Preface

For conspicuously absent in the burgeoning semiotic literature has been a unified treatise laying out the basics behind the very idea of semiotic inquiry in general, a treatise providing a map of semiosis as an integral phenomenon (it being understood that semiosis is but the name for the action of signs, which provides the common subject matter for the whole range of inquiries covered by the umbrella term "semiotics"). This book is a remedy for that absence, a first approximation to a comprehensive rationale for the linking of semiosis at the levels of culture, society, and nature organic and inorganic.

I have tried to have a fair regard for contemporary and historical scholarship, but nothing has been included here just for the sake of being included. I have not followed the practice of allowing the sociological prestige attained by the application of special methods within semiotics, or by celebrated idiosyncratic preoccupations of individual authors, to enter eo ipso into the account. I have tried to allow the requirements of the subject matter to dictate the references at every point. So if there are some strange omissions, as may seem, the reader is asked first to entertain the hypothesis that the omissions are due less to ignorance than to the objective of answering the question of what is really basic in the outline of this subject matter. There can be disagreement over basics, but, for the disagreement to be fruitful, someone has first to make a stab at saying what the basics are. Here is my guess at the riddle of how all being "pieces" and "relation" can yet supply a coherence of substance.

The aim of the book, then, is to fill the need for an answer to the question of just what is the essential nature and what are the fundamental varieties of possible semiosis. The substance of the answer to this twofold question is contained in chapters 3 through 6. Corresponding to this answer is the answer in chapter 2 to the prior question of what semiotics itself the knowledge corresponding to the subject matter basically is. And bracketing this whole discussion by way of opening and closing is a kind of sociological look at semiotics today in chapter 1, balanced by a historical look at semiotics in retrospect and prospect in chapter 7.

This is a book I have long wanted to write and one that has, for even longer, needed to be written; but, at least for this author, only recently have the essential insight and opportunity come together for expressing in a coherent overall framework the basic concepts of semiotics. I believe the book effectively demonstrates the thesis Sebeok advanced in his 1975 "Chronicle of Prejudices" (156):

Movement towards the definition of semiotic thinking in the biological and anthropological [and, I would add, physical environmental] framework of a theory of evolution represents . . . the only genuinely novel and significantly wholistic trend in the 20th century development in this field.

The twenty-first century, I hope, will bear this out, and we will see an end to the "sad fact" recorded by Sebeok more recently (1989b: 82)that "the contemporary teaching of semiotics is severely, perhaps cripplingly, impoverished" by "the utter, frightening innocence of most practitioners of semiotics about the natural order in which they and it are embedded." Semiotics indeed "will surely shrivel and wither unless this lesson sinks in", but the optimism and message of this book is that the lesson, being inscribed in the very object of semiotic inquiry, has to sink in as the inquiry continues to be pursued.

Debts in writing a book are normally theoretical or practical. In this case, one debt, like semiotics itself, straddles the two the work of Brooke Williams in editing the manuscript. The theoretical debts should be clear enough from the references in the text itself and from the dedication. Here I will mention only the main practical debts, after first noting a terminological point that might otherwise cause the English reader some confusion.

This book was conceived and written in Brazil, while I was a visiting professor on the Faculdade de Letras of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte (UFMG). In the background to all that is written here is the recurring linguistic problem of the final "s" often added nowadays to the technical term "semiotic". Although English readers tend to take it that way, the "s" on this word is not a plural form, but rather a kind of malformation puristically speaking. Since the malformation is inevitable anyway in popular consciousness, in earlier writing for English-speakers, I have taken the occasion of the linguistic accident of the two forms to convey a difference between foundational and superstructural inquiries in the field.

That strategy is unworkable in Portuguese. There is no way to accommodate the distinction of these two forms ("semiotic" vs. "semiotics") at the level of a single lexical item, because the Portuguese term "semiótica" is required equally for both. To insist in the context of a Portuguese speaking audience on the form of the distinction as earlier established in English, therefore, would be tantamount to making an at least twofold grammatical accident (first of the peculiar class of "ics" words, second of contemporary popular English) into an obstacle to the effective presentation of the broadest and most fundamental issues.

In the present work, accordingly, an accident of Portuguese has led me to strike a compromise which extricates us from relying overmuch on an accident of English. While I have varied the two forms in context in ways that could be shown to be consistent with earlier specialized discussions in English, I have not made an issue of the two forms in their variation in this work a variation which disappears in the Portuguese. Instead, my concern in the present work has been, rather, to convey and to establish the overlap and common core in the comprehension of both of the forms as they occur in general use today, and hence to use them even in their difference as suits the conveyance of the single form "semi6tica" (or semiotic, or semiotics) for a presentation of the broadest and most fundamental issues leading to an integral doctrina signorum today.

In view of the practical circumstances which concretely gave rise to this book, I must thank first of all the members of the Fulbright Commission in the United States, who appointed me to the UFMG, and second of all Dr. Marco Antônio da Rocha, Executive Director of the Fulbright Commission in Brasília, whose decision to extend my appointment for another semester made the completion of the book possible. Along with these gentlemen of the Fulbright Commission I owe thanks to James Barta, President of Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, for the leave of absence to work in Brazil.

The chapters of the book reflect my work in semiotics particularly since the publication of Introducing Semiotic in 1982. The present book ends by confirming with new detail the outline for a history of semiotic inquiry with which that book began. Williams (1985a: xxvi) has made the point that the synchronic and diachronic, being mutually implicatory at all points, can be "distinguished but not separated in semiosis". In just such a way does the overall perspective of the two works differ, that of the earlier book emphasizing diachrony, whereas a synchronic overview of the general theoretical possibilities for semiotic research dominates the present book throughout. Introducing Semiotic lent to the past a shape from the present toward shaping the future. Basics of Semiotics gives the full proportions of that mediating shape.

In particular, the chapters of this book reflect mainly the two courses and eight lectures I gave in Brazil during the winter semester of 1988.

Chapters 1, 3, and 4 reflect the plenary address and "short course" given at the VII Seminário Internacional de Semi6tica e Literatura at Cam-pina Grande in Paraíba on September 19 and September 20-22. I thank Professoras Elizabeth Marinheiro and Celina Alves Pereira who arranged the invitation.

Chapter 2 is one of two partial exceptions to the Brazilian pattern of the whole. For this chapter my main thanks go to Professor Desmond FitzGerald of the University of San Francisco, who brought the thoughts there expressed into their first rough form through the invitation he arranged for me to address, on May 29, 1987, a Language Colloquium being held at his university These ideas were further refined in classroom and informal discussions at the UFMG in my course on the development of semiotic consciousness, but the original draft was made in San Francisco.

Chapter 5, the other partial exception, is substantially drawn from an article now in press with The American Journal of Semiotics under the title "Sign, Text, and Criticism as Elements of Anthroposemiosis". Besides being a distillation of the text used for my course at the UFMG on language from a semiotic point of view, putting flesh on the bones of the integral model for human experience outlined in Introducing Semiotic, Part II, Section 3, and again in the editors' preface to Frontiers in Semiotics, subsequent drafts of this distillation were criticized editorially and much improved through the suggestions of Brooke Williams, Floyd Merrell, Myrdene Anderson, and Dean MacCannell. To these four editors are due thanks for this chapter.

Chapter 6 reflects in particular ideas presented at the Pontificia Universidade Católica de Sâo Paulo in a long lecture delivered on November 23. My thanks to Professora Maria Lúcia Santaella Braga, who arranged the lecture and provided incomparable hospitality for me and my wife and who, by her enthusiasm alone, persuaded my audience that the idea of a semiosis affecting even the stars might be of value.

Chapter 7 reflects particularly the Ciclo de Conferências I gave at the Universidade de Brasília, November 16-18. My thanks to Professor Karl Erik Schollhammer, who arranged the conferences, and who inspired, in the course of his own class lecture that I attended on Jakobson's poetics, the formulation of the peculiarly semiotic integration of history and theory expressed here. Karl Erik's hospitality and conversations were of exceptional value in gestating this work.

I thank Professor Myrdene Anderson of Purdue University, Professor Nathan Houser of the Peirce Edition Project at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, and Professor Ralph McInerny of Notre Dame University for the help they provided from afar in nailing down a few key references.

Over and above the specific work on the volume, thanks go to the faculty members of the Departamento de Letras Germânicas of the UFMG for their friendliness to me and their interest in semiotics. These thanks are due to the Chefe in particular, Professora Stela Beatris Tõrres Arnold, who arranged the details of my stay with the faculty I thank Professora Ana Lúcia Almeida Gazolla, Pró-Reitora de Pós-Graduação da UFMG, for her early suggestion of the extension of my stay.

Special thanks go to Professora Júnia de Castro Magalhães Alves for her careful readings of the chapters and general interest in the progress of the work and for the countless ways in which she helped two strangers become at home in a new language and land. She also embodied the healthy skepticism that should seize any reader confronting a first "volume of basics". When I told her the third chapter was complete, she answered "Yes. But is it any good?" Now the question applies to the whole.

Thanks go to the students who, by their attendance in the courses and their discussions, concretely demonstrated interest in our subject matterwhich is the essential encouragement for any professor. Among these students, two stand out in the intelligence of their enthusiasm: Thais Flores Nogueira Diniz and Júlio César Jeha. Senhor Jeha also helped directly in preparing the bibliography for this work, and in providing a first draft for the translation of chapter 5.

I thank J. Bantim Duarte, Editorial Director of Editora Atica in São Paulo, for extending a contract for the work in Portuguese translation; and Professora Ana Cláudia de Oliveira for her linguistic support in bringing that November 25 meeting in the Atica offices to its successful conclusion.

An acknowledgement goes above all to my colleague Julio C. M. Pinto, who was himself on the Paraiba program and provided the translation for my lectures there. Out of that collaboration grew the concrete proposal that became this book. His translation of the whole into Portuguese for Editora Atica is my deepest source of debt in making of this Brazilian book a reality for readers in Brazil.

JOHN DEELY
BELO HORIZONTE
29 MAY 1989