19

BROOKE WILLIAMS

History in Relation to Semiotic

The time has come for history to be classified within semiotics according to its proper characteristics both as a discipline in its own right and in terms of its transdisciplinary place in the development of a doctrine of signs. Sebeok’s comment (1979: 67) on the potential of semiotic to integrate the disciplines hits the heart of the matter as regards current controversy over the question of history:

Precisely how semiotics can function as “an organon” of all the sciences, and the wide humanistic implications of the assumption that semiotics “provides a base for understanding the main forms of human activity and their interrelationship”, since all such activities and relations are mediated exclusively by signs, pose a host of further questions that need to be widely as well as urgently debated, since, among other consequences, their satisfactory reformulation might lead to badly needed improvement of the curricula which still inform students of the human sciences worldwide.

The very right to existence of the discipline of history is often called into question passionately these days precisely because the as yet underdeveloped logic of history is neither purely scientific nor purely literary. It seems to have no place in a contemporary curriculum. It is a semiotic anomaly, seemingly grounded in neither fact nor fiction. It raises problems concerning the existence of “reality”, and therewith blood-pressures.

If the logic of history resists, on the one hand, a superimposed semiotic analysis (e.g., of Haidu 1982), so has it also resisted attempts to develop a formal logic of history (starting with Hempel 1942). The reasons for the misfit of history are in both cases the same. It is not, as is sometimes argued, that historians are “abnormally stupid”, but that the discipline of history is necessarily rooted in temporal human experience that can best be expressed in natural languages. Historians, therefore, find the very material itself that they work with resistant to “any tightly defined system whatever”, precisely because such a definition presupposes too much: it “leaves out the heart of the matter” (Tillinghast 1972: 13). It is this “heart of the matter” that needs to be classified logically, and it is this, I claim, that semiotic enables us to do for the first time.

The social scientists agree with the philosophers that it is analysis and classification, rather than the underdeveloped logic of history, that are at the heart of the matter academically, even in the purely humanistic studies. Given our philosophical tradition, in favor of knowledge admitting of universal statements, and of statements set out in the systematic form appropriate to theoretical knowledge—given, in other words, the mind-set that presupposes that the more abstract and general concepts of the physical sciences are closer to “reality” (see Conkin 1971: 155) than are concepts of any other sort—it follows that our modern logicians find it “virtually impossible to describe well the most basic things historians do” (Gallie 1964: 19).

Historians tend to see history as a mediating discipline that “occupies the treacherous middle ground between concrete particulars and abstract relations” (Conkin 1971: 143; see also Marwick 1970: 18). Whereas history once linked philosophy with poetry, today it links social science with literature. The question arises as to whether there really is an epistemological middle ground between art and science, a question that historians have always guessed to be answerable in the affirmative because the nature of historical material itself suggests such an hypothesis. The question is, then, whether the “problem” of history simply reduces to a problem with the humanistic presuppositions of the discipline, as analytic philosophers have unsatisfactorily tried to show, or whether it can be satisfactorily shown to reduce to literature, as some structuralists intimate. For instance, Hayden White (1978: 62, emphasis supplied) writes:

In my view history is in bad shape today because it has lost sight of its origin in the literary imagination. In the interest of appearing scientific and objective it has repressed and denied to itself its own greatest source of strength and renewal. By drawing historiography back once more to an intimate connection with its literary basis . . . we will be arriving at that “theory” of history without which it cannot pass for a “discipline” at all.

It appears that what we are dealing with is not a “mediating” discipline so much as an anomaly. Although this discipline is very old, what has come to be known as “the crisis of history” (Marrou 1959: 12) still persists—mayhap because the status of history as a discipline is still unresolved. One historian (Conkin 1971: 135) seems—unknowingly—to detect the right answer only after having given up on the wrong tracks: “most disquieting of all, so long as competing views of history retain their ties to mechanistic, mentalist, or vitalistic ontologies, they involve unbridgeable gulfs open to no intellectual reconciliation.”

It is at this point of no return that a doctrine of signs can step in and bridge the gulf, pave the way for an intellectual reconciliation. In so doing, semiotic can at last clarify what it is that historians do.

History need no longer serve as a presemiotic “mediator” between science and art, nor need history be caught in between these disciplines and squeezed out of existence by them. What is the source of this “problem”—seen in semiotic perspective—is that history is intrinsically interdisciplinary because of the nature of the material which informs the historian’s method. Because the physical, mind-independent being of historical material stands for mind-dependent human experience, this material elicits from the historian a human response at the poetic source of creativity that overflows into the historian’s work as a form of art. But because historical material consists of mind-independent or physical material that is publicly verifiable as to its existence, history also elicits from the historian an ordering of this material that is not only coherent for art’s sake, but is perhaps above all coherent (in a publicly verifiable way) for truth’s sake, in the same sense that the scientist seeks truth.

Now the “problem” of history, from a semiotic point of view, is not its relation to other disciplines, but that the logic of history has never been properly defined. Some regard it as anomalous to try to combine the imprecision of something relying primarily on natural language with the scientific notion of an objective coherence verifiable in relation to things existing that function as signs of a “history” independent of the historian’s mind. In the perspective of semiotic, history is revealed to be a discipline that resists all attempts to classify it as characteristic of the modes of reasoning of either science per se or art per se, precisely because history addresses the interaction and interdependence of nature and mind that seems to constitute human experience through semiosis. Whatever the public or private mind-set of the historian, we find we need no longer couch the problem of the “objective” world of nature and the “subjective” world of mind as if the relation were not correspective, or had to be construed hermeneutically so as to preclude precisely the relation between mind-dependent and mind-independent being.

History as a discipline is thus between science and art precisely in the sense that it addresses the interaction of nature and mind through the semiosis that transmits human culture, whether the subject of historical inquiry be, for example, the transmission of science or of art. The seeming anomaly of history appears only when this discipline is forced into prevailing classifications as science (“theoretical”) or art (“practical”) or both as a hybrid or mediating discipline. The anomaly disappears when the “problem” of history is situated in the context of semiotic.

To classify history in this way requires first of all that the logic of history be seen according to its own characteristics, and, second, that history be seen in relation to science and art neither as opposed to them, nor as mediating between them, nor as cut off from them by its proper autonomy (still less as having no longer a reason to exist), but rather as the relation between mind-independent and mind-dependent being that underlies the possibility of “history” as a discipline which is distinct from, but not separated from, science and art—not only because of an overlap and sharing of techniques, but also because it is as historical creations that science and art flourish within culture. In other words, history in its proper being is not first of all a discipline, but is precisely the anthroposemiotic transmission and generation of culture wherein nature and mind mutually influence each other in the shaping and constitution of “reality”.

To begin with, history has its own proper mode of reasoning that is distinct, but not separate, from the modes of scientific reasoning. The logic of history characteristically involves, without being circumscribed by, the logic of question and answer typical of detection (for fuller discussion, see Williams 1985: 285-287; see also: Russell 1984; Collingwood 1936-1940: 266-282, 1939: 29-43; and Marrou 1959: 89, 140). This is the logic of abduction as distinct from deductive and inductive modes of inference (in the precise sense explained in Deely 1982: 68-75, after Peirce; see also Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok 1979, Eco and Sebeok 1983).

The logic of question and answer characteristic of history is underdeveloped, and its potential unexploited, because the possibility of such a logic was itself a non-question in a philosophical tradition wherein realists belittled the reality of becoming, with the result that they reduced becoming propositions into being propositions (see Collingwood 1939: 28-29; Russell 1981: 179-189; also Merrell 1975: 76). The very arising of the question of the logic of history is itself but a part of the whole semiotic web in which the question of historical change arose, at which point the problem of history got structured in terms of the modern realistidealist debate. That is, it is only in relation to the time dimension of the semiotic web that historical becoming and the logic of history are revealed in the first place precisely as a question.

Because of an awareness of the time dimension of the semiotic web in which even the development of logic itself takes place, it can now be seen that the distinct modes of thinking of history and science need no longer be separated in an artificial way that cuts them off from human thought in its integral wholeness, wherein abstract and concrete, speculative and practical thinking, find a common ground in anthroposemiosis. Far from denying the proper logic of each, a semiotic perspective admits the richness of human experience and consciousness which integrates both modes of thought through semiosis.

In contrast to a lifeless propositional logic, what is characteristic of the logic of history is that it detects, rather than dismisses, the rich web of sign relations in human culture wherein the part can be understood only in relation to some whole, and a whole only in relation to the part. This interconnectedness cannot be observed from without as if the whole and the part were independent entities whose sign relations to each other were only external, that is, mind-independent simply. The historian uses the logic proper to history to penetrate to internal—or mind-dependent—relations that involve purpose and goals underlying external forces, a knowledge that differs radically from, for instance, the knowledge of a planetary system. Moreover, human products, such as a Gothic cathedral, form a semiotic web of temporal and dynamic relationships wherein the later parts of the whole are not only brought into existence by the earlier parts, but the earlier parts are themselves affected by the anticipatory internal relations they entertain to the later parts (see Collingwood 1936-1940: 210-217; Marrou 1959: 58-59; Tholfsen 1967: 243-244). The historian’s logic must therefore not only apprehend concrete signs, but also universal sign systems as these develop over time.

Thus being and becoming are two aspects of an indivisible single reality (see Tholfsen 1967: 107), wherein physical, or mind-independent being, and the physically unreal objects or aspects of objects of thought, or mind-dependent being, become interdependent insofar as it is cognition that gives them signification—that is, the use of signs explicitly as signs—in precisely the way in which relations between natural events, which are only extrinsic, cannot do, even if these relations also be classified sometimes as “semiotic” (Deely 1978; 1982: 93-123).

What the historian does is to make explicit the structuring process of signification, not by means of the dichotomous logic of a “before-after” relationship, but by means of the logic of history which deals with signification precisely as changing throughout the interval between given slices across, given cross-sections of, time. Whether a particular historian be oriented toward history as event or as structure, what cannot be escaped is “the heart of the historian’s problem”, which is “the transition between coherences, the explanation of radical discontinuity” (Struever 1974: 404). The historian’s problem must be approached from the anthroposemiotic standpoint that recognizes the “shifting line” between being and non-being, or mind-independent and mind-dependent elements wherein these distinct—but not separated—orders of existence exchange places over time as their interrelationships change according to human design and accident, as, for example, in the case of “heroes” who “shape the development of a given culture through myth and folklore in ways that cannot be reduced to causal lines stemming from actual achievements in the order of physical events, just as stories false in their origin can become true shapers of a course of social events, thus acquiring a reality which must be dealt with in its own right” (Deely 1982: 64-65).

Thus non-being, or “unreal” relations (in the sense of having no being apart from cognition), are notions that are founded on “real” relations (in the mind-independent sense in which things are observed to affect one another in their physical existence: cf. Poinsot 1632a: Second Preamble, esp. 83/9-16, 95/18-96/36), and, in turn, by influencing human conduct, these very “unrealities” can ultimately acquire sometimes the status of “reality” through such consequent incorporation into the network of real relations (Langan 1983: ix-x; Powell 1983) comprising the world of social interaction or of culture. Hence the inevitability of the human condition as historical, in the very precise sense of historicity as “the domination of man’s existence by a total view of reality (culture, Weltanschauung, etc.) not known to reduce to fact” (Deely 1971: 2).

In the perspective of semiotic, therefore, the old question of whether history be an art or a science or a mediating discipline between the two need no longer be approached by attempts to graft history onto the prevailing interdisciplinary mind-set that combines disciplines without developing the inner logic characteristic of each. Even the best attempts among historians to classify history according to its own proper logic succumb to a kind of double vision of history as a split-level discipline, half art and half science, or some proportion thereof. The noted historian Crane Brinton (1936) once called history an imaginative reconstruction of the past, which, while scientific in its methods and findings, is artistic in its presentation. The question has also been turned inside out: “All sciences are devoted to the quest for truth; truth can neither be apprehended nor communicated without art. History therefore is an art, like all other sciences” (Wedgwood 1956: 96).

These approaches to the anomaly of history fall short of resolving the problem. History deals not simply with external relations, but with internal relations as well—that is, not simply with some (now mind-independent) fact of the past, but with the feel of it as well (see Nye 1966: 140). As Johan Huizinga observed in his 1924 classic, The Waning of the Middle Ages (pp. 14-15):

A scientific historian of the Middle Ages, relying first and foremost on official documents, which rarely refer to the passions, except violence and cupidity, occasionally runs the risk of neglecting difference of tone between the life of the expiring Middle Ages and that of our own days. Such documents would make us forget the vehement pathos of medieval life, of which the chroniclers, however defective as to material facts, always keep us in mind.

The historian Lynn White (1956: 74) makes much the same point: “Much of life escaped the documents . . . . The historian must create his patterns of probable truth less in terms of specific records and more in terms of relationships intuitively evident to him as he deals with the records.”

What needs to be developed in the perspective of semiotic is the logical connection between fact and fiction. Historians have pointed out to one another for some time that they sometimes “behave more like writers of fiction than they either admit or know” (Wedgwood 1956: 95). Illustrative of such an historiographical problem is the question of what took place in the ministries and palaces of Europe during the days following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand which precipitated World War I. As Remak points out (1967: 117), any narrative of these days must of necessity be partially fictive, or constructed, in view of the difference between life itself and the logic of the historian:

For what in print is likely to look neat and logical, in truth, more often than not, was chaotic or at best improvised. Decisions were made with no time for proper reflection, messages crossed each other, and some of the most fateful errors were committed from motives no more profound or sinister than lack of information or sleep.

The logical connection between fact and fiction that still needs to be developed is the relation between words and ideas that semiotic can clarify (see Deely 1982: 131-142; also Merrell 1975: 101). While the naming process is a creative act of making something intelligible from the very beginning of historical inquiry, it is pushing an insight too far to say that the word therefore “creates” the object, as Kinser asserts (1981: 65): “The verbal formulas used to describe an object also create it.” The question then arises: What was there in the first place to describe? A tennis umpire, for example, may call a serve a fault or an ace, but all the umpire does is create the call, not the serve itself. If a given umpire, moreover, makes too many “wrong calls” according to public perception, this umpire will be removed as “umpire”.

To argue that the past does not exist until the historian makes the shots by calling them, that is, to argue that the historian creates the past simply by his or her construction of it, sinks history into a kind of linguistic quicksand which loses all ground upon which to base a semiotically objective inquiry. On the other hand, to fail to recognize the power of the word, or power of naming, in the shaping of thought about an object—in establishing the object’s signification—is to fail to recognize the presuppositions built into the naming process itself, and thus to fail to recognize any difference between “what really happened” and what we call “history”.

What we call “history” is therefore, to borrow a distinction that Wilden makes (1981: 2-3) about language, “both a representation of reality and a part of reality, part of the human context”:

It is the very task of language to bring its structure to the representation of reality, for where there is no structure, there is no sense. Structure structures content. And any language can be restructured in both form and content so as to deal with changing ecological and historical realities.

Thus history as transmitted through language is something flexible: semiosically, it structures the human Umwelt, but by reordering it continually. While the contemporary historian thus shares with the scientist a semiotically objective method of inquiry, the historian also possesses, because history is structured through natural language, a kind of poetic license in the crafting of historical reality.

Semiotic in principle thus distinguishes in order to unite the artistic and scientific, practical and speculative knowledge, as these are integrated in the method of history as historians practice it. The developing logic of semiotic and the heretofore underdeveloped logic of history are seen thus to converge toward a doctrine of signs that resolves of itself the anomaly presented by history in the presemiotic context of modern philosophy and science.

This “doctrine of signs”, of which history forms part, is precisely the “semiotic” that Locke called for in ending his Essay Concerning Human Understanding as a foundational doctrine of the structure of experience and consciousness. It is this new logic, “different”, as Locke put it, and more encompassing, as Poinsot remarked, than the “logic and critic we have been acquainted with heretofore”, that provides the perspective required to account for history.

Locke the physician—to draw an imaginary analogy—did not sever the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain; on the contrary, he shows how the two communicate. Semiotic thus integrates logically what is already integrated in the historian’s awareness. In so doing, semiotic, in contrast to traditional philosophy (Deely 1982: 64) opens the door to studying the orders of external and internal relations, mind-independent and mind-dependent relations, being and non-being (the “real” and “unreal”), not as if their boundaries were staked out in advance, but as constantly shifting because of the interaction between these two orders as the mind participates in what it observes—through the function of signs. Semiosis thereby structures experience flexibly. It is just this flexibility—publicly verifiable in part but suffused throughout with poetry (the free initiatives of human creativity)—which is the object of historical inquiry, and which the method of history is required to accommodate before all else—as, so to speak, its point of rest.