Introduction

As time goes by, my obiter dicta about semiotic theory, inquiry, methodology, critique, doxis (exhortation) or praxis (consummation), and applications in diverse domains continue more or less factitiously to pile up. These include collateral remarks, some of which have remained stubbornly glottocentric, in a traditional, perhaps even fusty, mode, on a wide assortment of semiotic topics. Other, more recent observations conjure up Nature as an interpretive, hermeneutic problem: they contrive a world fancied as though encrypted on its surface yet bridled by a concealed deep structure, a decipherable code or a “language.” Addressed to us all, it is palpably a hieroglyphic archive unsealed (cf. Blumenberg 1981; and Kergosien 1985). Galileo’s pronouncement, unavoidably formulated in poetic imagery or metaphor, fires the imagination: “this grand book, the universe, . . . is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth” (1957:328).

The cosmos is not, of course, unfailingly indited in deep mathematical idiom. As Jones recently called to mind, Cézanne, among others, had claimed that a painter, too, “is engaged . . . in the effort ‘to read [the book] of Nature’ ” (1989:91). A few crumbs of cake dipped in tea, la petite madeleine, were all that Proust needed to actuate from his bed in the cork-lined room at 102 Boulevard Haussman his role as tisseur, weaving his wonderously complex tapestry so slowly, so painfully that he thought of it as textile for his shroud. Sherlock Holmes likewise asserted the primacy of metonymic movement in the detective story—from fragmentary clues to large-scale scenario—when he remarked apropos a fictive magazine article of his called “The Book of Life”: “From a drop of water . . . a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it” (Doyle 1967:1.159). And so also the begetter of a well-crafted song, a syncretic work of art fabricated out of a hierarchy of sign repertoires—verbal, including metrical, as well as musical—creates, I suggest, a controlled nonpareil world of its own.

In the recollections of many of my American contemporaries, and so also in mine, a handful of public happenings remain seared in memory. You Must Remember This: Pearl Harbor Day, the commination of which caused intense trepidation as my father and I, listening together in Chicago in 1941 to a radio broadcast of a concert by the New York Philharmonic, heard an announcer interrupt with a flash to report the attack in Hawaii; the devastating news of FDR’s death in Georgia, which reached me, on a fine April day in 1945, while I was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, and which sent me into the streets of Philadelphia where thousands of citizens were milling about in our shared grief; or the moment in November 1963, when Margaret Mead, uncommonly flustered and still incredulous, told me in a San Francisco hotel elevator that she had just learned of JFK’s assassination in Texas.

A reclusive scene from my past clings to the mind with surprising force, laden with symbolic presentiment. I vividly recollect the last evening of 1942, when, having taken the train from my campus town to Manhattan, I spent several pre-midnight hours celebrating New Year’s Eve in the company of Princeton’s Lillian, Madame Librarian—which rhymes with Marian, the Madame Librarian of The Music Man—at the Hollywood Theater (as I am pretty sure it was called). We enjoyed a first showing of the movie Casablanca, which, in the event, had less to do with exotic Casablanca than with my native Budapest. Hungary was also the birthplace not only of Casablanca’s director, Mihály Kertész (aka Michael Curtiz) but also of several key members of his cast, including the talented comic Szőke Szakál. (Curtiz was reputed to have displayed a sign on his desk, “To Be Hungarian Is Not Enough.”) Already humming “As Time Goes By,” which would soon become Casablanca’s signature tune, we left the moviehouse for Times Square to embrace 1943.

Does Herman Hupfeld’s name evanesce—a sign writ perhaps in water? Or is his epitaph an air? It was Hupfeld who composed the music for and set to words this banal pop song he called “As Time Goes By.” Its three staves of six lines each were introduced by two performers, Oscar Shaw and Frances Williams, in a 1931 Broadway revue called Everybody’s Welcome. Rudy Vallee then cut a recording, issued on the RCA Victor label (Ewen 1966:24), with little publicity and hardly any immediate effect. Murray Burnett, a Cornell undergraduate at the time, was among the few who chanced to buy a platter, and, although he never saw the show, “he fell madly in love with the song, whose poignant melody and lyrics seemed to him an appropriate and timeless philosophy on the mysteries of love” (Francisco 1980:41).

Nine years afterward, in the summer of 1940, Burnett, with another young playwright, Joan Alison, started to plot a play, to have been titled Everybody Comes to Rick’s. Burnett still felt that, although “As Time Goes By” had failed to become a popular hit, it surely deserved another hearing. “It could be sung by the hero’s black friend to set the mood for the bittersweet reunion of Rick and his former paramour” (ibid.). So he wove it into the first act of their play, which, however, was fated to remain forever unproduced on Broadway, or, so far as anyone knows, anywhere at all. But eventually the play was bought for $20,000 as potential movie material by Warner Brothers, where Hal Wallis retitled it Casablanca. This was released in 1942.

Wallis, moreover, also bought the rights to Burnett’s favorite love song, “As Time Goes By.” Max Steiner, an Austrian arranger and conductor of Broadway musicals, steeped in the works of the classic romantic composers of the nineteenth century, but then just fresh from his triumphant creation of the background music for Gone With the Wind, was assigned to score the motion picture (on Steiner, see Gorbman 1987, Ch. 4).

Nobody else objected to leaving “As Time Goes By” in Casablanca, this according to Francisco’s lovingly detailed chronicle (ibid.:138). The main title of his book, You Must Remember This . . ., itself quotes the first six syllables from the song’s seventh line, as its dedication (“ . . . The fundamental things apply”) consists of the second eight from the eighth—yet Steiner later, though luckily too late, became convinced that its selection as the picture’s main theme song was a terrible mistake, since “the old tune was unnecessarily confining in its simplicity” (ibid.:185). The melody is indeed rather plain, although it does build up expectations in the listener and then plays with them in ways that do express the text.

Steiner, at any rate, wanted to substitute a stronger, more appropriate, more “significant” love song, one which he himself had composed. Accordingly, he demanded that the scenes in which “As Time Goes By” was played or sung be reshot with his new score. But he was overruled by Wallis, not just because the producer thought it a pleasant enough tune, but chiefly because Ingrid Bergman’s hair had already been shorn for her next role as Maria, the earthy guerrilla in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Ultimately, the success of Casablanca, critics generally agree, was in fact signally enhanced by Steiner’s masterful overall scoring. This was clearly anticipated and recognized by the studio, which featured Steiner’s name in the opening credits in letters as large as or larger than either Wallis’s or those of Michael Curtiz, the director, or even those of the three stars (these credits are all reproduced in Anobile 1974:3).

Steiner succeeded in accommodating “As Time Goes By” in the film so that the song, both as sung by Dooley Wilson (“Sam”) and as a recurrent musical theme mirroring and enhancing the narrative development, became its polysemous emblem. The music contributes to a sense of minatory suspense by Steiner’s artful interlacing of Hupfeld’s sentimental little tune with “La Marseillaise” on one side and “Deutschland über Alles” on the other. The rhythms seem to reconcile everyday speech with global political events. While, on the personal level, the tune itself modulates the shifting relationships of Ilsa and Rick, the rival anthems echo the overarching international conflict in the backdrop. Francisco rightly points out that it “requires a practiced ear to pick out some of Steiner’s minute integration of music behind dialogue” (1980:187). For example, when Ilsa comes back to visit Rick, who is drunk and alone in the darkened cafe after their first, brief sight of each other earlier (depicted in Anobile 1974:135-139), their verbal dialogue is matched by an exchange of heavy, threatening music behind Rick and a bright, almost childlike ditty behind Ilsa, both derived from “As Time Goes By.”

“As Time Goes By” became so popular after 1942 that RCA Victor revived its old recording, which then went on to become a best seller. Stores were swamped by customers asking for a Dooley Wilson recording, but no such track album was ever produced. The reason that a new disk version of the song could not be released was that James Petrillo, then the all-powerful boss of the American Federation of Musicians, had instituted a ban against all recordings. In December 1979, in a memorial broadcast originating from stage nine of the Warner Studios in Burbank, Frank Sinatra, standing in for Bogart, sang the song on network television while Ingrid Bergman sat at Dooley Wilson’s battered piano.

Casablanca offers a rich terrain for semiotic analysis, or, as Eco remarked in “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage” (the more interesting of his two complementary readings), the film is “a paramount laboratory for semiotic research into textual strategies . . . the first twenty minutes could be analyzed by a Russian Formalist and the rest by a Greimassian” (1986:197, 203). Casablanca as a whole, Eco thinks, “looks like a musical piece where every theme is exhibited according to a monodic line” (ibid:203). He apprehends an early hint of Arab music, which soon fades into the “Marseillaise.” These themes are meant to, and do, evoke, on the one hand, the genre of adventure movies, and, on the other, of patriotic movies of the times. Later, the theme of the Barbarians, “Deutschland über Alles,” is counterpoised. Although he validly identifies the cliché “They’re Playing Our Song” as reflecting one of the film’s several myths (Eco 1985:37), Sam reminds him of a brothel piano player from New Orleans (1986:204).

However, Eco nowhere mentions, let alone cites, the theme song (Ilsa: “Play it once, Sam, for old time’s sake. . . . Play it, Sam. . . . Play, ‘As Time Goes By.’ . . . I’ll hum it for you. Hm-hm, hm-hm, hm-hmmm—. . .” [Anobile 1974:94-95]) beyond noting that the tune is an “anticipated quotation” featured in the title of Woody Allen’s parodic homage, “Play It Again Sam” (on prospective intertextuality, cf. Sebeok 1986:183).

A good measure of Casablanca’s enduring renown must surely correlate with the amazing number of heterogeneity of titles, mostly of books, which the lyrics of “As Time Goes By” have inspired and still keep enkindling. Universal recognition, at least by an Anglophone public, is taken for granted. That such books may directly relate to, or be about, Casablanca, as Charles Francisco’s You Must Remember This . . ., is hardly surprising. And it is small wonder perhaps that Roger Ebert’s A Kiss Is Still a Kiss (seventh line), which is about movies, is besotted with quotations from “As Time Goes By,” except for the fact that his book makes no mention at all otherwise of Casablanca.

Ebert uses lines from the song for each of the chapter headings: “. . . no matter what the future brings” (twelfth line) for its Prologue; “A sigh is just a sigh” (eighth) for Chapter 1 “Hearts full of passion” (thirteenth) for Chapter 2; “Woman needs man—and man must have his mate” (fourteenth) for Chapter 3; “A fight for love and glory” (fifteenth) for Chapter 4; “It’s still the same old story” (fourteenth) for Chapter 5; “A case of do or die” (fifteenth) for Chapter 6; “The fundamental things apply” (eighth) for Chapter 7; “The world will always welcome lovers” (seventeenth) for Chapter 8; and, finally, “As time goes by” (eighteenth) for Chapter 9.

The song’s pertinence to other books in which it is cited is more remote, and, on occasion, neither spelled out nor clearly motivated. Thus Jeff Kisseloff chose to title his oral history of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II You Must Remember This (seventh line). He characterizes his work as being “about listening” (1989:xvi). He mentions King Kong, the “Lullaby of Broadway,” as well as Art Tatum, Fats Waller, and others at the piano, but leaves it to his readership to surmise his immediate wellspring.

More puzzling still, Norbert Hornstein titles—playfully, I guess—his rather technical treatise (1990) about universal grammar and the category of tense As Time Goes By (twelfth line). And the title of Diane K. Shah’s crime story, of “murder in Hollywood’s heyday” (1990), becomes, in an arch but unexplained variant, As Crime Goes By. Trivially, Linda Wells’s article in the Times, “As Time Goes By” (1989), is about female cosmetics consumers who are growing “older.”

There are also quite a few recent works of fiction infused by “As Time Goes By.” The three which I found most intriguing among such, although very different one from another, are:

—Joyce Carol Oates’s elaborate, powerful novel You Must Remember This (1987), the time frame, from the beginning of the 1950s, and preponderant mood of which amply justify the intertextual connotations and associations—of inexorable separations—aroused, at least in this spectator, by Casablanca. What must be remembered by Enid Stevick, the novel’s central character, is her confusing affair, indeed the claustraphobic arena of her world, that she must leave behind.

—Robert Coover’s astounding, funny flight of fancy—he calls it “ROMANCE! You Must Remember This” (1987:156-187)—which forms a part of a collection of “short fictions” under the umbrella title A Night at the Movies; or, You Must Remember This. Rick and Ilsa act out their obsessive sexual relationship so as to transmute Casablanca, in a witty trip of regretfulness, into a pornographic post-modernist homage—“A kiss is just a kiss is what the music is insinuating. A sigh . . .” (ibid.:165)—to the 1940s.

—In Hilary Bailey’s As Time Goes By (1988), Polly, the mildly feminist protagonist, is beset by domestic predicaments of her large family as she struggles to finish a newly plotted, long-overdue screenplay for Casablanca, compared to which “rearranging the simple affairs of the denizens of Casablanca was no problem at all” (ibid.:38). The story’s romanticism contrasts ironically with life in her house at Elgin Crescent. She wonders “why Ingrid hadn’t sent a more effective message to Bogart at the railway station when her husband had suddenly turned up . . . Surely she could have made it a little bit plainer? What stopped her from going to the station and whispering the story in his ear? This lack of common sense had caused a lot of trouble and the making of the film . . .” (ibid.:37). But in the end, it is her script that solves the immediate problems, at least for the nonce.

“Well, everybody in Casablanca has problems,” Rick says (Anobile 1974:168). That includes the Central European Victor Laszlo no less than the American Rick Blaine and his friends from all over, to say nothing of those rallied around either the Tricolor or the German flag. It’s still the same old story. . . .

Just so, the toilsome pursuit of the doctrine of signs, whether in workshops in Bologna or Paris, Budapest or Tartu, and elsewhere in the Old World as much as over here, is beset with problems. There are riddles of belonging and identity, dilemmas of definition and terminology, conundrums of theory and application, disputes about its past and its future. In short, semiotics is happily brimming over with fascinating puzzles. These perplexities are precisely what make semiotics such an absorbing subject of study.

To date, since the first edition of my Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs (1976; 2d ed., 1985) appeared, I have published over half a dozen further essay collections—usually in English to begin with, but eventually in German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish, in different combinations—variously addressing, or just chipping away at, facets of the sorts of problems mentioned, plus a congeries of related issues. In books such as those (see, for example, my Introduction to Sebeok 1981:1-16; Preface to Sebeok 1986:ix-xv; Foreword to Sebeok 1989:xv-xxi), or through interviews with young colleagues (for example, Skupien 1980; Marrone 1986; Switzer et al. 1990; Petrilli in Sebeok 1991:95-105; and so forth), I tried to emphasize the unity of thought underlying the manifestly patent diversity among these ventures and further to clarify points in contention. Two additional collections of mine are Essays in Zoosemiotics (1989-1990) and American Signatures (1991a).

Everybody’s Welcome was the vehicle in which Frances Williams was originally to have introduced “As Time Goes By.” Here, everybody is welcomed by way of the two complementary opening pieces, which are set out for the enjoyment of any reader who wishes first to engage with the world of modern semiotics. “The fundamental things apply” and they are exemplified in Chapter 1.

Following clues from George Herbert Mead (1934), Thure von Uexküll, in a landmark paper on biosemiotics (1991), clearly distinguishes among three types of semiosis: semiosis of information; semiosis of symptomatization (Mead’s “unintelligent gestures”); and semiosis of communication (Mead’s “intelligent gestures”). It is the third type that I emphasize in Chapter 2: the omnipresent interchange of signs among, and their lawful conversion within, organisms—a process too loosely and imprecisely called “communication”—which constitutes an inalienable contributory function, although one that is but subsidiary to the modeling property (discussed in Chapter 5), or the primary global representational, significative business of signs.

The following two companion pieces, “The Semiotic Self” and “The Semiotic Self Revisited” (Chapters 3 and 4), written about ten years apart, though very far from exhausting the topic, are especially meaningful to me because they reveal and manifest the decisive influence on my thinking about semiotic matters of two prodigious, but alas still insufficiently appreciated, contributors to the subject: the wonderously insightful and inventive Prussian theoretical biologist Jakob von Uexküll, especially as made plain, in present-day terms, by his eminent physician son, Thure; and the bold Swiss explorer Heini Hediger, who, over the past half-century, brought to light some of the most recondite enigmas of animal psychology.

The elder von Uexküll, who serendipitously reconfigured semiotics in his own image, and Hediger, whose questing passion for and strenuous erudition in all aspects of animal life in general and zoosemiosis in particular (see his summing up, 1990:415-439) are, each in his way, the sharpest observers of and profoundest thinkers about what Vernadsky came to call in 1926 the region of the “biosphere” (Bailes 1990:124, 190). They are indirectly responsible for the burgeoning, “with speed and new invention,” of the copious province of “biosemiotics,” believed to have been so baptized by Stepanov (1971: 27-32). Indeed, on the initiative of Thure von Uexküll—whose pioneering blueprint essay, “Biosemiotics,” is in press (1991)—an International Biosemiotics Society was organized by some of us semioticians, leavened with a generous sprinkling of biologists, physicians, and allied health personnel. The foundation of the IBS took place in May 1990 and thereupon was formally incorporated under German law in Baden-Württemberg, with the new society beginning to function fully in May 1991.

I have already mentioned Chapter 5, in which I critically enlist in the daedal dance between the region of the biosphere and the semiosphere, as Lotman, another contemporary giant of semiotics, evidently galvanized by Vernadsky, aptly dubbed this singular synchronic realm of humankind (1991, Part 2). I return to this perennial dialectic conversation, “things like third dimension,” again in Chapter 15, but do so there in an appreciably wider frame.

When the question of the multifarious actual or possible rapports between semiotics and linguistics—superordinate, subordinate, coordinate, or merely of provincially pedantic attention—was put to me by the compiler of a “comprehensive” survey of current work in the latter field, I agreed to take a look. The resulting overview, which now constitutes Chapter 6 (see also Nöth 1990:231-234), was, however, catechized by the young man who first commissioned it. He opined that my article failed to take adequate account of the relationship between semiotics on the one hand and the challenge of Chomsky to “traditional” linguistics on the other. Admitting the deficiency of my sample in this regard, I tried to extenuate my neglect by pointing out that generative-transformational grammarians, no doubt being preoccupied with more important matters, had written next to nothing about semiotics. This, though admitted by my would-be editor, was countered with the grotesque demand that my article should set forth what Noam Chomsky’s epigones would have said if they had considered the connection between the two fields. To this I said no—for I “get a trifle weary, with Mister Einstein’s the-’ry. . . .”

What Chapters 7, 8, 10, and 9 have in common is the intromission of a temporal perspective: “As time goes by.” All four convey the heavy freight of time. But whereas the first three contemplate sundry effects of the past, the last is a speculative excursus in extrapolation into what is yet to be (“No matter what the future brings . . .”).

Chapter 7 was written as an article invited to assess several books beating a dead horse, which, poor beast, having been one of its pallbearers, I fancied had long been laid to rest. Chapter 11 examines some specific Elizabethan antecedents of the clever Hans phenomenon, from which it would appear that, where language games—pace Wittgenstein, I mean linguistic confidence games—are concerned, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Chapter 8 was commissioned to be a rundown of what some months ago I deemed to belong to “biosemiotics.” But no state-of-the-art summation can be anything other than highly contingent. Advances, on many fronts, are all but impossible to keep up with. Take just two examples, themselves finally connected at their root:

—The implications of Sonea’s magesterially sweeping portrayal of bacterial semiosis (1990) reach far beyond the prokaryotes (organisms lacking membrane-bounded nuclei and such membrane-bounded organelles as plastids or mitochondria). Prokaryotes not only constitute half or more of the living world, but these ancestors of ours also “invented” semiosis about two billion years before the eukaryotes—that is, protoctists, plants, animals, and fungi—collectively constituting all the rest of the living world, began to evolve. The ways of bacterial semiosis (alias “symbiosis”) were indeed essential for the evolution of organisms like us, embodying the operations of the vertebrate central nervous system. Neither comparative semiotics nor diachronic semiotics will be possible any longer without a meticulous inventory and full comprehension of the bacterial sources of semiosis.

—Another case has to do with syntax-driven simplicity and complexity in nature. One way to picture syntax is as a set of instructions to go with a Lego kit, consisting of a few modules of different shapes and colors, with which, given a sufficient number of pieces and a few rules, a child can elaborate a potentially limitless number of aggregate structures. The periodic table devised by Mendeleev has, since 1869, been a familiar example of such a Tinkertoy-like set of elements out of which the entire known universe, inorganic as well as organic, is composed. Language is another, where universal phoneme constituents, called distinctive features, the number of which is astonishingly small, make up all higher-level sign components, that is, those having their own semantic referents (such as morphemes, words, phrases, clauses, and sentences). Together, these normalized units, their number being infinite, constitute the verbal semiotic hierarchy.

Comparably regulated semiotic hierarchies have been shown to govern sign processes (belonging to the domain called endosemiotics) involving communication between cells or cell complexes. These encompass, among others, the genetic code, the immune code, the metabolic code, the neural code. I mention them briefly in Chapter 8. However, the question “How many different exons were required to generate the current protein diversity?” has barely been unraveled. Now it is postulated that the basic pool is made up of only 1,000 to 7,000 exons, which are previously independent, short gene segments, separated by long introns, such modules naturally joining together to build up complex genetic information. Were no more than these needed to account for the staggering diversity of all terrestrial life? So it would appear. It is further believed that many of the core protein shapes, the fundamental elements of which have remained invariant, date back to four billion years ago, not long after life itself began. “The surprisingly small size of our estimate emphasizes the finite character of the underlying exon universe” (Dorit, Schoenbach, and Gilbert 1990:1381). While, so far, not all scientists accept the novel theory of Gilbert and his associates, “no matter that the progress, or what may yet be proved,” their calculations are in good conformity with overall expectations and they have already galvanized further researches.

I define myself as a biologist manqué, as well as, concurrently, a “doctrinaire of signs” malgré lui. Some clinging filaments of my jejune, bottled-up fascination with the behavior of animals tie the knot (“when two lovers woo, they still say, ‘I love you’ ”), in Chapter 10, with more seasoned semiotic reflections. To begin with, I captioned these cogitations, in the course of a private nostalgia trip, “What Is an Animal?” but was compelled to yield to force majeure when my editor adopted my query for the overall title of his book. This topic (see also Hoage 1989) led me to confront, or rather to nibble, with plenty of misgivings, at the edges of such issues as the distinction between inanimate matter and matter in a “living” state; the differences between scientific systematics and folk classification; the manifold but complementary codes to which an entity or object, such as an animal, must simultaneously belong, or how it straddles, by necessity, the unvarnished biosphere (“whale is a mammal”) and the semiosphere (“the whale is a fish”), of which the mythic world is an informing part (Ahab’s fathomless Moby Dick).

Any twentieth-century palimpsest on particular sign phases, whether by Charles Morris, Roman Jakobson, or any surviving commentators, myself among them, thus far turn out to be little else than more or less entertaining marginalia to Peirce’s categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness: “tones or tints upon conceptions” (1.353), “thin skeletons of thought” (1.355). Each such reckoning is but another act of abduction, another “guess at the riddle,” to cite a heading for one batch of notes for a book about the categories that Peirce conceived about 1890, but which—perhaps so arduous a feat exceeded even his own glorious powers—he never even came close to finishing. Yet we have to keep hacking away at the task. So I, too, have tried to pick away, if only to clarify them for my own benefit, and “at times relax, relieve the tension,” at the Index (Chapter 13) and its sexy progeny, the Fetish (Chapter 12), enlarging upon some of my previous remarks about the Icon, the Symptom, the Symbol, and other identified sign facets.

“This day and age we’re living in gives cause for apprehension” of the sort that troubled Francis Bacon, who labeled “Idols” bad habits in the mind of man. One irksome category of such fallacies he dubbed Idols of the forum. By this, Bacon meant to point to misunderstandings that can arise in the course of semiosic interactions, especially in the marketplace of ideas in human affairs. In Chapter 14 I discuss some troubling cases of fallacious discourse in the so-called concept industry and in the political arena.

In the final chapter, biology and semiotics are again conjoined. “The simple facts of life are such they cannot be removed.” There I attempt once more to trace some consequences and corollaries of the view that terrestrial semiosis got its start in phylogeny with the emergence of the earliest cell and that, in mammalian embryogenesis, individual semiosis builds up step by step with the unfolding of the sense organs, such progression continuing throughout life. Among the ultimate interpretants that put a stop to this extended, concatenated spawning of representations are personal mortality and the extinction of species.