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the action of signs
SEMIOSIS
(Columns of the table read from left to right)
IF WE ASK what it is that semiotic studies investigate, the answer is, in a word, action. The action of signs.
This peculiar type of action, corresponding to the distinctive type of knowledge that the name semiotic properly characterizes, has long been recognized in philosophy in connection with investigations of the various types of physical causality. But in that connection, the "ideal" or objective factor, the pattern according to which the investigations themselves were able to establish the material, formal, and determinative dimensions of causality in the productive or "efficient" sense, appeared as something marginal. This objective factor pertains more to the observation than to the observed in its independent existence. Hence this factor was not clearly pertinent to the results of investigations which did not have as their aim the establishment of any essential connection as such between observer and observed, such as would make "observation"—an extrinsic formal connection between subject knowing and subject known—even possible in the first place.
Some of the most difficult and extended passages in Poinsot's early attempt (1632a) to systematize the foundations of semiotic inquiry arise from the need to make this heretofore peripheral topic of natural inquiry central to the establishment of semiotic (see, for example, Questions 2-5 in Book I of his Treatise on Signs). More recently, in this same context of inquiry, Ralph Powell (1986, 1988) has managed to indicate how central this neglected and previously obscure type of causality is to the whole problematic of epistemology, once its semiotic character has been recognized.
Not until about 1906, however, was the peculiar action of signs singled out as a distinct field of possible inquiry in its own right, rather than through its adjacency with other lines of immediate investigation, and given a proper name. The investigator who singled out this field by giving it a name of its own was Charles Sanders Peirce, and the name he assigned to it was semiosis. At this point the doctrine of signs turned a corner in its development: Peirce saw that the full development of semiotic as a distinct body of knowledge required a dynamic view of signification as a process. Semiotics could not be merely a response to the question of the being proper to signs ontologically considered. Response must also be made to the further question of the becoming this peculiar type of being enables and sustains itself by. Symbols do not just exist; they also grow.
Semiosis as a type of activity is distinctive in that it always involves three elements, but it is even more distinctive in that one of these three elements need not be an actual existent thing. In all other types of action, the actors are correlative, and, hence, the action between them, however many there may be, is essentially dyadic and dynamical. For it to occur, both terms must exist. A car cannot hit a tree unless the tree is there to be hit, but a sign can signify an upcoming bridge that is no longer there. Galileo's eyes and telescope engaged in a dynamic interaction with light from the stars. But over and above this dynamic interaction he essayed opinions concerning the celestial spheres that turned out not to exist. And yet the nonbeing of these spheres contributed to Galileo's imprisonment and propositions concerning them were cited as grounds for the serious sanctions taken against Galileo by the authorities.
Peirce calls the action as such between existent things "brute force" or "dynamical interaction". It may be physical, or it may be psychological. In either case, the action takes place between two subjects of physical existence and is, in a terminology we shall be obliged to both clarify and insist upon along our way, always and irreducibly a subjective interaction. Subjective interactions, whether psychical or physical, are always involved in the action of signs, but they surround the semiosis as its context and condition, while always falling short of the action of signs proper. In other words, while the action of signs always involves dynamical interactions, dynamical interactions need not always involve the action of signs.
The distinctiveness of semiosis is unavoidable when we consider the case of two existing things affected in the course of their existence by what does not exist, but, if we understand what is distinctive about semiosis, that distinctiveness remains unmistakable even when the three terms involved in a semeiosy happen also to be all three existent. Peirce gives the example of the rise of the mercury in a thermometer, which is brought about "in a purely brute and dyadic way" by the increase of ambient warmth, but which, on being perceived by someone familiar with thermometers, also produces the idea of increasing warmth in the environment. This idea as a mental event belongs entirely to the order of subjective and physical existence, no more and no less than does the rising mercury and the ambient temperature of the thermometer's environs. It is, as Peirce puts it, the "immediate object" of the thermometer taken as a certain type of sign, namely, one indexical of an environmental condition.
The object of the thermometer as a sign is the relative warmth of the surroundings. The object of the idea of the thermometer as a sign is no different. The thermometer, however, prior to being read is involved only in dynamical interactions. On being read a third factor enters in, the factor of interpretation. The thermometer on being seen may not be recognized as a thermometer: in that case, besides being a subject of physical interactions, that is to say, a thing, it becomes also a cognized or known thing, an element of experience or object. But, if it is both seen and recognized as a thermometer, it is not only a thing become object but also an object become sign. As a thing it merely exists, a node of sustenance for a network of physical relations and actions. As an object it also exists for someone as an element of experience, differentiating a perceptual field in definite ways related to its being as a thing among other elements of the environment. But as a sign it stands not only for itself within experience and in the environment but also for something else as well, something besides itself. It not only exists (thing), it not only stands to someone (object), it also stands to someone for something else (sign). And this "something else" may or may not be real in the physical sense: what it indicates may be misleading, if, for example, the thermometer is defective.
In this case, its immediate object, the idea it produces as sign, becomes in its turn a node of sustenance for a network of relations presumed to be physical but that in fact, because of the defective nature of the thermometer being observed, is merely objective. Here we encounter a primary phenomenon that semiotic analysis is obliged to take into account: divisions of things as things and divisions of objects as objects are not the same and vary independently, the former being determined directly by physical action alone, the latter being mediated indirectly by semeiosy, the action of signs.7
The immediate point to be noted is this: Divisions of objects as objects and divisions of things as things may happen to coincide, as when the thermometer seen and recognized is also functioning properly; or they may happen to diverge, as when the thermometer seen and recognized is, unbeknownst to its interpreter, deceptive by defect. But, even when they coincide, the two orders remain irreducible in what is proper to them.8
The idea of surrounding temperature produced by the thermometer as sign represents to the interpreter of the thermometer something that itself is neither the idea nor the thermometer, namely, the presumed condition of the environment indexically represented by the thermometer. The idea as a mental representation, that is to say, a psychological reality, belongs to the order of subjective existence and is the immediate object of the thermometer as sign. But, within that order, the idea also functions to found a relation to something other than itself, namely, a condition of the environment surrounding the thermometer, which condition is both objective (known) and physical (something existent besides being known), presuming the thermometer accurate; or merely objective but deviant from the physical situation rather than coincident with it, presuming the thermometer defective. As founding this relation, in every case objective, in some cases coincidentally physical as well, the idea itself produced by the thermometer has in turn produced "the proper significate outcome" of the thermometer as sign. This Peirce calls the interpretant, a unique and important notion, the key to understanding the action of signs as a process, a form of becoming, as well as a kind of being, over and above the unique essential structure that makes signification possible in the first place.
Peirce suggests (c.1906: 5.473) that "it is very easy to see what the interpretant of a sign is: it is all that is explicit in the sign itself apart from its context and circumstances of utterance". In the case at hand: the sign is the thermometer; the context and circumstances of its utterance are the ambient warmth producing a certain level of the mercury correlated—accurately or inaccurately, as we have seen—with a scale, the whole of which apparatus is seen and recognized as a temperature measuring device; and what is explicit in the sign itself apart from this context and these circumstances is representation of something other than the thermometer, namely, the ambient temperature, as being presumably at what the thermometer indicates it to be, although this may be wrong due to defect in the mechanism. In other words, all that is explicit in the sign itself apart from its context and circumstances of utterance is "its proper significate outcome", the objective element of the situation as involving representation of one by another, irreducible to the dynamical interactions involved, and establishing channels and expectations along which some of the interactions will be diverted in ongoing exchanges.
In our example, the idea of the thermometer enabling the thermometer to function as a sign was in the first instance a mental representation. The interpretant of a sign, however—and this is a very important point"need not be a mental mode of being", nor, as we have seen, is it as mental mode of being that the idea produced by the thermometer functions as interpretant. Whether a given interpretant be an idea or not, what is essential to it as interpretant is that it be the ground upon which the sign is seen to be related to something else as signified, which signified in turn becomes a sign relative to other elements in the experience of the interpreter, setting in motion the chain of interpretants on which semiosis as a process feeds. In other words, what is essential to the interpretant is that it mediate the difference between objective and physical being, a difference that knows no fixed line. This is the reason why, at the same time, the triadic production of the interpretant is essential to a sign, and the interpretant need not be a mental mode of being, although, considered as founding a determinate relation of signification for some animal, it will be.
We see now with greater clarity the difference between the action of signs and the action of things. The action of signs is purely objective, always at once involving and exceeding the action of things as such, while the action of things as such is purely subjective or, what comes to the same thing, physical or psychic and restricted to the order of what exists here and now.9
Wherever the future influences a present course of events, therefore, we are confronted by semiosis. Never confined to what has been or is, semiosis transpires at the boundary between what is and what might be or might have been. Linguistic signs may well be "the ideological phenomenon par excellence", as Voloinov said (1929: 13); but the action of signs, which provides the general subject matter of semiotic inquiry, extends well beyond what we call "language", even though it is only through language that this range can be brought to light for us as inquirers. Why this is so we shall eventually see.
In order to appreciate the privileged and at the same time restricted role of linguistic signs in semiosis, however, it is necessary to get these peculiar signs into a larger perspective revealing something of the other processes, no less semiosic, on which the possibility and actuality of linguistic semioses depend. For this purpose, it is useful to outline in broad terms a number of levels within semiosis. These levels, of course, can be further distinguished indefinitely for purposes of specialized research and investigation. Here it will be enough to bring out in a synoptic way the prospective scope of semiotic inquiry, an effort that should also have the effect of neutralizing the vestigial inclinations to positivism and modern idealism that often in practice corrupt the semiotic standpoint by assimilating it to what is irretrievably presemiotic in the previous era and most recent epoch of philosophy.
The highest level of semiosis so far as our experience goes is also the one closest to us: anthroposemiosis. Looked at one way, anthroposemiosis includes all of the sign processes that human beings are directly involved in, and, looked at another way, names those sign processes which are species-specifically human. From the latter point of view, anthroposemiosis includes first of all language, and secondly those sign systems that come after language and further structure perception and modify the environment even for species of animals other than human, although the understanding of these postlinguistic changes in what is proper to them is possible only in and through language.
For this reason, language has come to be called in Eastern European circles of semiotic development the "primary modeling system" and the rest of human culture and civilization a series of "secondary modeling systems". As Sebeok in particular has taken pains to point out (1987), however, this way of describing the situation is not entirely satisfactory, because it is grounded, as is apparent, in a derivative understanding of anthroposemiosis. More fundamentally and inclusively, anthroposemiosis comprises, as we have said, all of the sign processes that human beings are directly involved in. From this point of view, language itself is already a secondary modeling system, not the primary one, even though, relative to the distinctively human cultural traditions and developments of civilization, language is the proximate enabling medium and sustaining network of semiosis. Proximate to language, however, is the larger semiotic web of human experience that intricately interweaves linguistic semiosis with perceptual
semioses shared in common with other biological species. This larger web delicately depends upon endosemiotic networks within the body whereby the human organism itself is sustained by a complex network of symbioses without which the human individual would perish, and which network proves in its own right to be a thoroughly semiosic one.
In addition, the interaction between human being and physical environment—whereby, for example, a person noting the sky anticipates stormy weather and prepares accordingly—gives rise to further strands of the semiotic web linking the human being not only with conspecifics and not only with other animals, but also with the general realm of physical surroundings in the largest sense. From this point of view, anthroposemiosis forms a seamless whole with all of nature, and the appropriate metaphor is not that of language as a primary modeling system but the ancient one of anthropos as microcosmos. Anthroposemiosis is the most complex form of semiosis not because it harbors unique modes of semiosis, beginning with language, but because, in addition to harboring unique developments, it harbors at the same time all the other semiosic developments as well and depends upon them in achieving whatever is unique and specific to itself, beginning with language.
The semiosic processes of perception and sensation that are common to other animals besides the human define the level and zone of what Sebeok and Wells first characterized as zoösemiosis (Sebeok 1963: 74). To their original coinage I add the umlaut, to prevent a misunderstanding that I have actually encountered, whereby this rich realm has been unwittingly reduced in hearers' minds to the study of sign systems among captive animals.
Like anthroposemiosis, zoösemiosis can be regarded from two standpoints. From one point of view, zoösemiosis is concerned with the overlap of semiotic processes shared between human animals and other animal forms. But this point of view provides only part of the story, for each animal species, not only the human one, develops also species-specific semiotic modalities, and these too are the province of zo6semiotic investigations. The splendid work of von Frisch (1950) unraveling the species-specific semiosis of bees, or of Kessel (1955) in uncovering the species-specific symbolic component in mating activities of balloon flies, provide landmark examples of zoösemiotic analysis beyond the study of semiotic systems shared between human and other animals (although humans do indeed mate and benefit, too, from the dance of bees). From the point of view of zoösemiosis as concerned with the study of species-specific semiotic modalities developed among the biological forms other than human, we can see an entire regrou ping of naturalist studies (which have their own distinguished traditions) under a new label more appropriate to and specificative of what naturalists have been trying to accomplish all along. Like anthroposemiosis, zoösemiosis comprises a series of microcosms and speciesspecific objective worlds as well, each one entangled in natural processes of physical interaction (secondness) as well as in semiosic processes of objective interaction within and across species. The collective whole forms an interlocking network of irreducibly semiotic relations, many of which are physical as well as objective, many of which are purely objective in specifically diverse patterns.
Most recently, a third macroscopic realm and level of semiosis within nature has been surveyed and established, under the rubric of phytosemiosis, the semiotic networks of plants, by the distinguished work of Martin Krampen and his coworkers. Here again a twofold standpoint is possible. There is undoubtedly semiosic interaction between plants and various species of animals, as the many insect victims of plants such as the notorious "venus fly-trap" mutely testify. It is surely remarkable, for example, that many plants grow in a form that is sexually deceiving to species of insect on which the propagation or nutrition of the plant depends. The plant world is replete with these astonishing examples of the extrinsic formal causality at the heart of sign activity. But there is also the question of semiosis within the plant world itself, as the recent discovery that trees are able to inform one another of zones of infection, for example, raises.
Here we reach a boundary line, which we may nonetheless cross by means of abduction, that is, the formulation of some hypothesis suggesting new ideas for the further extension of the boundaries of semiotic activity to include the realm of so-called inorganic nature, both chemical and physical. These ideas need to be developed, tested, and further refined or even rejected by whole teams of workers.
Besides the three main levels of semiosis that have been briefly described above and are firmly established regions of sign activity, there is reason to think that sign activity has also been at work in an anticipatory way even at inorganic levels before the advent of life in nature, as is suggested by the formula established by Poinsot (1632a: 126/3-4): "it suffices to be a sign virtually in order to signify in act". This formula derives from carefully considering the fact that all that pertains to secondness and dyadic interaction in semiosis belongs to signs strictly through what in them provides the foundations or fundaments whence result or might result relations of representation of another in which signifying consists formally as thirdness. 10 Sign activity in the inorganic realm would, according to this formula, occur less visibly and in the background, then, but virtually and as a matter of fact throughout the material realm.
On this hypothesis, there is not only the macroscopic realm of biosemiosis whose three main levels have been outlined and named, with plenty of indication of microscopic subcurrents equally semiosic, as in the case of endosemiosis stated by Sebeok. There is also the more inclusive macroscopic realm of evolution in general, let us call it physiosemiosis, an activity virtual by comparison with biosemiosis but no less replete with the objective causality whereby the physical interaction of existing things is channeled toward a future different from what obtains at the time of the affected interaction. This is a process whereby first stars and then planetary systems develop out of a more primitive atomic and molecular "dust", but these systems in turn give rise to conditions under which further complexifications of atomic structure become possible. Some of these possibilities, inevitably, become actual as well (such as an oxidizing atmosphere, to choose a local example), continuing the process, as I have shown elsewhere (1969: shown, that is, as definitively as anything can be shown in the absence of directly observed data), along an overall trajectory inevitably pointing to the establishment of biosemiosic phenomena.
On this hypothesis, semiosis, as providing the subject matter of semiotic investigation, would establish nothing less than a new framework and foundation for the whole of human knowledge. This new framework and foundation would embrace not only the so-called human and social sciences, as we have already seen from the partial tradition of semiology after Saussure, but also the so-called "hard" or natural sciences, precisely as they, too, arise from within and depend in their development upon experience and the processes of anthroposemiosis generally, as the wholistic tradition of semiotics after Peirce has begun to outline.
In many basic respects this is a contemporary development, but it draws its nourishment from long ago and has its own distinguished lineage of pioneers and precursors. In particular, we see here a contemporary development fulfilling the prophecy of Winance (1983: 515): "It is in the tradition of Peirce, Locke, and Poinsot that Logic becomes Semiotic, able to assimilate the whole of epistemology and natural philosophy as well". In Winance's remark, "epistemology" is to be taken as a synecdoche for the human sciences, and "natural philosophy" as a synecdoche for the natural sciences including, as Aquinas noted (c.1269: Book I, lectio 1, n. 2), "even metaphysics". Representing our answer to the question of what semiotics investigates integrally, that is, including in a single scheme both what is firmly established and what we abductively extrapolated, we may outline the overall subject matter of semiotic investigations as in Figure 1.
Regardless of our hypothetical extension of semiosis beyond the boundaries of the biological community—whether, that is, we wish to stick with the firmly established levels or wish also to consider the possibilities of a physiosemiosis in nature antecedent to and subtensive of the later and more restricted phenomena of biosemiosis—what is clear at this point is that semiotics is the name for a distinctive series of investigations, distinctive for the same reason that any investigation is distinctive, namely, by reason of what it studies, in the present case, semiosis. But how is such an activity as semiosis possible in the first place?
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the action of signs |