The Routledge Companion to Semiotics

Paul Cobley, Paul Cobley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135284282
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Companion to Semiotics provides the ideal introduction to semiotics, containing engaging essays from an impressive range of international leaders in the field.

Topics covered include:

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• the history, development, and uses of semiotics

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• key theorists, including Saussure, Peirce and Sebeok

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• crucial and contemporary topics such as biosemiotics, sociosemiotics and semioethics

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• the semiotics of media and culture, nature and cognition.

Featuring an extended glossary of key terms and thinkers as well as suggestions for further reading, this is an invaluable reference guide for students of semiotics at all levels.

Part I
UNDERSTANDING SEMIOTICS

INTRODUCTION

PAUL COBLEY

WHAT IS SEMIOTICS?

With a book like this, the reader has every right to ask, ‘What is semiotics?’ Furthermore, s/he is entitled to a straight answer. The usual one that is offered is that semiotics is the study of the sign – full stop. That might satisfy some readers; but, immediately, one gets into all sorts of technicalities about what constitutes a sign and then questions about the consequences. Some of these technicalities are covered in portions of the book that follow. But they are not appropriate for getting this book started.

Thomas A. Sebeok, who, along with Peirce and Saussure, has been the key figure in the development of semiotics, preferred another definition. When speaking to the media or to lay persons he stated simply that semiotics is the study of the difference between illusion and reality. As with so many things, he was right. Moreover, he was right for two reasons to do with the recent history of semiotics. First, the most well-known version of semiotics, which experienced immense popularity in Western intellectual circles from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, was the Saussure-influenced mix of structuralism and semiology which swept through the humanities and the social sciences along with Marxism and psychoanalysis. Derived especially from Barthes (as well as Lévi-Strauss, Greimas and Jakobson), semiology promised to reveal the semiosic machinations behind all manner of contemporary and historical phenomena, albeit phenomena that were ‘man-made’, within ‘culture’ and seemingly susceptible to an analysis in terms of glottocentrism (that is, in terms of their features which resembled the human attribute of verbal language). Often based on variants of the analysis in Barthes’ 1957 book Mythologies, which exposed the bourgeois myths that suffused the unconsidered trifles of popular culture, Barthes had actually publicly abandoned this approach as too facile by as early as 1971. Yet, the association of sign study with the exposure of illusion was already fixed.

The second reason that Sebeok’s definition is correct has to do with the much more far-ranging ambitions of contemporary semiotics, by which is meant the semiotics – not semiology – which followed Barthes’ abandonment of myth criticism and is associated with the doctrines of Peirce, Sebeok and, to a considerable extent, with Jakob von Uexküll. To be sure, this semiotics is very much concerned with ‘culture’ and the definition of what it is to be human; but it does not stop at culture’s boundaries, nor does it countenance the theoretical short-cut whereby Homo sapiens sapiens is taken as divorced from its environment and its heritage in nature. In short, semiotics is the study of the sign wherever signs are to be found – perhaps, even, in places where humans have not yet set foot. At first sight, this looks rather limiting, a closing of the case: in sum, the stultifying notion that everything, everywhere is to be considered as a sign. If semiotics was simply that notion, then it would be sterile indeed. But seeing semiotics as the study of the difference between reality and illusion, once more, is a much different matter. A sign, as Peirce is especially keen to point out, is for someone or something; as such, there are signs which function as signs for us (or for others) and things beyond signs. The notion of Umwelt, from von Uexküll, which is crucial for contemporary semiotics, suggests that all species live in a ‘world’ that is constructed out of their own signs, the latter being the result of their own sign-making and receiving capacities. (A fly, for example, has a much different sensory apparatus for making/receiving signs than does the human.) Beyond those capacities of semiosis (sign action) there is a world – the ‘real world’, in one sense – which cannot be reached. Yet, while it is true that within a species’ Umwelt there are all manner of possibilities of illusion – through misinterpretation of signs, through overlooking of signs and through signs not being 100 per cent adequate representations of reality – the testimony that an Umwelt is a fairly good guide to reality is offered by the survival of the species within a given Umwelt. If an Umwelt offered an irredeemably faulty grasp of reality, then that species would not survive. The study of the vicissitudes of signs in different Umwelten, including that of the human, and how such study sheds light on the human Umwelt – that is what contemporary semiotics is.

Does this mean that the study of human signs now has to proceed with an awareness of signs elsewhere in the semiosphere, in other Umwelten? The answer to this is, on one level, yes. Of course, there are plenty of instances of semiotics – some of them very good – which proceed without reference to any forms of signification outside of anthroposemiosis. Some of these are even by authors that know that there is signification outside of anthroposemiosis. However, to know that human communication and semiosis are characterized not just by verbal expression but also by the faculty of the nonverbal offers the opportunity of enriching the understanding not just of communication but also of cognition. To know that the faculty of the nonverbal is shared with animals and plants offers opportunities to any analysis where nonverbality is in any way a factor. To know that organisms have an ineffable number of sign processes taking place within them – endosemiosis – changes how one might understand human and other cognition, as well as human and other communication. Furthermore, to know that disciplines such as ethology (the study of animal communication), biology and aspects of the other sciences have light to shed on communication is of paramount importance not just because it encourages interdisciplinarity but because it promotes a more comprehensive knowledge. Biological and physical processes involve semioses, in the same broad way that culture does, that are often dismissed as mere metaphors. All the disciplines in the human and social sciences involve tracking sign processes, despite not necessarily avowing these processes as such. All are committed in principle to distinguishing reality from illusion. Effectively, then, semiotics is concerned with the matters that all the other disciplines either take for granted, dismiss or neglect.

So, this is semiotics and what this book is about – an enduring enquiry into the boundaries of illusion and reality, a practice of interrogating signs which has borne fruit from the pre-Socratics to the present. Semiotics as a field (within which other disciplines variously operate) has only really existed for around a century. Semiotics as a discipline – with a small degree of institutionalization in a period during which traditional disciplines have been increasingly specialized and fiercely protective – has only gained prominence in the last sixty years. How can it be stated that semiotics has both a long and short lineage in the history of ideas?

A BRIEF WORD ON THE HISTORY OF SEMIOTICS

A fair amount, in different ways, has been written on the history of semiotics. Deely’s Four Ages of Understanding (2001a) offers a comprehensive overview and much more, including a complete revaluation of the history of philosophy. Meanwhile, Favareau (2007) provides an excellent and incisive analytic history of the means by which traditional attempts to deal with the entire panoply of signification have been transmuted into today’s concerns, with repressions and amplifications in the history of ideas. In the face of such contributions to the field, no more than a very cursory sketch can be offered here for the purposes of orientation. Further information is offered in the major essays in Part I as well as in many of the entries that make up Part II. What is notable, perhaps, is that any major discipline which finds itself in the position of being able to trace its own noble lineage and demonstrate that that lineage is still being realized is clearly in a healthy condition.

As Sebeok was repeatedly motivated to mention, semiotics derives from pre-Socratic thought. First, this entails a philosophy which is concerned with how the entire cosmos operates – the earth, its inhabitants and the elements – rather than just the interactions that constitute the polis. As is the case in the present, semiotics tends to address the bigger picture and sometimes arouses suspicion for this from those currents of thought that are fixated on shifts in power relations between humans as the whole of intellectual concern. However, the more direct link of semiotics to pre-Socratic thought is through the figure of Hippocrates and his (followers’) corpus. As with the later ancient medic Galen, Hippocrates did not just assemble a huge list of universal symptoms with the same aetiologies in Cos as in Libya, but actually developed a full-blown science of symptomatology concerned not just with diagnosis but also prognosis (Sebeok 2001a). The first relied on the physical signs of the illness on the patient’s body, along with the signs s/he emitted through groans, gestures or attempted vocal elucidation. Already, here, semiotics’ recognition of the body as a container of signs, humans’ repertoire of verbal and nonverbal communication, the systematicity of signs, and the dissemination of signs throughout nature was in place. In addition to this, the ancient medics’ concern not just with the brute indexical reality of symptoms (and, sometimes, their iconicity and symbolicity), but with projecting the course of an illness, was, at the same time, a prefigurement of modern science and an anticipation of semiotics after Peirce.

It would be easy to read the subsequent history of semiotics through the refracting lens of Peirce. Yet, the temptation to do so is understandable because Peirce was so well versed in traditions of logic and semiotics. Moreover, it is often assumed in various areas of thought – partly because of the Dark Ages in Europe, partly for other complicated reasons to do with the historiography of ideas – that relatively little of importance went on between the work of the classical Greek period and the rediscovery of Aristotle that immediately preceded the Renaissance and the birth of the modern age. Although, in respect of the logic that suffuses semiotics, Deely (1982: 197) suggests of the development of Stoic tradition informing Aristotle’s logic (see Manetti, this volume) that ‘up to very recent times, in the post-classical civilizations of Europe the works of Aristotle in logic really provide the main backdrop against which logical development took place’, his work, as emblematic of contemporary semiotics, has been devoted to opening up the lineages closed by intellectual history. Thus, Boethius (c. 480–524) and his near contemporary St Augustine (354–430) should now be understood as providing, in some ways, the template for thinking the sign in the much neglected tradition of the Latin Age. Both provided early suggestions that the sign was not a matter which could be considered either solely of nature or solely of culture. The contexts in which they delivered their theses on these issues could not be more different from those to be witnessed in the contemporary academy. However, they provide the lineage to today’s semiotics.

Peirce, with some limitations, knew the work of scholasticism and the Latin thinkers rather well. For the Latins, the perspective on signs emanating from the teachings of St Thomas Aquinas – later called Thomism – was paramount and the subject of numerous exigeses. Most important of all of these latter, without a doubt, is that of John (sometimes ‘Jean’ or ‘João’) Poinsot (also cited on occasion as ‘John of St Thomas’). Poinsot’s writings, especially his Tractatus de Signis (1632), appearing nearly sixty years before Locke coined the term ‘semiotics’, offer in a number of ways the possibility of developing a proper semiotic consciousness even before the work of Peirce. The chief contribution of Poinsot is his specific realist foregrounding of the sign as the object of study to illuminate mind-dependent and mind-independent being. The overwhelming impediment to a semiotic consciousness in modern thought has been the prominence in such thought of the Kantian idealist notion of the ‘ding an sich’, the entity that is unknowable (i.e. totally mind-independent being). Yet, coming immediately before Descartes and the moderns, Poinsot’s Thomism offered the means to overcome this impasse by demonstrating how cultural reality in the human species is the locus where the differences between mind-independent and mind-dependent being become knowable and distinguishable (see Deely 2005a: 76). An iceberg’s tip protrudes into experience as an object (a mind-dependent entity); moreover, it is, as such, a thing (mind-independent); but, above all, as is known from the popular phrase, the tip is a sign that there is much more below (Deely 1994a: 144). An important corollary of this is that whatever is beneath the tip of the iceberg cannot be approached as a thing. It is possible that experience could make it an object but, even then, through the sensations it provokes, the feelings about them and its consequence, it is only available as a sign. It is simultaneously of the order of mind-independent and mind-dependent being, and it would be foolish to bracket off one or the other in an attempt to render it as either solely object or thing. Hence Peirce’s statement that ‘to try to peel off signs & get down to the real thing is like trying to peel an onion and ...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• USING THIS BOOK
• Part I UNDERSTANDING SEMIOTICS
• Part II KEY THEMES AND MAJOR FIGURES IN SEMIOTICS
• REFERENCES
• INDEX