The Beginning of Semiotics and the End of Science

In the preface to Sight, Sound, and Sense, Thomas A. Sebeok (1978:viii) reminds us that semiotics is “an ancient discipline, stemming from pre-Socratic clinical roots.” Sebeok and others have traced semiotics back to the earliest arts of diagnosis and prognosis, which still haunt rational scientific attempts at observation and prediction.¹ Semiotics’ antiquity usually appears under a positive sign, as a rallying point, a flag, designed to convey a sense of pride and solidarity with an ancient community, a community without definite limits. We wish to suggest the contrary, that semiotics’ antiquity properly belongs under a negative sign. Consider the alternative hypothesis that semiotics has existed for so long in the same form as we know it today because it has been suppressed. It exists everywhere in hiding: in Rousseau, Locke, Poinsot, Dante, Augustine, on the walls of caves, etc.² Access to the history of semiotics is accomplished not so much by a process of discovery as by liberation. The obstacles in the way of semiotic understanding are alliances of intellectual tradition formed to preserve dying scientific, religious, literary-historical and political systems.

Systems in decay set as their first and final task that of protecting their basic framework of values from critical examination. This is something more than Parsonian “boundary maintenance.” Protective mechanisms operate at the level of consciousness to prevent thought from returning to its own source. Two main strategies have been used. (1) The framework of core values is screened or masked, as when a group’s real values are systematically violated in all its public acts. This describes the political program of the hard sciences, for example, when they pretend that their language is not metaphorical until a new theory replaces an old one at which time all the old terms suddenly “become” metaphors—aether, phlogiston, neutron, particle. (2) Or, values can be fully exposed but always qualified with the claim that they are not values at all but real and true parts of the actual constitution of the universe, for which claim there is a second claim of ample proof. This strategy is also found in science but it is most developed in religious thought and in other systems which run on blind faith.^*

Semiotics, originally designed, perhaps, for more limited purposes, inevitably collides with these and all other forms of self-imposed cultural despotism. This was the most painful lesson of C. S. Peirce’s intellectual life, interestingly centering on his disagreement with his father about the definition of mathematics.³ To Charles, it was eventually not logical to assert, as his father had, that mathematics is restricted to drawing conclusions from “known” hypotheses:

It is the essence of semiotics to put a system’s frame or generative principles into question first, prior to any examination of deductions from them. Properly followed through, this operation has the potential to liberate thought and action in ways foreclosed even in Marx’s crude semiotic of material values.⁴ As the great Peirce scholar Max Fisch (1978:36) has stated: “There are no uninferred premisses and no inference-terminating conclusions.”

The advance of semiotics is blocked when there is placed in its path an aspect of culture that is protected by science, for example, or a religious belief or a political or economic system, that has developed to the point where it exists ‘without question’. In other words, science purports to ask questions about economic systems, for example, but close examination reveals that the questions it asks are off to the side of certain features of our system. These are also the conditions under which academic freedom may be directly opposed to intellectual freedom—semiotic questioning of basic frameworks is sufficient grounds for its exclusion from the ‘established’ disciplines.

Now we face an even more interesting possibility, namely that semiotics has sufficient power to ‘establish itself’, to transform itself into a barrier to semiotic understanding. There is evidence of a desire within semiotics to forget the origin of meaning in difference, to consolidate and unify the semiotic community, to define it and give it definite limits. This is still a minor theme, expressed openly in only a few essays (see, for example, Umberto Eco 1978:74 and Alain Rey 1978:99) and opposed by others. It is this opposition of a unified semiotics to a semiotics of difference that is destined to become more important as the deep structural contradiction at the heart of the semiotic revolution, as the basis for the revolution within the revolution.

Critique of the Semiotics of Unity

There is nothing morally or aesthetically wrong with unity in and of itself, nor can there be. Unity is often understood as a positive aesthetic value, as the opposite of alienation, or as referring to an instant of peaceful completeness. As such, unity attracts powerfully. Plato, then Freud, claimed we all wish for it. It is possible, even desirable within certain frameworks, to undertake a quest for unity in a state of innocent ignorance.

The quest for semiotic unity usually appears as a scientific effort to annihilate ambiguity. If a communication system is working properly, according to this view, a message links a receiver to the intention of its sender. What at first appears to be a simple communication model is something more: a logocentric one-way communication model, an extension of the will. Thus, for example, Alain Rey (1978:108) proposes to restrict a branch of “unified semiotics” to the study of “voluntary messages,” and Eco (1978:74) writes of “pseudo-communication between an unintentional sender and an unintentional receiver.” These statements are easily recognized by semiotic insiders as based on a literal reading of Saussure, a reading that suggests semantic unification of the diadic signifier/signified relationship. The opposition is with more figural readings of Saussure, such as the one provided by Merleau-Ponty, and with Peircian triadic semiotics, which locates interpretation on the same plane with signifier and signified, automatically producing a counter-tendency toward ambiguity and differentiation.⁵

In the semiotics of unity, language becomes a communication device—albeit usually not a very good one. Eco (1978:78) writes: “it is not possible to conceive the reason for the institution of such signifying relationships if not for communicative purposes.” From the standpoint of theories of figurai language (for example, Peirce or Rousseau), this statement constitutes a radical reduction of linguistic possibility. Within the semiotics of unity, however, it is a valorization of language to define it by its role in conscious or willed communication, which is an ultimate value for those who seek community

It is possible to arrive at the same destination from either an ideological or a theoretical starting point. A commitment to unity is built into semiological theory that presupposes a unified language community and an ideal two-person speaker:hearer relationship.⁶ It was by means of these originally harmless fictions that Saussure cleared the ground for modern linguistics. But these same ideas can have a negative influence if they intrude into general semiotics and foreclose access to the individual and the community. The semiotics of unity shares with the discipline social sciences the best strategy yet devised for suppressing understanding of individuals and communities, specifically their promotion to the status of units of analysis.

Assumptions of unity at the level of the individual or the community are based on a desire to return to a state of nature. Nature, which has no knowledge of itself, is not alienated. Within nature there is no deviation and ambiguity. Nature can be seen as approaching the ideal of pure communication. Some ethologists, already operating within a semiotic frame, subscribe to a semiotics of unity and locate humanity in the nature-culture, pure communication model. For example, Paul Ekman (1978:141) has written: “My discussion of emotion has argued that the linkage between facial movement (sign) and emotions (significant) is natural, with an evolutionary basis, rather than a conventional or arbitrary association.”⁷ Beginning with Saussurian assumptions, Ekman (this is also characteristic of Birdwhistell and others) eventually contradicts Saussure’s principle of the arbitrariness of the link between signifier and signified. Other ethologists, already operating within a semiotic frame, subscribe to a semiotics of differences and locate animals in culture. For example, Peter Marler (1978:115) describes the monkeys he studied as intersemiotic beings, operating between systems of signs, constructing and deconstructing meaning by movement, pitch, tone, utterance, and relationship, in short, beings already at a considerable remove from a state of nature.⁸ The semiotics of unity produces some of the same results produced by disciplined social science. Ekman’s men are presented as natural objects which produce meaning-for-scientists. His men seem more like monkeys, while Peter Marler’s monkeys seem more like men.⁹

The method of unified semiotics is unidirectional interpretation, a scientific praxis designed to determine, in the sense of “fix,” proper meanings within semantic fields, that is, to forge consensus. This method is in alignment with the moral programs of the un-thought-through discipline social sciences in which everyone is supposed to have a clear message to send and a fine reason to send it; in which verbal communication is held to be good for mind and body.¹⁰ The urgent communicative requirement of a semantic “fix” creates a situation in which no sign is trans-systemic. As a modern Californian might express it, “it is impossible to know where I am coming from unless you have been there yourself.” Position, stance, particular perspectives, become sacred. The semantic meaning of a sign’s position in its system becomes the meaning sought by science, and science when its work is done becomes scripture. No one has spoken more eloquently than William Stokoe of the human consequences of the moral programs implicit in unidirectional interpretation:

The postulate of unity is the starting point for a retrogressive moment: humanity is sent back to nature, animals are demoted to the realm of the pre-natural or mechanical.¹¹ It is a reflex of the Cartesian scientific mind to hold itself above its subject matter, to pretend that its thoughts, at least, are not signs. Descartes claimed that he could think without signs or metaphors and Charles Peirce criticized Descartes for making this claim. Within the framework of unified semiotics, the scientific investigator claims all the important work of differentiating and classifying. Alain Rey (1978:105), who interestingly remarks that he would have preferred a Husserlian or Heideggerian starting point, writes:

It would be interesting indeed if science truly arrogated to itself absolutely the right to divide up the world. But it appears at crucial moments that this “science” demands the right to classify only in order to align itself with existing categories powerfully enforced by conventional social structural arrangements (subject/object, male/female, public/private, individual/group, man/animal, East/West, etc., etc.) including existing arrangements within the university. Note, for example, that Rey is trying to open the back door of semiotics to all the academic categories (in just one sentence he uses the words “scientist,” “scholar,” “historical,” “cultural,” “psychological,” “motives,” “unconscious”) which semiotics is currently in the process of reevaluating. This is the way that conventional social arrangements arm themselves with science and become “second nature.”¹² The image of man that emerges from the semiotics of unity is, to our mind, one of the least attractive we have ever devised for ourselves, exactly that of a political animal.

THE SECOND SEMIOTIC: THE SEMIOTIC OF DIFFERENCE

As should by now be clear, semiotics contains its own internal critique of the semiotics of unity. This critique operates, for the most part, implicitly at the level of the way decisions are made in semiotic analyses.¹³ Now it is possible to assess the positive contribution of this other mode. This contribution falls mainly into three areas: Further refinement of (1) an approach to communication that does not necessarily involve human individuals as senders and/or receivers, (2) an integrated semiotics of communication and structure, and (3) applications of semiotics to diverse fields of inquiry, a diversity that ought to recast the divisions of knowledge—from veterinary medicine to comparative literature, from the practice of translation to the psychoanalysis of philosophy.

From the standpoint of this second semiotic of difference, assumptions of unity are separated from questions having to do with the appearance of unity. All cultural systems (religions, languages, normatively governed face-to-face behavior, etc.) project unified imagery that attracts support in the form of faith or belief. This imagery is the domain of general semiotic research. Such research, however, attacks its own roots if it aligns itself politically with conserving unity, not as image but as ‘reality’. Of course, it is possible that by falling in line with rigidified cultural categories, the semiotics of unity might be contributing to its downfall (culture’s, its own) by amplifying redundant convention to the point where it becomes just noise.

Along these lines, Paul Bouissac re-writes the term nonsense in much the same way that Stokoe re-writes the term nonverbal. Specifically, Bouissac (1978:250) suggests that clowns function to remind us of the arbitrariness of conventions, that nonsense is meta-sense:

We are not entirely convinced that cultural revolution works exactly in this way, but we are certain that Bouissac’s study of clowns and limericks is written on the side of a semiotic of difference. This is expressed not merely in his willingness to question conventional unities, but in his still more radical move to discover tendencies within culture itself to question its own conventions, to differentiate itself internally.

As we suggested above, the semiotics of difference is based on two related principles:

I. The Ends of a Communication Relationship Are Not Necessarily Individuals

The structure Bouissac has described, in which a semiotic subsystem (nonsense) questions the other (modern culture) of which it is a part radically opens the definition of communication. Here we have two systems communicating through clown acts. The individual in this arrangement, like Marler’s monkeys, is an intersemiotic being. And, while he would not necessarily think of himself this way, his communications with other individuals are by-products of his activities as an operator between semiotic/cultural systems. Communication is both less willed and more important from the standpoint of the living community than it is in the semiotics of unity.

We could be on the verge of a new era of freedom in intersemiotic studies, the opening of direct analytical relations between semiotic systems.¹⁵ Until recently, intersemiotic analysis was restrictively bound to a linguistic core. It proceeded by the rather cumbersome process of translating all systems of meaning into languages or language-like devices, after which operation their comparison became either unnecessary or impossible. This is the reason why the monuments of social and critical thought remain more sophisticated than their discipline followers. Marx moved freely between economic and political systems, Durkheim between social organization and religion, and Weber between religion and economy. They uncovered differentiation, class, value, etc., in institutional arrangements directly. The important point for semiotics is that they did not first have to show the elegant phonological analogues of these concepts. Recent advances of the Tartu school, the Tel Quel group in Paris, and the Bloomington Center have made it possible to move beyond the one-way relationship of language to other systems of meaning. Boguslaw Lawendowski (1978:280-81) criticizes Jakobson’s restriction of the meaning and method of “intersemiotics,” but he might just as well have mentioned Benveniste or anyone else writing on the subject ten years ago:

How the Semiotics of Difference Changes Priorities in the Disciplines

The decentering of linguistics within semiotics has potentially farreaching implications for the structure of the disciplines in the college of liberal arts. So long as semiotics maintained one of the academic disciplines as central, it could be classified under that discipline and incorporated into the academy piecemeal without its having much effect on existing structures, hierarchies, and priorities between and among the disciplines. This is no longer possible. Now that semiotics is moving off to the side of linguistics, it urges upon us the need to rebuild completely the disciplinary structure of the academy. Everyone is in a classic double-bind: semiotics needs a home which it cannot have; the academic disciplines need new ideas that only semiotics can provide.

There have been several notable recent efforts to pressure disciplinary structures through the development of semiolinguistics and semiolinguistic criticism. The model provided by Benveniste has found more readily than most some acceptance in the avant-garde of academic fields. But there are difficulties with the model, a model that makes language the master-pattern of semiotics. Benveniste argues quite persuasively that language is only a member of a class of cultural systems of meaning. His argument breaks down, however, into a series of unsupported assertions about the privileged position of language over the other semiotic systems, of natural language over literary language, and the impossibility of translating one semiotic system into another (e.g., music into language). These assertions, if believed, would tend to maintain university departments exactly as they are now defined, with literary, history, and language studies at the core. Fredric Jameson, who has given a great deal of careful consideration to these matters echoes Benveniste (1978b) in terms of the initial challenge to rethink traditional studies. But he does so with a note of worried concern, using such phrases as “the more mindless forms of the fetishism of language” and stating that the idea of “the primacy of language . . . is in so much of today’s critical practice little more than a received idea or unexamined presupposition” (508). As we have suggested, the weakness of the claim of semiotic priority of “natural” languages has not gone unnoticed in Bloomington, Paris, and Tartu. In the mode of error, an error which Jameson is repeating, Benveniste liberated structuralism from the prison-house of language. Post-disciplinary thought is composing itself very rapidly of direct semiotic studies of non-linguistic cultural productions: ritual, film, economic exchange, behavior, etc. and these studies are the most fruitful when, as we have suggested in the introduction, they give us the power to reflect on language, and show it (and us) its own image. It follows that criticism and all other forms of interpretation should not be a specialized department of culture, but should be evenly distributed throughout culture and society, perhaps even throughout the university. Professor Jameson has a mastery of structuralist concepts and vocabulary and he is committed to the positions of the New Left. But these features of his style could not eventually deflect the conservative direction of an intellectual program organized around maintaining the autonomy of language and its transcendence over all other systems of meaning. This larger program is based on a hierarchy of values that elevates literature over other aspects of culture (510); text over history (511); unity over difference (513); motive over act (514); theory over practice (515); subject over object (516); and the unconscious over the conscious (521).

There would be no reason to decry this program if the hierarchization of values did not also imply certain political and institutional hierarchizations that we feel sure Professor Jameson would personally deplore. For so long as language’s transcendent position remains ultimately unquestioned then the critic alone is priest:

Or a rabbi:

There is an unmistakable elegiac tone here, a tone that should probably not be indulged. History is indeed the most important text we will ever have to read, but its significance extends beyond narrative, as Marx and Lukács knew. ‘History’ only emerges through its difference from what appears to be ‘new’ or ‘modern’, a difference that finds its most powerful expression in literary form. Literature is where we learn to read the signs of history and literary studies have no need of a nostalgic defense based on the hypostasis of the term ‘history’, as in Roger Shattuck’s recent defense (1980:29-36) of the Spanish professor who taught by reading Don Quixote aloud to his classes. Literature is where we learn to read signs, the most important skill the modern world, like the traditional one, has ever needed.

The current effort to restore (essentially historicist) priorities in the discipline humanities finds many parallels in the social sciences. Linguistics, sociology, anthropology, etc. are undergoing their own defensive changes. The typical pattern here is a revival of interest in British empiricism and a simultaneous effort to sweep under the rug the obvious displacement of subjectivity produced by the semiotics of difference. Intersemiotics is intersubjectivity. Or, as Peirce (Collected Papers, vol. 5, p. 289, n.1; cited in Fisch 1978:36) put it, “just as we say that a body is in motion, and not that motion is in a body, we ought to say that we are in thought and not that thoughts are in us.” John Deely (1978:10) makes the same point: “a given relation, formed once by nature, another time by mind, is equivalent for signifying precisely because the relation is in either case an intersubjective mode of being, having its proper reality in the union of two (or more) otherwise distinct objects.” As we have suggested above, a proto-semiotic version of this idea is found in Marx’s or Durkheim’s analyses of religion. Setting aside, for the moment, the rather different conclusions which they drew from their findings, both Marx and Durkheim showed the ways religion acts as an interpreter of economic and social organization, an interpreter that coordinates the activities of individuals without necessarily requiring of any of them full consciousness of the range of problems they are solving: in fact, quite the opposite—the religion is more sophisticated than its adherents. Durkheim (1965a:21-33) eventually suggested that the categories of science and logic, what he called our “priceless instruments of thought,” “time, space, class, number, cause, substance, personality, etc.,” originated in the structure of the human community, first appearing as normatively governed social relations.

No idea has been more strongly resisted than this one. Sometimes we suspect that students are attracted to the social sciences as missionaries to fight this idea from within, to make the social sciences the final resting place of conventional Western religious and economic thought, specifically to continue to promote the individual, now in the name of science, to the status of a being who is both spiritually and physically independent and autonomous, a being with an unalienable right to pray to his own god and sell his own labor. We think it therefore highly unlikely that the discipline social sciences will accept Peirce’s formulation of these matters which, from a conventional standpoint, is more radical still, standing Durkheim and Marx on their heads:

II. Semiotics Integrates Communication and Structure

The problem of the relationship of communication and structure (the latter variously conceived as interaction and/or exchange) has been the major limiting factor in the development of the conventional, discipline social sciences since the writings of Durkheim and Marx. It is politely disattended by most students. The braver ones write about it. For example, Marcel Mauss (1967:1) begins his study of The Gift with a bold statement, perhaps a challenge to his famous uncle’s ideas, to the effect that the exchange of gifts is an alternate form of social structural differentiation: “We shall note the various principles behind this necessary form of exchange (which is nothing less than the division of labor itself).” Similarly, Erving Goffman (1961:7) comments: “The study of every unit of social organization must eventually lead to an analysis of the interaction of its elements. The analytical distinction between units of organization and processes of interaction is, therefore, not destined to divide up our work for us.”

The promise of these statements is realized for the first time in the semiotics of difference with its decentered (that is, inter-) subjectivity and its admission of other than human interlocutors. (Even Marx’s claim that commodities enter into social relations with each other has been difficult for his otherwise radical followers to accept.) Now it is possible to state that communication equals form or structure without having to deny everything we intuitively know about culture: namely, that culture can interpret, although, turned against itself, sometimes it refuses to do so. The following simple illustrations indicate that social group formation (for example) can be both product and source of communication.

A.Communication forms a group:

 “Everyone with last names beginning with the letters A through D line up on the right.”

B.Group forms a communication:

 “Five thousand hostiles are camped in the valley of the Little Bighorn River.”

Any semiotic/cultural system capable of producing interpretative consciousness (for example, a school of art, a political movement, a person) either within or without, communicates. A cobra communicates by sitting on the veranda in a way that is understood by all men and other animals. Interpretation transforms communication into something more than messages sent. Even if the so-called “content” of the message is impoverished by interpretation, it is still a message that has been interpreted. It has become a part of the community without definite limits that is “capable of an indefinite increase in knowledge.”

Until quite recently, it has not been possible to advance beyond the disciplines in the construction of new models of culture and subjectivity. We have suggested that the second semiotics, the semiotics of difference, provides both programs and examples to get the humanities and social sciences moving again. It also provides the logical basis for an as yet unwritten post-individualistic political economy.

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* It seems ironically apparent that today it is science itself that seems a system based on faith, a faith that is on the verge of fading.