A preliminary and tentative version of this text (dealing with a semiotics of visual and architectural signs) was written and published in 1967 as Appunti per una semiologia delle comunicazioni visive. A more theoretically oriented version – offering an overall view of semiotics and containing a longepistemological discussion on structuralism – was published in 1968 as La struttura assente. I worked for two years on the French, German, Spanish and Swedish translations (only the Yugoslavian, Polish and Brazilian ones appeared with sufficient speed to reproduce the original Italian edition without any addition) re-arranging and enlarging the book – and correcting many parts of it to take into account reviews of the first Italian edition. The result was a book half way between La struttura assente and something else. This ‘something else’ appeared in Italian as a collection of essays, Le forme del contenuto, 1971.
As for the English version, after two unsatisfactory attempts at translation and many unsuccessful revisions, I decided (in 1973) to give up and to re-write the book directly in English – with the help of David Osmond-Smith, who has put more work into adapting my semiotic pidgin than he would have done if translating a new book, though he should not be held responsible for the results of this symbiotic adventure. To re-write in another language means to re-think: and the result of this truly semiotic experience (which would have strongly interested Benjamin Lee Whorf) is that this book no longer has anything to do with La struttura assente – so that I have now retranslated it into Italian as a brand-new work (Trattato di semiotica generale).
Apart from the different (but by no means irrelevant) organization of the material, four new elements characterize the present text as a partial critique of my own preceding researches: (i) an attempt to introduce into the semiotic framework a theory of referents; (ii) an attempt to relate pragmatics to semantics; (iii) a critique of the notion of ‘sign’ and of the classical typologies of signs; (iv) a different approach to the notion of iconism – whose critique, developed in my preceding works, I still maintain, but without substituting for the naive assumption that icons are non-coded analogical devices, the equally naive one that icons are arbitrary and fully analyzable devices. The replacement of a typology of signs by a typology of modes of sign production has helped me, I hope, to dissolve the umbrella-notion of iconism into a more complex network of semiotic operations. In doing so, the book has acquired a sort of ‘chiasmatic’ structure. In its first part, devoted to a theory of codes, I have tried to propose a restricted and unified set of categories able to explain verbal and non-verbal devices and to extend the notion of sign-function to various types of significant units, so-called signs, strings of signs, texts and macro-texts – the whole attempt being governed by the principle of Ockham’s razor, non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem – which would seem to be a rather scientific procedure.
In the second part, devoted to a theory of sign production, I felt obliged to proceed in an inverse direction: the categories under consideration (such as symbol, icon and index) were unable to explain a lot of different phenomena that I believed to fall within the domain of semiotics. I was therefore forced to adopt an anti-Ockhamistic principle: entia sunt multiplicanda propter necessitatem. I believe that, under given circumstances, this procedure is also a scientific one.
I would not have arrived at the results outlined in this book without the help of many friends, without the discussions that have appeared in the first six issues of the review VS-Quaderni di studi semiotici, and without confrontations with my students at Florence, Bologna, New York University, Northwestern University, La Plata and many other places around the world. Since the list of references allows me to pay my debts, I shall limit myself to warmly thanking my friends Ugo Volli and Paolo Fabbri, who have helped me throughout the various stages of the research – mainly by merciless criticism – and whose ideas I have freely used in various circumstances.
Milan, 1967-1974.