Cultural Semiosis

Tracing the Signifier

Hugh J. Silverman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415919555
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317827986
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Critical Theory
• Index: Literature

Cultural Semiosis traces the theoretical itinerary of the signifier in the continental tradition. Cultural semiosis provides links for cultural studies to the philosophical, the literary, the historical and the social. Understood semiotically, cultural signs and signifiers are inscribed in the fabric of cultural practices. Cultural semiosis enters the spaces of everyday language, visuality, sexuality and symbolization. These original essays interpret and provide tools for the understanding of cultural studies within a philosophical framework. Contributors: M. Alison Arnett, Debra Bergoffen, Peter Carravetta, Alessandro Carrera, Julia Kristeva, John Llewelyn, Michael Naas, Kelly Oliver, Adi Ophir, Francois Raffoul, Mark Roberts, Stephanie Sage, Hugh J. Silverman.

Part I
Theorizing the Sign

Chapter 1
The Reasons of the Code: Reading Eco’s a Theory of Semiotics

Peter Carravetta

I Think I Am a Verb

—Ulysses S. Grant

Umberto Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics¹ is widely regarded as one of the most comprehensive treatments of semiosis.² It is also a turning point in Eco’s itinerary through various forms of interpretive thought.³ Moreover, in the history and development of semiotics in Italy, Eco’s opus is a milestone, a historiographical moment of consolidation as well as a compass needle that locates paths and sets agendas for subsequent study.⁴ After a necessarily compressed synthesis of some fundamental tenets of A Theory of semiotics, I propose to study three specific aspects:

First, how the theory qua Theory is actually constructed, taking into account its component elements, their definition, and their use.

Second, how a semiotic method is construed. Here I will consider its functioning and meaning with respect to the question of interpretation. The critical assumption (developed elsewhere)⁵ is that Theory and Method are inextricably connected and interdependent. But theory is basically related to ontology and ideology, whereas Method is the formal-epistemological component necessary for grounding and legitimizing theory.

Third, how semiotics treats the arts and offers a semiotic aesthetic, or an aesthetic semiotic. This will bear on the relationship between semiotics and social and cultural criticism.

In general, then, I propose to reread one of the most important and successful texts in the discipline of semiotics in order to gauge its coherence against its claims to universal validity, to question its metaphysical underpinnings, and to point out some of the paradoxes of a semiotically informed cultural criticism.

I. Topos

According to Eco, a “general semiotic theory [should be able] to explain every case of sign-function in terms of underlying systems of elements mutually correlated by one or more codes” (TS, 3). Moreover, a general semiotics “should consider: a) a theory of codes and b) a theory of sign production.” According to Eco:

In principle, a semiotics of signification entails a theory of codes, while a semiotics of communication entails a theory of sign production.

The distinction between a theory of codes and a theory of sign-production does not correspond to the ones between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’, competence and performance, syntactics (and semantics) and pragmatics. (TS, 4)

Stressing the shift away from structural linguistics,⁶ Eco continues:

It is not by chance that the discriminating categories are the ones of signification and communication. As will be [demonstrated], there is a signification system (and therefore a code) when there is the socially conventionalized possibility of generating sign-functions.… [T]here is on the contrary a communication process when the possibilities provided by a signification system are exploited in order to physically produce expressions for many practical purposes. (TS, 4)

If, as Eco indicates, semiotics comprehends and subsumes the other models of signification and communication, e.g., Chomskian, Saussurean, etc., he is also suggesting an even broader horizon, such that ideally it should replace philosophy itself.⁷ The terrain disclosed to inquiry by this discipline is also a sweeping vision:

semiotics studies all cultural processes as processes of communication. Therefore each of these processes would seem to be permitted by an underlying system of signification. (TS, 8)⁸

Eco goes on to explain that the two semiotics, that of communication and that of signification, are not “mutually exclusive approaches in opposition” (TS, 8).⁹

According to Eco, the communicative process requires that there be the passage of a signal from a source through a transmitter along a channel and addressed to a receiver. Following Jakobson’s model, Eco naturally assumes that any message will entail different occurrences of the five corresponding functions: referential, emotive, imperative, phatic, and metalinguistic (TS, 262). It follows from these premises that signification is possible only if a code exists already, i.e., “if something stands for something else” that was or could be. We shall return to this key formulation again and again.

A first consequence of this axiom is that all the communicative stages acquire meaning, signification, or a reason to exist provided that the sign (or signal) represents or substitutes for something else. This raises some problems, as if whenever some sort of exchange is deemed to be meaningful, communication simultaneously hides or obscures something else. The receiver understands, or rather “decodes,” what this sign (or cluster of signs) means¹⁰ because it falls within a network of systems and rules which the receiver already knows and where the sign becomes the sole bearer of necessary information.¹¹

II. The Field of Inference

Underlying Eco’s book is what Ferdinand de Saussure did not say. Saussure never clarified what the signified was, “leaving it half way between a mental image, a concept and a[n undefined] psychological reality [non altrimenti circoscritta],” which is given within that global plenum called society (TS, 14-15). Therefore,

according to Saussure signs ‘express’ ideas and provided that he did not share a Platonic interpretation of the term ‘idea,’ such ideas must be mental events that concern a human mind. Thus the sign is implicitly regarded as a communicative device [artificio comunicativo] taking place between two human beings intentionally aiming to communicate or to express something. (TS, 15)

Now we begin to perceive stress points in the unfolding of the Theory. We read that all semiological systems are “strictly conventionalized systems of artificial signs, such as military signals, rules of etiquette, and visual alphabets” (TS, 15). However, these systems make sense if the sign is taken as a communicative “device,” that is, a man-made artificial “thing” which entails intentionality and production and thus ultimately speaks to a consciousness! But if consciousness cannot be coded, it does not exist. Consciousness and intentionality are not thematized in Eco’s Theory of Semiotics, and would at any rate follow upon the explication and adoption of the rationalist notion of inference: “there exist acts of inference which must be recognized as semiosic acts”¹² (TS, 17). Inference, however, needs the sign as a necessary support, as a floating Grund of sorts, and intentionality is subjected to the same kind of radical semiotic critique, as will be the intensional fallacy and the extensional fallacy, which Eco discusses later with reference to the theory of codes (TS, 58-59,62-66).

Eco states that “semiotics is mainly concerned with signs as social forces” (TS, 65). Understanding these social forces is complex, owing to their multifaceted functions, their being originally polymorphous, capable of suggesting different conceptions of thinking and the universe. From ancient times down through Hobbes, “a sign was defined as the evident antecedent of a consequent or the consequent of an antecedent when similar consequences have been previously observed,” but the sign was also reconceptualized as “an entity from which the present or the future or past existence of another being is inferred [and] as a proposition constituted by a valid and revealing connection to its consequent” (TS, 17).

Eco must therefore make some fundamental assumptions in order to proceed with any of these definitions of the sign and the connected problem of intentionality/inference-signification. He is well aware of the critical risks: “Probably this straightforward identification of inference and signification leaves many shades of difference unexplored: it only needs to be corrected by adding the expression ‘when this association is culturally recognized and systematically coded’” (TS, 17). We must keep on referring to these “shades of difference” because they will help us in the two-fold task of seeing what semiotics includes, subsumes, explains, and what it ignores, expels, or cannot know.

For Eco, Saussure’s ideas had this limitation: the problem of the signified, by remaining unresolved, continued to be an “open” question, a question he had addressed in his earlier work on the basis of non- or pre-semiotic philosophies and criticism.¹³ Though the signified would later be the object of specific studies in the areas of semantics and pragmatics,¹⁴ the signifier still took center stage in his research of the early seventies. And the signifier was traceable. After all Eco’s historical-theoretical recollecting illustrates the ample and yet unharnessed possibilities of the notion of the sign, taking advantage of its concrete, empirical dimension. He can now transfer the notion of “communicative device” onto the plane of Peirce’s logical conception of the sign.

III. Sign, Absence, Theory

Peirce’s work is crucial to the theory of semiotics. Peirce’s definitions appear time and again in Eco as in the following passage from the Collected Papers 5.488:

By semiosis I mean an action, an influence, which is, involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as [the] sign, its object and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in anyway resolvable into actions between pairs. (TS, 15)

Hence the sign is, citing Peirce, “something which stands to somebody for something in some respects or capacity” (Collected Papers 2.228). Furthermore, “when—on the basis of an underlying rule— something actually presented to the perception of the addressee stands for something else, there is signification” (TS, 8). Eco adds that “the subjects of Peirce’s ‘semiosis’ are not human subjects but rather three abstract semiotic entities, the dialectic of which is not affected by concrete communicative behavior” (TS, 15, my emphasis).

While Eco’s account of Peirce seems to leave concrete behavior aside, his concurrent adoption of Morris suggests that something else must be going on here. First, Eco claims that “human subjects” are not involved. But how can this be if semiotics deals with cultural (or better yet: cultured, acculturated) communication (cf. Pareyson, Apocalittici e Integrati, 354-57)? The cultural is in principle a “human” product. Second, claiming that its dialectic is not affected by concrete communicative behavior suggests that it is removed, abstracted, or set apart from material or “real” communication. Such a position betrays formalistic and idealistic matrices.¹⁵

Given the exclusion of human subjects and concrete communicative behavior from the conception of semiotic entities, the question of the relationship between Theory and Method, of how ideas get translated into reality, forcefully reemerges. Is the Theory so metaphysical, so essentialist, so strongly inclusive (and therefore exclusive) and self-legitimating that, no matter what happens in actual human communicative intercourse, precepts will hold and validity will not be affected? Does not the “application” of the Theory need to be translated into a Method practiced through human agency? And doesn’t this have an effect on the very Theory (Eco’s Theory) from which it is derived?

Yet if we assume, as Eco seems to do, that method and theory are unrelated and can be studied as two autonomous areas of research, then does not semiotic theory aspire to timelessness, eternity, universalism, and totality?¹⁶ This would make it a “strong” theory in the tradition of Aristotle,¹⁷ Aquinas,¹⁸ Locke,¹⁹ and Kant, grounded in necessary but improvable axioms and deducing everything from them. Even Peirce’s triadic schema left the door open for a more existential and ontological conception of human agency. This trilateral epistemology which was potentially predisposed toward ontological hermeneutics²⁰ must therefore be reduced to a more manageable dualism, as in Charles Morris’s semiotics.²¹

In Theory of Semiotics, Eco cites this key passage from Morris’s 1938 essay on “The Foundations of a Theory of Signs”:

Semiotics, then, is not concerned with the study of a particular kind of object, but with ordinary objects insofar (and only insofar) as they participate in semiosis. (TS, 16)

This definition, resonant with the premises and the promise of one of the major efforts in twentieth-century culture to come up with a Unified Theory,²² seems also to be the ontological-theoretical foundation of Eco’s semiotics of the code. Such a semiotics is not preoccupied with the real, with any objects or things, unless they are first translated into signs and exist as signs … but not necessarily for something or for someone not readily present. The center of the universe, thefundamentum inconcussum, is an abstract concept/thing which necessarily harks back, or points forward, to something else, to an elsewhere. One gets the feeling that Hermes is showing only one side of hims...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Introduction
• I. Theorizing the Sign
• II. Cultural Signifiers
• III. The Limits of Semiosis
• Notes
• Selective Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors