A. THEORY OF SEMIOTICS

Semiotics, therefore, contrasts with semiosis as knowledge contrasts with that which is known. Semiotics is knowledge about semiosis; it is the theoretical accounting for signs and what they do.

This is actually an important distinction, because, if we are right in what we have said about the extent of semiosis, the history of semiosis and the history of the universe, at least insofar as the universe inclines toward a species of our linguistic type as part of itself, are the same thing. But the history of semiotics, by contrast, is quite another matter and, while complicated, is considerably more manageable. It will be the story of the attempts, more or less fitful, to take account of that which underlies semiosis and makes it possible, namely, the sign. What is a sign such that it makes possible semiosis?

This is the foundational question of semiotic inquiry, the basic question, to which we have essayed an answer in chapter 4, and for which the preceding and following chapters may be regarded as supporting amplifications. Beyond the scope of this book, however, over and above this question, there is the investigation of the role of signs in particular spheres, such as architecture, the fine arts, literature, the codes of dress, legal codes, heraldry, prognostics or symptomatology in medicine, linguistics, historiography, geography, geology, ecosystems, astronomy, chemistry, physics, etc.

But these specialized inquiries into signs of this or that type, the actions of signs in creating and molding this or that objective sphere of experience, oddly enough, have heretofore been normally pursued apart from any thematic consciousness of what a sign is in its distinctive objectivity, of what is distinctive about the objectivity of the sign.

Semiotics thus is the attempt to account theoretically for what is distinctive about the sign, both in its being and in the temporally coterminous action that follows upon that being, according to the ancient saying that "as a being is, so does it act" (agere sequitur esse). To the extent that such a reflexive attempt comes to permeate specialized investigations about signs, the reflection imparts to those investigations—no matter how well established and "traditional"—its own thematic unity and assimilates them to the field of investigations properly called "semiotic". Thus, "the field of investigations properly called semiotic" includes by right all the traditional disciplines in virtue of their dependency in what they are as typically distinct structures of signification upon a network of sign relations constituting them; but in fact the field includes those disciplines only at the moment when and to the extent that, besides being seen to be structures of signification, they are looked at and analyzed thematically in terms of this virtually semiotic constitution. The field of investigations virtually semiotic is coextensive with the field of all investigations, but the actual field of semiotic investigations properly so-called is much smaller at any given moment. It exists as a demand of the future on present thought, in the form, like knowledge itself, of a task being completed rather than of a task done. It finds itself at every moment, to borrow a description from Peirce (1868: 5.316), "dependent on the future thought of the community".

In this way, the history and the theory of semiotics intertwine and grow together. But there is also a certain reflective moment, or series of moments, more or less critical, anterior to which semiotics properly speaking, in its contrast with semiosis, does not exist or exists in a very febrile condition.

The history of semiotics in this manner is always twofold. It is first of all a gathering together and identification of those moments of self-consciousness about the sign when signs are not only used but recognized in their contrast with what they are used for. That is to say, semiotics must first, in order to achieve its history, identify and hierarchize those moments where the sign comes to be recognized for the role it plays in its own right and not just deployed quasi-invisibly in dealings with objects.

Then, retrenching the thematic consciousness thus attained, semiotics as a moment of consciousness expands outward over the whole realm of knowledge and belief to elicit from within each of the disciplines objectively constituted an actual awareness, more or less reluctant, of the semioses and semiotic processes virtually present within them by their very nature as finite knowledge.

In this way, the traditionally established disciplines become themselves transformed semiotically, by being brought to a higher level of self-consciousness and, at the same time, a lower level of isolation within the community of inquirers. This is what is meant by the inherent interdisciplinarity of semiotics, and how semiotics tends to function as an antidote for overspecialization, by imposing an objective awareness of the common processes of signification on which the most specialized achievements of knowledge depend.

This is the expansion of semiotic consciousness along, so to say, the axis of synchronicity.

But the expansion of semiotic consciousness also transpires, and by the same impetus, diachronically, so to say, back across time, over the previous epochs of civilization, art, science, and philosophy, for example, or literature and theology, in order to rethink them and reconsider their products precisely from a semiotic point of view. In this way, semiotics brings about a rewriting of previous thought and consequently of history.

We see, then, that, synchronically and diachronically, the theory of semiotics and the history of semiotics are of a piece, mutually self-constituting. Unlike a natural history, say, of the continents of earth or of the Pterodactyl among the dinosaurs, the object of semiotic history is not actually given until and unless the theory that makes it visible—that is, the consciousness of the sign in its distinctive being—has already been achieved.

The history of semiotics is first of all an achievement of semiotic consciousness and then the working out of the implications of that consciousness, so far as it is able to sustain itself systematically, in every sphere of knowledge and experience. In this way, it is a history that extends also into the future, and will never be completed while thought itself continues to grow.

"Semiotic consciousness" is nothing more nor less than the explicit awareness of the role of the sign as that role is played in a given respect. Since, however, it turns out that the whole of experience, from its origins in sense to its highest achievements of understanding, is constituted by signs, it follows that the history of semiotics will be first of all a tracing of the lines which lead to that moment when this total or comprehensive role of the sign in the constituting of experience and knowledge came to be realized. After that, the history of semiotics will be the working out of the implications of this realization both synchronically and diachronically.

But "diachrony", in this case, is not just a matter of retrospect, or of a sequence of discrete synchronic sections arranged as prior and posterior. The diachrony of semiotic consciousness is the formation of future thought as well as the transmission and comparison of past thought. It involves an awareness of demands the future makes on present thinking in order for present thought to be what it is as containing also what no longer is or might never have been in relation to what could be. In a word, the axes of diachrony and synchrony in semiotic consciousness mark the labile intersection ehere the critical control of objectivity—"criticism" in the broadest sense—is exercised through the subjectivity of the individual linguistic animal.

Thus, when we speak of the "history" of semiotics, we are obliged to have in mind the working out and rendering publicly accessible, from within the myriad subjectivities of the knowers capable of raising semiosis to the semiotic level, of the implications of the realization of the sign's comprehensive role in the constituting and development of experience diachronically in both directions. It is for this reason that the future of thought, as well as its past, will be different as a result of the achievement of a semiotic consciousness, different, too, in unpredictable ways (because of the factor of chance both in itself and as subjectively diffracted in social life).

In a word, the theory of semiotics in the basic sense will be the explanation of how the whole of knowledge and experience depends on signs, or is a product of semiosis; the history of semiotics in the basic sense will be the tracing of the lines that made such an explanation possible and necessary, even though this history in another sense remains open by virtue of thought in the present to an indefinite future as well.

B. HISTORY OF SEMIOTICS

Secondarily, such a history will consist in the record of the workings out of the implications of such a consciousness. It will be enough, in keeping with the purpose of the present work, to restrict ourselves to a preliminary answer in outline to the first question: Where in fact was semiotic consciousness first achieved in its integrity?

The answer to that question, simply put, is that semiotic consciousness found its original thematic statement and systematic formulation in the Latin world as it developed indigenously (after the collapse of Rome, which remained dominated in its speculative consciousness by the Greek philosophies and language) between Augustine thematically (c.397AD) and Poinsot systematically (1632). Precisely this development received its name unwittingly from an Englishman, John Locke, in 1690, who suggested in the form of a hypothetical alternative to the perspective in which his own labors had mainly developed a perspective whose development would destroy the speculative substance of those earlier labors, along with the whole subsequent modern development in continuity with them. Finally, in nominal continuity with Locke and speculative continuity with the largely unknown Latin forebears, the range and complexity in detail of the issues that need to be clarified in the perspective of semiotic was illustrated relentlessly in the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, from his discovery of the semiotic categories, subsuming the concerns of realism and idealism through their common dependency on experience, in 1867, to his death in 1914.

Having tried, for several chapters now, to examine directly the subject matter thus uncovered, let us next try—as befits the self-consciousness the sign imposes through its inescapable lesson of the historicity of thought— to look also historically at what has been examined.

1. The Ancient World and Augustine

The "seme-" root of our term semiotics and its many congeners, of course, is definitively Greek in extraction. But, in the Greek writings extant for us today, the dominant feature in this regard is the split, verging on dichotomic, between Semeion/Nature, on the one hand, and Symbolon/Culture, on the other hand. This is true of Plato in the Cratylus (c.385BC), of Aristotle throughout his works (including notably the woefully mistranslated Perihermenias [c.330BC: 16-20a; cf. Eco et al. 1986: 66-68], whereby Boethius [esp. inter 511-513AD] unwittingly increased the impetus of Augustine's suggestions for a unified doctrina signorum), and of Greek medicine, which Sebeok (1985: 181) regards (after "linguistic affinities" and "the profoundest strata of human wisdom" conventionally fossilized as philosophical analysis) as "the third, admittedly uneven leg upon which semiotics rests". For, in medicine, it is definitely the semeion/nature side that dominates prognostics (see Sebeok 1984c), despite the "sop to Cerberus" all its own that medicine even today regularly proffers in the placebo—but without by any means being the whole of the story (as is best seen today through the work of Baer 1982, 1988).

Apart from these great icons of ancient Greece, there are also the Stoics, who, in their debates with the Epicureans, unquestionably developed at greatest length the theory of signs in the ancient world but who unfortunately have survived only in fragments conveyed principally by their enemies, Sextus Empiricus (c.200) in particular. General accounts of the Stoic sign theory, more or less comprehensive under the circumstances, can be found in Savan 1986 and 1986a, Eco 1980, and Verbeke 1978. Like the apple of Tantalus, the Stoic writings are there to be enjoyed, if only they could be reached—which makes their allure all the greater. Perhaps this is why a leading expert today on Stoic logic (Mates) routinely imposes upon his exposition of supposedly Stoic conceptions terminology drawn from the framework of symbolic logic after Russell and the early Wittgenstein, while the most fascinating author of abductions on Stoic semiotics (Eco) has turned lately to novels. Clarke's "History of Semiotic" (1987: 12-42) provides an excellent summary here where the evidence is scanty, but after Augustine becomes a phantasmagoric montage constructed of secondary sources standard in traditional philosophy, but based entirely on presemiotic research interests.

Augustine's role against the ancient Greek and Roman background has been nicely captured in a recent descriptive summary jointly essayed by Eco, Lambertini, Marmo, and Tabarroni (1986: 65-66):

It was Augustine who first proposed a 'general semiotics'—that is, a general 'science' or 'doctrine' of signs, where signs become the genus of which words (onomata) and natural symptoms (sèmeîa) are alike equally species.

Medieval semiotics knows at this point two lines of thinking as possibly unified, but without having achieved their actual unification. ... Out of the tension of this opposition—under the provocation, as it were, of Augustine—is born much of the distinctively Latin development of semiotic consciousness.

Echoes of the tension persist to this day, as in Husserl's quintessentially modern and at the same time contemporary attempt to deny the possible unity of a semiotic consciousness (cf. Kruse 1986), or more generally throughout the academic world, as evidenced in Eco (1982) and in the ongoing "nature/nurture" controversy in psychology and anthropology.

2. The Latin World

The objection of the logicians concerned precisely what John Locke would shortly (1690) see as the first task confronting the would-be semiotician, namely, the bringing of outward signs such as words and gestures and the interior means of knowing such as images and ideas under the common perspective afforded by the notion of sign.

The origins of this rebellion against the age-old linkage of signs with the sense-perceptible are as yet obscure but seem definitely linked to the influence of Ockham at Paris and his introduction of the notion of the concept as a "signum naturale". Clearly afoot as early as Petrus d'Ailly (c. 1372) was the further designation of the interior means of knowing as "signa formalia", contrasting with the outward "signa instrumentalia" whereby the known or felt inwardly is shared publicly. Williams (1985a: xxxiii) made the following summary of the historical situation in this regard:

A major strand of semiotic reflection and controversy, beginning from at least the fourteenth century and developing especially in the Iberian university world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but involving also a wide geographic area ... turned precisely on this question of whether the sign as such involves a per se sensible half. The increasingly consistent answer was made in the negative.

But what is of principal interest here is that, as it turns out, this point of historical controversy is the central point theoretically for the accomplishment of the main task of semiotic as Locke proposed it, to wit, the bringing of ideas as well as words into the perspective of a doctrine of signs.

3. The Iberian Connection

What actually is common to all treatments of the sign, from ancient times to the present, [is,] namely, the seeing of the sign as a 'mask of Janus', bi-facial, or 'relative to the cognitive powers of some organism, on the one hand, and to the content signified on the other'. If it is therefore this relativity that constitutes the being proper to signs, then why . . . add the further condition that this relativity has to be grounded in an object of sense as such?

It is precisely the inclusion as essential of this further condition which is not essential ... which has inevitably confused the discussion of the nature or being proper to signs-'all signs insofar as they are signs'. The crux of the problem concerns the 'difference between a sign functioning as such from within the cognitive powers of an organism, and a sign functioning as such by impacting on those powers from without'. This difference [is] crucial to the functioning of signs ... insofar as the ground of observability in the perceiver, or that which makes him or her be a perceiver, is not as such itself susceptible of observation.

It follows ... that the taking into account of this distinction gives rise to 'the true ground question' for a doctrine of signs: 'In what does the relativity essential to signifying properly consist?' This question ... has never been resolved satisfactorily within specifically realist or idealist paradigms of thought. ... The breakthrough resolution of John Poinsot in his Treatise on Signs (1632a) was itself anomalous in terms of previous traditions as well as in terms of what it anticipated. In contrast, pre-semiotic realist or idealist paradigms of thought have failed, respectively, either to appreciate that perception itself structures its object as relative, or to appreciate that ideas are signs before becoming objects of our awareness, and, as signs, can give access to 'the nature of things' (to nature, that is) only as revealed relatively through signs.

The decisive development in this regard was the privileged achievement of John Poinsot, a student with the Conimbricenses, and the successor, after a century, to Soto's own teaching position at the University of Alcalá de Henares. With a single stroke of genius resolving the controversies, since Boethius, over the interpretation of relative being in the categorial scheme of Aristotle, Poinsot (1632a 117/28-118/18, esp. 118/14-18, annotated in Deely 1985: 472-479) was able to provide semiotics with a unified object conveying the action of signs both in nature virtually and in experience actually, as at work at all three of the analytically distinguishable levels of conscious life (sensation, perception, intellection). By this same stroke he was also able to reconcile in the univocity of the object signified the profound difference between what is and what is not either present in experience here and now or present in physical nature at all (Poinsot 1632a: Book III).

Poinsot was able to reduce to systematic unity Soto's ad hoc series of distinctions, as he put it in his first announcement of the work of his Treatise ("Lectori", 1631; p. 5 of the Deely 1985 edition), and thereby to complete the gestation in Latin philosophy of the first foundational treatise establishing the fundamental character of, and the ultimate simplicity of the standpoint determining, the issues that govern the unity and scope of the doctrine of signs. Unfortunately, because he so skillfully embedded his Tractatus de Signis within a massive and traditional Aristotelian cursus philosophiae naturalis, he unwittingly ensured its slippage into oblivion in the wake of Descartes' modern revolution. Three hundred and six years would pass between the original publication of Poinsot's Treatise on Signs and the first frail appearance of some of its leading ideas in late modern culture (Maritain 1937-1938, discussed in Deely 1986d).

4. The Place of John Locke

The principal instigation that Locke himself wrote in reaction against, but along very different lines from what he would end by proposing for "semiotic", was the Cartesian attempt (1637, 1641) to claim for rational thought a complete separation from any dependency on sensory experience.

The irony of the situation in this regard was that Locke's principal objections to Descartes were not at all furthered by the speculative course he set at the beginning and pursued through the body of his monumental Essay concerning Humane Understanding of 1690. Instead, he furthered the Cartesian revolution in spite of himself; deflected the brilliant suspicions of Berkeley (1732); fathered the cynical skepticism of Hume (1748);⁴⁷ and laid the seeds of overthrow of his own work in concluding it with the suggestion that what is really needed is a complete reconsideration of "Ideas and Words, as the great Instruments of Knowledge" in the perspective that a doctrine of signs would make possible. The consideration of the means of knowing and communicating within the perspective of signifying, he presciently suggested, "would afford us another sort of Logick and Critick, than what we have hitherto been acquainted with". It was for this possible development that he proposed the name semiotic.

The antinomy between the actual point of view adopted at the beginning for the Essay as a whole and the possible point of view proposed at its conclusion (Deely 1986a) is, for semiotic historiography, an object worthy of consideration in its own right.

It remains that to Locke goes the privilege and power of the naming. If today we call the doctrine of signs "semiotic" and not "semiology", it is to the brief concluding chapter XX in the original edition of Locke's Essay that we must look for the reason—there, and to the influence this chapter exercised on the young American thinker, Charles Sanders Peirce, who read the Essay but made of its conclusion a substantial part of his philosophy and lifework from 1867 onward.

5. Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles S. Peirce, and John Poinsot

We shall call it semîology (from the Greek semeion, 'sign'). It would teach us what signs consist of and what laws govern them.

We see then that Saussure's intuition was fatally flawed in its original formulation. He placed on his intuition of the need for a science of signs the fatal qualification of viewing it as a subordinate (or "subaltern") rather than as an architectonic discipline respecting the whole of human belief, knowledge, and experience, as we have seen its internal requirements dictate. He further compromised his proposal for the enterprise by making of linguistics "le patron gnéérale de toute sémiologie", raising the "arbitrariness of signs" into a principle of analysis for all expressive systems. Thereby he obscured the much more fundamental interplay of the subjectivity of the physical environment and the subjectivity of the cognizing organism in the constitution of objectivity for Umwelten in general and the human Lebenswelt in particular, whereby, in the latter case, even the linguistic sign in its public functioning becomes assimilated from the start to a natural form, as far as its users are concerned.

The duality of signifiant and signifié, in a word, lacked the thirdness whereby the sign in its foundation (and whether or not this foundation be essentially arbitrary or "stipulated") undergoes transformation into first an object and then into other signs. The dynamics of the process linking semiosis in culture with semiosis in nature, and making one the extension of the other in an ongoing spiral of interactions, needs to be brought in. But, for that, the framework needs to be radically reformulated. As far as the contemporary establishment of semiotics goes, it was the privilege of Charles Sanders Peirce to provide just such an alternative framework under the influence of Locke's suggestion.

Let us look with some care at what Peirce did with Locke's suggestion, and see if we can see with something of dispassion "Why", as Short put it (1988), "we prefer Peirce to Saussure" today. We will see at the same time something of the doctrinal convergence Peirce, working with contemporary and modern materials, achieves with the foundational synthesis of a doctrine of signs distillated by Poinsot from the materials of Greek antiquity and the Latin middle age.

Beginning with his "New List of Categories" in 1867, and continuing until his death in 1914, semiotic in this broadest sense of the study of semiosis surrounding, as well as within, the human world provided the thrust underlying and the unity for a substantial part, and perhaps even for the whole, of Peirce's philosophy.⁴⁸

At the same time, even in the "New List of Categories" as originally drafted, it is fair to say that Peirce labored overly under the influence of Kant as Master of the Moderns—that is to say, between the horns of the dilemma set by the (false) dichotomy of the realism versus idealism controversy. Since, as I think, semiotic in principle and by right—the jus signi, let us say—begins by transcending the terms of this controversy, it is not surprising that Peirce had such a time of it whenever he succumbed to the temptation to try to classify his own work in realist-idealist terms. Assuming naturally the terms of the controversy as it had developed over the course of modern thought, he only gradually came to critical terms with the fact that semiotic as such is a form neither of realism nor of idealism, but beyond both.

As a disciple of Kant in early life, Peirce labored at the impossible task of establishing the complete autonomy of the ideal/mental from what is individually existent in nature. In later life he concluded that this erroneous quest had vitiated modern philosophy (1903: 1.19-21). Significant of this evolution of his thought is the fact that in Peirce's later philosophy his supreme category of Thirdness changed from representation in 1867 to triadic relation as common to both representations and to laws existent in nature (c.1899: 1.565).

By his Lowell Lectures of 1903, and even already in his c. 1890 "Guess at the Riddle", it is clear that Peirce was well on the way to taking his categories of semiosis properly in hand and was marking out a course of future development for philosophy (as semiotic) that is nothing less than a new age, as different in its characteristics as is the "realism" of Greek and Latin times from the idealism of modern times in the national languages.

In his "Minute Logic" (c.1902a: 1.203-272) we have a lengthy analysis of what he calls "ideal" or "final" causality. He assimilates these two terms as descriptions of the same general type of causality (ibid.: 1.211, 227). But, in successive analyses (ibid.: 1.211, 214, 227, 231; and similarly in 1903: 1.26), it emerges that causality by ideas constitutes the more general form of this sort of explanation, inasmuch as final causality, being concerned with mind, purpose, or quasi-purpose, is restricted to psychology and biology (c.1902a: 1.269), whereas ideal causality in its general type requires as such neither purpose (1.211) nor mind nor soul (1.216: cf. the analysis of Poinsot 1632a: 177/8-178/7).

Now Peirce identifies this ideal causality with his category of Thirdness, the central element of his semiotic (1903: 1.26) and the locus for any account of narrative, or of "lawfulness of any kind". Thirdness consists of triadic relations (c. 1899: 1.565). In these triadic relations the foundations specify the several relations in different ways, so that one relation is specified, for example, as "lover of", and another as "loved by" (1897: 3.466).

Thanks to their specification, triadic relations have a certain generality (c.1902a: 2.92; 1903: 1.26). Signs constitute one general class of triadic relations, and the laws of nature (which are expressed through signs) constitute the other general class (c. 1896: 1.480). Signs themselves are either genuine or degenerate. Genuine signs concern existential relations between interacting bodies and need an interpretant to be fully specified as signs (c.1902a: 2.92). For the genuine triadic sign relation is a mind-dependent similarity relation between the object of the existential relation and the existential relation itself as object for the interpretant (1904: 8.332). For example, words need an interpretant to be fully specified as signs. Triadic sign relations that are degenerate in the first degree concern existential relations between interacting bodies but require no interpretant to make them fully specified as signs. For example, a rap on the door means a visitor, with no explanation needed. Triadic sign relations that are degenerate in the second degree concern mind-dependent relations specified by the intrinsic possibility of the objects with which they are concerned, because these relations cannot vary between truth and falsity whatever any human group may think, as for example, in the case of mathematics, logic, ethics, esthetics, psychology, and poetry (1903a: 5.125; 1908: 6.455; c.1909: 6.328).

It is clear that when either science or literature, or anything in between, is considered in a semiotic framework as comprehensive as this, an exclusive treatment of its processes from the standpoint of constructed signs simply will not do. We risk being lost in crossword puzzles of great interest, maybe, but without validity as modes of understanding the semiosis peculiar to humanity as it extends and links up again with the semiosis that weaves together human beings with the rest of life and nature.

Thus, the work of Peirce is regarded justly as the greatest achievement of any American philosopher, and at the same time the emergence of semiotic as the major tradition of intellectual life today throws the lost work of Poinsot into relief for its original contribution. Just as the writings of the American philosopher Charles Peirce first illustrated something of the comprehensive scope and complexity in detail of issues that need to be clarified and thought through anew in the perspective of semiotic, so did the Iberian Tractatus de Signis of John Poinsot first express the fundamental character of these issues in light of the ultimate simplicity of the standpoint determining the semiotic point of view. The Dean of Peirce scholarship, Max H. Fisch, comments with emphasis in this regard (1986) that, within its limits, Poinsot's work provides us with "the most systematic treatise on signs that has ever been written".

Just as semiotics itself appears today as a completely unexpected development within the traditionally established entrenchments of disciplinary specialization, so does it require a thorough re-examination of the relation of modern thought in its mainstream development to Latin times in general and to the Iberian Latin development in particular. In renewing the history of thought and restoring unity to the ancient enterprise of socalled philosophical understanding, Poinsot's work occupies a privileged position in the mainstream of semiotic discourse as we see it developing today. "Poinsot's thought", Sebeok points out (1982: x),

belongs decisively to that mainstream as the 'missing link' between the ancients and the moderns in the history of semiotic, a pivot as well as a divide between two huge intellective landscapes the ecology of neither of which could be fully appreciated prior to this major publishing event.

In this way, in particular, semiotics puts an end, long overdue, to the Cartesian revolution (the collection edited by Chenu 1984 is very helpful in this regard) and to the pretensions of scientific thought to transcend, through mathematical means, the human condition. The model for semiotics is rather that of a community of inquirers, precisely because "the human Umwelt presents us with a continuum of past, present, and future in which continuity and change, convention and invention, commingle, and of which the ultimate source of unity is time" (Williams 1985: 274). Thus, the work of Williams (1982, 1983, 1984, 1985-1987, 1987a, 1988) and of Pencak (1987; Williams and Pencak, forthcoming) in penetrating the traditional field of historiographical study from an explicitly semiotic point of view, is one of the most essential advances in the developing understanding of semiotics today.

Eventually, we will see that the doctrine of signs requires for its full possibilities a treating of history as the laboratory within which semiosis, anthroposemiosis in particular, achieves its results, and to which it must constantly recur when an impasse is reached or new alternatives are required. Thirdness, after all, is what history is all about.

6. Jakob von Uexküll

Once the foundations have been secured, there remains the task of building the edifice and the enterprise of semiotic understanding, by elucidating at all points the crucial processes comprising the interface of nature and culture summed up in the term semiosis. This task, too, is clogged by underbrush accruing from presemiotic thought structures that must be cut away as semiotics reclaims from previous thought contributions essential to its own enterprise of reflective understanding.

We have now to see how the history and theory of semiotics includes as well background figures who, without explicitly understanding their work as semiotic, have made useful and even decisive contributions toward the recognition of what appears in its full propriety within the widening vista of semiotics. In the case of thinkers who did not deal directly, in the sense of with set and conscious purpose, with the notion of semiotic foundations, the wrestling in areas of semiosic functionings with conceptual difficulties accruing from obstructive thought structures is made all the more difficult for the want of an explicit entertainment of an alternative to the prevailing mindsets. In such a case, the very obstructions risk being incorporated into the creative conceptions themselves. When this happens, an inevitable degree of distortion results, to the extent that the creative novelties become assimilated to paradigms exclusive of the foundational clarity and expanse the perspective of semiotics could eventually provide.

There are thus three classes of what Rauch (1983) calls semiotists: there are the semioticians, workers who begin from the vantage point and within the perspective of the sign; there are the pioneers or founding figures of semiotics, the protosemioticians, who struggled to establish the essential nature and fundamental varieties of possible semiosis; and there are also, among the ranks of present and past workers of the mind, cryptosemioticians, who need themselves to become aware of the perspective that semiotic affords⁴⁹ or whose work needs to be by others reclaimed and re-established from within that perspective.⁵⁰ In particular, oppositions seemingly irreconcilable from the standpoint of the customary juxtaposition of idealism to realism often admit of subsumption within a higher synthesis from the vantage of semiotic. In such a way, apparent contradictions within the history of semiotics need not always remain so at the level of theory

Here, and by way of concluding our historical sketch, we will deal with the case of one of the greatest cryptosemioticians of the century immediately following the publication in 1867 of Peirce's "New List of Categories", Jakob von Uexküll. The Umwelt-Forschung he pioneered (1899-1940) is probably the most important recent illustration of a cryptosemiotic enterprise transcending, in the direction of semiotic, the limitations it otherwise imposed upon itself by embracing too intimately the mindset and paradigm immediately available in the milieu of the time and place.

When we talk of the Umwelt, as we have seen, we are talking about the central category of zoösemiosis and anthroposemiosis alike. The objective world generated at only these levels of semiosis finally constitutes, to borrow Toews's felicitous phrase (1987), "the autonomy of meaning and the irreducibility of experience" to anything that might be supposed to exist independently of it. This concept, belonging to the biological foundations that "lie at the very epicenter of the study of both communication and signification in the human animal" (Sebeok 1976a: x), we owe principally to the work of Jakob von Uexküll. So it is not surprising that von Uexküll has begun to emerge within contemporary semiotics as perhaps the single most important background thinker for understanding the biological conditions of our experience of the world in the terms required by semiotic.⁵¹

Having already shown synchronically how useful this concept is to semiotics, we will now look at von Uexküll's work diachronically in terms of its "semiotic lag", the phenomenon wherein the terms used in articulating a newer, developing paradigm inevitably reflect the older ways of thinking in contrast to which the new development is taking place, and hence constitute a kind of drag on the development, until a point is reached whereat it becomes possible to coin effectively a fresh turn of phrase reflecting precisely the new rather than the old. The new terminology has the simultaneous effect of ceasing the drag and highlighting what in fact was developing all along (cf. Merrell 1987).

In the case of Jakob von Uexkll, the drag is a consequence of having rooted his biological theories to an eventually counterproductive degree in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1781, 1787). On the positive side, it was Kant who best focussed thematic attention on the constructive regularities at work from the side of the subject in establishing the objects of experience so far as they belong to the phenomenal realm of the appearances of everyday life. Appreciation of the constructive role of the cognitive powers of the knowing subject and of that subject's affective shaping of cognitive content in the presentation through perception of what is known was, to be sure, an essential advance of philosophical understanding in the matter of dealing theoretically with the origins of knowledge and the nature of experience in the assessments of belief and practices. The emphasis on these matters communicated from Kant to von Uexküll was indispensable.

Dispensable was the Kantian failure to deal with the rationale according to which the constructive elements contributed by the subject—socalled concepts or ideas—are abductively arrived at as necessary postulates in the first place. This rationale was one of the several threads in the discussions crucial for epistemology that developed over the closing Latin centuries—particularly in Iberia—and were lost to the modern development as it took place, after Descartes, through the Latin filter of Suarez's Disputationes Metaphysicae of 1597.

In the German and Kantian context—even more, if possible, than in the modern context generally—the opposition of the terms "subjective" and "objective" is a firmly established dichotomy whose transparency is self-evident. Within this context, von Uexküll himself, who, as his son notes (T. von Uexküll 1981: 148), did not think of his work thematically under the rubric of semiotic, had little alternative to seeing the Umwelt in opposition to the supposed and so-called objective, and as belonging to the phenomenal realm in Kant's sense—on the side of the "subjective", that is, dichotomically conceived in opposition to the supposed "objective".

The want of alternative for von Uexküll himself has resulted in considerable confusion regarding his work in general (through misplaced associations with "vitalism") and, specifically, in notorious difficulties in interpreting (or "translating") the key term, "Umwelt".⁵² The difficulties are a clue to the real problem.⁵³ As far as semiotics is concerned, von Uexküll's work needs to be thought through afresh at the level of basic terminology generally and specifically as regards the extent of reliance placed on the Kantian scheme for philosophy of mind.

T. von Uexküll, for example, in explaining his father's work for the context of semiotics today, unwittingly brings out the inconsistency that obtains between an orthodox Kantian perspective and the perspective of semiotic. According to the son's account (I choose an example where the inconsistency that runs throughout the account is concisely illustrated within one short paragraph, T. von Uexküll 1981: 161): on the one hand, "A schema is a strictly private program" for the formation of complex signs "in our subjective universe"; and, on the other hand, "The schemata which we have formed during our life are intersubjectively identical" at least "in the most general outlines". But, of course, to speak of the intersubjective save as a pure appearance, in a Kantian context, is as internally inconsistent as to speak of a grasping of the Ding-an-sich in that same context (as Hegel best noted).

The conflict, thus, is between an idealist perspective in which the mind knows only what it constructs and the semiotic perspective in which what the mind constructs and what is partially prejacent to those constructions interweave objectively to constitute indistinctly what is directly experienced and known.

Himself immersed in the Kantian philosophy—that is, the most classical of the classical modern idealisms—Jakob von Uexküll yet was creating in spite of that immersion, through a creative intuition of his own, a notion anticipating another context entirely, a context which had yet to catalyze thematically and receive general acceptance under its own proper name, to wit, the context of semiotic as the doctrine of signs. He was inadvertently precipitating a paradigm shift. A formula I applied to Heidegger (1986: 56), mutatis mutandis (that is, substituting "biologist" for "philosopher" and "from within" for "against") can be applied to Jakob von Uexkll: among modern biologists he is the one who struggled most from within the coils of German idealism and in the direction of a semiotic.

For, unlike Heidegger, who expressly wrestled with reaching an alternative to the existing paradigms both realist and idealist, von Uexküll embraced a horn of the false dilemma: he saw himself as merely extending the Kantian paradigm to biology. He did not see that such an "adaptation" presupposed a capacity of human understanding incompatible with the original claims Kant thought to establish for rational life by his initiative. In other words, to apply Kant's paradigm as von Uexküll intended, it was necessary in the application already to transcend the paradigm—an adaptation of the original through mutation indeed.

The genuine adoption by a human observer of the point of view of another life form, on which Umwelt research is predicated, is a-priori impossible in the original Kantian scheme. Either Umweltensforschung is a form of transcendental illusion, or, if it is valid—if, for example, von Frisch really did interpret with some correctness the bee's dance or von Uexküll the toad's search image—then von Uexküll, in extending Kant's ideas to biology, was also doing something more, something that the Kantian paradigm did not allow for, namely, achieving objectively and grasping as such an intersubjective correspondence between subjectivities attained through the sign relation.⁵⁴

Once it is understood that the classical terms of the subject-object dichotomy are rendered nugatory within the perspective of a doctrine of signs and that, within this context, the term "objective" functions precisely to mean the prospectively intersubjective, in opposition to both terms of the dichotomy classically understood, new possibilities of understanding are opened up. These possibilities are more in line with what is at the center of, the original to, von Uexkll's work than could be seen through the filter of Kantian idealism, which provided at the time the only developed language available to a scientist of philosophical bent. As "a consistently shared point of view, having as its subject matter all systems of signs irrespective of their substance and without regard to the species of the emitter or receiver involved" (Sebeok 1968: 64), semiotics requires a theoretical foundation equally comprehensive. That foundation can be provided only by an understanding of the being with its consequent causality and action proper to signs in their universal role. With all the subdivisions, neither a perspective of traditional idealism nor of traditional realism has the required expanse.

As semiotics comes of age, it must increasingly free itself from the drag of pre-existing philosophical paradigms. Beginning with the sign—that is, from the function of signs taken in their own right within our experience (semiosis)—it is the task of semiotics to create a new paradigm—its ownand to review, criticize, and improve wherever possible all previous accounts of experience, knowledge and belief in the terms of that paradigm. It is thus that the history of semiotics and the theory of semiotics are only virtually distinct, forming together the actual whole of human understanding as an achievement, a prise de conscience, in process and in community.

The maxim for that process, accordingly, is the same as the maxim for semiotics itself: Nil est in intellectum nec in sensum quod non prius habeatur in signum ("There is nothing in thought or in sensation which is not first possessed in a sign").⁵⁵ For if the anthropos as semiotic animal is an interpretant of semiosis in nature and culture alike, that can only be because the ideas of this animal, in their function as signs, are not limited to either order, but have rather, as we explained above, the universe in its totality—"all that wider universe, embracing the universe of existents as a part"—as their object.