PREFACE

Throughout the 1975-76 academic year, a pilot program in Semiotics in the Humanities, unprecedented in the nation, was undertaken at Indiana University with the aid of a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (EP 22467-75-375). The intent of the project was to in-augurate and facilitate the integration of semiotics into the curriculum of the Bloomington campus of Indiana University (with the cooperation of the Indianapolis campus).

The pilot program consisted of: (1) a year's lecture course, Signaling Behavior in Man and Animals, conducted by the undersigned under the spon-sorship of the Honors Division, and open to qualified undergraduates and interested graduate students from any department of the university; (2) a series of lectures and seminars in connection with the course, offered by outstanding visiting semioticians, who also advised on the shaping of the eventual semiotics curriculum; and (3) a thorough survey of the Indiana University Library holdings in semiotics, with recommendations for relevant acquisitions of books and serials. This three-pronged development undoubtedly succeeded in increasing awareness among members of the faculty and in the university community at large of the usefulness and importance of semiotics as a general method of analysis, and in opening the way to the accommodation of semiotic studies into already existing curricula. We found that student interest was so widespread to begin with that our efforts were greeted in those quarters with animation and müch more ready acceptance than by their conservative elders in the ranks of the administration and teaching staff.

On June 1, 1976, I submitted a lengthy narrative report to the National Endowment for the Humanities summarizing the results of the experiment. This statement was based, in part, on a very careful and exhaustive prior assessment of the overall impact of the program by a distinguished outside evaluating committee, which, in turn, reported to the Visiting Committee of our Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies. Since curricula in semiotic studies are now also unfolding in other universities throughout the country, notably, Brown, Colorado (Boulder), and Vanderbilt, even in the Public School System of Brookline, Massachusetts, it may be worth mentioning that a limited number of copies of the final report, with extensive supporting documentation, including copies of the video-taped television interviews with six of the visiting speakers, can be made available through the facilities of the Research Center, which administered the pilot program.

Eighteen visiting speakers participated in this enterprise, some of whom gave several lectures. Thirteen of the papers, most of them revised, were then selected for inclusion in this volume. Some of the others have appeared, or will appear, elsewhere, in more or less modified form; they include:

Raymond Bellour (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), "Hitchcock's The Birds : Analysis of a Fragment," previously published (in French) in Cahiers du cinéma, ηο.219 (September 1968).

Erving Goffman (University of Pennsylvania), "Picture Frames," now incorporated in his monograph Gender Advertisements, in Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication, vol.3, no.2 (1976).

Henry Hiž (University of Pennsylvania), "What Do Stones and Bricks Have to Say: Meaning in Architecture," partially incorporated into his 1976 presidential address to the Semiotic Society of America.

Roman Jakobson (Harvard University and MIT), "Science of Sounds as Signs," to be incorporated in his forthcoming book (with Linda Waugh), The Ultimate Constituents of Language (Indiana University Press).

Sebastian K. Shaumyan (Yale University), "Linguistics as a Part of Semiotics," Forum Linguisticum, vol.1, no.l, but also to appear, in substantially enlarged form, in the Studies in Semiotics series (Peter de Ridder Press).

The choice of topic was left to each of our guests to determine, the only constraint being, of course, the overall theme of the program. Variety was desirable because we wanted to appeal to the largest possible segment of the university community, and, in fact, audiences ranged from about fifty to a thousand or more.

Semiotics can be informally defined as a science that studies all possible varieties of signs, the rules governing their generation and production, transmission and exchange, reception and interpretation. Concisely put, semiotics has two complementary, interdependent aspects: communication and signification. As I have delineated in a number of recent publications, semiotics is an ancient discipline, stemming from pre-Socratic clinical roots, which then led to the development of three fundamental semiotic traditions—the medical, the philosophical, and the linguistic—that have thoroughly intermingled at various periods in Western intellectual history, although there were times when they strove for autonomy. In the middle of the last decade, semiotics underwent a spontaneous and rapid international development that led to the emergence of semiotic workshops in Eastern and Western Europe, North and South America, Australia, Israel, and Japan. The influence of the semiotic method has variously encompassed or influenced all subjects commonly called "the humanities," most of the social sciences, some of the behavioral sciences, and even some natural sciences such as genetics, physiology, and, most notably, ethology. Although most often involving the "sciences of man" (especially the nomothetic sciences), semiotics has also become a powerful tool in animal communication studies. Further, one may speak of the semiotic behavior of machines such as computers.

This explosive development no doubt partially derives from the pressure and technological improvement of the mass media, in consequence of which the problem of communication has proved to be one of the most pivotal ones of our civilization. It is readily understandable, therefore, why so many disciplines were reoriented and have converged upon the study of the general laws of cultural and natural signification. Another pertinent factor here has been the emergence of a few charismatic figures at the turn of the century (e.g., Ferdinand de Saussure in linguistics, Charles S. Peirce in philosophy), followed by such creative contemporary synthesizers of their major traditions as Roman Jakobson.

No single collection, such as this one, can possibly claim to present a complete panoramic vista of so complex an area of human concern, with its venerable history and with so many disciplinary ramifications, as the doctrine of signs. Nonetheless, when read in conjunction with A Perfusion of Signs (Indiana University Press, 1977), one can gain a fairly comprehensive overview of current semiotic theory and practice, for these two compendia were meant to complement one another. The ordering of the contents was imposed by the editor after the fact. It is arbitrary. The essays can be sampled, at the readers pleasure, and enjoyed according to any arrangement.

Now for some concluding words about the title of the present volume, Sight, Sound, and Sense. Since the Greeks proposed that the sign is constituted of two indispensable moieties, one aisthëton, "perceptible" or "sensible," the other noëton, "intelligible" or "rational," almost every semiotic model put forward since has retained this dual conception, labeled with one pair of terms or another. Accordingly, the last noun in the title alliteratively renders sëmainomenon and its successive transformations. The first two nouns split the Stoic sémainon with a view to the two main channels upon which semioticians have lavished the bulk of their attention: the optical and the acoustical. It is important, however, to be mindful that these are but two out of the much vaster range of media of communication at the disposal of organisms, including particularly man. Some of them are discussed in a very recent book, How Animals Communicate (Indiana University Press, 1977); in much larger part, however, they constitute an endlessly fascinating area of research still on the threshold of man's scientific grasp.

The pilot program owed much to the help of Theresa de Magalhaes Calvet, Research Associate (now at the University of Paraiba, Brazil), and Margot D. Lenhart, Administrative Assistant in the Research Center. May Lee assisted, with her customary skill, in the transmogrification of the manuscript into print.

THOMAS A. SEBEOK

Bloomington,

February 7, 1977