CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY had much to say about Aristotle's definition of the human being as a "rational animal". The problem was that, in this definition, the term "animal" was somehow never quite taken seriously, and most of the discussion centered on showing how "being rational" contrasted with "being animal" in such a way as to render animality unimportant. In the extreme case—the work of Descartes (1637, 1641)—the contrast was emphasized to the extent of being transformed into an outright opposition, and a new definition of the human as a "thinking thing" was proposed to replace the old definition entirely.

"Thinking things"—humans—were opposed to "extended things"— all bodies, including the animals other than human. In this way, the ancient definition was bifurcated: the first part (which supposedly designated a uniquely human factor in one among the animals) became the whole definition of the human being, while the second part (which supposedly designated something shared by human beings with other species or types of cognitive animate beings) was made to reduce those other types of beings to a material uniformity that became the whole definition of what was opposed to the human and in contrast with it, namely, bodies of whatever sort.

This modern dualism of mind and body was rooted in a certain interpretation of the mind's ideas as being themselves the objects directly given in experience. As we will see, the idea thus interpreted as an objective representation—as an object before being a sign—is incompatible with the interpretation of ideas as signs. A suspicion of this incompatibility, indeed, may have been the reason why Locke, in proposing the introduction of semiotic into the scheme of human knowledge, saw as a first task for semiotic the bringing of "ideas"—the inner side of knowing—along with "words"—the outer manifestation of the knowing—into the perspective of the sign. For he rightly guessed that the successful completion of this task would result in a radically different account of knowledge and experience than what was developing in the then-modern philosophy, including his own.

The semiotic understanding of what a human being is can only be an upshot of that radically different account. If we are to propose, for example, "linguistic animal" as a semiotic definition, we will find that, in order to interpret the defining terms semiotically, we cannot avoid taking animality very seriously indeed, if only in order to understand language. What comes first in the expression, we will find, comes second in the interpretation of the expression. For in the expression, "linguistic animal", the linguistic term not only presupposes for its sense what is first of all an animal construction, namely, an Umwelt, but also differentiates the objective relations comprising an Umwelt not from above, independently, or externally, but from within.

A. THE CONTENT OF EXPERIENCE

Although belonging to the cognitive dimension of experience, semiotics does not have its roots in a theory first of all. First of all it is rooted in a process, the process of semiosis, specifically as that process is responsible for the very possibility and for whatever there is of actuality in the experience of any living being. This actuality, in certain cases (such as our own), can then be reflected upon and come to constitute in its own right an object according to what is specific to it, namely, the dependency of experience throughout on the action of signs. At that moment of reflective insight, semiotics begins as a moment of anthroposemiosis.

Like any other work of reflection, the development of semiotics is subject to errors, false starts, and blind alleys. At the outset, perhaps the single problem that has most often thrown off reflections on the sign has been getting straight the distinction between a sign and a representation and, consequently, the difference between signification and representation. We have touched on this distinction in chapter 4 particularly, but here some further remarks will be helpful. The confusion comes from the fact that every sign must be a representation, but, whereas every signification involves representation, not every representation must be a sign. In other words, the sign is a representation of a certain type but of a certain type only, whereas a representation may or may not be a sign.

A representation may be of itself, or it may be of something other than itself. In the former case it constitutes an object, but only in the latter case does it constitute a sign. This is why, as we have seen in chapter 4, the sign in its proper—its irreducible—being always involves a pure relationship. In the technical terms established there, we may say that a representation as such may be a merely transcendental relationship, whereas a sign is also always an ontological relation. In the sign, the transcendental element of the relation—the representational factor—is merely fundamental, that is, the foundation or ground whence springs the ontological relation to something else—the significate or signified. And it is in this relation to another that the sign formally consists.

In the case of a representation as such, what is fundamental and what is formal may coincide (the case of objective self-representation). When that occurs, the representation exists as an object of awareness. But, in the case of a sign, what is fundamental (the representation grounding and founding the relation of signification) and what is formal (the relation of signification itself) never coincide. It is a question of modality, as I have explained in technical discussions elsewhere (esp. 1986e: 39-40). As a result, although an object may also function experientially as a sign, it need not so function (the moon, well known to ancient man, never served for him as a reminder of the U.S. Apollo Space Program of the 1970s, nor need the god Apollo and the moon have been brought together in order to signify a program to reach the moon). And a sign that is also an object may, accordingly, cease to be sign in any given respect for any given case or instance of perception (as when we tie a string to remind us of something and then forget what the string is to remind us of, or when we can't remember a word we have previously looked up, and so forth).

The confusion of signs as such with representations has been, historically, perhaps the most common cause of misunderstanding of the role of signs in experience. This confusion is what led Descartes and Locke to posit ideas as the objects of our awareness and then to trouble themselves mightily with the problem of figuring out how these self-representations might or might not be causally connected with or resemblant of the assumed (but not directly experienced) existence of extramental things. Once it is understood, however, that objects as such are always representations but representations as such are never signs, it becomes clear that, to whatever extent ideas are signs, they are differentiated from, rather than identified with, the objects of our awareness here and now. The distinction between representation and sign, in what concerns semiotics, is the distinction between object and sign. A representation may or may not be an object, but to be an object is necessarily to be a representation, while for being a sign being a representation is not enough.

These are extremely important distinctions, the full understanding of which involves not a few subtleties. The point of entry into a semiotic understanding of ideas as signs is the point of exit from the modern interpretation of ideas as representations, as the objects of which we are directly aware when we think. Precisely as signs, ideas are separated from rather than identified with the objects they signify, and objects signified that in turn become signs do so by themselves becoming differentiated from what they signify. As signified, objects always presuppose a relation to something other than themselves on which their being as objects depends, for, as objects, they exist precisely as cognized. Indeed, their being as object is at the terminus completing such a relation.

The foundation of such an objective relation, however—the element of representation in the signifying—need by no means be itself an object, nor could it be in every case. For the being of objects represented as other than what does the representing implies among the representing elements some at least that lay the ground of objectivity without themselves being part of that direct ground. The experience of objects that in turn signify other objects must not be allowed to obscure this fundamental point, if the standpoint of semiotic is to be achieved. This is a second subtlety on which integral achievement of the semiotic point of view very much depends.

The need for an objectively sensible element as sign-vehicle is not essential to the functioning of the sign as such, but only to the transformation of objects already known in their own right into signs of other objects as well. The essential function of the sign, however, has already been achieved in the making present of the object in the first place. For, in that case, the intraorganismic factor (the psychological state, say, or the nervous condition) on the basis of which the object exists as known to begin with, is already serving to engender the relation whereby the factor in question serves to make present in awareness that which it itself is not, namely, the object. The object may itself then in turn also function as a sign of other objects or be taken inferentially as a "reverse sign" to abduce the existence of its corresponding idea or psychological state on the basis of which it exists here and now as something experienced or known. But the signs at the base of objectivity never present themselves directly as objects. This is a simple matter of fact, whose possibility is explained (the reason for the possibility of which is given) by the being of the sign as essentially relational over and above the subjectivity of whatever is related by it, as we saw in Chapter 4.

The objects of experience as such, thus, depend in every case on signs, and they themselves further differentiate within experience into other signs, so that one object, which as object represents itself, comes also through associations of various kinds to represent other objects besides itself. In that way, an object comes to be a sign as well as an object in its own right.

But it is not only into signs that objects dissolve through experience. They also dissolve (or resolve) into objects of very different types. Here we come to a third subtlety on which a grasp of the main entry point into semiotics depends: just as signs are prior to and distinct from objects within experience, so objects are prior to and distinct from the things with which they happen to be partially identical. At the most primitive levels of experience, and throughout the most sophisticated experiences, no doubt certain elements of objectivity are also prejacent elements of the physical surroundings. But it is not as prejacent that they are objective. As prejacent, in their prejacency, they were not objective in our sense at all. Whatever is objective exists through an actual representation, that is, as cognized or known. If what exists as known also happens to exist, in whole or in part, physically as well, that is, independently of the cognizing, then we say that it is, besides being an object, also a thing—a case of a "physical object". Thus, within our experience, things are included both among objects and among what objects may become signs of. But objects may also be and become signs of non-things, of mistakes, errors, lies, wishes, or fantasies of various kinds, including realizable dreams of a better future than what is existing could alone portend. Whatever is known is, as such—that is, as known—objective, be it Hamlet or Napoleon. But whatever exists objectively may (as in the case of Hamlet) or may not (as in the case of Napoleon) exist only objectively.

We are not, therefore, going beyond the boundaries of experience by introducing here the notion of "thing", for precisely within those boundaries some among objects present themselves as having an existence that exceeds the knowing of it. The notion of things in its contrast both to objects and to signs arises inevitably and quite early in the experience of each of us, through the resistance we meet to our desires and, indeed, our expectations, with such regularity that there is no adult real or conceivable who does not have the idea of an environment surrounding him or her that is comprised of a great variety of objects possessing a being or existence that exceeds the individual's experience of them, in precisely the sense that much of this variety anteceded the individual me, much of it is unknown to me (it is full of surprises, welcome and unwelcome), and much of it will survive my demise.

Things, in this most general sense, are whatever in my experience is experienced as not reducing to my experience of it, and as having an embodiment, moreover, in the environmental structures such that it is not a mere figment of thought or imagination, but has also an existence proper to itself that is physical or "real" in the sense that it obtains apart from my thinking of it. Things have bodies, in a word.

But note, too, the transformation semiotics imposes on our use of the common term "objective". The word "object" and its derivatives need to be appropriated from common usage to become termini technici in the context of semiotics. "Object" or "objective structure" refer, in contrast to the various usual usages, to the becoming of things through and in experience. Objects are not what things are in a being prior to and independent of experience. Objects are what the things become once experienced—that is, once they take on the existence proper to experience. But objects are not only things experienced. Objects are more than things, even when—which is not always the case—they are also things. Objects always involve a "relation to an observer", so to speak, or, more exactly, to an organism experiencing. Things only sometimes involve such a relation.

Within experience, the status of objects not designated to be signs with other objects so designated is peculiarly unstable, not because of a deficiency in the sign but because of an instability in the status of the object as such. This instability characterizes the object, regardless of whether a given object (a star, say, or a vampire) is also a prejacent physical element in the environment, whereby, as we have seen, every type of object, every objectivity and objective structure as fitted into experience, owes its being to the sign. The seemingly derivative and unstable status of signs that are objectively constituted within the order of experience, then, is due to the fact that any object can become a sign of any other object, and every object in experience begins as or quickly becomes a sign of several other objects (which ones depending on context and changing over time).

There remains, however, a constancy underlying this apparent variance. What does not change, what remains invariant at the base of experience, is the role of the sign as giving being to objects of whatever type in the first place, and providing the medium for their growth and transformations.

Thus, when we speak from the strict standpoint of experience (which of course we must in all contexts where we hope to avoid delusion), the sign is not by any means one thing among many others: the sign is not any thing at all, nor is it even first of all a distinct class of objects. As a type of object or objective structure contrasting with other objective structures, the sign is singularly unstable and derivative, for it is what all things—not just some—become in experience. But first of all and most radically, a sign is neither a thing nor an object but the pattern according to which things and objects interweave to make up the fabric of experience, wherein one part so stands for other parts as to give greater or lesser "meaning" to the whole at various times and in various contexts.

This status of the sign—whereby it is itself not a sensible or perceptible item (even when it has such an item for its foundation or "vehicle") but the arrangement of such items according to what they signify and provide as the content of significance to experienced objects—is, we shall see, the key to the higher level process of linguistic semiosis, which, as we shall also see, draws the line between human life forms and the other animals. Making this intelligible but imperceptible and insensible status itself objectified, thereby introducing into objects the dimension of stipulability, as we shall see, is precisely what constitutes anthroposemiosis in its difference from zoösemiosis and marks the beginning of language (prior to its exaptation for communication, for example, in speech) as a distinctive modeling system.²⁰

But in order to develop this point effectively, we need first to develop more integrally the notion of embodiment as a fundamental objective structure. We saw above that the notion of having a body is proper to that type of object that is also a thing. But not only things have bodies. Embodiment is a general phenomenon of experience, inasmuch as whatever we encounter, learn, or share through experience has about it an aspect which is accessible by some sensory modality, be it only the physical being of marks or sounds subsumed within language and employed to create some text (a literary corpus, we even say). Herein resides and is conveyed some object of consideration that (we learn on occasion, whereas at other times we know—or think we know—from the start) has no other body besides a textual one. Examples are the medieval unicorn, the ancient minotaur, the celestial spheres which gave occasion for the condemnation and imprisonment of Galileo.

This was what we meant above in distinguishing, within our notion of objects experienced as things, the notion also of objects that may or may not be things. A thing experienced and an object of experience are not wholly the same. Of course, every thing experienced is by that very fact also an object of experience. But not every object of experience, by any means, is also a thing in the sense of having—such as experience indicates to be the case with much of nature—an existence prejacent to the human community and independent of an embodiment within that community.

Illustrative of this distinction are objects that are sometimes identical with physical things, as "the north star" names a unique natural entity contextualized to a specifically cultural but also magnetic and planetary frame of reference. At other times objects are identified with physical things without achieving a unique identity therewith—as the boundary for a certain stretch between Iowa and Illinois "is" the Mississippi River or as the President of the United States was first identified with Washington and later with a whole string of successors. At other times physical structures are made to instantiate objectivity without by any means being identical with the object locally embodied, as a statue of Romulus and Remus as founders of Rome, or a statue of the minotaur, has the physical aspect of a thing without that physical aspect being at all what is proper to its objectivity, in contrast to the mountain stream which enters experience as an object with a physical being precisely proper to and part and parcel of its objectivity. So, too, many objects of experience have no physical existence in addition to their embodiment within texts. Cinderella, we think, along with her glass slipper and pumpkin coach, are purely objective, in a way the rocks and stars are not. The celestial spheres, long thought to embody the very stars, turn out not to embody them at all. The stars proved to be the bodies, and the spheres proved to be but objects in the merest sense of fictions cut out of the whole cloth of experience by the understanding, which confused their objectivity with the physical existence proper to things become object, that is, experienced.

We the better see thus that the world of experience as experienced is through and through objective, the leprechaun no less than the cancer cell or silver bullet (used to kill werewolves) or mountain stream. We see, too, that the physical universe on its material side exists within and as part of the objective universe of experience, indeed, as its lining and skeleton, so to speak. But we see also that the objective and physical worlds are by no means coterminous, as each extends in its own way well beyond the confines of the other.

Of course, strictly speaking, only the objective world, in all its diversity mixed with physicality, exists as experienced. The physical surroundings may or may not also so exist—that is, objectively, or as experienced—and then only partially. At least, this is the notion of physical being and existence that experience imposes on each of us, the notion that there is more to what we experience in its aspect of embodiment than reduces down to our experience of it, so that there are no doubt "things we have yet to learn and things we may never know".

A particularly interesting aspect of the requirement that objects have an embodiment, be it only "textual" or linguistic in the sense of conveyance by some sensible moyen subsumed into the order of language, comes into view in those cases where the objects discoursed about are by definition independent of the world of bodies entirely: the case of supposed spirits or of the angels and deity of Western religious conviction. Here the objective embodiment—the texts explaining and arguing about the nature and reality of these beings—is precisely denied to be of the essence of the object experienced through the discourse about it. This case is in sharp contrast, say, to the unicorn, which only contingently proved to want for a bodily form beyond the discursive, or textual, corpus.

Although these considerations hardly exhaust the variety of ways in which objectivity and physical existence or being interweave, they are perhaps sufficient to make unmistakable the point made in our earlier chapters to the effect that the contrast between objective and physical being in what we experience is a fundamental contrast between two orders or frameworks that are not identical at every point, even when they happen to coincide. The objective and the physical depend upon one another without being coextensive and without being articulated in the same way. This last point is extremely important to take fully into account. The structure of experience and the structure of nature are, because of it, relatively independent variables.

We thus have a general rule: physical being, while it reveals itself within experience as involving a dimension that exceeds experience, also reveals itself on the material side as providing for experience a necessary lining. That is, experience, without being reducible to the points where physical and objective being are coincident, consists formally in an objective structure embodied through a lattice of physical relations that would not be just what they are apart from experience, but that are not the whole of experience either. The objective world (the world of experience) at once enfolds in part and restructures in part the physical environment within which it sustains itself. This is also true of the biosemiotic network of objective worlds taken as a totality (cf. Bargatzky 1978; Lovelock 1972, 1979, 1988).

We see thus that the action proper to signs is at the heart of the interplay between objective and physical being that constitutes experience, and illustrates in the constituting that the sign must be, as we saw in chapter 4, a purely relational being in order to function and act as it does in playing precisely this mediating role, beyond the dynamics of physical interaction (whether material and physical or psychological and psychic, as Peirce c. 1906: 5.484 joined Poinsot 1632a: 195/3-9, 18-29 in pointing out). The sign manifests itself in semiosis not at all as a physical thing, nor even as a peculiar type and variety of object. The sign appears, rather, as the linkage whereby the objects, be they bodily entities or purely objective, come to stand one for another within some particular context or web of experience.

The semiotic web, it turns out, embraces not just the living world (the biosphere) nor even just the realm of cognizing organisms. The so-called physical world itself exists within the world of experience. But it is not as experienced that the physical world is properly called physical. As experienced, as we have seen, it is properly called objective. The further discrimination among objects of experience, between those that are also physical existents and those that are only objects of experience, is itself a matter of experience. The engrained dichotomy between the subjective on the one hand, which is all that is essentially private or illusory, and the objective on the other hand, which is what is public, real, and independent of the observer, simply fails to hold up when duly weighed and considered in the light of the only instrument we have for discriminating the true (or more sound) from the false (or less sound). A trichotomy is necessary, and a trichotomy of a most peculiar kind.

The essential category for the experienced as such is the category of the objective: whatever exists in any way as known. Opposed to the objective in this sense is both the physical in the sense of the things of the environment prejacent to and able as such to survive the demise of experience, and the subjective in the sense of the psychological or psychic depths of the individual insofar as they are not available objectively here and now. In other words, we have a trichotomy where the subject stands at the center of a web of relationships comprising precisely an objective world. Through the web, each subject is also entangled in other webs with other centers, the whole comprising an objective network. The filaments and strands of this network of intersecting webs catch aspects of subjectivities that exist through their bodily dimension as elements active in the physical environment below and beyond the ways in which the subject experiences that environment and reconstitutes it structurally as an objective world shareable with some others. The strands of this network then hold these aspects up for scrutiny from the centered perspectives and thereby objectivize the subjective aspects and incorporate them as aspects now of something else besides, namely, an Umwelt, a shared objective world, in its contrast to environment.

B. SPECIES-SPECIFIC OBJECTIVE WORLDS

With this understanding of objectivity in mind, a useful concept for discussing the being of signs as constructive through experience of a world precisely objective throughout is that of the Umwelt. Originally formulated at the end of the nineteenth century by the biological researcher Jakob von Uexküll and developed through further researches well into this century (von Uexküll 1899-1940), this concept, with important modifications of its originally overly-Kantian and needlessly antievolutionary context of formulation, is commonly used in semiotics today in connection with the doctrine of signs.

The environment selectively reconstituted and organized according to the specific needs and interests of the individual organism constitutes an Umwelt. The Umwelt thus depends upon and corresponds to an Innenwelt, or cognitive map, developed within each individual. The Innenwelt enables the individual to find its way in the environment and insert itself into a network of communication, interest, and livelihood shareable especially with the several other individuals of its own kind. If the organism could not objectify enough of the physical surroundings to catch its food, for example, it would not, as Jacob more or less picturesquely remarked (1982: 56), live to tell the tale.

Of course, the possibility of coincidence of environmental with objective elements actually realized within experience and indefinitely expandable through the critical control of objectification lies at the heart of science and constitutes the basis and ground for all studies and experimentation properly termed scientific. But this possibility as critically verifiable is already owing to a special feature—textuality, as we shall see—whereby the specifically human Umwelt, the Lebenswelt, as it is times called, is a uniquely malleable Umwelt open in ways no other Umwelt on this planet is open to reconstitution along alternative lines of objectification, both within itself and in its relations with the external environment physical as such.

The Umwelt in principle, thus, is a "model world" from the point of view of possibility: it is one of the infinite variety of possible alternatives according to which the bare physical furnishings of the environment can be arranged and incorporated into an architectural superstructure of possible experiences, supposing especially this or that biological form. But from the point of view of its inhabitants, an Umwelt is the actual world of experience and everyday reality. In comparison to this actual world of experience, the prejacent physical in its proper being is secondary, derivative, and not necessarily recognized according to the intrinsic requirements of its own being.

We think today, for example, generally, that a human Umwelt incorporating the institution of slavery is a less acceptable species-specific habitat than one that is free of slavery. The "model world" of the twentieth century is sharply different in this regard from the "model world" acceptable to and inhabited by the ancient Greeks, Saint Paul, medieval man, and so forth. The Umwelt of Sparta differed sharply from that of Athens, and much appropriation of physical resources within the shared environment was put to the use of determining which objective model should dominate over or even supplant the other. Rome sought to destroy not the physical lining of the Carthaginian Umwelt so much as the Umwelt itself as sustained by that lining.

The notion of reality and the notion of the Umwelt are, from the point of view of experience, inseparable. Yet what is distinctive about human experience in contrast to a purely perceptually structured consciousness is, quite precisely, the discoverability that Umwelt and environment (or physical surroundings) are yet not coextensive. From this bare suspicion of the understanding in its difference from sense arises the whole enterprise of science and technology, on the one hand, and morality as distinct from mores, on the other.

The problem of the action of signs in the context of our own experience, therefore, is, fundamentally, the problem of the common source of all Umwelts (the emergence of objectivity in its difference realized from the physical environment as such), and, formally, the problem of the emergence within objectivity of the realization of its difference from the physical surroundings. This latter realization, we shall see, is tantamount to the invention of language or—what comes to the same thing—the advent of textuality. There may be forms of semiosis already at work in physical nature itself anterior to the advent of anything living and continuing independent of it, to be sure. But only with the Umwelt do we encounter in its full actuality the first phenomenon of semiosis, the explicit realization of the function essential to the sign: 'referral' or renvoi, the word by which Jakobson, as Sebeok well put it (1984a: 66) "deftly captured and transfixed each and every sign process conforming to the classic formula, aliquid stans pro aliquo" (one thing standing for another).²¹

This point is among the most fundamental points to be made in regard to the sign: there is no object that does not depend in its objectivity on the simultaneous action of the sign as making present in experience something other than itself, something that it itself is not.

The further point concerning what is species-specific to experience in a human Umwelt is well-made through an observation of Maritain's (1957: 52-54): on the one hand, animals other than humans make use of signs, but they do not know that there are signs; on the other hand, the birth of language and the grasp of the relation of signification as such— as distinct from the sign vehicle, or sensible embodiment of the sign as ground of semiosis, as well as from the object signified—are the same. For "what defines language is not precisely the use of words, or even of conventional signs; it is the use of any sign whatsoever as involving the knowledge or awareness of the relation of signification".²² In this relation as such consists formally and strictly, as distinct from fundamentally and perceptually, the sign in its proper being: "and therefore a potential infinity"—what later authors have called 'unlimited semiosis'; "it is the use of signs in so far as it manifests that the mind has grasped and brought out the relation of signification".

This feat opens the possibility of a text and establishes therewith the boundary beyond which zoösemiosis becomes specifically anthroposemiotic. At this moment the specifically closed Umwelt is opened up to the prospect of infinity; zoösemiosis becomes anthroposemiosis, capable of a progression into infinity.²³

C. SPECIES-SPECIFICALLY HUMAN SEMIOSIS

Once the relation of signification has been grasped on its own, as distinct from a particular object signifying another particular object signified, it becomes possible to detach that relation from any particular objective sign vehicle and, taking this invisible content itself as the basis for further representations, to attach it, instead, to some other object. This other object will now serve, by choice, in lieu of the original vesselthat is, will now serve as ground for a relation originally grounded elsewhere. With the possibility of such a choice, a new kind of sign and a new mode of signifying comes into existence objectively, the stipulable sign.

What we call "linguistic signs" are a specific variety or sub-species of the stipulable sign. The members of this sub-specific set are arbitrary in their ground over-all, although natural inasmuch as they consist in relationships no less than (and precisely as do) other kinds of signs as such—for example: signs embodying connections that are physical before becoming also objective and social (such as the connections between clouds and rain or smoke and fire); or signs formed of connections that are objective associatively rather than physically (such as the connections between candlelight and lovers, napkins and meals); or of connections that are manipulative (such as pressing a lever and receiving a pellet of food) rather than stipulative; or social signs subsequent to language embodying connections which are only objective and cultural (such as the connection between flag and country). The ability to grasp the actual stipulation of linguistic signs, in contrast to making associations based on their perceptible aspects, is just what is meant by "intelligence" in the species-specific sense of linguistic competence.²⁴ This ability is "a subspecies of semiotic competence", as Johansen says (1985: 279), which overlays the biological species-specific competence with a developmental dimension historical in a Lamarckian sense, thus introducing into the objective world of the species the permeating element of textuality.

Using the older terminology of images and ideas along with conceptual premises that are pre-zoösemiotic, Maritain attempted thus to describe the situation (1957: 53):

Normally in the development of a child it is necessary that the idea be "enacted" by the senses and lived through before it is born as an idea; it is necessary that the relationship of signification should first be actively exercised in a gesture, a cry, in a sensory sign bound up with the desire that is to be expressed. Knowing this relationship of signification will come later, and this will be to have the idea, even if it is merely implicit, of that which is signified. Animals and children make use of this signification; they do not perceive it. When the child begins to perceive it (then exploits it, toys with it, even in the absence of the real need to which it corresponds)—at that moment the idea has emerged.

But this description fails in its purpose, unless it is further made clear that the detachment of the relationship from the related elements is achieved in such a way that the relation in its proper being as imperceptible can be made an objective foundation or basis that, directly as such (that is, as imperceptible), is able further to serve to stand for and represent some other relationship yet again. (Whether that other relationship terminate at an object that is also imperceptible in turn is not what matters, although it does emphasize what is distinctive to the semiosis in question). A dog, for example, wanting to be let out, can indeed learn to fake the need to evacuate as a way of manipulating its master "even in the absence of the real need to which it corresponds". And yet, at that moment, an idea in the sense in question has not emerged, no matter how playful the dog may become in its efforts.

At the heart of the difference between the human Umwelt and the Umwelt of other cognitive organisms is the "idea" in this specifically semiotic sense: the relationship itself that constitutes signification is grasped in its proper being at once imperceptible and distinguishable both from a given signified and from a given sign-vehicle—and therefore as detachable from any given vehicle and attachable to any other vehicle, as well as directable to some other object, or to the same object only, in its new attachment. This difference makes for the possibility of a text as such.

Texts are not only literary. They can be any physical structure at all made to embody ideas in the semiotic sense. Indeed, the whole of culture, in this radical sense (cf. Danow 1987), is a text. In this sense, culture as a text is a network of signs whose lattice of articulations is chosen at critical nodes, though not at all nodes (which would be impossible, an outer limit of the intelligible, pushed, for example, in Joyce's Finnegans Wake). These critical nodes are chosen differently and to different degrees in individual cases but are also, as chosen, subsequently detached in effect from the initial choices and naturalized through the habit-patterns of a community as "conventions" in the strong sense of "the way we do things (by preference unthinkingly) here".

The network exhibits a hierarchical or quasi-hierarchical structure relative to the physical side of the objects experienced within the network's frame.²⁵ Thus, a technological artifact embodies critically controlled and stipulated relativities no less than does an artistic or literary creation, and all three would serve as documentary evidence to some future historian or anthropologist or to an extraterrestrial seeking to understand the contemporary human Umwelt. But, whereas the objective relations embodied in the technological device directly relate also to its physical constitution as such in order for it to function as an instrument, the objective relations embodied in an artistic structure dominate the physical constitution of the whole in quite another fashion. Finally, the objective relations constitutive of the literary work tend to be a variable relatively free in respect to their embodiment, that is, their sensorially accessible base. For this reason the written word tends to function as the primary analogate for our understanding of text, inasmuch as here the relation of signification is exhibited not only as subject to critical control (that is, as cultural) but also in the form most subject to critical control (that is, the linguistic form) while still retaining permanence in the exhibition (the written in contrast to the spoken word).

To create a text is therefore to become aware of the difference between physical surroundings and objective world and to play with this difference, thereby erecting a system of signs at once expressly in consciousness of the difference and enhancive of it. To create a text is predicated on the understanding that "the role of the object in the semiosis is", as Johansen puts it (1985: 235), "not confined to being an element in an experiential situation interpreted to tell if a symbol applies or not". To create a text is hence to proceed accordingly in the use of signs freely to structure objectivity in a contour and manner accessible only to a conspecific, in the precise sense of another organism able to share that understanding and to grasp signs fashioned on its basis (that is to say, encoded according to patterns neither reducible to nor accessible within the perceptible dimension as such of the sign structure). To create a text is thus a function of musement.

For an understanding of this function two terms must be clarified: code and idea.

D. THE "CONVENTIONALITY" OF SIGNS IN ANTHROPOSEMIOSIS

When the term "ideas" is defined semiotically, that is, as the individual discovery of relation as such as the connection and difference between sign and signified, the question becomes: how is such a discovery shared? How is a relation of signification grasped for itself as detachable from this sign-vehicle and attachable rather to that one, communicated in its difference? That is the question to which the term "code" is proposed as answer. In other words, "idea" is to Innenwelt as code is to Umwelt as species-specifically (and regardless of planetary location) human. To understand what a text is and to understand the human lifeworld in what is specific to it are the same.

The perceptions of an animal that learns through experience, and the beliefs of a human animal as subject to rational criticism, are keys to textuality as the species-specific human form of objectivity. We distinguish among "fancies" the two distinct iconic forms: images, derivable from and reducible to a correlation between objects sensorially accessible as such (given a specific biological endowment), and conceptions or ideas, which express relations of signification in the being proper to them as relations (that is, as indifferent to their subjective ground and, consequently, as detachable from any given sign-vehicle as object for attachment to an objective ground elsewhere and otherwise). Ideas in this sense, conceptions within perceptions of the world, are unique to, and species-specifically definitive of, anthroposemiosis.

But in order to establish the basis for shared conceptions, these ideas must be embodied in a publicly accessible objective structure, which is not the case as long as their only embodiment is the cerebral cortex of the individual for whom a given idea has taken form. A given objective relation, seen in its detachability, must not only be detached but also attached elsewhere: it must be assigned a new ground in such a way that that new ground can in turn be experienced as a sign-vehicle relative to the objectivity originally grasped elsewhere. The code is the correlation and proportioning of a sensibly accessible element to an objectivity that is understood as correlated thereto. The idea must be correlated with some physical element within experience that is taken to serve as ground for the relation in which the idea expressly consists. That correlation is what constitutes a code in its difference from an idea.

Code and idea alike are logical interpretants,²⁶ but the logical interpretant considered now on the side of Innenwelt (idea), now on the side of Umwelt (code). A code thus channels and directs relations among objects in a publicly accessible way. A mastery of the encoding will result in a partial duplication (a sufficient overlap, we might say) within the decoder of the ideas behind the original encoding, thereby imposing, to that extent, a common conception (an intersubjective moment) within and beyond the perceptually shared objectivity. The Umwelt, in itself perceptual through and through according to the species-specific constraints of a biological inheritance, is now modified and restructured from within by further objective relations not themselves constrained directly by the biological heritage. Code, in short, belongs to the object experienced and idea to the organism experiencing. Both alike serve to ground, channel, and define or specify the relationships of dependency that comprise the objective world in its integral being subsumptive of the physical.

So far we have noted that semiosis, in the fullest sense of the action of signs, extends well beyond the boundaries of culture, as even well beyond the boundaries of animal societies, to include the dynamics of plant life and even the dynamics of chemistry and physics down to the quantum level insofar as there is a question of future outcomes and law governed interaction. Our concentration has been on the explicit absorption and redistribution of elements of physical environment within the relational network of objective world through cognitively mediated experience. We have focused on the construction of species-specific Umwelts corresponding to Innenwelts for the purpose of providing the proximate genus in contrast to which the specific difference of a human world—a Lebenswelt—might become visible.

That difference, we now see, is textuality, in the precise sense of the introduction, through understanding, of relations into the objective world that are not grounded in the perceptible elements, as such, of that Umwelt as correlated with a species-specific biological heritage. These relations alter the objectivity itself experienced and add to that experience the element of critical control as a possibility. Such control is not in the bare sense of something modified or modifiable through the muscular effort and plan of the organism (such as, for example, the beaver contemplating a mountain stream before and after building its dam), but in the rich sense of recognizing the possible, in its objective being, as distinct from the whole order of physical elements as such actually given here and now.

The exaptation²⁷ of the human modeling system (let us say, language in the ground sense) through speech into a communication system is therefore only one aspect of textuality: specifically, that aspect wherein the communicative intention finds an embodiment that is distinct from the other purposes that enter in when action is directed, beyond language, to the establishment of the postlinguistic structures of civil organization, shelter, trade, clothing, and so forth. These other systems, too,

depend on the stipulable sign actualized in a determinate way (a "conventional sign") in the fullest sense of an alternative contingent embodiment of the relation of signification grasped in itself, as distinct from any given subjective ground. But these other systems are required to take account of their material embodiment as objects created to perform more than a communicative function (in the case of a house, for example, to withstand the elements; in the case of a machine, to work reliably; and so on). In contrast, the language as exapted to communicate, through embodiment in a system of sense perceptible elements, needs to take no more account of the bodily form than is minimally necessary to the one function in its purity. For this function no more is needed than to convey the code, according to which the relations constituted by ideas have been transferred from the Innenwelt to the Umwelt, as determinative of the experience of others able to grasp the code precisely in its conventional being (its situation of being incidental to the sensible constitution of its immediate ground, its "arbitrariness" in happening to be this way from customs dimanated from stipulations). Thus, the animals other than humans perceive the difference between the general's uniform and that of the private, but only the human animals have a chance to understand the difference not in its material effects (for the animals, too, experience social power relations) but in its formal constitutive (which is first of all cultural and only derivatively social).

In this sense we can agree with Barthes that "every semiological system has its linguistic admixture" (1964: 10; cf. Culler 1982: 21). At the same time our point is more basic: every linguistic system has its semiological surplus. The language is not only not an autonomous system, still less "a semiotic into which all other semiotics may be translated" (Hjelmslev 1961: 109). The structural peculiarity of language is not unlimited in that sense. But language is unlimited in the sense of being able to draw all other semiotics (and semiosis) into the trajectory of the communicative intention freed from a species-specific biological inheritance. The "linguistic admixture", far from providing the foundation of all other semiotics, pertains rather to their surplus and perfection in community—that is to say, as they are drawn into and made shareable through the diaphanous medium and network of relations (the codes in particular) through which the objective world receives a texture of intelligence.

In such community, the contexts of nature itself and of biosemiosis in particular are enhanced and transformed according to objective possibilities not prefigured as such in or by the biological heritage of the species. These possibilities are opened up, rather, through the Lamarckian means of convention, which is transmissible through the praeterphysical vehicle of correlating codes embodied in physical elements reworked with understanding. Included in such transmissible convention are the physical elements of linguistic communication. These achieve a semiotic pre-eminence by virtue of being independent of any specific purpose, in order to be, in the context of communication, at the service of every other purpose. Language as a communication system—as a publicly available coding of the Umwelt—is thus the objective reflection of the freedom of the intellect as a growth in time.²⁸

At the same time the coding of the Umwelt is not restricted or reducible to linguistic coding in this sense. According to our anthroposemiotic definition of ideas, the coding of the Umwelt is the series of marks made by intelligence on the objective world in whatever respect and whether deliberately or as a concomitant attribute of intelligent action. The conventionalizing of objective relations makes of the context of Umwelts and physical relations the one texture of human experience. This "conventionalizing", this "loosening up" of the objective world as naturally determined (by biological heredity on one side and physical environment on the other) whereby reality itself becomes in some measure "freely chosen" (in Powell's phrase, 1983), constitutes the network of codes in the broadest sense, including the linguistic code as a subset. This conventionalizing of objective relations is not something actual or actualizable in only one way. It is something multiply actual (the diversity of the natural languages) and only virtually universal.²⁹ Such a virtual universality is destined always to be defeated in time by the particular actualizations called into being by specific circumstances on this planet, and most likely on planets elsewhere, as giving rise, through semiosis, to a biosphere and intelligent life in the sense that we are speaking of it here as anthroposemiotic. Yet between these particular realizations there yet always remains the virtuality whereby one system of coding could be, given sufficient ingenuity, translated into the other, so that the virtually universal also defeats the actual particular in its own way, though only potentially and in the background.

In such a context we can appropriate Eco's conclusion (1977: 52): "To see cultural life as a web of codes and as a continuous reference from code to code is to restore to the human animal its true nature"—as long as we realize that the "nature" we are restoring the human animal to is its nature as semiosic in actu signato. The human animal, as inventor of the Rule, needs also to realize that this inventor is in dire need of being wary of the surrounding virtualities which measure, in every case, how truly reasonable the "rule" is against the background and in the context of what humanity must depend on (such as the rain forests or the ozone layer, and biosemiosis in general) in order to pursue its seemingly (but not entirely in fact) "unlimited semiosis". Otherwise, we risk making a semiotics on the model of the Hobbesian King, answerable to nothing below and hence immune to considerations of justice or injustice.

The codes themselves of culture already incorporate through the content of what they are used to convey (their "surplus", semiologically speaking) what is more than culture and binds it to the further reality of surroundings as physical. This whole which is more than language and within which language functions as a relational dependency suspended between what it presupposes and what presupposes it is the primary reality of human experience as a whole. We move from the idea of reality as an order of existence independent of the observer to a semiotic idea of "reality" as including also the observer in all that is dependent on the observer, along with whatever in experience reveals itself as a part of something—the old idea of "reality"—independent of the observer ("physical being" in its praeter-objective character as the lining of experience). We move from the classical modern idea of reality, which was the ancient and medieval idea as well (Deely 1984: 265-266), to the postmodern idea of reality as the text of specifically human experience. We move from communication in the service of biological ends to a communication system opening as well possible worlds beyond any species-specific objective one, or any imaginary reductionistic purely physical one (the myth of Positivism).

Such is the movement within objectivity from sign to textuality, that is to say, to an objectivity which includes within its network of objective relations a dimension or aspect, an "affordance", in Gibson's phrase (1979—though not his sense: see Cunningham 1988), whereby objectification itself can be subjected to critical control and reshaped by stipulation. This brings us to the matter of criticism. This is a method proper to les sciences humaines, indeed, but an activity no less essential to the evaluation of presentations in the natural sciences and, in general, the activity distinctive of anthroposemiosis in its linguistic and cultural development beyond animal societies and the communications proper to zoösemiosis.

E. CRITICISM AS THE EXPLORATION OF TEXTUALITY

We have seen that the codes demarcating culture in its proper being incorporate, while at the same time contrast with, the physical side of objects and the objective "things" comprising together the Umwelts (the experience and structures of experience) of the various species interacting within the objective human world or (outside our awareness perhaps—but vitally and biologically in contrast with "culturally") within the organismic population comprising the human species as a biological entity. We have also seen that such codes are only incompletely actualized (within consciousness especially), while remaining operative virtually as a totality at cross purposes with itself (in the residual oppositions of perspective encoded into the objective world through past discourse and social interaction). Hence, for example (Eco 1977: 31; cf. Carleton 1649: sec. 6): "From one speaker to another there can be differences in the complexity of semantic analysis of a term: these differences produce sub-codes on the basis of which one speaker could assign meanings to the terms which other speakers would not assign to them; the different mastery of such sub-codes reveals class differences in social interaction".

Consequently, criticism is not merely "literary". It is an activity of mind that ranges across the entire horizon of objectivity textualized, including those types of objectification characterizing natural science. There are as many authentic roles for criticism as there are ways of bringing into the objective sphere, with greater explicitness and formalizing, the roles played or playable by the traces left in experience of the workings of intelligence over these many generations present through the past. Such traces are especially apparent in the linguistic sign ("the ideological phenomenon par excellence", as Vološinov remarked [1929: 131), but also in general in that surplus of semiosis we have come to call "textuality" or "culture" in the sense of postlinguistic structures (Deely 1982: 198 n. 1, after Morris 1946).

Given this purview, the semiological systems of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida find in spite of themselves a theoretical ground within what Sebeok calls (1977: 181) the "major tradition" of semiotic development. So also do the systems after Eco (1973: 153; 1976) that, without being called semiological by their proponents, yet share the ideology of equating semiosis with the tracings and workings of codes precisely as conventional (in the base sense of standing in part on that irreducible element of the arbitrary which is inseparable from even though not identical with the stipulability of signs) within culture, lucubrating (in consequence) absorption of the indexical and iconic as such.

This label, as we saw in chapter 1, is a reference to a strategy for encouraging a view of semiotics not as a theory in either the traditional critical sense or in the traditional scientific sense, but as what Locke called a doctrine of signs (1690: 361-362; commentary in Deely 1986a, 1986c), a term which must be carefully construed. In the context of Locke's Essay, as Sebeok first pointed out (1976a: ix), "doctrine" has a unique sense, one redolent in particular of the Latin Renaissance mainstream understanding of philosophical knowledge in its double contrast with empirically soluble formulations on one side and theological formulations dependent on religious authority on the other side (Deely 1982: 127-130, 1986b). A doctrine of signs, within this notion of philosophical doctrine generally, specifically transcends the opposition of culture to nature, and thereby precludes an autonomously linguistic or literary semiotics, pretensions toward which, as we have seen, Sebeok (1977) rightly dubbed collectively a "minor tradition" respecting semiotics as a whole.

Such a doctrina signorum was specifically inaugurated in Poinsot's work (1632a: 38/16-20, 117/28-118/6), though the fullness of its object was not stated before Peirce, who coined the name semiosis (c.1906: 5.488) for the action through which this relative being of signs so artfully disengaged and delineated by Poinsot is sustained and fulfilled through actions. Thus, the doctrine of signs has for its unifying object, as we saw in Chapter 3, the action of signs explicitly recognized as an activity or process constructive not only of human experience but of all organismic experience and, we shall argue, of the physical environment itself. The argument of the chapter following is that the environment in its physical being is already developmental, and therefore virtually semiosic, by virtue, that is, of its tending to give rise to and to subsequently support and lend itself to appropriate transformation by the plethora of Umwelts (including the species-specifically human one) precisely in their contrast—as objective worlds—to the physical realm they presuppose. The objective worlds not only rest upon this prejacent physicality, they subsume it in part as it is in its own right, even while restructuring it directly in the objective order as well as subjectively through physical interactions as subjects.

The decisive move in this strategy for establishing the doctrine of signs on the basis of its full and proper possibilities for understanding today turns, not surprisingly, on our conception of language. We saw above, in line with our view of language as (prior to exaptation) the species-specifically human Innenwelt, that the essence of language is arguably equatable with the discovery of the relation of signification and the consequent reconstitution of experienced signs as stipulatable. This latter point refers to the subsequent use of any sign in the light of an apprehended difference between, on the one hand, an object signified as such, and, on the other hand, a sign-vehicle (or signifier) as such, in their mutual difference from the linkage itself between the two as able to be abstracted and codified for purposes of communication. By the same stroke, we saw, a field of infinite possibilities opened up—the field of unlimited semiosis. As Merrell briefly put it (1988: 257): "if a dog and the idea of a dog were separate, then there would be a relation between them, and therefore an idea of this relation, and so on, ad infinitum."

In giving a place to textuality as the objectivity proper to human beings, we see that what is required at the foundation is a notion of language larger and more fundamental than the network of differences conveyed through the employment of the arbitrary array we call (in relation to the network of conventions and contrasts constituting them formally) "linguistic signs". Maritain observes of this larger notion, this surplus creating the admixture whereby the whole of culture is textualized (1964: 91):

The term language does not relate only to the words which we use, it covers also all that which serves us to make ourselves understood, and therefore the whole imagery which we use and which is that of the persons to whom we speak, at such and such a moment of time and in such and such a place on earth. (Supposing that through some telephone through duration we could tell a contemporary of Julius Caesar something which concerns our epoch, could we speak to him of airplanes and of electronic machines, of the British Parliament, or of the Presidium of the Communist Party? The other person would not understand anything; it would indeed be necessary to use the imagery furnished by his own type of culture, as well as his own words and his own syntax.)

Given the coextensiveness, then, of textuality with the objective world of human experience (of a Lebenswelt in contrast to a pure Umwelt, let us say), the question becomes one of how to construe the "linguistic admixture" demonstrable within every semiological system—that is, within the totality of human experience, including the experience of "nature" so-called. This question brings us to the heart of the matter of what semiotics finally is, and what it has to contribute to the study of either branch or any subdivision of the accepted division of university studies today into the "sciences" on the one hand and the "humanities" on the other, including literature.

F. A MATRIX FOR ALL THE SCIENCES

The main point in this regard is that semiotics pertains to a renewal of the foundations of our understanding of knowledge and experience across the board, and hence to a transformation of the disciplinary superstructures culturally distributing that understanding (the traditional disciplines as currently founded). Semiotics also pertains to the renewal of any single currently established discipline within, say, the humanities, but only by way of achieving a proper understanding of semiosis itself in some particular. It is thus not just a question of putting aside the ill-advised or, as Culler more mordantly muses (1981: 20), "futile attempt to distinguish the humanities from the social sciences". It is, rather, a question of new foundations for the "sciences" in the ancient sense of the whole panoply of disciplinarily diversified human knowledge—be the object of the diversity "human", "natural", or "social" (in the current description). Semiotics is a perspective concerned with the matrix of all the disciplines, precisely as they are offsprings within experience of anthroposemiosis.

This claim is at the heart of semiotics' so-called "imperialism". It is not a question of imperialism, however, but of recognizing the role of experience as the ground of understanding throughout and the centrality of history in making of that ground a rich soil. It is more a question of recovering from the imperialism of the natural sciences, physics in particular, as the distinct heritage of positivism, and of seeing the subsets of semiosis within anthroposemiosis for what they are in relation to the whole.

Floyd Merrell makes the point nicely, in a note on his recent text (1988: 262 n. 12):

. . .in general the hermeneutical movement has been beneficial insofar as it has directed attention to the role of interpretation and understanding in the humanities. However, Stephen Toulmin observes, and rightly so [1982: 99-100], that this movement 'has done us a disservice' also because it does not recognize any comparable role for interpretation in the natural sciences and in this way sharply separates the two fields of scholarship and experience. Consequently, ... the central truths and virtues of hermeneutics have become encumbered with a whole string of false inferences and misleading dichotomies.

A truly "radical hermeneutics", such as Caputo calls for (1987), must first of all come round to the semiotic point of view, for that point of view, that standpoint, achieved its first systematic expression precisely by an author (Poinsot 1632: 38/1ff., commentary in Deely 1985, 1988) realizing and thematizing the point that interpretive activity or "hermeneutics" (the privileged term for the notion then was "perihermenias", as noted in Deely 1982: 188n.16) is coextensive with the life of the mind—and, we would add today, extensive of nature itself as engendering life.

This is the governing insight of the semiotic enterprise integrally conceived in all its phases and periods. Semiotics provides a perspective on the whole of experience in what is proper to it as experience. In achieving this, it becomes "first" among the sciences not as one among the others, such as traditional metaphysics envisaged, but as doctrina contrasts to scientia (Williams 1985; Anderson et al. 1984; Sebeok 1976a: ix) and as what is first in the understanding contrasts with what is derivative therefrom (Deely 1987, 1988, 1988a).

It is thus a question of realizing what is proper to the semiotic point of view, and of distinguishing what is foundational from what is consequent thereto and partial thereof. From the beginning, both from outside (for example, Ricoeur 1981 and after) and from within (for example, Bakhtin 1971,³⁰ Culler 1977), the semiotics movement has suffered from practitioners who mistook some part of semiosis for the whole of semiotics and who systematically strove to reduce the perspective of semiotic to the perspective of that preferred part with which they identified it. From within, the problem has been more serious, in that the European influence after Saussure, only now beginning to be absorbed and meliorated in the broader American influence emanating from Peirce, has created in the popular consciousness a de facto equation of semiotics with structuralist and literary concerns. To this day, in much of the literature sociologically defining the contemporary development of semiotics, a naive assumption remains transparently at work equating the semiotic point of view with literary preoccupations and tending toward the explicit extreme of equating semiosis with "the product of encoding signs" (Morgan 1985: 8). Thus, as prominent an author as Robert Scholes is able to assert (1982: ix) that, "usually defined as the study of signs (from a Greek root meaning sign), semiotics has in fact become the study of codes."

To all such views (the gamut of writings more or less dominated by the tendency within semiotics toward this explicit extreme) apply Sebeok's blunt rejoinder (1984b: 2) to Hawkes (1977: 124): "Nothing could be a more deluded misconstrual of the facts of the matter, but the speciousness of this and associated historical deformations are due to our own inertia in having hitherto neglected the serious exploration of our true lineage".

What is fundamentally misguided about the semiological tendency to treat intertextuality as a self-contained whole, centered on the literary sign and closed in upon itself through an unlimited (but autistic) semiosis, is the compartmentalization of culture from nature by the inappropriate importing of the presuppositions of idealistic philosophy into the perspective opened by the sign. The perspective opened by the sign is as removed from idealism as it is from realism in the requirements proper to its own development. The study of sign action cannot properly be confined to the boundaries of the artifactual nor measured by the paradigm of linguistic exchanges. If such study is artificially so confined and measured, it is cut off from the context required ultimately even for the intelligibility of the literary, as Johansen demonstrates in his "Prolegomena to a semiotic theory of text interpretation" (1985).

If, while striving to be semiotic, a perspective takes for its object specifically literary textuality as constituted terminatively, that is, as itself objectified and scrutinized as known—much as if it were the "given" for semiotics comparable to the stones of the geologist or the reptilian bones of paleontology—such a perspective has yet to achieve the standpoint proper to the sign. The perspective proper to semiotics arises rather, exactly as in Locke's anomalous conclusion (1690: 361-362), with the idea of the idea as a nexus of relationships that carry the cognizant subject beyond itself and constitute at the same time, on the basis of a cognitive map of the environment, an Umwelt, which is strictly irreducible to the prejacent physical and species-specific for every life form, including the human one. This human Umwelt or "Lebenswelt", as we have seen, in contrast to the Umwelten of purely zoösemiotic life forms, has a unique texture through which it is transformable into an asymptotic number of variant models, through the unique moyen of language.

In the end, the idea of reality as the species-specific objective world is what gives intelligibility and place to the activity of all criticism, whether it aims at developing one side of the contrast between the environmentally given and the specifically constructed, as in literary criticism, or at distinguishing the specifically constructed in order to concentrate on the environmentally given, as in much scientific criticism. The relationship of Innenwelt to Umwelt is such that we finally understand that what has been called "fiction", for example, is not an imitation of something else so much as an expression of a semiosis that makes of the something else just as easily an imitation of what began as fiction (see Toews' analysis of contemporary historians in terms of 'William of Baskerville' in Williams and Pencak 1991). In this way, as Culler puts it (1981: 38), "one of the effects of semiotics is to question the distinction between literary and nonliterary discourse".

It is a question of remodeling the world—the objective world—but as this objective world includes in its proper being something also of physical surroundings. The question is not so much simply that "realism is in essence deeply mythic" (Con Davis 1985: 56) as that reality—the reality of human experience, wherein the line between what is dependent upon and independent of interpretive activity can never be finally drawn because that very line itself shifts with each new achievement of understanding—is in essence thoroughly semiosic.

Literature, as the most presuppositioned and purely objective phase of anthroposemiosis (able to deal directly with the object as nonexistent instead of having to discover its nonexistence by chagrin, as sometimes happens in natural science or in history), requires the most complete account of signification. While a literary "text itself need not refer to any past experiences", nonetheless, "experience of objects, actions, or events, similar to what is referred to in a given text, is a prerequisite to the understanding of it" (Johansen 1985: 261-262; cf. King 1987).

G. A MODEL FOR DISCOURSE AS SEMIOSIS

That and how the universe of discourse—any discourse, including literary—"is bound up with the experience of the parties" to the discourse is what the literary scholar Dines Johansen has shown in an essay expressly regarding the problem of situating literature and literary criticism within the more general purview of semiosis as it is regarded in the major tradition of contemporary semiotic development. We can usefully introduce Johansen's model for anthroposemiosis (1982: 473, 1985:266), as including specifically the literary The model is here editorially modified, mainly by enhancing by explicitly labeling the identification of the ten axes defining the planes constitutive of "the semiotic pyramid". Johansen's reasons for introducing this model are also our own (1985: 265): on the one hand, it is intended as a heuristic device which should make it possible to recognize the multiple relationships of each element; on the other hand, it should further the inquiry into the nature of the signifying process by calling attention to the interrelations between certain aspects of meaning production and interpretation, and, of course, by provoking objections:

FIGURE 2. The Pyramid of Anthroposemiosis

	1. Proposition Plane	2. Communication Plane
	3. Convention Plane	4. Representation Plane
	5. Proposition Plane	6. Communication Plane
	7. Convention Plane	8. Representation Plane
	9. Proposition Plane	10. Communication Plane

          FIGURE 3. The Planes of Semiosis within Discourse

For purposes of making explicit critical possibilities afforded by this model for approaching explication of texts of whatever objective type, we might here fruitfully redistribute the pyramid according to the ten interdependent triangular planes comprising the model—six radiating from the sign-pole, four from the organismic poles of interpreter and utterer—in order to underscore how presuppositioned and farthest removed from autonomy ("the myth of intertextuality and intersemioticity", as we might say) a literary semiotics is in the scheme of experience. In effect, Johansen's pyramid can be made to serve as an interpretant for Bakhtin's remark (1975: 48) that the language of a novel "is a system of intersecting planes" which, moreover, bind it to common experiences underlying scientific texts as well (Figure 3).

If one enters seriously into Johansen's argument that the semiotics of texts, when pursued integrally rather than according to faddish abstractions, involves one with all these planes simultaneously (but according to emphases that, of course, can be varied for the purposes of the analysis at hand), one also begins to see how a literary semiotics might be constituted in the full scope of the possibilities afforded to it by the doctrine of signs.

These possibilities are made visible precisely when the foundational inquiries of the doctrine of signs are made commensurate with the full scope of semiosis, as a process subtending the whole of nature so far as nature involves a development in time along lines that transcend the physically established patterns of any given moment in the cosmic evolution. As that framework makes itself visible in the diverse works contributing more and more consciously to its edification, we see that the "place marked out in advance" for semiotics and giving it "a right to existence", in Saussure's curious expression (i.1906-1911: 33; cf. Russell 1982), is something that cannot be defined in a way exclusive of any activity of interpretation but rather can be defined only inclusive thereof.

To study the sign is to uncover semiosis, and therewith a web as vast as nature itself. The arrangement, the web of renvoi sustaining the environmental and sensible elements at each moment according to patterns that are not themselves sensible nor reducible to what is sensible, constitutes the semiotic object in its full possibilities for understanding.

This is a "reality" quite different from that prejacent given in which the mind had no part and to which the observer contributed hopefully nothing, conceived by the medievals and sought by the moderns. Nor is it a reality wholly reducible to the mind's own workings on the basis of a hidden outer realm and a hidden inner mechanism of understanding linked only by the phenomena constituted by the mind itself, as Kant concluded. Something much richer than either reduction, something more collusive even than the rapport between fly trap and fly in the realm of insects and flowers, this newer paradigm—in a phrase, semiotic reality—recognizes that the boundary between what is dependent upon and what is independent of interpretive activity can never be finally fixed from within experience because the boundary itself fluctuates in function of the development of understanding, whether "speculative" or "practical", "scientific" or "literary".

Like the human sciences themselves, "semiotics is not only a field of different approaches to a unique object but also a field of sometimes conflicting philosophical definitions of this unique object" (Eco 1979: 77). Furthermore (and in this it provides the matrix for natural science as well), semiotics is the field studying the process whereby any object is constituted in its full actuality as known: not simply as a process in nature, but also as the prise de conscience whereby nature becomes fully aware of itself and achieves its final totality in the transcendence over physical being. This process of transcendence begins with the historical Umwelten and is fully realized in the reflexivity of the Lebenswelt that makes of each text a prospective intertext incorporating life and fiction and the whole of nature as well through a semiosis metaphysically unlimitedand even physically, though limited, not wholly determinately so. This situation has been personified by Floyd Merrell (1988: 260) in a creature far more worthy of the talents of Disney artists than the pedestrian Roger Rabbit. Imagine a filmic rendering of the Chimerical Octopus, constructed on the following plan:

Consider each sign possibility to be a point ... with an infinite set of lines connecting it to all other points in the universe. .... Each signpoint is like a chimerical octopus whose body is the point and whose tentacles are the infinite number of lines emanating from that point ready to suck in one or more of all the other sign-points, which then become its interpretant and hence another sign-point. (Actually, more in accord with Laplace and God, each tentacle would have an eye at its extremity enabling it to 'see' all other sign-points simultaneously.)

This entire conglomeration of lines, to be true to form, will have certain characteristics: (a) the whole can be 'cut' at any point and reconnected along any one of its lines, like Peirce's amorphous 'book of assertions' [1903: 4.512]; (b) at a given instant the conglomerate is static (the synchronic dimension), but it holds the possibility for all future connections (the diachronic dimension)—this instant is not the Saussurean slice out of the semiological salami, it is the entire conglomerate given 'en bloc', holding all past, present, and future possibilities; and (c) the conglomerate is self-contained, twisting and doubling back on itself, like Einsteinian space-time (called the "block" universe), or like an infinity of infinitely thin Möbius strips intersecting each other at the point of their twist. However, (d) with respect to finite sign users, unlike point-octopuses, all observations and relations must remain inside: there is no global vision, for immanence rules—commensurate with quantum theory, which has demolished the classical view of subject/object and observer/ observed. And (e) there can be no complete description of the whole since, commensurate with Peirce's plastic 'book of assertions', logical connections do not remain the same over time, and since, with our own finite number of appendages and sensory organs, we can never process all signs in an instant.

H. SUMMATION

Among the human sciences, semiotics is unique in being a study concerned with the matrix of all the sciences, and in revealing the centrality of history to the enterprise of understanding in its totality. The centrality of history to understanding is revealed through the codes of culture that alone sustain, beyond the individual insight, the commens (Peirce 1906: 196-197) or shared mentality that defines a language (such as English), a discipline (such as physics or literary criticism), a subculture (such as the Gays), a nation (such as Israel), and, ultimately, civilization itself in all its conflicting strands of historically embedded interpretations giving structure to the everyday experience of the conspecifics capable of language. We can thus say, in view of the larger sense of language sketched by Maritain and insisted upon independently by Bakhtin (1971: 214, as cited in Todorov 1981: 56): "in living speech, messages are, strictly speaking, created for the first time in the process of transmission, and ultimately" (that is, prejacent to, and independent of, the anthroposemiosis itself) "there is no code"—even though, like sound waves on the side of nature, codes may play a supporting role and even result from the message.

In this perspective, criticism can contribute in its own right to bringing into explicit objectivity contributions of the understanding that have been left in a virtual state of exercise rather than expressly signified and recognized. This would be criticism at its best, criticism displaying the rich art of evaluating and analyzing with knowledge and propriety the works of civilization, especially art, music, and literature, wherein the free play of intellect and the full contrast of the objective to the biological and physical orders come into pre-eminence. Such a criticism, far from being equated with semiotics, would participate in the development of semiotics, a development drawing into its network of renvoi the whole of past thought, present science, and future civilization.

In this way the critical exercise will also contribute to, and perhaps even establish within semiotics, a formula more adequate to the full understanding of anthropos than any that has been devised heretofore.