THREE

The Tenuous “Reality”
of Signs

I. OUT OF CONTROL? The holistic, nonlinear view suggested at the close of chapter 2 in conjunction with the notion that all processes consist of variations on a theme with no absolute reduplication has been, so to speak, “in the air.” To cite merely a few examples, I have already referred to the relativity framework of a set of space-time “knots” flowing along the warps and woofs of the continuum and the quantum theoretical formulation of an interconnected web. In evolution, the variation-on-a-theme principle is described by Conrad H. Waddington’s (1957) “chreodic paths” in the “genetic landscape,” and more recently by Rupert Sheldrake’s (1988a) “morphic fields.”¹

Evolution is now being described as “emergent systems” in a “self-organizing” universe (Jantsch 1980) and as “synergetics”—nonlinear cooperative interaction between evolving entities (Corning 1983; Haken 1978, 1980). In addition, we have the exuberant and at times quasi-mystical holistic view of Henry Margenau (1987; LeShan and Margenau 1982), the grand synthetic view integrating Eastern philosophy and Western science with cosmic consciousness (Wilber 1977, 1982; Hayward 1984, 1987; Peat 1987; Briggs and Peat 1984, 1989), and the more moderated “anthropic cosmological principle” (Barrow and Tipler 1986). Other “new sciences” within this emergent field deal with the appearance, development, and functioning of complex systems regardless of the domain of investigation to which they belong. They originated with general system theory pioneered by the likes of Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968), Anatol Rapoport (1950, 1974), and Kenneth Boulding (1956, 1978), along with the science of cybernetics developed by, among others, Norbert Wiener (1948, 1950), W. Ross Ashby (1954), Warren S. McCulloch (1965), and Stafford Beer (1959).

Since the 1960s, investigators of complex systems have been joined and reinforced by nonequilibrium thermodynamics, via the work of Ilya Prigogine (1980, 1981; Prigogine and Stengers 1984) and his followers; by cellular automata, with John von Neumann’s (1958) pioneering work which later evolved into the autopoietic system theory of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (Varela 1979; Maturana and Varela 1980, 1987); and by catastrophe theory and dynamic systems theory developed by René Thom (1975, 1983), Christopher Zeeman (1977), and Ralph Abraham (Abraham and Shaw 1982). It is becoming increasingly evident that these fields of intellectual endeavor—occasionally known collectively as “sciences of complexity”—may well offer a viable alternative to the classical model.

On the other hand, in the social sciences and humanities, the emerging world picture is suggested by various postures—to enumerate a few, anti-foundationalism (Bernstein 1983; Rorty 1979; Rajchman and West 1985; Baynes, Bohman, and McCarthy 1987), textualism and textual undecidability (Derrida 1973, 1974, 1978), the new historiography (Foucault 1970; Hunt 1989; LaCapra 1983; White 1978, 1987), ethnography (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1983; Tyler 1978, 1987), and sociology of knowledge (Bloor 1976, 1983; Radnitsky and Bartley 1987; Phillips 1973, 1977). The principle of variation on a theme as fundamental to languages, both natural and formal, the arts, and life itself, is nowhere more remarkably presented than in Hofstadter (1979) and Gombrich (1960, 1979), and in actual works by the likes of John Barth, Beckett, and Borges, e. e. cummings, Lewis Carroll, and Gertrude Stein, and Escher and René Magritte.

But actually, this holistic view, thanks to a few harbingers, has been slowly emerging for some time. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries certain mathematicians, among them Euler, Fermat, and Lagrange, developed abstract descriptions of nonlinear processes. This trend culminated in the nineteenth century in the so-called Hamilton-Jacobi theory, which provides a uniform framework capable of accounting for change emerging out of the totality—e.g., Bohm’s implicate order—which suggests that the events (Seconds) of the world—the explicate order—are ultimately interpreted as the expression (Thirds) of an underlying unity. The clash between permanence and change, the one and the many, parts and the whole, also bears on the distinction between linear thinking and nonlinear thinking, and, by interpolation, between Saussurean semiological binarism and Peircean semiotic triadism (see Merrell 1991 for a critique of semiology from the vantage of Peircean semiotics).

Indeed, there is, as we shall note, a certain complementarity in these so-called oppositions. For example, in contrast to semiotics, Saussurean semiology, predicated on the principle of radical differences, tends toward binarism and linearity. Langue is antagonistic toward parole, and synchrony toward diachrony. Yet syntagm, which is more compatible with the right-hand side of these two dichotomies, does not always take a back seat to paradigm; it introduces a sort of nondiachronic, yet nonsynchronic, dimension to signification, interjecting irreversibility into the system. Rather than dynamizing the whole affair, syntagm stultifies it. Unlike parole, and especially Chomsky’s performance, it does not effectively embody a capacity to generate an infinite diversity of messages within an equally diverse set of contexts (i.e., reference frames). On the contrary. Syntagm is like the acceleration problem in chapter I where movement is there, once and for all, as a static trajectory on a graph. Order prevails, and linearity inheres, true to the mathematics of differential equations in engineering, physics, biology, and economics.

Classical linear systems are by and large predictable in their behavior and attractive in terms of their relative simplicity. Smooth and continuous, they soothe the eye and mind. They most satisfactorily describe slow-flowing streams, electrical circuits, springs stretching continuously, machines operating normally, the pleasant movement of a piece by Brahms, Renaissance—as opposed to baroque—architecture, or language organized in a novel with customary patterns. The Saussurean view of language works fine during a particular synchronic “moment,” when signifiers and signifieds fall into the phalangeal marching order that suits our longing for harmony and simplicity, for predictability and therefrom, perchance, control.²

Linearity does, of course, have its place. It can frequently be used to analyze complex systems into simpler ones. This is made possible by the fact that linear systems are reducible to collections of coupled differential equations corresponding to the interacting elements in the system. For example, the sound patterns produced by each instrument in an orchestra can be broken down by “Fourier analysis” into a complex wave of superpositions, and when these are combined with the complex wave of all other instruments, a linear pattern can be derived. This and other such computations lend credence to the classical tradition of conceiving the universe as a vast set of linear cause-and-effect sequences. Given relatively simple systems considered in isolation, this approximation has its validity.

However, such harmonious bliss is quite alien to a new arrival on the scene: the “physics of chaos,” which is an extension of the study of complex systems.³ Once the activity within a system reaches a high pitch, it takes leave of linearity and enters the more complex domain of nonlinear effects. A stream becomes turbulent, a circuit breaks down, an engine begins vibrating and finally blows, a concerto suddenly takes an unexpected turn, a novel reveals its multiply paradoxical navel, its aporia, at which point its expected meaning also vibrates to pieces. Such unexpected breakdowns are the essence of Hofstadter’s (1979) chimerical self-destructing record player, which contains the equivalent of a double bind. It is like a Gödelian sentence causing a formal system to disintegrate when the crescendo reaches a certain peak. Actually, the same effect can be experienced with any cheap stereo. Gradual turning of the volume knob produces a linear response from the speakers, but if it is turned too far, nonlinearities in the circuit will cause a distortion in the output. These more complex systems, evincing radical perturbations, transformations, catastrophes, and violent evolutionary breaks, imply far more complex and more subtle processes which demand an account of the entire system, not merely its parts.

Nonetheless, we persist in our striving for order, harmony, simplicity.⁴ Cause-and-effect schemes were successfully represented by linear differential equations from within the classical scientific framework. By the end of the nineteenth century, scientists were relying almost exclusively on linear equations. They were only remotely acquainted with nonlinear equations capable of modeling discontinuous breaks in a diverse range of phenomena (explosions, sudden changes in cloud formations or air currents, the fracture of a continental plate, a bridge or dam under pressure suddenly giving way). The problem was that such equations required techniques unavailable to investigators up to the 1970s. Today, nonlinear equations are used extensively. For instance, they can model how an earthquake occurs after irregular pressure along a fault line increases until a critical value is reached. What they cannot do is determine precisely when this will occur, for there is no linear cause-and-effect sequence allowing for predictability. If cause and effect there be, it is nonlinear, involving a numbing complexity of variables. Nonlinear equations model chaos, but they have demolished the dream of reductionist science, for virtually all vestiges of control have been lost.⁵

II. OR MERELY ORGANIZED CHAOS? “But Saussurean synchronicity,” one might wish to retort, “does incorporate nonlinearity, and network ‘causality.’ As such, it lends itself to interconnectedness. Witness the chessboard analogy to language, for example.”

This would be a distortion of Saussure, however. The synchronic slice out of the semiological salami is binary rather than trinary and polydimensional. And regarding a sentence’s actualization into a syntagmatic string, it is linearly rather than multiply connected. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1983:242) point out, rightly I believe, that Louis Hjelmslev’s “glossematics”

stands in profound opposition to the Saussurean and post-Saussurean undertaking. Because it abandons all privileged reference. Because it describes a pure field of algebraic immanence that no longer allows any surveillance on the part of a transcendent instance, even one that has withdrawn. Because within this field it sets in motion its flows of form and substance, content and expression. Because it substitutes the relationship of reciprocal precondition between expression and content for the relationship of subordination between signifier and signified.

In short, Hjelmslev’s language is a free matrix; Saussure’s is more akin to a Markov chain generator. The former destroys the notion of a linear stream of signifiers, which is also particularly highlighted in much of Jacques Lacan’s writings. It allows for expression of the individual as a unidirectional trajectory within a social network, and, in addition, it allows for that individual’s multiple lateral moves in unexpected directions within the entire interconnected, nonlinear fabric. It lends itself to tree structure as well as patterns, and to a binary “this or that,” or “this and then that,” as well as to an indecisive and vacillating “either this . . . or . . . or . . . n,” which, when carried out to a sufficient number of decimal places, becomes “both and.”⁶

In fact Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation is remarkably nonlinear. And, I might add, it is nonlinguistic; they find Saussure’s language-based semiology especially unacceptable, preferring Peirce’s “nonlinguistic semiotics” in much of their work (see in particular Guattari 1984). Deleuze and Guattari foreground the individual from within the whole, which has been shoved under the rug for so long because of the West’s obsession with abstractions. In so doing, they contrast what they term the nonlinear, radically independent schizophrenic attitude via-a-vis the world with the linear behavior of the obsessively binary-goggled paranoiac.⁷ Linear tunnel vision is paranoia; perpetual nonlinear breaks at orthogonal angles into unaccustomed pathways constitutes schizophrenia. A schizophrenic vacillation, “either this . . . or . . . or . . . n,” takes over from the paranoid “this or that” or “this and then that.” The schizophrenic’s molecular indeterminacy takes precedence over a paranoid statistical molar certainty. The “binary machine” breaks down, and the multiply dimensional “schizophrenic machine,” centered within its “semiotically natural” environment, replaces it. Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenic experiences, both as an individual and as the entire species, the “semiotic world” in terms of semiosic production. He is an individual and everybody at one and the same time. Without plans, design, or vision, he mushrooms out into the “semiotically real” world metaphorically to encompass the whole.

As Deleuze and Guattari (1983:15) put it:

The schizo has his own system of coordinates for situating himself at his disposal, because, first of all, he has at his disposal his very own recording code, which does not coincide with the social code, or coincides with it only in order to parody it. The code of delirium or of desire proves to have an extraordinary fluidity. It might be said that the schizophrenic passes from one code to the other, that he deliberately scrambles all the codes, by quickly shifting from one to another, according to the questions asked him, never giving the same explanation from one day to the next, never invoking the same genealogy, never recording the same event in the same way.

The schizophrenic is a nomad, a rebel. The paranoiac remains within the system, caught in a one-dimensional stream of labyrinthlike binary choices; there is no way out and no retrievable center. In contrast, the orthogonal schizophrenic’s sidestep places him “outside,” which is no transcendental quantum leap, mind you, but entails awareness of the binary wave-train head on: it is as if everything were there all at once, which endows him with the characteristics of every-body and at the same time no-body. Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenic is also a pragmatist par excellence. That is to say, he is a bricoleur. He is in command of a hodgepodge collection of signs of related characteristics with a general but always transient rule of thumb for their use, and he goes about rearranging them in continually novel and different patterns and configurations: his language is a word-salad relating to a junkyard of “semiotic objects.” As a consequence, he remains indifferent toward the methods of production and the product, or the overall result to be achieved. What is of interest is the doing, the process.

Two perplexities ensue from this account: (1) Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term machine, obviously of cybernetic origin, which they creatively interject among other technical terms, and (2) the question, “How can we account for the schizophrenic’s ‘either . . . or . . . or . . . n’ in terms of semiosis?”

Regarding the first perplexity, the problem with the term machine is that it tends to be construed as excessively binary and linear. It threatens to conjure up in the mind either an image of the mechanistic paradigm, developed in the eighteenth century with the notion of de le Mettrie’s (1912) l’Homme machine, or the early cybernetics of Norbert Wiener and others, an offshoot of which was the Shannon-Weaver information theory, both of them remaining somewhat tinged with the classical model (see Campbell 1982). On the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari’s machine is strikingly comparable to Maturana and Varela’s (1980:136; 1987: 75-80) definition of the term: an entity in physical space qualified by its particular mode of organization capable of communicating with other entities by structural couplings—which implies a nonanimistic view foregrounding the inner dynamism of the entity. An organism, in contrast to a “machine”—insofar as the latter is presently known, though that could change in the future—is radically nonlinear in nature. And it is more “synchronic” than linear and causal in that patterns unfold out of a more general background of possibilia (the implicate order), something like the pianist revealing what was concealed in the musical score as she deftly moves her fingers across the keyboard. The score as possibilia is there, all at once, and the pianist enjoys the freedom of actualizing some—but never the totality—of those possibilia.

One might now retort that the term synchronicity reveals an antiprocessual, and hence anti-Peircean, posture. However, there is synchrony and there is “synchrony.” My use of the word is divorced from the notion of a static Saussurean slice. Rather, it bears on Peirce’s pre-First and Firstness—i.e., Aristotle’s potentia as appropriated by Heisenberg, and, among others, by Bohm, in his attempt to articulate the implicate domain. The idea of synchronicity with respect to the Minkowski “block” is not tantamount to Saussurean “synchronicity,” as some hopeful structuralists have speculated (for example, Jakobson, 1972). In the first place the “block” allows for no simultaneities; in the second, it is nonlinear rather than linear; in the third, commensurate with Hjelmslev’s concept of language, any and all inhabitants remain immanent—a characteristic emphasized by Deleuze and Guattari.

According to the nonlinear equations of general relativity, Reimannian geometry provides the ground for all “matter” and “energy” which emerge as “lumps” or “knots” of curving time-space. A “knot” can remain relatively stable over a certain period of time, or it can ramble about, “colliding” with its neighbors. In whichever case it is never divorced from but is related to everything else in its environment, and even to the entire universe. What appear to be disparate objects of experience are actually interrelated and interacting emanations from a nonlinear field. The universe is in this respect like an organism in which each part is in some manner a manifestation of a single, undivided whole. Although the parts might appear to be the product of random Brownian-like motion, from a broader view, they compose an orchestrated ensemble.

Ilya Prigogine (Prigogine and Stengers 1984:186-87) uses the example of a colony of termites to illustrate this point. Each insect within the colony seems to be scurrying about at random with its minute piece of dirt, its activity unrelated to that of the other termites. Then, at some critical point the movement of the colony becomes coordinated, and a complex nest is constructed as if the entire collection of insects composed an organism with a blueprint in hand to guide it. It is as if a few “knots” came together to create order out of the vast sea of chaos. This is not exactly the case, however, as Prigogine repeatedly argues, for such order out of chaos is the natural process of all phenomena, be they inorganic or organic, unicellular or organisms of incomprehensible complexity.⁸

Various levels of organization are at work here, from micro- to macro-levels. The important point is that as a system develops, the level of organization does not always determine its structural complexity: higher levels are not necessarily more complex than their subsystems. At the molecular level, H₂S0₄ is considerably simpler than the atomic structure of H, S, and O, and their atomic structure is simpler than their subatomic level. A colony of cells is structurally simpler than the structure of each constituent cell, and the structure of that cell is simpler than the molecular structures of which it is composed. The structure of the termite colony, an ape society, or an ecological system is less complex than the biological and organic structure of each individual component. Simplicity and complexity, in this sense, depend upon the perspective; they exist in large degree in the eye of their beholder.

The hierarchy resulting from the evolution of more complex systems, especially living systems, not only is structural but manifests a certain nonlinear form of control.⁹ At the termite colony level, the hierarchical chain of command exercises its control over the structurally more complex individual members of the colony. Less complex higher systems can then control more complex subsystems. Biophysicist Howard Pattee (1970, 1977, 1986) argues that at higher levels, irrelevant details of more complex subsystems are shunted aside in order to force the lower-level units into patterns of collective behavior independent of their structural workings as independent units. On the other hand, once a new hierarchical level has emerged, it tends horizontally to branch out, evolving into a progressively more complex system. Hydrogen is structurally less complex than uranium, adenine than RNA and DNA, ape colonies are less complex than human societies, and so on. Thus a new level is often marked by development into simplification, which then gravitates toward evolutionary complexification—though, I must mention, the destiny is teleonomic, that is, unforeseeable, as Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenic has testified repeatedly.

However, when viewed as a whole, the vertical development of higher systems coupled with their horizontal evolution, especially when considering life processes, tends toward complexification, not simplification. And if sign behavior is, as Peirce asserted time and again, tantamount to life processes, we should expect sign processes to follow the general procedures of developmental simplification and evolutionary complexification (Salthe and Anderson 1989).

Let us, then, consider an example from Peirce: natural language as symbol.

III. THE GROWTH OF SIGNS. A proposition, Peirce demonstrates, is a compound sign containing two signs of less abstract sort: an index (the subject) and an icon (the predicate). In fact,

It is impossible to find a proposition so simple as not to have reference to two signs. Take, for instance, “it rains.” Here the icon is the mental composite photograph of all the rainy days the thinker has experienced. The index, is all whereby he distinguishes that day, as it is placed in his experience. The symbol is the mental act whereby [he] stamps that day as rainy. . . . (CP:2.438)

At the outset this seems straightforward enough. The icon as “mental composite photograph” and the index as “that day,” distinguished from all other days representing the speaker’s memory store, expectations, and propensities, are a relatively complex system. The proposition or symbol as a “mental act” becomes merely an abstract stamp, a veritable caricature placed on an existing set of possible sensory, “semiotically real,” and cognitive conditions. The icon is possibility, Firstness, what might be as related to the intricate set of all past happenings in the memory bank of the speaker. The index is Secondness, a happens-to-be in relation to all other “semiotically real” events, past, present, and future to come, whether “out there” or in the imagination. And the proposition, consisting of the interconnected icon and index, is Thirdness, what most probably would be in the event that a certain set of conditions, from an anesthetizing complexity of possible conditions, were to exist.¹⁰

But things are never quite so simple as we would like. Peirce goes on to point out that in the case of most relatively complex propositions, the subject-index pair is itself compound. In the sentence (a) “A sells B to C for the price D,” A, B, C, and D form a set of four indices, and “______sells______to______for the price______” is the icon or idea representing the set of indices. According to the sentence (b) “James Keys, who wrote Only Two Can Play This Game, is actually G. Spencer-Brown, author of Laws of Form,” the indices in question are linked to the same “semiotic object,” though they are not identical or synonymous, since the two instantiations of the “semiotic object” are dressed in distinct semiotic attire and they are contextualized differently. The proposition brings the two indices together as a relatively simple whole, thus eschewing many of the possible instantiations of the “object” in question while focusing on that quality of the “object” relevant to the particular proposition.

On the other hand, (c) “Flying planes can be dangerous” contains an ambiguous index, the two “objects” being mutually exclusive. Disambiguation of the proposition eschews the myriad instantiations (composite photographs) of each of the incompatible icons, while foregrounding precisely that incompatibility in order to determine, in the context of its use, which of the two indices applies. When considering propositions (a), (b), and (c) in terms of the existing set of sensory, “semiotically real,” and cognitive conditions, the labyrinthine complexity of natural language in regard to its implicate and explicate, nonselective and selective, dimensions begins to take effect.

However, we have hardly begun to scratch the surface. Peirce’s “it rains” as a “mental composite photograph” (icon) of the sum total of the rainy days the utterer has experienced comes dangerously close to—if it is not itself the spitting image of—that long-venerated “picture theory,” shot from the launching pad by Plato and brought to its aphelion with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The picture theory—mind and/or language as a mirror of nature—came to predominate so thoroughly in metaphysical ventures that, as Richard Rorty (1979:12) remarks,

It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions. The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as a great mirror, containing various representations—some accurate, some not—and capable of being studied by pure nonempirical methods. Without the notion of the mind as mirror, the notion of knowledge as accuracy of representation would not have suggested itself.¹¹

Rorty critiques Peirce’s use of the phrase “man’s glassy essence” (CP:6.270-71) on arguing that “a person is nothing but a symbol involving a general idea.” Peirce propagates the erroneous idea, Rorty points out, that “man” is an essence trying to discover the essence of essence (nature). The universe, so this story goes, has produced minds that mirror the universe: the mirror mirrors itself within itself. The Cartesians, Rorty continues, erred in that they believed the mind tuned properly inward could divine the essence of everything, and the empiricists were on the wrong track in remaining true to Cartesian epistemology in their belief that the Inner Eye was capable of reduplicating everything “out there” (Rorty 1979:70-127). On the other hand, Rorty applauds cognitive psychologist Jerry Fodor (1975) for his postulating psychological states as propositional and computational rather than metaphorical or visual. If representation there be, the Chomsky-Fodor innateness thesis, according to which representation is generated by a mechanism “wired into” the brain, is rather plausible. However, confusion reigns between pictures and propositions—between retinal images (and their counterparts in the cortex) and such beliefs as “That’s blue and square.” The image is unmediated, and the belief put in propositional dress is a premise. To reduce an image to a proposition is contradictorily to fuse the two (Rorty 1979:252-53).

Rorty adopts a variant of Quine’s “holistic” approach in order to get rid of the mirror-of-nature metaphor and visual perception. We are within the fabric of sentences, he tells us, and as such we cannot grasp the totality of things, hence we cannot know how the mirror works—if the mirror indeed existed—let alone know that it mirrors by faithfully describing what is mirrored. The most we can do is do what we do—using language within particular contexts—and hope for the best. All we have is a fabric of sentences. To say something is not necessarily to say something about something but simply to use language. In Rorty’s (1979:371-72) words:

We must get the visual, and in particular the mirroring, metaphors out of our speech altogether. To do this we have to understand speech not only as not the externalizing of inner representations, but as not a representation at all. We have to drop the notion of correspondence for sentences as well as for thoughts, and see sentences as connected with other sentences rather than with the world. We have to see the term “corresponds to how things are” as an automatic compliment paid to successful normal discourse rather than as a relation to be studied and aspired to throughout the rest of discourse.

The upshot has it that there is no mirror but mirage, no representation but mediation.

In the first place, regarding Rorty’s critique of the fusion and confusion of images and propositions, the former unmediated and the latter mediated, we have the fundamentals of Peirce’s Firstness and Thirdness, iconicity and symbolicity. But the latter cannot exist without Firstness and Secondness (the “semiotically real”—not the “actually real”). This distinction between “semiotically real” and “real” is of utmost importance, for therein lies a most significant facet of semiosis: the two shall never meet for anything short of an infinite community of knowers. In the second place, another distinction I have mentioned, and will elaborate on repeatedly, is that between vagueness and generality, the former gravitating toward Firstness, the latter toward Thirdness. The image is destined to remain inexorably vague and to a degree inconsistent—therefore it is not merely a cloudy mirror to be polished to its lustrous best (truth). And propositions cannot but be, as generals, incomplete—therefore they will never directly say what the world is. In this sense “it rains” as a “mental composite photograph” cannot be a reliable mirror image but an approximation. And when couched in propositional form, “that day,” as an index “pointing” to the “semiotically real” world, makes up a premise—as Rorty would say regarding “That’s blue and square”—which, coupled with a supporting premise and a conclusion, composes an argument (consisting of a subject and a set of propositions). But just as the mental image, or whatever we wish to call it, cannot but remain somewhat vague, and each proposition somewhat incomplete, so any and all arguments can never reach absolute fulfillment.

What, actually, would be the significance of a perfectly faithful mirror image? Returning to Rorty (1979:376), “The notion of an unclouded Mirror of Nature is the notion of a mirror which would be indistinguishable from what was mirrored, and thus would not be a mirror at all. The notion of a human being whose mind is such an unclouded mirror, and who knows this, is the image, as Sartre says, of God.” This ideal unclouded mirror would be tantamount to the Final Interpretant—as I shall illustrate further in chapters 6 and 7—in its self-contained, self-reflexive, self-sufficient totality: The Ultimate Hologram. Available solely to some infinite entity, it must remain inaccessible for us in the Peircean sense. Hence we hardly need to worry about it, but best we should continue doing what we can do, as Rorty counsels. If Peircean “mirror of nature” there be, it is certainly no utopian dream in the Cartesian style. Rather, true to Peirce’s mathematics-rather than language-based sign theory, as a mind construct it is “semiotically real” but perennially inaccessible to any collection of “semiotic objects” in the world “out there.”

Consideration of this unclouded mirror ushers in Umberto Eco and his essay on mirrors in Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984:202-26). Eco calls mirror images absolute doubles, which is not to say that they are icons, for, Eco argues, they are not signs in the full sense at all. A sign, according to Eco’s theory, must be able to refer back in time or space to something which is what the sign at least in part is not: it must endow its user with the possibility of lying (Eco 1984:177-82). A mirror, in contrast, cannot be a presence in the absence of that to which it refers; it never refers to remote consequents. Thus neither can it be correlated with a content. Nor can it establish a relationship between types or generals, but only between tokens or individuals. As such it is never independent of its medium, and therefore cannot enjoy an interpretant: it simply is what it is, unmediated in the sense of sign-object-interpretant interaction.

But what is absolute iconism anyway? If it is not signness, then what can it be in Peirce’s universe perfused with signs, if not wholly consisting of signs? In view of the preceding chapters, it is, like Rorty’s unclouded Mirror of Nature, the impossible Final Interpretant. This unimaginable Interpretant, having taken in more and more until it included all, has become coterminous with the Pure Monad. The ideal continuum at one extreme is equal to the ideal continuum at the other extreme. I cannot overemphasize the fact that this Peircean conception of things is not the same as that ill-fated dream, that quest for the chimerical Mirror of Nature Rorty so effectively deconstructs. Peirce is exonerated at least in part by his illustrating time and again that we are within the holistic fabric of signs, with no map of the whole to guide us. Although Peirce did not take the final leap, he compellingly demonstrated that we need not expend needless energy toward realizing pretentious dreams, but, by way of critical dialogic exchange, collectively we can push on hopefully to become a bit more right than wrong. In this light, if the mirror does not produce a sign in the full sense when coupled with its image but affords a vague and delusory hope of reaching, somewhere and somewhen, that Grand Absolute Icon, the problem is that it promises infinitely more than it can deliver.

Eco suggests so much. The mirror image is a most peculiar case of the double: it is an absolute double. This explains

why mirrors inspired so much literature; this virtual duplication of stimuli (which sometimes works as if there were both my body as an object and my body as a subject, splitting and facing itself), this theft of an image, this unceasing temptation to believe I am someone else, makes a man’s experience with mirrors an absolutely unique one, on the threshold between perception and signification. (Eco 1984:210)

The apparent duplication of the body as both object and subject constitutes in effect a fusion, albeit imaginary rather than “real,” of the long-standing subject-object dichotomy. It is precisely from this imagined absolute iconism inherent in the specular image that “the dream of a sign having the same characteristics arises” (Eco 1984:210)—and thus the Western obsession with ocular metaphors, the Great Mirror of Nature, the Inner Eye capable of reduplicating, in all its fullness, the world “out there.” Eco writes further of mirrors as “rigid designators,” concluding that there is a difference between mirror images and proper names in that the former is an absolute proper name, just as it is an absolute double and an absolute icon. The mirror image serves vicariously to bring to fruition the semiotic delusion of proper names’ “being immediately linked to their referent (just like the semiotic dream of an image having all the properties of the object they refer to),” which “arises from a sort of catopric nostalgia” (Eco 1984:212). It also fulfills the obsession among many traditional cultures with “word magic”—the word becomes coterminous with the thing, hence to be in possession of a person’s name is to be in possession of that person—as well as James G. Frazer’s magic by likeness (metaphor-iconicity) and magic by contagion or contact (metonymy-indexicality).

Since we are destined to remain short of the Absolute Icon or Final Interpretant, (a) “A sells B to C for the price of D” cannot be a picture of the “real” transaction. Nor is it even a “picture” of the “semiotically real” event in question. It is merely a sentence among sentences, to be understood in the context of other sentences. “James Keys” and “G. Spencer-Brown” in proposition (b) cannot be mirror images of one another, given their unique context as tokens occurring in the linear stream of signs. And “Flying planes” in (c) dramatically reveals the semiotic uncertainty present in any and all systems whose obstinate push toward the absolute must remain as an infinitely receding horizon.

IV. SIGNS LOST AND SIGNS REGAINED. Actually, propositions (a), (b), and (c) are quite depthless and value-free in comparison to pregnant, value-laden propositions such as, say, (d) “The universe is a machine.” Product of the Cartesian-Newtonian corpuscular-kinetic world view, this proposition embodies and at the same time lies behind an entire language-dependent and culture-dependent universe of discourse, from the hard sciences to the social sciences to the humanities, and it came to pervade, by the end of the nineteenth century and well into the present one, the arts and even many facets of everyday speech habits. In short, it became the tacitly presupposed universe embedded in the collective mind of the community, thus compelling automatized semiotic responses to certain conditions.¹² It became virtually unimaginable that the universe could be otherwise.

Our semiotic world is constructed by means of an elaborate succession of cuts or marks which eventually form a complex and relatively coherent set of categories: “This is a Mayan, not an Aztec, jade carving,” “The humpback whales are endangered,” “You’ve come a long way, baby,” “The market plunged 59.3 points,” “Have a good one,” and so on. With continued use of categories in contextualized discourse, mindlessness sets in such that behavior becomes automatized, not entirely unlike that of the pianist in chapter 2. The good news is that without such categories the world would be devoid of much of its meaning for us. The bad news is that the mind tends toward stultification, toward embedded forms of sign generation and interpretation. In Buddhism, such mindless acts of signification, Peirce’s habit of mind or thought (Boler 1964), are called the “Lord of Speech”:

We adopt sets of categories which serve as ways of managing phenomena. The most fully developed products of this tendency are ideologies, the systems of ideas that rationalize, justify and sanctify our lives. Nationalism, communism, existentialism, Christianity, Buddhism—all provide us with identities, rules of action, and interpretations of how and why things happen as they do. (Trungpa [1973] in Langer [1989:11])

Shedding one set of categories and constructing a new set can be a disconcerting, even bizarre, experience, to wit, as illustrated by Borges’s (1964a:103) ancient Chinese encyclopedia in which animals are put into apparently absurd pigeonholes, or by Einstein’s equally strange Gedanken experiments. Deviation from such embedded pathways of least resistance must be a mindful act, a swim against the current, a negentropic force against a brain in the process of running down. In many Eastern philosophies, proper meditation techniques lead to such de-automatization. In the process old categories dissolve back into the semiosic soup, and the individual is no longer trapped by customary stereotypes and classes (Deikman 1966).

Actually, mindlessness entails a spectrum, from brute physical force to instinct to customary pathways of physical action to mental habits or styles of reason and reaction. As habit, it is Thirdness, or as part of another triad, deduction. Purely rational or deductive thinking serves to confirm old mindsets, rigid categories. On the other hand, the continuous flow of experience, or Firstness, presents the possibility of novelty; this is the realm of abduction. But an abduction is nothing unless it passes the test of Secondness, by inductive trials and tribulations. The trick, of course, is to maintain oneself in a state of readiness for mindful happenings. That, precisely, is how free flights of the imagination that develop into fruitful artworks, theories, inventions, technological innovations, and so on come about.

Further to place proposition (d), “The universe is a machine,” in its proper context, let us turn to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970). It is now generally accepted that scientific development follows definite patterns, whether or not they are those precisely specified by Kuhn. According to this theory, the train of information generation and processing in the sciences is nonlinear, marked by periodic bursts of creative activity (“revolutionary science”) interspersed with periods of relatively routine research (“normal science”). During “normal science” (conducted by way of habit, Thirdness, that is, embedded, automatized semiotic activity), the received world picture is rarely questioned. Scientists content themselves with designing tests for existing theories, extending those theories to uninvestigated phenomena, and in general doing mop-up work.

However, “perturbations” eventually appear in the form of new evidence that fails to conform to expectations (Peirce’s “clash” of Secondness). These perturbations, eventually breeding anomalies, accumulate and cast doubt on the soundness of the theoretical core of the world picture. When the conglomeration of perturbations exceeds a critical mass, the status of the paradigm begins to change: it no longer commands the blind allegiance of the more adventuresome scientists, while conservative investigators begin fighting rear-guard action to defend the anomaly-ridden theory. Eventually, by an imaginative flight of fancy (abduction, Firstness), some maverick scientist, usually young of age and outside the mainstream of “normal science,” generates a radically novel theory partly to almost wholly incompatible with the received view. This new view is initially embraced by a minority group of scientists who then turn “revolutionary,” and if the revolution is effective, the conventional theoretical edifice soon collapses. Only by such a revolution could the centuries-old dominion of classical physics have come to an end.

More specifically, the original formulation of the machine model, in Descartes’s (1644:285-86) words, was: “I have described the earth and the whole visible universe as if it were a machine, having regard only to the shape and movement of its parts.” This Cartesian-Newtonian trope, after becoming entrenched (embedded and implicitly acknowledged, via habit), was eventually transformed into “The universe is a machine,” which served generally to govern the tacit—and at times mindless—behavior of the community. The citizens of the community tended to go along with their daily affairs, oblivious of the original as if clause in the “machine ≈ universe” trope, conducting their scientific activity as if this were simply the way the world is. In other words, the Newtonian revolution booted the language of science to a new level, which then branched out horizontally to become progressively more complex, eventually giving rise to perturbations. The linguistic system gradually became less stable, and finally virtually chaotic, until the appearance of a new world view, the Einsteinian revolution, which, as the mind of the scientific community became more accustomed to this new conceptual framework, revealed a new world of relative order.¹³ In other words, the Newtonian set of symbols were morphologically transmuted into a new set: symbols evince a tendency to multiply (CP:2.302).

It is worthy of note that, in light of the above comments on hierarchization, the fundamental changes brought about by such “paradigm shifts” not only radically alter the basic constructs of science; they also simplify them—recall the words on simplicity and complexity in section II of this chapter. Relative simplicity replaces the labyrinth of perturbations and their accompanying anomalies that burdened the existing paradigm. The apparently comparative simplicity of an emerging world picture should not be construed as easily comprehended merely because it might appear at the outset less burdened with an undesirable cargo of complexity. Emerging paradigms are seldom if ever fully understood at the outset. As a rule they are many steps removed from the plane of observation and common sense—Copernicus’s theory was dubbed “Copernicus’s paradox” for a couple of centuries. Einstein’s equation E = mc² is simpler than Lorentz’s transformation formulas used by some physicists in their attempt to salvage the waning Newtonian world picture, but it required one to step up to a much higher level of abstraction in order to grasp it; hence it did not immediately receive wide acclaim. Much the same could be said, and examples given, of nonscientific endeavors.

To couch the above paragraphs more specifically in Peircean terms, originally, the sign, as proposition, or symbol—Descartes’s “universe as if it were a machine”—was conceived to be a figurative, rhetorical device with which to generate a universe of discourse. As such the proposition, along with others, became an argument, the pinnacle of semiosis and the ultimate sign in Peirce’s basic tenfold set of categories. During the early stages of the Cartesian world image, the argument entailed use of the sign as symbol with cognizance of the metaphor qua metaphor. This is the active mind at work, conception and cognition via the mediacy of Thirdness, a mind-dependent synthesis of signs and their “semiotic objects” by sheer intellection. However, with time, nonintellectual, nonconscious habit exercised its dominion. Consequently, what were previously conscious thought processes gradually submerge into the depths of consciousness to become less mediate, and more as if immediate.¹⁴ Mind, tending to jell, becomes increasingly passive, toward, and finally reaching, the stage when it acts and reacts mindlessly. This, precisely, is the level of tacit knowledge, which approaches the instinctive domain of behavior.

Such habituation marks embedded sign use, and de-generacy of signs from symbol to index and finally to icon. In other words, the “universe as if it were a machine” becomes indexicalized such that the distinction between this (machine, which is empirically accessible in terms of its parts and functions) and that (universe, which is in part nonempirical but is rendered intelligible in relation to a machine) begins to fade. And ultimately, the once-proud proposition becomes iconized such that the universe is tacitly viewed as that which is, that is, as if it were literally a machine—though I do not wish to disparage iconicity, which is crucial to the semiosic process.¹⁵ It is now as if the initial Cartesian trope were a quasi-absolute icon, a mirror image of the universe: something approximating the Mirror of Nature was artificially realized in the minds of many practitioners of science by the end of the nineteenth century.

At this point the system reaches out and bites its own tail. On the other hand, it is now open to the domain of Firstness, chance, spontaneity, possibility. Hence there can exist, once again, susceptibility to novelty by way of abduction. Indeed, the spontaneity of Firstness, of iconicity, is always grounded in the very nature of things. Without it there is no physical process, diversification, growth, development, or evolution. Chance and spontaneity at one extreme, and generality, habit, and law at the other have a meeting ground in common: one extreme entails the continuum of all possibilities, the other entails the continuous becoming of all that was possible. The end is the beginning and the beginning the end.

But actually, to repeat, there can be neither end nor beginning for finite consciousness. In the sense of Bohm (1986:196-201), enfoldment is timeless, unfolding is temporal. The temporal is a becoming of being, without being’s ever becoming a final and absolute state; the timeless (“synchronic”) is the being of becoming, the substrate or background from which everything that is perceived and conceived arises without the possible exhaustion of being or the termination of becoming.

In another way of putting this, the generation of meaning, according to the examples I have given from a portion of Peirce’s theory of icons, indices, and symbols, creates, so to speak, “knots” in the semiosic fabric. Such “knots” are nonlinear systems which can, by way of the flow of all “knots,” evolve into forms that are to a greater or lesser degree maintained in spite of their being in a process of perpetual change. And through it all, the semiosic fabric prevails. It is as it is, though it is never exactly the same from one instant to the next. The Heraclitean (or Peircean) image of a river as the same yet different is once again apropos. The river maintains its general shape because it is never the same; it is constantly dying and being reborn by virtue of its flow. There are perturbations, undulations, debris that temporarily check the flow, minute eddies, and through periods of drought, flash floods, spring thaws, and so on, it suffers catastrophic shifts, some of them irreparable. Nevertheless, it is conceived as the same river, as a dynamic whole, and requires no artificial act of construction to give it life. It is self-sufficient, and in this respect it contains its own meaning.

Significantly, the patterns and perturbations emerging on the river’s surface are the result of chance and contingency existing at a deeper level, the general background or, so to speak, implicate order. Synchronicity, as the term might be used in this context, is precisely such apparently time-bound chance happenings—that is, there is apparent chance at the surface, but necessity lies timelessly at the deepest of levels. The image of Peirce’s “bottomless lake” of consciousness, which involves thought-signs at the surface that emerge from a deeper ground and are sustained by it, is germane here. Conjoining Peirce’s metaphor with Bohm’s trope, the mind contains in enfolded form the whole of this background, only a minuscule portion of which at a given point in time is available to consciousness, much like the enfoldment of a particular sign from the background containing the plethora of signs that otherwise could have been unfolded but were not (Bohm 1980:204-206). The “synchronic” domain, or “block” if you will, is the potential for all signs, all meaning, all “semiotically real worlds,” generated from the implicate domain.

Understandably, therefore, each interpretant of a sign inevitably passes away into other signs whose successors necessarily contain within themselves some “memory” or “trace” of the signs that preceded them. These interpretants serve retroactively to determine what will have happened in order that that which was “earlier” might be made relatively coherent with that which will be “later.” Every interpretant caught in the semiosic flow of things is, like a space-time “knot,” interactively interrelated with everything else in one’s mutually “causative” holistic fabric of signs: a given Umwelt- generated “semiotic world.”

By a somewhat tangential route, I now turn to the second perplexity put forth in section II: how to relate Deleuze and Guattari’s vacillating “either . . . or . . . or . . . n” to the semiosic process.