Preface

This book is about the recent rapid development of semiotics as a body of ideas and techniques for the social sciences and humanities. It is equally a response to some changes which are happening in the “real world.” We think the two are related. A quick scan of current popular entertainments reveals an obsession with alien things and sensations—monstrous creatures and emotions squeezing humanity from without and within. A decade ago, we might have borrowed some ideas from Herbert Marcuse and easily dismissed such a trend as the commercial exploitation of alienation, i.e., as a logical progression of a particular socio-economic system. Now it appears that we are up to something more basic than making profits from our own alienation. We are in the process of re-drawing the lines around humanity. Alienation is not even a technical term in post-structural thought. Political questions and positions which were unthinkable even in the halcyon radicalism of ten years ago are now routine: Are you for or against the United States using nuclear weapons on Europe as a historical object lesson and a way of avoiding a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union? Are you pro- or anti-life?

Certainly the current condition of the collective conscience is deplorable. But equally deplorable are corrections that are based on a return to the earlier values consensus: e.g., men are superior to women; no underdeveloped country could ever win a war with the United States; we are better than they are; etc. It was the easy falsifiability of these “truths” that led to the current historical moment. By now it should be clear that the 1970s tendency for everyone to split off into thousands of little groups, each one built around a controversial attitude, was less a solution than a psychological retreat from modernity.

Today it is commonplace for individuals and groups, via words and deeds, to question structure, to question, that is, the validity of previously unchallenged associations, oppositions, and hierarchies. When we hear someone say “government policies are the best available example of modern fiction,” or “whales are us,” or “God is returning and boy is She pissed,” we can safely assume that the world itself is becoming post-structural. Everything that was once thought to be a “fact,” or a “self-evident truth,” or a belief that could exist beyond question is now seen as a social expression or a sign. Even if no one had raised the technical specter of semiotics, the current epoch would still be the time of the sign.

And, we think that even if no one had participated in the development of semiotics, the current radical questioning of the ultimate value of Western arts and sciences would still have occurred. After Marx’s analysis of class conflict it was only a matter of time before some bright student would see that Cartesian rationalism follows the same violent pattern of dominance and submission in playing out the subject/object relationship in the bourgeois disciplines. At which point everyone else, being non-Marxist, would become anti-Marxist by definition.

Since the stage on which these dramas are occurring is our culture and its reflection in the social sciences and humanities, we are proposing here a closer look at culture, specifically at complex modern cultures and the mechanisms of cultural change. We will suggest that it is only at this point that semiotics becomes indispensable. We might sloganize this beginning as a kind of mid-game substitution: in the place of the subject/object split we are sending in the sign, a unification of subject and object or things and their meanings or values.

The following critical essays, analyses of culture and institutions and modest attempts at theory construction, are interdisciplinary, just as the humanities and culture are “interdisciplinary.” In this regard we have been favored by an excellent marriage as a basis for a working partnership of the social sciences (Dean’s background) and humanities (Juliet’s). No doubt some will complain that we have exceeded our interdisciplinary license. Perhaps. But there are compelling reasons for pressing these limits in the social sciences and humanities today, reasons that have already been expressed (better than we can here) in the editorial stance of such journals as Semiotica, Diacritics, Signs, Sémiotext(e), Sub-stance, Glyph, Social Text, Critical Inquiry, Poetique, etc.

The first part of the book, “The Semiotic Mechanism of Cultural Production,” presents a modified Saussurian model of the sign we have devised as a minimally adequate framework for both literary and socio-cultural analysis of culture. The other parts of the book build and expand upon this model. Part Two, “Socio-Cultural Applications,” explores the implications of the general model for the social sciences. Chapter 3, “The Deconstruction of Social Reality,” is intended to be theoretically and methodologically programmatic in that it provides a semiotic model of behavior. The remaining chapters in Part Two are critical. Each contains a re-reading of some recent tendencies in the social sciences from a semiotic perspective: the new anthropology (“ethnosemiotics”), “ethnomethodology,” etc. Part Three of the book addresses literary and cultural criticism. Chapter 6, “On the Nature of the Literary Sign,” is analogous to chapter 3, “The Deconstruction of Social Reality,” in that it provides a model for reading literary texts that is a version of the model presented in chapter 3 for “reading” behavior, Chapter 7, “On the Discriminations of Signs,” sorts out the recent intellectual historical evolution from phenomenology through existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics, viewing this evolution from the standpoint of the successive transformations of our understanding of the sign that have taken place during this history. The last chapter, “A Community without Definite Limits,” is a critique of counterrevolutionary tendencies that have recently surfaced within semiotics.

The fact that our collaboration has been both productive and, for us, genuinely enjoyable has not had a rational institutional result: we are both on the faculty of the same university but on campuses five hundred miles apart.