Holmes (he called this procedure “the science of deduction”)—as the historian
Carlo Ginzburg demonstrated in the sparkling chapter he contributed to Eco’s
and my collection, The Sign of Three (1983). The paths leading to academic
semiotics are highly diverse, yet finally convergent: many, such as Locke (him­
self a medical man), Vico (chapter 12), Peirce (while claiming his roots in chem­
istry), Husserl, Cassirer (chapter 12), Morris, Susanne Langer (chapter 13), Eco,
and Deely, arrived via philosophy. Indeed, John Deely recently wrote a substan­
tial tome, Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy
from Ancient Times to the Turn of the 21st Century (2000), to show how this
came about again and again. Others, such as Saussure, Buyssens, Hjelmslev,
Jakobson, Prieto, Greimas, Metz, Mounin, Rauch (chapter 13), and I, came to
semiotics more or less straight out of technical linguistics. Maritain was a Do­
minican theologian. Lotman and Voigt detoured via cultural studies (cf. chap­
ters 14 and 15). Marvin Carlson entered from theater studies; Solomon Marcus
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from mathematics; Eero Tarasti from musicology; Floyd Merrell from chemis­
try; Milton Singer and Michael Silverstein from anthropology; and so forth.
Although I had my earliest brush with semiotic studies as far back as
the mid-i93os, while I was an undergraduate at Magdalene College in Cam­
bridge—where I. A. Richards was then Pepys Librarian and where, wide-eyed,
I thumbed through his and C. K. Ogden’s The Meaning of Meaning (1938), as
well as, with bewilderment, tried to make sense of the English translation of
Jakob von Uexkiill’s Theoretical Biology (1926, as set forth in chapter 3)—I by
no means envisioned semiotics as an immediate career choice. In fact, at the
University of Chicago, I later enjoyed the robust discipline of biology, espe­
cially genetics, although I kept up a dalliance of sorts with semiotics under the
benevolent tutelage of Charles Morris. However, my formal training as a lin­
guist began there, chiefly under the intensive guidance of Leonard Bloomfield,
then continued, after I moved to Princeton in 1941 to pursue my graduate edu­
cation, with increasing fervency under Roman Jakobson (then still working in
New York). Both Bloomfield and Jakobson urged me to specialize, inter alia, in
Finno-Ugric studies (chapters 16 and 17), a language family to which I eventu­
ally devoted not only my dissertation but also several decades of my early teach­
ing and administrative activities at Indiana University.
The meandering road from these relatively straightforward beginnings into
the tulgey woods of semiotics was long, labyrinthine, and full of surprises, as
well as punctuated by not a few exciting encounters along the way. In the pilot
scheme for this very book, I had in fact earmarked for inclusion an additional
section, titled “Summing Up.” I attempted to sketch out the tale of how it
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