A SEMIOTIC APPROACH TO CULTURE

When we use the term “post-disciplinary” in this book, we are referring to the paradigms in the social sciences and humanities that have undergone recent rapid development: phenomenology, structuralism, and semiotics. Each of these three frameworks has exhibited a capacity to cross disciplinary boundary lines and stimulate discussion that goes beyond the concerns, as traditionally defined, of any single discipline. We know that the term “post-disciplinary” can also convey a belief that the disciplines are dead. We do not want to imply that. But some of the most pressing problems, the study of modern culture among them, are beyond the grasp of the theories and methods of any one discipline, such as anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, philosophy, history, etc. We are using “post-disciplinary” to mean that we have tried to extend our models of culture beyond those found in the academic disciplines, and we have built our models always on the base of more than one discipline. In other words, we approached the boundaries of our individual disciplines as thresholds, not as the ultimate horizons, of knowledge.

Our main purpose in writing this book is a positive one: we wanted to contribute to the development of an approach to the description and analysis of cultural forms, of drama, language, behavior, ritual, literature, and so forth. But the book also contains a double critique. We criticize the academic disciplines for carving up the study of culture into many exclusive, circumscribed, closely defended domains, thus fostering confusion and stagnation at precisely the historical moment when what is most needed is the leadership they could provide if they were willing to work with and learn from one another in their common enterprise. And we criticize structuralism and phenomenology for often failing to incorporate an adequate base of hard-won disciplinary knowledge into their formulations. This latter tendency leads to the creation of naive models of culture presented in unwieldy, overelaborate terminology.

We assume, then, that any scholar/researcher will base his or her study of culture on a core of disciplinary knowledge, which includes knowing the history of the particular discipline’s ideas and basic concepts, knowing how they are applied, having a trained ability to criticize and develop the basic conceptions, and being experienced in using the discipline’s methods of research and analysis on concrete materials (plot outlines, the ethnographic record, famous case studies of neuroses, etc.) Far from denying the importance of discipline competence, we assume it as a starting point for the work that follows. And we also assume that the scholar/researcher will show a certain degree of flexibility, will be interested in what can be learned from the various perspectives and skills developed within the other disciplines. Literary critics know, among other things, that when they are analyzing a text, they must discover what meanings of the words were current when the text was written. Anthropologists know that much behavior once thought to be biologically “innate” occurs only in certain cultures. This kind of basic discipline knowledge is a prerequisite for the study of culture but, we shall argue, it should not be pursued as an end in itself. When it is pursued as an end in itself, it does not contribute to our understanding of culture so much as to the institutional fiction of “disciplines,” where lines are drawn mainly as a matter of administrative convenience, that is, for political and organizational, not scholarly, reasons.

Some social scientists, literary scholars, designers, and others have already opted to locate their creative activities beyond the boundaries of their disciplines. Our book is for these students and scholars and others seeking to understand the intellectual base of such work. We think it is already possible to discern some interesting overall features of the semiotic movement. (1) It transcends national boundaries. (2) It transcends major political divisions, for example, that between Communist and capitalist nations. We find open and lively dialogue between Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Juri Lotman, Umberto Eco, Hans Gadamer, Décio Pignatari, and others representing North and South America, eastern and western Europe and the Soviet Union. After Marx, none of the intellectual movements in the humanities and social sciences, not even existentialism and psychoanalysis, have shown the capacity for such wide extension. (3) Underlying this trans-national dialogue there is a common intellectual base, which can be found in the writings of the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. (4) Most of the research and scholarship that makes up the semiotic core is also technically post-rational in that it refuses to accept uncritically any form of subject/object dualism. (5) Finally, this work is increasingly organized around the explication of signs.

In addressing our own disciplines, comparative literature, sociology and anthropology, we have adopted the stance that comparative cultural studies cannot make sense except as a contribution to a general semiotics of culture.

Even though it has not been carefully thought through, and some would prefer not to think it through, the continued development of semiotic perspectives is having a profound impact on the organization of the social sciences and humanities. As a minority of scholars from the diverse disciplines join the semiotic revolution or one of its precursor movements (phenomenology, structuralism), we must be cautious not to produce new and counter-productive oppositions between the new approaches and the old. There is already sufficient discomfort in the humanities and social sciences with new problems and frameworks. Some critics, for example, apply their insight beyond the confines of the literary text to film, advertising, propaganda, even to the writings of other critics, but not without stirring debate about the propriety of abandoning the “great book” tradition.¹ Sociology splits into several factions. One adheres to the “scientific” sociology tradition based on survey methods and functional theory, while others have branched into ethnomethodology, symbolic structuralism, and Marxist analysis. Historians searching for new approaches to universal history have found the key to understanding to be rhetorical tropes as often as “material conditions” or “great ideas.” Some anthropologists now make observations of modern society, agricultural systems, tourism, etc., topics that are in conflict with anthropology’s traditional and continuing concern with “primitives.” These changes are not occurring in an orderly series, the way the progress of a discipline is presented in one of its introductory textbooks. Rather, they are proliferating simultaneously like Protestant sects after the Reformation.

This disorganization is distressing to some scholars and scientists, but we think attempts at restoring order, the order of older cultural disciplines, would impose unnecessary and intolerable restrictions on the development of cultural knowledge and is, in fact, impossible except as an artificial reaction. We are referring to the limits implicit in the design of boundaries around existing disciplines and subspecialties in the traditional social sciences and humanities. Cultural anthropology divides the world into “culture areas”: South America, Oceania, Africa south of the Sahara, etc. It makes of these the general areas of expertise of individual scholars. Scholarly specialties are the whole bundle of cultural practices of a single group in the area: Bororo, Tipokia, Ndembu, etc. Western cultural studies by contrast, are internally differentiated by genre (music, literature, drama, etc.) and further subdivided internally by time period and language (nineteenth-century English fiction, etc.). Taken together, these systems, which at first appear to be based on a simple logic of efficiency, are far from innocent. They reinforce the separation of our Western, or “high,” culture from the cultures of other peoples. They assure that non-Western ideas, insofar as they are incorporated into the academic curriculum, will be assigned to ethnic ghettoes separate from the departments that guard the sacred cultural traditions of the West. And they subdivide our understanding of our own cultural development to the point where our culture ceases to exist as a subject of systematic study in its own right.

In short, as we have already suggested, the liberal arts became the victim of their own criticism of society at just the moment when their leadership was most needed. They taught us that there has been a crisis of communication and reason; that there was no longer a rigorous philosophical basis for what is good, true, or beautiful. The center did not hold. Things fell apart. Meaning, in the sense of a meaning for life that can be conveyed via a good liberal arts education, disappeared. By their own account, the old social science and humanistic disciplines are no longer useful for holding our moral/aesthetic universe together. Is it not natural, then, that the disciplines degenerate into merely technical exercises with no unifying spirit? Is it not understandable that a good humanist would just sit around waiting for the apocalypse?

We think not. And in this book we attempt to show that semiotics has the power to transform criticism into a progressive intellectual movement.² The crisis of communication and reason necessarily occurred at exactly the same moment when central human concerns were coming to be understood as problems of language. As the disciplines became increasingly self-conscious about the importance of language and their use of it, they lost confidence in the universality of their truths. We think that this is deeply ironic, for the interpretative and critical liberal arts have a better handle on the kinds of issues the world faces today than the positivistic sciences have. The very old humanistic tradition of questioning our being might reclaim the territory that it has lost to moralistic cant: writers and social philosophers have, after all, had a great deal to say about the way one can face chaos, misunderstanding, error, and the disappearance of the divine.

If it is true, as we suggest, that the liberal arts disciplines faltered when they realized that they are only another form of language, a discourse, a myth, a “metalanguage” in Barthes’s terms, they could fruitfully use this insight for a renewal of spirit and direction. The techniques, vocabulary, and critical philosophy of semiotics are available for examining the specifically linguistic nature of the disciplines.

If we continue to work within the disciplines without recognizing their linguistic and figurative underpinnings, then the disciplines will fall short of comprehending culture. Descartes himself, father of rational science, attempted to minimize the role language played in conception, but his Discourse on Method and his Meditations are inevitably entangled with language.

Merely demonstrating that the Cartesian cogito is a ‘myth’ accomplishes little, however. If we continue to work within the discourse of the disciplines in opposition to the Cartesian cogito, we always arrive at an impasse. We can show that the cogito is a myth, but in so doing we are also demonstrating that only language can attack language and we are caught in our own trap. We are forced to side with the neo-idealists and existentialists (perhaps against our own scholarly programs) in the erroneous belief that we have the power to transform society through our philosophizing. There is another way to arrive at the same impasse. Still working within language, we might advance the claim that not all reality is language, that language has a separate order of its own that is opposed to the ‘natural’ order. This is the neo-rational position, in which language occupies the position once held by scientific thought: that is, the only legitimate subjectivity.

Here is precisely the point at which a different metalanguage—semiotics—is necessary to get beyond the impasse. A semiotic framework can and must account for the different and often opposing meanings the sign has in various fields. Consider the status of the sign in idealism on the one hand and rationalism on the other. In idealism and existentialism, the sign is always a metaphor (a relationship between signifier and signified), a means of inscribing all of human culture into the “poetic,” “imaginative,” tropic, or rhetorical side of being. The critic, literary or social, who demystifies metaphors by showing their arbitrariness acts as censor for the idealist sign as it tends to exceed its imaginary limits and become reality. In a rational framework, the sign is totally arbitrary; the merely conventional sign, like the notation in music or the systems used in mathematics, is the basic sign-unit. The rational sign is opposed by the unconventional (the ‘irrational’) attitude that censors the rational sign’s arbitrariness, and demands latitude for disorder, free play, and the recognition of elements that exceed reason. Framed in another metalanguage, idealism is Oedipal and rationalism is schizoid.

We are suggesting, then, that language is not the only reality, as idealists and neo-idealists would have it, nor is it an epiphenomenon, as the materialists would have it. It participates in a structuring process that occurs at all levels of the organization of matter and spirit. In this book we want to develop a method for explication of this structuring process by moving from the word to the sign as our basic analytical term. And following Peirce, Husserl, Saussure, and Derrida, we might find ourselves once more able to return to “thought”: not because it dominates and masters speech, but because it, like speech, is steeped in signs.

We know that most of the problems we discuss here have already been solved by Edmund Husserl and his followers. Husserl’s radical critique of science and culture is indispensable to the semiotic work that followed it through existentialism and structuralism to post-structuralism. And, of course, Husserl’s work foreshadowed the current loss of faith in the ultimate wisdom of science. Still we feel that there are important matters of method and domain, as well as some concrete problems that must be solved in the analysis of culture, which have so far been assessed in only a partial fashion by phenomenologists. Much of what we have written is a re-assessment of these matters. We have tried to present these debates in such a way that the issues are clear and can be understood without resort to special knowledge.

Comment on Some Recent Changes in Our Social Institutions and Culture

The central hypothesis of this book is that continued adherence to pre-semiotic modes of understanding is one reason colleges of arts and sciences in American universities have become separated from the mainstream of American life during the last ten years. The cultural disciplines as they are currently constituted can be used against themselves to sacralize and rigidity genre boundaries and ethnic “identities.” A semiotic approach emphasizes the mechanisms in the production of culture, and cultural values, in the interactions between genres and groups. During the last decade, public recognition of national and international differences became an essential internal element of American culture. We think that the growth of this recognition has sometimes outstripped our academic capacity to define and articulate cultural differences. In spite of heroic efforts in programs of international studies and ethnic studies and among other post-disciplinary elements of the liberal arts disciplines, the recent pace of cultural semiosis in American society is outrunning academic understanding.

Consider the recent rapid evolution of the image of the black American in the popular consciousness. Intelligent blacks are now a normal component of television series. Contrast this not only with the Step-N-Fetchits of the nineteen thirties and forties, but with the Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte roles of the fifties and sixties: wooden heroes whose most important act was to exhibit hostility on appropriate cue. Middle America is in the process of revising its stereotypes. But why? A case can be made that there has been little concomitant shift in the economic relations between blacks and whites: for example, the unemployment rate for black youths continues to be disproportionately high. From a practical, political, or functional standpoint, the revision of stereotypes that now affects all ethnicities in American society makes very little sense. It often appears as the simple pendulum-swinging of a confused propaganda machine. Consider the Chinese. Ten years ago, the then Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, could conjure the image of a half-billion yellow demons “each with an H-bomb under his arm.” Today, that image has receded. Mexican Americans were once working class by definition. Now they are also bourgeois. Ten years ago the Japanese were everyone’s favorite ethnic group; now they are seen as capable, once again, of violence and political extremism.

A semiotics of culture accepts as one of its central tasks the responsibility to account for these changes intellectually and to accommodate them institutionally. Note that the fundamentals of the Western view of the Chinese have actually remained quite stable. Now they are friendly, intelligent, cultured, clever; before they were wily, decadently overcivilized, and devious—all the same traits under a negative rather than a positive sign. Similarly, though our estimation of the Russians keeps cycling, the Russians continue to have “soul.” But the case of the blacks is not a simple sign reversal. Less than ten years ago, our most highly educated liberal intellectuals were frightened by intelligent blacks (perhaps some still are). We recall the remarks of one of our Ivy League professors about a young National Urban Fellow, “He’s so intelligent he’s frightening.” Blacks now have intellect even in Middle American eyes. It is interesting that even though women also developed a national political base during the same period, they did not gain “intellect” in the process: they are still believed to be incapable of abstract, theoretical thought.

The semiotics of culture enables us not only to talk about, but to perceive and, we think, to eventually control the nonverbal expressions of heterogeneous groups and entities, and to comprehend them in terms of their structured relationships with other groups and entities. Semiotics undoes the white myth of the isolate, which has spilled over from our ethnopolitics into the discipline cultural sciences as the (false) idea that we can study and understand groups, texts, and/or genres in and of themselves without reference to their relations to other groups, texts, and genres.

Cultural Semiosis Does Not Stop at the Last Ethnic Frontier

The simultaneous appearance of “It” motion pictures about alien creatures and the re-birth of interest in Freud’s “Id” (the alien creature within) signals on both the popular and intellectual fronts a growing uneasiness with all the divisions and distinctions by which we have lived, a (potentially unfortunate) search for new and absolute oppositions. One now urges the American public to be either pro- or anti-life and calls on the Supreme Court to finalize a definition of death. Not only can we not assume that “we” are better than “they” are on a cultural plane, our other most sacred moral and philosophical divisions have come into question: self/other, mind/matter, form/content, male/female, West/East, subject/object. The aim of general semiotics is to illustrate concretely the ways in which these oppositions are necessary fictions from the standpoint of our culture as we once knew it and are also merely arbitrary and replaceable. Here is the point of greatest disagreement between semiotics and conventional Western science and philosophy: according to conventional wisdom, values and meanings, on some level, must be accepted without question if they are to exist in the first place. They must appear to have a basis in reality or the ‘facts’ or the ‘data’ that goes beyond their status as mere meanings. In its division of all meanings into signifiers and signifieds, however, semiotics necessarily throws the integrity of our values into question and exposes the collective unconscious motives behind what is taken to be ‘reality.’ In other words, in addressing the problem of how we know and how things mean from a non-abstract standpoint, semiotics transforms all science into political action.

A SEMIOTIC MANIFESTO

Now we want to make explicit what we have so far only implied, that there is a concrete and living link between the semiotic revolution and the current rapid pace of change of values and behavior in modern social life. Semiotics is the study of the means of the production of meaning. “How do, how can, we know?” is a serious question, not merely philosophically but also at the level of everyday existence. The question, as we have asked it, averts definitions and responses in terms of ultimate, original and/or authentic being. There are no naive beginnings in semiotics and, as Max Fisch has said, “no inference-terminating conclusions.” By deferring the problem of defining what things mean, semiotics may be less than philosophically authoritative, but all the more adept at describing cultural existences. Philosophical framing makes pure definitions seem to be set off from other definitions that have been provided. But the differentiations of things owes as much to the peculiar history of meanings that have already been ascribed to them—consciously or not—as to any pristine or pure definitions. Rousseau wrote of the autobiography he was then planning to write that its style would be a part of his story, as much a part as the narrative succession of ‘facts.’ We can say the same of our social institutions: their style too is “significant” and the official definitions of them are always, as Freud, Goffman, and Derrida have so nicely shown, eroded by their “underlife.”

The current alternative to a semiotics of culture and institutions is rationalism and positivism. Rationalism contains the idea that any social or human problem can be solved by development and application of analytical models refined always in the direction of increasingly truthful representations of the ‘real-world.’ Though he saw it as too massive an undertaking, Descartes was able to conceive of a total reconstruction of the house of culture. Eventually, positivism, in its role as the political arm of rationalism, would accept Descartes’s challenge and make the social sciences and humanities the engines of ‘progress’ in the development of our Western cultural institutions and the domination of Western values over the rest of the world. Descartes wrote:

Only one century later, such thinking found its response, as Rousseau labored at deconstructing the “purity” of origins, showing how they are contaminated by time and history (see Derrida 1967a). And in the following century, Saussure (1966:71-72) did the same for language:

(Saussure assumes that language is analogous to other social institutions.)

Saussure’s work brought forth the revolution in Western cultural understanding called “structuralism” whose historic import and impact have yet to be fully assessed. From Piaget and Lévi-Strauss to Lacan and Bateson, structuralism provides one of the first examples of a pan-disciplinary intellectual movement that saw alliances between technology, language, and culture. The Zeitgeist of the nineteen fifties and sixties to which structuralism responded has passed, of course, but the current epoch, still groping toward self-consciousness, must come to terms with structural insights in nearly every aspect of Western science, natural or cultural.³ It may well be that these insights will be modified or radically re-written by confrontation with altered social conditions, but the idea of “structure” (zero change) in itself provides all the necessary impetus for our attempt to conceive of change or “revolution” properly so-called. It is the confrontation of structure and post-structural (semiotic) perspectives on change and revolution that prompted our second reading of Rousseau, Saussure, and Peirce, and Descartes, and much of this book is based on that second reading.

No one knew better than Rousseau, Saussure, and Peirce that our institutions—linguistic and otherwise—are subject to mutability, to change. Tradition, the multiplicity of their signs, collective inertia, and the overcomplexity of institutional systems operate against change. But because they have no basis other than arbitrariness, signs can change their meanings. “Change” is very strictly defined by Saussure (1966:75) as a “shift in the relationship of signifier and signified.” The meaning of an institution can change—even without its being destroyed or renewed—like the linguistic sign, it can be “transvalued,” losing whatever “meaning” it had had for its community. This kind of revolution—the semiotic revolution—is unlike other conceptions of revolution as put forth by puritans and Marxists: it is neither a cyclical return to a prior historical state nor the arrival in a brave new world without future history.

Semiotics, like Rousseau’s supplement (see Derrida 1967a), is the ‘appropriate technology’ for a philosophy that confines itself to the peculiarities, hazards, and bizarreries of existence. Some semioticians will be more interested in the traditional institutions than in the moment of change (the ‘originary’ moment); there is not only room for both kinds of emphasis in semiotics, they are mutually determinant and inescapable. We may finally, we think, be ready to get beyond oscillation in our cultural methods: literary history collapses of boredom without the excitement of regenerated meanings and values that various movements, from New Criticism to Deconstructionism, have fortunately provided; the primitive world is tearing away from anthropology’s grasp while the modern world demands better descriptions of its own structure and consciousness. Semiotics makes possible the transvaluation of disciplines by permitting both aspects, history and tradition, to work together, not just as forced associates or antagonists, but as necessary partners in the study of culture.

Semiotics—indeed the very definition of the sign—includes the interpreter (perceiver, addressee) as a constitutive component of meaning. Merely by asking the semiotic question, “Who is speaking and to whom?” (as Freud once demanded of his patients’ fragmentary phrases) one comes to view cultural forms in a new light, a light that puts the working intellect back at the center of thought, ‘figuring things out’. Semiotics offers the alternative to the great schisms (schizms?) that have always attended Western science by bringing the active communicative aspect of culture into any analysis. Even though there is within semiotics itself some retreat from the semiotic question (see the recent work by some writers on the concept of subjectivity)⁴ the semiotic question will persistently demand to be answered.

Our starting point is the assumption that culture is not a rational structure, that it cannot be understood from the standpoint of either arché or telos, origin or aim, but must be understood as it unfolds, develops, changes, erases itself, and rewrites itself. Culture is neither fantastic nor unordered, neither historical nor ahistorical. And we shall not understand enough about culture until we can accept its post-rational expressions as such.

We want to make it clear from the beginning that we do not wish to join in the creation of a new set of oppositions between semiotic cultural sciences and our cultural traditions. Rather, we want to advance the semiotic revolution and the cultural sciences by a critical review of some major semiotic and proto-semiotic insights about culture and its products. To a semiotician trained in prognosis and diagnosis (trained, that is, in the reading of signs) the confrontations between culture and the various analyses of culture are archetypes: they are moments in the evolution of a semiotic system when the boundaries are redrawn and there is a shift in the relationship between the signifiers and the signifieds. Ferdinand de Saussure (1966:74) wrote of the structure of language and its bizarre quality of being both perfectly immutable and perfectly mutable: “Because the sign is arbitrary it follows no other law than that of tradition, and because it is based on tradition it is arbitrary. Time, which insures the continuity of language wields another influence apparently contradictory to the first: the more or less rapid change of linguistic signs.” Compare Saussure’s vision with that of rational science and traditional morality which, in order to function properly, must be taken in by their own fictions of stability and order. At the structural level, the level of all meaning, the semiotic revolution is a total shift in the relationship of ideas and signs. The current effort to redraw academic boundaries and the production of new differentiations of culture are visible manifestations of a semiotic revolution.

Language, Thought, and Signs

Descartes asks us to believe in a complete separation between ourselves and the other animals and that this separation is based on uniquely human faculties, language and reason. His formulation is innocent enough as a claim for what is human and as the base for the monuments we have constructed to reason and language—our modern sciences and humanities. But it also perpetuates an assumption that has lost all its authority in the twentieth century; namely, that the thinking human subject is the sole owner of logic and reason. In effect, Descartes rules out the possibility of a trans-subjective logic or system that emerges from and goes beyond any of its individual manifestations, which leads the thinking subject along the path of insight. Already in the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin had described one such system: the process of natural selection, an emergent logic, complex and elegant, had been producing species each uniquely adapted to an ecological niche, while eluding the scientific cogito. It is all the more remarkable from a Cartesian standpoint that this collective work is done so intelligently by plants and animals without the intervention of either God or science—indeed, when science gets involved it often breeds maladaptive monstrosities.

Today, any “Cartesian” science or philosophy that establishes boundaries around its subject matter and claims exclusive control over what constitutes the truth therein, is suspect and open to challenge. We note that not all of these challenges produce felicitous results. Analytical atrocities are routinely committed in the name of post-rational thought. First among these, and perfectly predictable, is the recent (heavily supported) research designed to demonstrate that apes can be taught English.⁵ There are other examples, much less clear-cut. Parapsychology openly challenged theoretical physics at a recent forum of the national meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Midwifery and “natural healing” confront the American Medical Association, sometimes from within.

The current confrontation of rational and post-rational thinking is sharply defined in scientific communities but not confined to them. Satanic cults demand responses from organized religion to questions concerning the ultimate value of life, and the answers are not forthcoming.⁶ Natural “sciences of the concrete,” to borrow Lévi-Strauss’s term, such as astrology, folk medicine, and primitive agricultural practices are being revived and studied avidly. Similarly, in the realm of everyday morality, liberal common sense, which once supplied quick answers to any question no matter how outlandish the question, now equivocates on every question concerning human sexuality. On homosexuality, for example, there is tolerance and also the sense that full acceptance undermines natural reproduction and social relationships. So we take an Ann Landersish stand, “It’s all right for them, perhaps they should seek therapy, but we have no right to call them ‘sick’,” etc.

While ‘Cartesian’ logic no longer holds, it is also evident that the quality of insight based on a mere denial of rationalism is not necessarily superior. The intellectual avant-garde has never been so volatile as it is at the present moment. When everything goes right, someone ‘pulls off’ a major breakthrough into the inner workings of a trans-subjective system: for example, Chomsky’s critique of what he called “Cartesian linguistics” and his subsequent development of “generative grammar,” which carried us from the deadend notion that thought produces language to the logic of creation within language itself. When everything goes wrong, the exhausted Cartesian cogito ends up opposed to a modern weirdo, undisciplined and irrational, masquerading as post-rational and post-disciplinary.

In the last ten years semiotics has been revived (as it was on several other similar occasions in the past) for use as a kind of all-terrain vehicle conveying these issues across the various scientific and humanistic fields. In a sense this is an unfair burden thrust upon semiotics by disciplines that have faltered in their own philosophical and theoretical development. The semiotic movement contains within itself the full range of strengths and weaknesses associated with post-rational thought. In this book, we have attempted to restrict ourselves to the positive side, to a progressive general semiotics that does not abdicate its revolutionary responsibilities.

Descartes told us that our humanity is conditional upon our ability to use words to convey thoughts. And he warned us “that we should not confuse speech with the natural movements that indicate passions, and can be imitated by machines as well as by animals; nor should we think, like some of the ancients, that animals speak although we do not understand their language.” As we have suggested, the seeds of the semiotic revolution (and perhaps some others) were already planted in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

We know that so long as semiotics functions only as a partner to modern structural linguistics it cannot be called revolutionary. The revolution that empowered language and speech above other human activities and made the forms of language—its rules and its beauties—the universal “human substance” was begun as early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Language was esteemed by rationalism because it pictured thought; although thought remained elevated over its representative. Philosophical expression of this is found in Descartes, who dismissed communication as a means of defining the human; other animals communicate but only we can think. Yet his dismissal generated perhaps more partisans for language as the arbiter of human destiny than the seventeenth century rationalist could ever have imagined. Any involvement with language—as with sex—seems to generate endless interest in it, and the controlled and orderly rationalist entry into the linguistic arena (the search for universal grammar) spawned the eighteenth century’s startling and sprawling insight reversing Descartes: thought is the product of associated (linguistic) images.⁷

We think that the Cartesian cogito has achieved its abundance of technological miracles and disasters, has played out the wealth it produced, and is exhausted. Again language, as in the eighteenth century, asserts its claims to define humanity. In an ironic reversal of priority of the ancient seven liberal arts (the trivium gaining the upper hand over the quadrivium) speculation about grammar, rhetoric, and logic have re-emerged to suggest once more that language is the key and the riddle of humanity. Continental and Anglo-American philosophers, linguists and poets, psychoanalysts and sociologists, historians and social theorists, even the last hold-outs in the practical arts, economists and medical doctors, are assimilating and even accepting a linguistic definition of their discipline tasks. One could recite a very long list of the scholars and thinkers⁸ engaged in, entangled in, language and agreeing upon the linguistic horizon of nearly every field of knowledge: we have genetic codes, computer languages, the retrieval of socio-cultural knowledge from fragments of conversation, personality and character construction in psychoanalysis as well as in literary texts—even physicists cheerfully adopt Lewis Carroll’s freeplay in naming the subatomic particles that they hold to be the base of physical reality.

The cultural sciences have tended to use the grammatical and rhetorical aspects of language for their models. As rhetoric, language denies order to reality outside its controlled formation by tropes (for example, metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, chiasmus, synecdoche, analogy, irony, etc.). As grammar, language controls the creation of meaning through sets of rules that regulate “creativity.” It seems that we now find ourselves on the verge of being able to tie up the loose ends of cultural life in the linguistic package, ratifying, as it were, the modernity of our culture in the reflexive act of honoring language.

The contribution semiotics has made to this situation should not be underestimated. Semiotics and linguistics are empirically linked in the works of the influential Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who claimed that linguistics was only a subfield of a larger and more general science of signs yet to be developed. Following Saussure (although the studies did not always agree with the details of his theory), there was an explosion of semiolinguistic studies in Western and Eastern Europe and America. These studies in aggregate constitute the most developed practical working-out of the structure of language and languages that we have ever witnessed. While there are those who object to the inflation of language—its being overworked as the model of creation it is nonetheless the case that we are, for the moment at least, enmeshed in it, and it is our duty to comprehend it. Semiotics has provided the most fruitful source of insight into the nature, structure, and development of language yet devised. In the semiotic mirror, language at last acquires a self-image.

Semiotics honors and mirrors language, restoring its centrality in culture. But it also transcends language, going beyond it as the final cause of meaningful existence. By the continuous and always subversive intrusion of the question of the sign, in which subject, object, and interpretation are fused, semiotics can liberate meaning from language, and vice versa, relieving language of some of its overheavy cultural burdens. The semiotic question, the search for the sign-character in any meaningful event or structure (that is, the question how, not what, does this mean?), keeps the primary linguistic model, with its tendency toward idealism, pinned down, in context, and capable of self-reflection. Semiotic analysis insists on uncovering all the sign-components in meaning: subject/object/interpretant; signifier/signified/language community; sender/referent/receiver; writer/text/reader; etc. In other words, semiotics is the method that reflects on linguistic structures-even those structures already purported to be reflection on language. One role of semiotics is to keep these reflections honest and open. Rhetorical analysis, for example, can become one-sided. The subjectivist will-to-power seems all too easily legitimated when, as with Foucault, the world is seen as a series of tropes, whose aesthetic and emotional meanings are unimportant. Yet when rhetoric is seen as ornamental or purely aesthetic, the analysis loses sight of the communicative intent and/or function of the trope (e.g., persuasion, appeal, seduction). Semiotics demands of rhetoric that it reveal both its aspects eventually if not simultaneously.

Semiotics embodies within itself the same analytic flexibility by which all cultural systems (such as “language” and “humanity”) live, including the radical oppositions found at the very heart of cultural systems. This is the reason that semiotics has the capacity both to center and decenter the linguistic primacy (discussed above), not from a hostile or mute stance, but from within. It should come as only a mild surprise, when viewed from this perspective, as a paradox we might have expected, that one of the greatest masters of semiotic analysis in our century, Roland Barthes, should have asked that semiotics subordinate itself to linguistics (1975).

Here is the crucial decision for cultural studies: do we use the actual terminology devised linguistically for the analysis of language and apply it to other sign systems, discovering the tropic nature of history, for example, or the grammar of the Decameron? Or do we assume that one of the pleasures of the text arises from its offering, as language does, the matter and the form of/for analysis? Our study of culture is based on the second option.

Conclusion

Recent social change and corresponding shifts in intellectual paradigms in the social sciences and humanities have been so rapid that many scholars are being asked to reject a system of ideas they never accepted in the first place. This is producing hopeless confusion in the academy. We have suggested that the linguistic critique of logocentric or rational science only went so far as to set up grammar and rhetoric in the place of the Cartesian cogito. Even the linguistic critique is unacceptable from the standpoint of conventional discipline wisdom, and yet we are already demanding that it be set aside in favor of a still more radical general semiotics of culture. It is quite natural under these circumstances that semiotics would appear to some as a useless surplus of activity and reconstructing of domains—language, art, science, politics, medicine, etc.—that have seemed adequate and valid up till now. Even some so-called semioticians think of it as a useless surplus of activity and are attracted to it mainly because it provides them with the latest set of fashionable buzzwords from Paris or Germany or Tel Aviv or Mexico City, a jargon that serves as the status marker for a few self-styled intellectual elites. Sometimes we suspect that semiotics has established itself on American soil by means of gestures hostile to that soil: through the efforts of foreign language teachers who can do ‘semiospeak’ and who consciously reserve its ‘mysteries’ for their initiates. It appears most often as a kind of cult, rather than as part of a partnership between a maturing American intellectual life and a serious European attraction for American materials. This integration is in fact growing; it is real on both the theoretical and the practical planes, as a survey of professional exchanges and/or bibliographies reveals; and competency at ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ may soon be a minimal requirement for academic life even outside the ‘foreign language’ orientation. Thus, despite its initial image as a ‘foreign import’ competing with more sensible American products and despite the fear of job displacement by ‘foreign workers’ (scholars whose work and interests cross national and/or discipline boundaries), semiotics is growing and extending its appeal.⁹ We think that the growth of semiotics under such adverse institutional circumstances is based on its power as method: it offers the best, if not the only, way of responding to important changes that have occurred in us and in the world.

Not only in academia but in all walks of life each of us must play different roles and meet a diversity of challenges, and each is required to excel in more than one area. In fact, one might make a case that the academy, with its tenure system and organization of specializations into departments, is less responsive to the changes in modern values than any other area of society. A medical doctor we know has just earned a law degree. And we know of others who are considering the same move as a “matter of necessity.” The actor Paul Newman has recently placed in the grueling twenty-four-hour automobile race at Le Mans. Former Harvard professor Timothy Leary now works as a stand-up comic in Los Angeles nightclubs.

These new patterns and combinations are signs that the cultural oppositions that formerly organized life in modern society are no longer valid. And the erosion of the validity of former cultural oppositions operates not merely on the level of individual careers but on the total system: for example, witness our recent difficulty in distinguishing between art and pornography. Modernity has promoted the erotic to the point where its denial leads to the death of culture. But while the liberation of eros is complete, or almost complete, on a legal level, there remains a strange alignment of official morality and aesthetic judgment that continues to suppress the erotic by defining it as “pornography.” Not only does this suppression skew both “straight” art and “porn,” it assures that advances on one of our most important new frontiers occur outside the context of critical discussion and evaluation. And this is not the only area in which the un-thought-through popular consciousness has seized the initiative from academic, disciplined thought. Sociology is haunted by the spectre of journalism. In fact, “journalism” competes with many of the fields of cultural studies and sometimes, like fiction, outruns them.

Even on the personal and psychological level, the former oppositions are no longer certain. It used to be that one was either a career woman or a mother: one was a capitalist or a communist; a businessman or a professor; scientist or aesthete; even American or foreigner. There were no in-betweens. You could not be a blonde movie actress and be smart; you could not be young and wise or old and healthy; you could not be a hard-driving success and a good father. These fundamental oppositions, like any syntagm, are losing their grip on the structure of life in modern society; and while they have not been replaced, we are in that provisional situation in which instead of either/or we all have to be both/and. This is one of the reasons the woman has become a central figure during the last few years. Women have traditionally been permitted to represent authority only if they truncated their other roles—wife, mother, etc. And so, over time, they became adepts at masking their authority and balancing multiple, overlapping, and seemingly contradictory roles. They have developed some expert solutions to a problem men are only now beginning to face.

The revolution makes demands on everyone, not merely on those who have consciously joined it. Once everyone has doubled and redoubled their roles, positions, and points of view, revolution occurs not by a multiplication of effort but by a reduction of effort. For example, an entire ‘class’ might disappear in a relatively short period of time by the simple expedient of mass rejection of one role in favor of others that are already in place. And the process might even go unnoticed. We think that we have already witnessed the quiet undoing of a human type, actually a decent figure, the liberal who was once the pillar of the liberal arts. Liberals believed in the dignity and equality of individuals, the trustworthiness of persons in positions of authority, the infallibility of our society and its institutions, detachment and objectivity as the basis for scientific progress, the principle of a direct relationship between effort and reward, and the openness of our institutions to new ideas and talents. There is considerable liberal backlash in the liberal arts today, and great nostalgia for the image, but no one seriously accepts the assumption of a rational social system on which this particular set of values is based, and most liberals have simply given up being liberals.

At the level of our actual existence, the semiotic revolution has begun, and it will complete itself as everyone gets tired of their schizoid performances and concentrates their efforts on the roles and perspectives they favor above the others. We are reminded of Rousseau’s description of France before the revolution that he predicted but did not live to see:

Apparently, most of these eighteenth-century “drugstore cowboys” were striving for intellectual recognition or upward social mobility. And it was their revolutionary spirit that Marx gave ultimate and radical formulation as consciousness-for-itself and seizure of the means of production. We do not think there is any reason to believe that the revolution of modernity is located so unambiguously under a positive sign, that it will inevitably produce upward social mobility and self-improvement. We do believe, however, that it is the historical task of semiotics to figure out what sign it is under.