Paul Cobley
The relation between semiotics, science, and literature is, like the history of semiotics, two-sided, with either side almost – but not quite – a mirror of the other. In fact, one could argue that the relation of semiotics to the fields of science and literature is actually a key constituent of the definition of semiotics itself. Semiotics is not yet an institutionalized discipline like, say, linguistics or biology. Nor is it viewed in the same way by different groups: those who write for semiotics journals and publish books in the field and participate in semiotics conferences, and those who are aware of semiotics’ existence but have no commitment to semiotics except insofar as it can be used as a tool or a straw man for other pursuits.
As is well known, semiotics is defined as “the study of the sign,” a problematic definition because much of semiotics’ project and analysis is concerned with entities larger than the sign (for example, the “text”) and because the concept of “sign” often seems to bracket out the nature of the consciousness that apprehends or constitutes that sign. Semiotics is also associated with a number of proper names: Charles Sanders Peirce, the American logician, scientist, and philosopher; Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss linguist; and Thomas A. Sebeok, the Hungarian-American linguist and “biologist manqué.”
Since Saussure’s impact on the study of literature has been held by many to be profound (e.g., Culler 1975) and to be so by virtue of his sign theory, it is necessary to mention some technicalities. The theory is principally to be found in his Cours de linguistique générale (1916; translated into English in 1959 and 1983). Saussure’s Cours has been taken as projecting “a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life” (Saussure 1983: 15). Saussure makes it clear that a linguistic sign is not “a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept [signifié, signified] and a sound pattern [signifiant, signifier]” (66). Moreover, “the sound pattern is not actually a sound; for a sound is something physical” (66). The linguistic sign is thus a “two-sided psychological entity” (67), not a relation between a thing in the world and the way that it is designated.
A signifié is bound to each signifiant but their binding is not natural or preordained. For example, the connection between a signifiant “duck” and the concept of “duckness” is specific only to the development of a particular national language. Put another way, there is an arbitrary relation in the linguistic sign; thus, “when semiology is established … the main object of study in semiology will … be the class of systems based upon the arbitrary nature of the sign” (Saussure 1983: 68). For Saussure, the object of linguistics (and, by extension, sign study) is the collective phenomenon, the system that allows signifying: langue. Langue is the set of multifarious and interconnected differences between all signs (with their arbitrary relations). Available to, and stemming from, all speakers, langue enables parole – speech –“the sum total of what people say” (19).
As Harris (2001) argues rather persuasively, Saussure’s version of linguistics aspired to some of the criteria of “science” that various fringe subjects of the late nineteenth century were queuing up to acquire, particularly that it has an “object” (langue) that can be systematically broken down into smaller elements. The Cours does discuss entities larger than the sign, such as syntagma (the sentence, phrase or clause); but it holds back from suggesting that such “texts” are beyond the determinations of the system and cannot be broken down into smaller components for the purpose of analysis.
Despite – or because of – its systematic take on linguistic signs, many of the Cours’ champions were contributors to major currents in twentieth-century literary analysis (Harris 2001: 118; 2003). Saussurean sign theory was conveyed to the Moscow Linguistic Circle, including the young Roman Jakobson, the Russian Formalists, and Mikhail Bakhtin (Todorov 1984: 6–13). Possibly the most influential receptions of Saussure were the closely argued essays on linguistics by Emile Benveniste, the father of poststructuralism, and by the high structuralist “glossematics” of Louis Hjelmslev, who sought to extend the system concept of langue. The theoretical heir to Hjelmslev was the early work of Roland Barthes; yet Barthes, like Jakobson and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, was now promoting structuralism through the study of literature. His first book, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953), discussed literary writing in terms of Saussurean “arbitrariness,” a theme that he was to continue a decade later in his polemical volume Sur Racine (1963). Like his other writings of the period, these viewed cultural artifacts as dependent not on transcendent factors such as beauty or truth but on the nature of the system – langue – that generated or facilitated them.
Lévi-Strauss effectively considered mythic narratives in a manner similar to Barthes’s literary criticism, as revealing the langue behind copious examples of parole (e.g. Lévi-Strauss 1977), thus providing the impetus for a major research project in literature and beyond. Another influential Saussurean, A.J. Greimas, in a fashion which, from a distance at least, is akin to that of Lévi-Strauss, gave priority to structural relations between narrative entities rather than to their intrinsic qualities. Along with the recovered work of Vladimir Propp, Greimas effectively gave birth to the discipline known as “narratology,” a specific way of understanding narrative – not just “literary writing”–relying on a systematic, thorough, and disinterested approach to narrative’s mechanics. Unsurprisingly, this approach provided a stark contrast to those which observe or seek out “value” in some narratives (and not others) or which provide hierarchies of narratives based on spurious categories such as the “genius” of an author or artiste.
Given this systematic approach to literature, coupled with the heritage of Saussurean linguistics’ attempt at scientific status (Parisian intellectuals were making similar claims for psychoanalysis and Marxism), there was excitement about semiology’s claim to knowledge. In issue 47 (1971) of Tel Quel, the literary organ edited by novelist Philippe Sollers and house journal of early Parisian poststructuralism, Barthes revealed a “euphoric dream of scientificity” arising from semiology’sinfluence on literary criticism (cited in Coward and Ellis 1977: 25).
In his 1970 book S/Z, Barthes attempted to implement a “scientific” analysis of literature. S/Z dissects a Balzac short story, “Sarrasine,” dividing it up into very brief segments and by elaborating five codes through whose matrix the text passes. The idea of a “code” has a scientistic bearing here, since it suggests the stability of the signifiant/signifié relationship that structuralism purported to reveal as the central conceit of traditional “realist” texts. Yet, the final implication of S/Z – that this relationship is inherently unstable in literature – is ambiguous in relation to the project of literature’s “scientificity,” since it suggests a high degree of subjectivity on the part of the reader is responsible for enacting any relationship between signifiant and signifié.
Irrespective of such ambiguity, semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism have, through their co-opting of literature and science, assisted in producing a “discursive imagination,” a perspective in which human affairs and the effecting of change in human affairs are determined by the vicissitudes of signs and collections of signs in discourse. Assisted by the much-vaunted “linguistic turn” in social thought (Rorty 1967), this perspective has persisted until recently, not just in the study of literature but also in the study of culture in general. Although claiming to avoid ahistoricism (for example, Barthes’s position from Mythologues [1957] onwards was that he was exposing, by reference to history [or “culture”], the “naturalization” of artifacts), the post-semiological perspective has increasingly relied on the almost Berkeleyan idea that the world is “constructed in discourse.” As such, science as advocated by, say, Darwin, was to be bracketed or supplanted by a “science” of culture represented in the nexus of Marx–Freud–Saussure (refracted, arguably, through the prism of Althusser–Lacan–Derrida). In philosophical terms, there is something obvious to be gained from this perspective: the rejection of a naïve one-to-one relationship between the world and its representations. In political terms, there is something equally obvious to be gained: constant suspicion of social-scientific engineering, such as eugenics, social Darwinism, or Lysenkoism, as well as an awareness of the way that so-called “pure science” serves power interests. Yet, in the philosophical case, semiology did not establish a new terrain: the grounds upon which it conducted its arguments have a long, albeit largely forgotten, history in scholastic debates about nominalism and realism (Deely 2008: 29–46). In the political case, semiology’s attempt to forge a new “science” of literature (and culture) threatened to bracket scientific research into nature altogether and create not just a “prison-house of language” that it was the task of critique to analyse, but a real “prison-house” in which either nothing existed beyond the system of langue or what did exist there was unknowable.
Semiotics, as opposed to semiology, is the study of all signs, not just linguistic ones. Historically, semiotics precedes semiology. Both terms are derived from a Greek root, seme, but “semiotics” was taken up by the American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce, who sought to classify all types of signs in the universe. In this way, semiotics constitutes the major tradition of sign study derived from the ancient semioticians – medics such as Hippocrates of Cos and Galen of Pergamon who developed a science of symptomatology (see Sebeok 2001a; Staiano-Ross 2009a, 2009b, 2009c) and were concerned with natural signs – and, later, from Augustine, who proposed a sign theory applicable to language and culture (see Deely 2009a). If semiology created the impression that the whole of sign study was human discourse and the human sign, semiotics demonstrated something very different. The localized study of the linguistic sign, a sign type used by humans alone, is only one component of the study of the sign in general. The human phenomenon of language is just one minuscule aspect of a broader semiosis, the action of signs throughout the universe no matter how they might be embodied. Put this way, language looks tiny compared to the array of signs engendered by, say, interactions between living cells.
Semiotics, even in comprising some aspects of semiology, is very much a pre-Socratic project. The recognition of bodies as containers of signs, humans’ repertoire of verbal and non-verbal communication, the systematicity of signs, and the dissemination of signs throughout nature that informed the construction of the Hippocratic Corpus are instances of this. The ancient medics’ concern with projecting the course of an illness was also a prefiguration of modern science and an anticipation of semiotics after Peirce. Yet, the major tradition of semiotics also pre-Socratically unifies science and philosophy by its concern with how the entire cosmos operates – the Earth, its inhabitants, and the elements – rather than just the interactions that constitute the polis. Both Peirce and Sebeok, out of step with the intellectual fashions of their times, shared this outlook. For the later Peirce, especially, the entirety of logic, philosophy, and science was only approachable through an expansive sign theory. Peirce himself was a scientist in his post at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey (see Brent 1998), but was so also in the way his “semeiotic” was totally interwoven with the “assertion and interpretation” that are the hallmark of science (see Hookway 1985: 118–44).
For Peirce, the sign was crucial: he wrote to Lady Welby late in life, revealing that he had recognized ten basic types of signs and 59,049 different classes of signs in all (Peirce 1966: 407). The roots of Peirce’s triadic sign can be discovered in his profound knowledge of not just classical logic but the Latin scholastic tradition. The Latins took as part of their task the exegesis of the perspective on signs emanating from the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. The most important of these exegetes was John (sometimes “Jean” or “Joao”) Poinsot: his Tractatus de Signis (1632), nearly sixty years before Locke coined the term “semiotics,” offers a realist foregrounding of the sign as the object of study to illuminate two key states: mind-dependent being and mind-independent being. The Kantian idealist notion of the Ding an sich, the thing-in-itself, so important for modern thought and, putatively, for science, posits an entity that is unknowable (i.e., mind-independent being). Before Kant, however, Poinsot’s semiotic offered the means to overcome the impasse of the knowable and the unknowable by demonstrating how cultural reality in the human species is where the differences between mind-independent and mind-dependent being become knowable and distinguishable (see Deely 2005: 76).
Deely, the scholar who rescued Poinsot from mere footnote status, demonstrates how Poinsot defined an object as always an object signified (involving, though not necessarily reducible to, mind-dependent status), definitionally distinct from a thing (a mind-independent entity). The latter may be made an object by the thing being experienced; but, even then, through the sensations it provokes, the feelings about them and their consequences, that thing is never available “in full”–it is available only through a sign (Deely 1994: 11–22; cf. 2009b). The sign is simultaneously of the order of mind-independent and mind-dependent being, no matter what futile attempts to bracket off one or the other form of being might be made in an attempt to render the sign as either solely object or thing. As Peirce noted, “Reals are signs. To try to peel off signs & get down to the real thing is like trying to peel an onion and get down to the onion itself” (Peirce 1905: L 387).
These arguments about the nature of signs have been suspended by much of modern thought, including semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism. This suspending of the consideration of signs’ purchase on the real takes place in spite of the fact that such a consideration is central to what constitutes scientific knowledge, precisely the reason in the Latin arguments reviewed and expanded by Peirce (shifting the focus from the being to the action of signs and introducing the “interpretant” as the “third term” of the sign relation). One way in which the suspension has been achieved is through historiography: that is, the convenient reiteration that between 1350 and 1650 – effectively between William of Ockham and Descartes – nothing happened in the history of Western thought (see Cobley 2009). Arguably the most important living American philosopher, John Deely, has stressed that the Latin thinkers cannot be disregarded: as with semiotics, their project was not fixated on twentieth-century preoccupations such as power and the polis but, like the pre-Socratics, considered “psychology” and the investigation of living things. Modern thought (roughly from the Enlightenment to ultra-modern poststructuralism), epitomized on the one hand by literature that eschews the unified version of the world in literary “realism” and, on the other, by philosophy that sees reality constructed in the vagaries of “language,” has bequeathed a view of the world in which a one-to-one relationship of the world and its representation, and even of a signifier and a signified, is irredeemably faulty.
The Latin thought that informs contemporary semiotics was well apprised of the faults of representation, as evident in the concept of mind-dependent being (ens rationis); but more importantly, it recognized, unlike semiology and much modern thought, that representation is not the whole of the sign. For Poinsot and, later, for Peirce, the sign needs to be understood as the entire relation of elements that constitute it rather than just the representational “relation” between some vehicle and some terminus. The real relation that constitutes the sign is precisely the relation that unites vehicle with terminus: a triad comprising vehicle, terminus, and the relation between them (representamen-object-interpretant). The “relation of representation” must be distinct from that of “signification by a sign in general,” must be merely a part of sign action, simply because a sign’s object or terminus can represent another and also represent itself, whereas it would be a contradiction for a sign to be a sign of itself. A sign – even if referring to itself – must have some level of difference from its object in order to function as a sign. This is not to say that a sign cannot refer to itself, but that a sign’s object – when that object is itself – is characterized by a different order of experience than that for the object alone. Poinsot emphasized that the relation in a sign is not so much suprasubjective as contextual: in one set of circumstances the relation in a sign could be of the order of mind-independent being (known as ens reale by the Latins), in another set it could be of mind-dependent being (ens rationis) (Deely 2001: 729).
The Latin heritage of sign study was relatively vaguely known by Peirce scholars, including Jakobson, the ex-Russian Formalist, and Charles Morris, both of whom were teachers and friends of Sebeok. The latter encouraged Deely’s recovery of the scholastics from the late 1960s to the twenty-first century, but it was Sebeok himself who was to demonstrate at length the broad importance for science of semiotics’ figuring of relations in the triadic sign across different domains and for different species. Although a prolific linguist, Sebeok was also a polymath maintaining a “biological outlook” (cf. Sebeok 2010). This is worth mentioning in light of the breadth of semiotics on which Sebeok insisted; but it also demonstrates that, unlike semiology, Sebeok’s semiotics would be sympathetic to research into the natural world without being naïve about the relation of the sign and world and without proposing itself as an alternative or true “science” (Sebeok always referred to the doctrine of signs). Emphatically, Sebeok inaugurated zoosemiotics in 1963, but it was his development of biosemiotics which was to prove most consequential for the relation of semiotics to science.
From linguistics, cybernetics, and communication science, Sebeok began to develop semiotics in the direction of Jakob von Uexküll (see Sebeok 2001b: 34). The notion of Umwelt, from von Uexküll, central now to 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. There are signs which function as signs for us (or for others) and, as has been noted, things beyond signs. Yet, whereas the nominalist tradition of semiology would pronounce the world of things to be unknowable – or, in more cunning versions, “abject,”“a semiotic chora” (Kristeva 1982), “undecidable” (Derrida 1981) – the realist tradition of contemporary semiotics seeks further. The world of the thing is apprehended only by the sign, to be sure – that is, any organism’s Umwelt is constituted by its own sign-making capacity, its own semiosis facilitated by the sensory apparatus it possesses, whether it is a human or a mere tick. Yet, signs in an Umwelt have considerable richness. A dog’s hearing, for example, has advantages specific to that species; a fly’s antennae and visual organs, to take another example, invariably enable it to swiftly avoid even the most deadly of rolled-up newspapers. In sum, an Umwelt offers an indispensable guide to reality which, while not comprehensive, is sufficient to maintain the continued existence of specific species. Contemporary semiotics thus employs a realist understanding of the sign which recognizes that species cannot “see” everything, yet that the relationality beheld through semiosis is not just rich but imperative for survival.
Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt provided the basis for Sebeok’s acceleration of semiotics’ consideration of its natural and biological foundations. As early as 1975, he had already named the project in print in an essay on the way that zoosemiotics stands at the intersection of nature and culture. In the next two and a half decades, Sebeok sought to bring together the leading thinkers in biosemiotics from the sciences: Giorgio Prodi (oncology), Heini Hediger (zoology), Thure von Uexküll (medicine), Jesper Hoffmeyer (molecular biology), and Kalevi Kull (botany) among others. In addition to zoosemiotics, sign study now would involve a semiotics of plants (“phytosemiotics”), of fungi (“mycosemiotics”), and of the 3.5-billion-year-old global prokaryotic communication network within and between different bacterial cells (“microsemiotics, cytosemiotics”).
Semiotics (the major tradition) has demonstrated a commitment to knowledge in a number of ways, then: through a sophisticated sign theory that is aware of the lure of nominalism and versions of constructionism but is geared towards realism; through a holistic grasp of the myriad domains across nature where sign action takes place; and, at a time when modern thought in its death throes is fixated on the polis and shifts of power relations as the limit point of reality, through an embrace of the possibilities of science, particularly biology, rather than an outright rejection of it. All this is clear from the recent development of biosemiotics alone (see, for example, Barbieri 2007; cf. Deely 2009c). Yet, interesting in the context of this chapter is the role of literature or literary modes of thought. In one sense, semiology imploded because its quasi-scientistic insistence on the singularized sign tended to go against the text- or discourse-orientated study of literature that had so fueled sign study in the second half of the twentieth century. Nowhere was this more the case than in the so-called Tartu-Moscow school which, in the circumstances of a large part of its existence, was compelled to concern itself with Russian classics. Yet, partly out of Lotman’s work in that school (see, for example, Lotman 1977) there arose new possibilities as a result of the study of literary forms of “knowing” or, more specifically in contemporary semiotic terms, “modeling.”
For Sebeok, embracing the work of both Lotman and von Uexküll, the most apt English translation of Umwelt was “model.” The human Umwelt –“language” understood as an innate capacity for verbal differentiation plus non-verbal communication – evinced three kinds of modeling: Primary (the world as derived from the innate capacity for differentiation); Secondary (the world constructed in verbal expression); Tertiary (the world growing out of sophisticated cultural forms with a basis in Primary and Secondary modeling) (Sebeok 1988). In terms of literature, writing occupies an interesting space in this formulation because it is clearly a kind of Tertiary modeling while also being Primary because it “organizes experience and surrounding reality both spatially and temporally, conferring sense upon them and constructing whole new worlds” (Ponzio 2003: 7). It is no coincidence that Sebeok’s final original monograph (with Danesi), The Forms of Meaning (2000), while seeking principally to institute a new, post-biosemiotic terminology for sign study, did so by way of the concept of modeling. Moreover, it focused on “forms” rather than singularized signs. In addition to Sebeok’s not inconsiderable literary and cultural analysis (see, for example, Sebeok 2000), his project of biosemiotics arguably rests on the reconceptualization of science – biology in particular – in terms of how organisms “know” the world. It might be more contentious to suggest that this interest in “knowing” has a literary basis; however, if one considers Sebeok’s early career alone – in anthropology, linguistics, and biology, convening the major conferences such as those on Myth (1955), Style in Language (1958) and Approaches to Semiotics (1962) – literature, as a putatively dominant form of culture allied to linguistics, would have been high on the agenda. Biosemiotics is, in some measure, a critique of science’s failure to acknowledge agency and “knowing” (see Hoffmeyer 1996, 2008; see also Brier 2008). Its alliance with approaches to cultural – or literary – forms of knowing (sometimes called “sociosemiotics” or “cultural semiotics”) is inevitable, because biosemiotics has predominantly arisen from them.
The development of semiotics is clearly instructive for understanding the relation of approaches to science and literature. In the case of semiology, “science” has been a rhetorical battering ram employed to break into the financially and technologically bolstered citadel of science (without inverted commas). In short, semiology and its mode of studying literature tended to present itself as a new, all-knowing “science.” As a constituent of the lesser partner in the binary of the two cultures, it had good reason to be both suspicious and arrogant in the face of perceived oppression. Yet, unlike semiotics, it did not have the benefitof the distinction, introduced by Peirce from Jeremy Bentham, of “ideoscopic” and “cenoscopic” sciences (see Deely 2008: 3–9). The Enlightenment perspective, with the invention of scientific technologies after Galileo, was dominated by the search for new phenomena – ideoscopy; before the Enlightenment, however, there was much to gain from the scrutiny of common experience – cenoscopy. The major tradition of semiotics (stemming from Peirce and Sebeok) did not simply take a different tack to semiology; rather, it had an almost completely distinct lineage, partly based on cenoscopic science. Rather than straightforwardly provoking conflict within the binary, or even projecting three cultures (cf. Kagan 2009), semiotics’ theory of semiosis – signs, texts, discourse, relation, context, and Umwelt – has presented a path to knowledge that serves as a bridge between the humanities and the sciences (see Perron et al. 2000; see also Brier 2008: esp. 82–83, 266–68; and, above all, the “manifesto” of Anderson et al. 1984). Although the following statement seems to force the tentative mirror image announced at the outset, the most direct way to sum up is to say that sign study in the guise of semiology attempted to give “scientific” status to the analysis and practice of literature; semiotics, on the other hand, has pursued a project of “literarizing” science. The major tradition has taken a concept previously associated with the world of trivial or rarefied cultural artifacts – signification – and attempted to demonstrate the benefits of recognizing its guiding role in cultural and natural phenomena, both of which, in the end, are natural.
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