From Linguistic to Semiotic Models of Cultural Change

Semiotic interpretation of cultural production currently operates within a limiting framework of opposing assumptions, having to do with the relationship of “natural language” to other cultural systems. On the one side is Benveniste’s (1969:130) seemingly radical semiotic assertion that “natural language” is the ultimate interprétant for all other aspects (departments) of culture. On the other is the Tartu school’s more recent opening (Lotman and Uspensky 1978) of Benveniste’s position: the suggestion that language is dependent, at least in part, on the existence of other cultural forms. According to Lotman and Uspensky, cultural productions act as models, as the ‘semiotic mechanism’, of cultural evolution. Tzvetan Todorov came to much the same conclusion when he advanced the claim (1977:19-20), that literature, while secondary, is also the form of semiotic system that serves as a model for language as well. One would thus have to question (as Roland Barthes has; see our chapter 7) the traditional view of the imaginative arts, especially literature, as having a primarily semantic (meaning-bearing) function in relationship to ‘natural language,’ as Benveniste would have it. Yet it is undeniable that at least these arts feed upon ‘naturalized’ cultural systems, such as language, as their source: and ‘natural’ codes have been most successfully applied to their analysis by structural semiology.

This ‘natural language vs. all other sign systems’ formulation is not a helpful polarization of the semiotics of cultural production. The Tartu group has moved to liberate art from the primacy of language but we think they have not moved far enough to the ‘semiotic mechanism’ that operates throughout the realm of modern culture on language, art, social movements, morality, ritual, propaganda. We want to continue to open the question of the semiotics of culture in directions that would clarify the ways in which cultural images in all spheres exert both conservative and radical influences on total cultural development.

The Lotman/Uspensky thesis has the effect of introducing a dynamic—specifically an evolutionary element into the semiotic investigation of cultural forms (1978:223 and 1974:302-3): “Man is included in a more mobile world than all the rest of nature.” This responds not only to an intuitive sense that the semiotics of culture must necessarily include a dynamic mechanism, but it also responds to the conservative literary criticisms of semiotic inquiry as to the ‘mythic’ and synchronic in relation to literature (De Man 1971: 10-11). In the essay on the “Semiotic Mechanism of Culture” and elsewhere, Lotman’s terms curiously repeat those of Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and alert us to the tendency of culture to prevent its own development except as a perpetuation of a synchronic illusion of pure contemporaneity (repetition, an ally of the death instinct). Questions of ‘pure change’ recur in the Lotman/Uspensky theses which raise for discussion the very categories of the semiology of language itself—synchronic and diachronic.

The approach we propose aims to liberate signifying systems from the matrix (‘natural language’) to vie for primacy as the semiotic mechanism of cultural production and they are limited only insofar as one would use conventionally defined ‘Cultural Productions’ as a model for cultural production in general. Lotman/Uspensky limit the generative, productive power to conventionally conceived ‘artistic acts’. But the potential is there to go beyond these, to expand semiotic inquiry about the development of cultural change into the heart of other forms of cultural production—into “the heart of social life” as de Saussure wanted—into those cultural productions usually studied by anthropologists.

Interestingly, Lévi-Strauss (1967:49) reserved such an investigation of self-reproductive culture for a cybernetic future:

Such a ‘future’ is, of course, already at hand; and we need only bring the practitioners of its analysis together with Lotman/Uspensky’s theses to make this clear. In modern culture, manners (Erving Goffman, Lévi-Strauss himself), morals (Dean MacCannell), passions (Freud), social movements (Dürkheim, Frank Young), and those great modern fictions—governmental policies—have all been demonstrated to be local systems to semiosis that equally have the empirical potential, the power, to serve as models for any and/or every other facet of culture. Attempts to reserve primacy (ontological or otherwise) for a particular semiotic system—be it ‘natural language’ or ‘Art’—is an evident error.¹ Even everyday life proliferates cultural productions that serve as meta-systems of interpretation: from below the level of the individual to the self and beyond, to class, and to any human system, we engage in a drama of interpretations that is the mechanism (secondary modeling systems) of cultural development. Before we did, Emile Dürkheim (1965a:24) recognized in everyday cultural arrangements a pre-figurative (pre-conceptual/inspirational) model for cultural conceptions even of the highest type:

In other words, everyday ‘natural’ cultural arrangements function as sign systems by virtue of the fact that they call forth other sign systems, or in Peirce’s terms (1955:99), “signs give birth to other signs, and especially one thought calls forth another.” (See also Lotman 1974:303.)³

The sender-receiver model applies here in a curious way: culture sends a message to itself (the sign, as Peirce often wrote, is always ‘addressed’ to someone), but the receiver’s reading of this message (culture’s reading itself) will always be a more developed sign than that originally addressed to it.⁴ It is not merely a gesture or a sign, it is one that has been read or interpreted. And even when that interpretation is less skilled than it need be, or more skilled, as when a student fails to understand an assignment, or understands it better than its author, the original sign plus its reading constitutes an expanded structure. The expanded structure is composed of the sign and some form of response to it. This is the heart of cultural evolution. It begins with a production and proceeds to a reproduction that is not a simple doubling but a reflection at a higher power. This progress is called “pure rhetoric” by Peirce.

Now it is possible to map two different directions to cultural evolution. The mechanism of the self-reading of culture can spiral ever upwards until all sense of the ‘natural cultural’ source is forgotten. The model for this is the toy Freud called a magic tablet, on which the child may write or draw, then erase clear by lifting the surface sheet off the underlying gelatin base. Each erasure appears to provide a new beginning, a clean start, but the impression of each previous use remains embedded in the base. Lotman/Uspensky (1978:216) speak, in an unconscious echo of Freud’s magic tablet and all true philosophical tabulae rasae, of cultures’ having an apparent periodic need of “forgetting,” at which point one must, as Husserl insisted, return to the “things themselves.” The essence of culture may reside in an interplay between its mnemonic function (memory, recording, writing) and resistance to such remembering.

The other possibility is that the reflection of the sign can begin to assert its own stability and deny birthright to other signs. It can act prospectively; the sign can declare itself the anti-revolution. In this case, the sign is structured as an attempt to stabilize ‘natural’ cultural arrangements so as not to have to progress or change. An example would be the touristic image of an ‘authentic’ ethnic identity. Following this direction, the realization of the true destiny is to promote unchangeability. Lotman/Uspensky (1978:227) write:

This form of cultural “reproduction” and production, like Oscar Wilde’s “life imitates art,” is the classical mimesis (the imitation of nature) in reverse. Everyday cultural arrangements become merely a representative, or sign, of reflected images. Some ethnomethodologists (see chapter 5) base their understanding of everyday life entirely on this one-sided view of cultural “evolution.” They have concentrated all their analysis on those aspects of culture that contain the seeds of its own destruction. The mimetic attitude is sterile and conservative and leads inevitably to the death of culture (the death, that is, of culture in the sense of an evolutionary striving, of thought and action that give rise to other thoughts and actions.) The anti-revolutionary cultural sign is trapped in a specular stasis of the narcissistic type best described by Lacan’s “stade du miroir.”

Culture that reproduces itself as a series of endless mirrorings, yet adds nothing either to the original ‘natural’ culture or to the original ‘image’ of it, is literally the death of culture—it conserves itself as is. Art becomes ‘regulative’ or propaganda; everyday life is merely a matter of impression-management, ethnic groups attempt to construct, then operate within, quasi-official ‘authentic’ versions of themselves.

The current attack in France on ‘the self’ (the mirrored image) in the name of ‘the subject’ is a desperate attempt to sabotage this mechanism and to inspire some cultural mobility (in the form of the personal motive, ‘desire’).⁵ This attempt is hardly new in the history of Western thought: one need only read of Gérard de Nerval’s maddening impotence at seeing his Sylvie, self-conscious after reading Rousseau, unable to be a peasant—she can only act at being one.

SEMIOSIS AND THE MORAL ORDER—COMMENT ON ROUSSEAU

As has been suggested above, these issues were originally framed in their distinctively modern form by J. J. Rousseau with an insight that is far from being exhausted. Rousseau made his critique of contemporary modern culture precisely in terms of the question of development, or progress.

His first major work was The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1749 and 1964a), the prize-winning essay that answered the Académie de Dijon’s question whether the advancement of culture in modern times had helped to improve our mores (moeurs, morals, manners, customs). Rousseau relates that the structure of the Discourse, which he repeatedly referred to as the fatal and unlucky piece of writing that opened his unhappy literary career, appeared to him in an almost visionary way while en route to visit his fellow radical philosophe Diderot, imprisoned at Vincennes.

The Discourse stunned a cosmopolitan and culturally smug Europe with its negative response (the advancement of modern culture, according to Rousseau, had not helped to perfect our mores). It brought Rousseau instant notoriety, as well as rejoinders from such unlikely figures as King Stanislaus of Poland. Advanced civilization—arts and sciences—had become second nature to the sophisticated eighteenth-century upper classes. The “mind of the Enlightenment,” as Cassirer (1955:305 and 93ff.) calls it, was at the height of its powers, relishing its own prowess. How, then, could an upstart dare to find culture potentially flawed in terms of its consequences for morals, manners, and customs?

Rousseau first contrasts the culture of his day with the images of past cultures—Sparta, early Rome—as counter-proof of progress: there, laws and conduct, rules and rule-governed behavior were in virtually perfect accord. Any subsequent developments that claim to desire the meshing of Law with Public Order could never be seen as a ‘progress’, but only as a degeneration. Such a ‘degeneration’ obviously must have occurred, in the Roman instance, at least, for by the time of Rome’s greatest expansion, law and order, art and life, sign and meaning had obviously radically diverged. In the voice of Fabricius, transported in time from early to late Rome, Rousseau cries, “What is the meaning of these statues, these paintings, these buildings? Madmen, what have you done? ... Do rhetoricians govern you?” (1964:45).

What has intervened, as the complaint makes clear, is the advent of the sign, with its merely arbitrary relation to meaning. Semiosis is exhibited in the Roman case first in concrete ‘natural’ cultural forms, forms such as buildings, temples, and houses (1964:54) wherein front and back regions have no necessary semantic relationship to each other. And semiosis extends even and especially to manners, morals, and passions today:

Man seems to be freed via culture from all necessary meaning. This liberation occurs by the process of culture’s having reflected upon its ‘natural’ cultural arrangements and its having entered into the realm of speculative semiosis. The implicit political program of cultural anthropology with its claims for the coherence of primitive culture is in part the anthropologists’ way of attempting to correct for the failings of our own culture by showing us that real cultures are not contaminated by uncontrolled semiosis.

At this point, most readings of Rousseau equivocate: does he then want a primitivist return to a ‘nature’ that would pre-exist all culture? Or does he, with Hegel, wish to use culture to heal the wound (the scandalous gap between sign and meaning) that he has uncovered? It is clear that Rousseau’s discursive mode is highly ambiguous at this point, for while one might assume that he wishes for a return to a pre-semiotic state,⁶ he is in fact doing something else.

He is demonstrating the liberation from nature that semiosis brings, on the one hand, and, on the other, the fear of its own freedom on the part of culture. So far from being used to effect a supreme liberation, Rousseau finds, signs are now used repressively, as a way of maintaining social order.⁷ Even in the absence of any transcendental standard or ‘meaning’ to which signs would adhere, men have managed to use signs against themselves. They find principles, rules for meaning, competency, interaction even in the very mechanism of semiosis. They now know sign and meaning will diverge and expect it or are at least resigned to it.

The first reflections on ‘natural’ cultural arrangements are what we call ‘arts and sciences’. It is the arts and sciences that have introduced a stable orderliness into the otherwise purely mobile world of semiosis. This orderliness goes so far as to include even the most intimate inter-subjective relations among men. Anticipating the work, though not necessarily the cool neutral attitude of twentieth-century ethnomethodologists, including especially Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman, Rousseau wrote:

Even the most ‘personal’ of relationships are codified, not because of a priori prescriptions, but because semiosis has introduced the possibility of acting merely for pleasure rather than out of necessity. Yet men have now made of pleasure itself an art with its own poetics. The very possibility of intending to please depends upon a variable ratio between sign and meaning. Only if one can adjust one’s projected image (message, sign given) to suit what one presumes the receiver expects or prefers can we attempt consciously to please (see D. MacCannell 1976a: 108). Every aspect of culture becomes accommodation: men anticipate the response of the other before acting; cultural productions become commodities as they tailor themselves more and more to the marketplace and try to please the audience.

At the end of his now classic study, The Presentation of Seif in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman (1959:251) reflects:

Going beyond everyday social performances, sacred painting (re)-becomes pornography, sculpture (re)becomes idolatry, art pleases and it does not guide. Yet its sway is all the more potent since it binds men with art to their own self-satisfaction, their present felicities (Rousseau 1964a:53).

Pleasure, now a principle, becomes in turn a principle of self-preservation, a regulation for repetition. Ironically, it will now serve the death of culture, the repression of semiosis. Well before Freud, Rousseau saw that cultural man has the capacity to generate a norm out of the most norm-free of situations and to serve, in the name of maintaining itself, the “death instinct.” In short, ‘culture’ seems always to tend to re-become ‘nature’, i.e., an ordered set of principled, fixed behaviors and structures. It can only ‘progress’, then, if resubjected to the radical reflection on ‘natural’ cultural arrangements by which semiosis originates.

Rousseau’s First Discourse fulfills this reflective function for the modern culture of the European Enlightenment, the cultural situation in which we still exist, the one in which we do our humanist and social scientific work. It not only reopened to speculation what had seemed a closed question as to the assured progress of contemporary culture; it also served as a volatile point of departure for subsequent cultural history. The developments of Romanticism and modern thought have used Rousseau’s writings as a mobilizing force, both in the political and personal senses.

The radical question thus put to culture is: how do we generate unfreedom and a ‘natural’ order out of the freedom from nature provided by culture-as-semiosis? The most cogent answers to this question lie in the fields of linguistics, cultural anthropology, ethnomethodology, and Durkheimian sociology, whose goal is to specify the systems of norms which ‘free’ and arbitrary acts of association generate.⁸

But there is another side to the question: Rousseau demonstrated that the pragmatic Horatian maxim that cultural productions must ‘please’ has become a fixed standard and a rule for order. How do we generate freedom (cultural progress, semiotic evolution) out of the unfreedom of principled or rule-governed activity? Especially when these norms do not exist as “fixed or external criteria,” in Saussure’s terms (Rousseau coined the word criterion [1964a:48]) but seem to arise spontaneously, inexorably. This is the question that interested Peirce.

Prefiguring de Saussure (1966:115-22), Rousseau has uncovered the structuring mechanism, that which ‘naturalizes’ culture, fixes ‘meanings’, rigidities signs, and stabilizes patterns in the way in which values are created in the void, in the semiotic absence of any fixed or external criteria. The demobilization occurs by means of creating evaluative scales by which one can compare one sign to another or exchange one sign against the other to determine at least a relative value, meaning or worth: money, status, power, progress. These values originate in an ‘arbitrary’ act of association^* (one could call it pre-metaphoric thought); but this fluid, open possibility soon finds closure and the values appear to be fixed and firm (syntagmatic-chained-oppositions).

Value can only arise through speculative association or the reading of one cultural production in the light of another, that is, through reflection. It is the original relationship, the conceptual act, or figuring. But it is a thoroughly mobile act, like thought, capable of endless deconstructive generation if not stabilized in some form or figure. Like the metaphor, it is entirely too transportable and generates its own antithesis, a desire for self-preservation and stability. Thus semiosis, the divergence between sign and meaning, fosters a semiotic system of evaluation that operates as a counter to pure changeability. As de Saussure showed, the structure of ‘natural language’ operates despite its arbitrary basis (the sign):

(1) by creation of an exchange value, or the means of measuring cultural products of dissimilar nature

(2) or by creation of a comparative value in which cultural productions (chief among them ‘man’) of a similar nature are measured.

In short, according to Saussure (and Rousseau) the basis for the structure of values is metonymy (exchange) and metaphor (comparison).

Semiosis and Social Values—Economy, Metonymy, and Metaphor

Once all cultural items have found their relative values and ‘principles’ have been generated therefrom, social organization is fixed and culture appears ‘natural’. Men are seen as equals by an original act of metaphor/evaluation, a transfer of identity. Their association begins as a free one, based upon pleasure; they become fixed in a social hierarchy according to their use value; similarly commodities are originally designed for utility; they become revalued by a metaphoric transfer to the pleasure scale. Marx saw metaphorization as the basic act of evaluation, one which is not restricted to language, but to all systems of cultural production.

We repress the origin of values by forgetting the sign mechanisms (first, association, and then, comparison/exchange) by which they arise.⁹ It is only this repression which makes possible the automatism, ease (Rousseau’s word is commodité, p.54), and perpetuation of modern culture. Modern culture is the new Eden, a second nature. Cultural development and proliferation reassure us, man’s ‘art’ can impose ‘order over chaos’, or ‘give existence meaning’. But in forgetting its semiotic or figurative origin culture fails to ‘progress’, and self-satisfaction, the death of culture, ensues.

How then does change occur? Must it arise from a violence to the social order, from a willful act or transgression against ‘natural’ arrangements? Many have assumed this to be the only exit from the present, and the current fashion for ‘violence’ stems in part from the feeling of being trapped in what Nietzsche called ‘the prison-house of language’. Rousseau, however, had a much less hopeful view of the will than such a notion would suppose. For him, change just as much as fixity arises from the heart of social life, from the semiotic mechanism. The scales of value, based upon an original metaphorization, tend to rotate ninety degrees around an axis, and to be applied metonymically to other aspects of culture: items that should only be compared (e.g., persons) are exchanged, and items that should be exchanged (e.g., goods) become compared:

Luxuries are examples of the second transfer, the conversion of dissimilar items into comparative equalization along the aesthetic dimension of ‘pleasing’ (p. 50). In each case, what had been an item in a scale with an assignable value, meaning, or worth, suddenly loses its ‘properties’ by a transfer to the other scale. It acquires (or re-acquires) the mode of being of the sign: in the case of man, he becomes a mathematical figure/a measure of his labor or use-value; and in the case of commodities, they become aesthetic objects, decorative, ornamental, useless.¹⁰

To recapitulate: each scale of value, hierarchical/vertical/numerical or lateral/temporal/aesthetic originates through figuration, the placement together of two signs in juxtaposition. From there, value judgments of either superiority/inferiority or primary/secondary are made. From then on, the scale (or syntagmatic chain) is assumed to be fixed, principles or regulative inferences are drawn from it, and the originally arbitrary act of association or positioning is forgotten or repressed: “Men are born free ... and everywhere they are in chains.” Only a revolution¹¹ can re-metaphorize this now ‘natural’ arrangement and bring out the original semiotic mechanism by means of which the value system arises. This revolution re-institutes the sign as value-free and arbitrary, as a pure metaphor (concept/figure), but this in turn will also produce a new distribution of values along a scale and generate new principles.

Many thinkers after Rousseau also attempted to separate and sort these confused value scales into proper order, for selected local areas of culture: Kant, for example, tried to divest the aesthetic judgment, or ‘delight’,¹² of its confusion with utility principles. And several novelists and poets, such as Stendhal (J. MacCannell 1978b), Nerval, and Baudelaire, not to mention Nietzsche, show an overt but sometimes impotent hostility toward figures—of speech, of language, and of geometry as these become fixed figures. The most recent development in this opposition can be seen in the deconstructionist movement and the interest in open tropes, or the freeing of metaphor/metonymy from their place (see Derrida 1974 and 1979). It remained for de Saussure to make especially clear the basic value axes in any semiotic system. Only the sign (figure) can generate culture, and only the sign (figure) can institute the death of culture, its ‘naturalization’.

Conclusion

The dialectic of enlightenment has often appeared as an impasse for pragmatic, modern culture: we are either trapped in culture’s artificiality, or we go ‘primitive’ and join the barbarian attack on culture. The writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau have often been presumed to be paradigmatic of this enlightenment dilemma. What we are suggesting here is an alternative reading of Rousseau. Clearly there are moments, interstitial gaps, in which cultural change occurs—meaning is lost; things are revalued—and ever since Rousseau we have been avid in our attempts to prolong these ‘acultural’ periods. Thus we have Deleuze and Guattari (1977) railing against the Oedipal (repressive) generation of cultural figures that Freud revealed; we have neo-Marxists and literary critics “unable to write poetry (or about it) after Auschwitz,” just as we have the spokesman of Hitler’s Imperial Chamber of Culture saying, “When I hear the word ‘culture’, I reach for my gun” (quoted in Adorno 1967:26). And, of course, we have the various romanticisms with their love-hate for culture that were so well discriminated by A. O. Lovejoy (1948:228-53).

We are suggesting a reformulation of questions of either/or, for or against culture. By scrutinizing culture as a production not of but like social and economic relations, semiotics can begin to comprehend the importance that cultural productions have assumed alongside of mechanical, industrial, financial, biological, and social productions. The “purity” of high art, the nineteenth-century era of the ivory tower wherein aesthetic pleasure came to be known as “work” has been succeeded by an era in which work is supposed to be pleasure (D. MacCannell 1976a): this is a reversal of a fundamental binary opposition no semiotician can ignore.

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*Roland Barthes’s “Myth Today” (1972:151ff.) judges the anti-historical bias of mythic thought to be pathological in a modern context.

*This doing and undoing process is discussed in detail in our later chapter on the literary sign.