Sign Crossroads in Global Perspective

Semiotics and Responsibilities

Susan Petrilli, Susan Petrilli

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351490863
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Littérature
• Categoría: Théorie de la critique littéraire

Language is the species-specific human version of the animal system of communication. In contrast to non-human animals, language enables humans to invent a plurality of possible worlds; reflect upon signs; be responsible for our actions; gain conscious awareness of our inevitable mutual involvement in the network of life on this planet; and be responsibly involved in the destiny of the planet. The author looks at semiotics, the study of signs, symbols, and communication as developing sequentially rather than successively, more synchronically than diachronically. She discusses the contemporary phenomenon that people in today's society have witnessed and participated in, as part of the development of semiotics. Although there is a long history preceding semiotics, in a sense the field is, as a phenomenon, more "of our time" than of any time past. Its leading figures, whom Petrilli examines, belong to the twentieth and twenty-first century. Semiotics is associated with a capacity for listening. This capacity is also the condition for reconnecting to and recovering the ancient vocation of semiotics as that branch of medical science relating to the interpretation of signs or symptoms. The pragmatic aspect of global semiotics studies the impact of language or signs on those who use them, and looks for consequences in actual practice. In this respect, Petrilli theorizes that the task for semiotics in the era of globalization is nothing less than to take responsibility for life in its totality.

1

Semioethics and Responsibility¹

Beyond Specialisms, Universalisms, and Humanisms

1. Premiss

2. Life, Signs, and Responsibility: Enter “Significs”

3. The Relation with the Other, Dialogism, and Listening as the Condition for Human Understanding

4. Pragmatic Semiotics, the Responsive Interpretant, and Critique of Reductionism

5. Semiosis and its Future, a Semioethic Perspective

6. From Semiosis to Semioethics

7. Semioethics, Before and Beyond Globalization

In these remarks I want to look at semiotics, as it were, more synchronically than diachronically. It is not the whole history of semiotic development as a consciousness of the fundamental role of signs in life and experience that I want to discuss, but rather the contemporary phenomenon that we today who have lived in both the 20^th and the 21^st century have witnessed and participated in as the development of semiotics.* For though there is of course a long history behind the semiotics of today, still there is a sense in which semiotics is, as a widespread intellectual movement, a phenomenon more “of our time” than it is of any time past. So it is mainly of figures alive in the 20^th century, and a few of them still alive today, that I want to speak. And I want to speak in particular of the ethical dimension implicit in human semiosis that has only just begun to come to the fore, for example (a case of synchronicity), in the year 2003, under the title of “existential semiotics” in the work of Eero Tarasti and “semioethics” in my work with Augusto Ponzio; and with the term “semioethics” taken up later by others as well.

1. Premiss

Language is the species-specifically human version of the animal modeling system that enables each one of us, differently from non-human animals: 1) to invent a plurality of possible worlds; 2) to reflect upon signs; 3) to be responsible for one’s actions; 4) to gain conscious awareness of our inevitable involvement, of each and every one of us, in the sign network of life over the entire planet; and 5) to be responsibly involved in the destiny of planetary semiosis. Considering the advanced levels reached in technological development today this means either to participate in any possibility for improving life conditions over the planet, or to contribute to the possibility of its destruction, whether this be its immediate destruction or more or less slow extinction. The first four points enter the general architecture of the project for “Global Semiotics”, or “Semiotics of life”, which finds a recent and mature expression in the work of Thomas A. Sebeok (1920–2001), but which goes back at least to the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) and Charles W. Morris (1901–1971). And in fact, Sebeok’s global semiotics is closely related to pragmatism as developed by the latter two, though especially to the pragmaticism of Peirce.² The fifth point is the departure point for that orientation in semiotics which can no longer be given up for various reasons, including our level of awareness and the fact that, in today’s situation of global communication, it is now virtually impossible to pretend that we can’t see, don’t feel, don’t want to know.

Let us begin from the precognition of the turn of semiotics in the direction of what, with co-author Augusto Ponzio,³ I have designated as “semioethics”. Let us begin in the year 1971, the year that Thomas Sebeok’s essay on “‘Semiotic’ and Its Congeners” shares in common with an edition of the “compact” version of the Oxford English Dictionary, on which I shall rely. In addition, let me draw on Sebeok’s 1984 Presidential Address thirteen years later, which he considered his “most autobiographical piece”,⁴ delivered under the title, “Vital Signs”. With his “global semiotics”, Sebeok in fact takes his place in a semiotic horizon delineated by Peirce, Morris, and Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) as well. In his 1984 presidential address, Sebeok reminds us (p. 9) that it is Peirce who is “our lodestar” in the contemporary development, as semiotics overtakes and assimilates as no more than a part of itself the 20^th century European-American development of semiology.⁵ More than the work of any single figure, it was certainly under Sebeok’s influence that the label “semiotics” came to mark the first florescence in late modern consciousness of something like a realization of the universal role of signs in creating the reality of human consciousness. It is just that global semiotic consciousness that we see now acquiring — late in the game — an ethical dimension, that is to say, a dimension of responsibility for the whole in which we are involved insofar as we are involved in it, which is the theme of my address to you today. And it was exactly eleven years after Sebeok’s diagnostic Presidential Address to the Semiotic Society of America that we find John Deely first suggesting, in ad lib remarks at the conclusion of his 1995 paper, “A New Beginning for the Sciences” (remarks never incorporated into the written text), that perhaps the more fully correct term for what has more confusedly been called (since Charles Darwin, 1809–1882) “evolution” is rather “semiosis”.⁶

These are the contemporary lines of thought that I hope to weave together in our musings for this occasion.

2. Life, Signs, and Responsibility: Enter “Significs”

This brings me to the nexus, the crucial node, of the musement I am placing before you on this occasion: when Sebeok notes (1984:21) that “Tife modifies the universe to meet its needs, and accomplishes this by means of sign action” Yet by feeling at the same time “strongly drawn to Wheeler’s suggestion that the fundamental physical constants, the nuclear and cosmological parameters, and others, are constrained by the unbudging requirement that life evolve”, is he not suggesting (even without realizing it) that the development of the physical universe prior to the advent of life was itself a product of semiosis? And is this not so even if that prior development, as Peirce suggested (W 2.404), “cannot be fully revealed or brought to light by any study of the sign alone, as such. [Even if] Knowledge of it must come from some previous or collateral source”?

In short, even if we accept Sebeok’s proposition that there is no life without the action of signs, we have still to ask whether the converse of this proposition, “no signs without life” is also true. Sebeok, the principal architect of semiotics as overtaking and absorbing semiology as but a part of the “doctrine of signs”,⁷ was inclined so to think. “Doctrine of signs” is the expression that Sebeok preferred for his particular approach to sign action, rather than the more ennobling terms “science” or “theory”. He adopted the expression from John Locke (1632–1704), for whom a “doctrine” was a body of principles and opinions that vaguely go to form a field of knowledge; and with this expression Sebeok took his own place in a tradition that included George Berkeley (1685–1753)⁸ and led to Peirce. And it turns out that this expression “doctrine of signs”, for which Locke coined“semiotics” as a synonym, was used by the Latins in exactly Locke’s sense.⁹

But we have to realize that Peirce had a still broader view than Sebeok; and in this same line of thinking, Deely (1989a) draws out of John Poinsot (1589–1644) concrete indications of a philosophical nature to suggest that while indeed semiosis is essential for living things to maintain themselves as living, there is also reason to consider that semiosis is essential to living things not only in their present and actual existence, as Sebeok recognized, but also to the bringing about within the physical universe of the initial conditions which made life first proximately possible and then actual At this point semiosis passes from all “grades of degeneracy” (or “pregeneracy”) to reveal its full and genuine form in the veritable conflagration of sign activity drawing ever more and more complex living systems into reality as nature begins its climb, certainly on this planet (as all but certainly on planets elsewhere) toward that unique form of life which (as Maritain originally remarked) not only makes use of signs but is able to recognize that there are signs: the life of the “semiotic animal”¹⁰

Peirce conveyed an idea of the broad scope of his semiotic perspective in a letter of 23 December 1908 (by then he was reaching his seventies) to Victoria Lady Welby (1837–1912):¹¹

it has never been in my power to study anything, — mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economic, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic.

All existents, whether human or nonhuman, impose themselves upon Peirce’s attention insofar as they are signs, or better, insofar as they carry out a “sign function” Indeed, as he stated in “Issues of Pragmaticism”, a paper of 1905 (CP 5.448, n.l): the entire universe, the universe of existents and the universe of our conceptual constructions about them, that wider universe we are accustomed to refer to as truth, of which the universe of existents is only a part, “all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs”.

Peirce in various writings listed numerous examples of what he believed classified as signs, such as his preface to a paper of 1909,“Essays on Meaning: By a Half-Century’s Student of the Same”. As he worked towards the formulation of a general description of signs, he indicated such things as images, pictures, diagrams, pointing fingers, symptoms, winks, a knot in ones handkerchief, memories, fancies, concepts, indications, tokens, numerals, letters, words, phrases, sentences, chapters, books, libraries, signals, imperative commands, microscopes, legislative representatives, musical notes, concerts, performances, natural cries — in other words, anything able to create mental images which emanate from something external to itself.¹² But beyond general semiosis, in what we now identify as the “anthroposemiosic sphere”, in Peirces view, the universe considered globally is a sign/a vast representamen, a great symbol …, an argument”; and insofar as it is an argument it is “necessarily a great work of art, a great poem …, a symphony …, a painting” (CP 5.119). To state that the universe is perfused with signs (CP 5.448, n. 1) implies that the universe — the whole universe, including, before, and beyond life — is structurally endowed with a capacity for the potentially infinite generation of signifying and interpreting processes.

But that which I now wish to underline, in this presentation, is that with the development of anthroposemiosis and the appearance of the human being — the “semiotic animal” — there emerges a consciousness which will bring with it and, as we shall see, for the first time in the finite universe, a sense of responsibility: responsibility for the future of the animal species, where such singular consciousness emerges, but responsibility which turns out to extend in principle not only to every other animal species as well, but to every form of life; because responsibility is rooted in a form of knowledge (“metasemiosis”,¹³ I call it) which alone is capable of envisioning the requirements of the biosphere as a planetary and intersystemic phenomenon and so of taking steps to bring civilization and culture into line with the requirements which, unless met, will destroy Gaia — the planetary whole of biosemioses upon which the flourishing of life depends.

As I have claimed elsewhere against a reductive interpretation of Peircean semiotics,¹⁴ the problem of the relation to others, of dialogue and responsibility towards others, is no less than pivotal in Peirces own conception of semiosis in the human world, and therefore in the human subject. In fact, an aspect of Peirce s sign theory that should not be underestimated is the contribution he makes towards redefining subjectivity. Insofar as it is made of signs, that is, signs in becoming, subjectivity emerges as a dialogic and relational open unit, a process evolving in the open intrapersonal and interpersonal dialogic interrelationship with self and others, such that subjectivity is inexorably the expression of interconnectedness among signs, and not only of isolation from other substances, and involving therefore the condition of inevitable responsivity to others, to other “signs” in the great semiosic network. In such a situation indifference and closing to the other is an imposed and artificial constriction. The dialogic conception of thought and subjectivity as developed throughout the course of his research may be traced back to Peirces early writings. Insofar as subjectivity is made of signs — in my terminology, sign material — its boundaries cannot be defined once and for all. Indeed, the boundary can only be delimited in the dialogic encounter with other subjects. Human beings are born into a community where experiences are lived in relation to the experiences of the other members of that community and never isolatedly from it (CP 5.403 note 2):

[W]e know that man is not whole as long as he is single, that he is essentially a possible member of society. Especially, one man’s experience is nothing, if it stands alone. If he sees what others cannot, we call it hallucination. It is not ‘my’ experience, but ‘our’ e...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface: In Her Own Voice, John Deely
• The Seventh Sebeok Fellow, John Deely
• 1. Semioethics and Responsibility: Beyond Specialisms, Universalisms, and Humanisms
• 2. Working with Interpreters of the “Meaning of Meaning”: International Trends among 20th-century Sign Theorists
• 3. The Relation with Morris in Rossi-Landi’s and Sebeok’s Approach to Signs
• 4. Iconicity and the Origin of Language: Charles S. Peirce and Giorgio Fano
• 5. Bodies and Signs: For a Typology of Semiosic Materiality
• 6. Semiotic Phenomenology of Predicative Judgement
• 7. On Communication: Contributions to the Human Sciences and to Humanism from Semiotics Understood as Semioethics
• 8. Iconicity in Translation: On Similarity, Alterity, and Dialogism in the Relation among Signs
• Index