Sign Studies and Semioethics

Communication, Translation and Values

Susan Petrilli

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781614519126
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book examines the issues surrounding the problematic perpetuation of dominant sign systems through the framework of 'semioethics'. Semioethics is concerned with using semiotics as a powerful tool to critique the status quo and move beyond the reproduction of the dominant order of communication. The aim is to present semioethics as a method to engage semiotics in an active rethink of our ability as humans to affect change.

Part I: Critical semiotics, structures and models

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Chapter 1

Signposts leading to semioethics: on signs, values and the non-neutrality of semiotics

“Logic came about for the sake of reasonableness, not reasonableness for the sake of logic.” Let us never lose sight of that truth, forgotten though it is, every day, in every walk of life ...

(Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers 2.195)

1.1 The sign science and its developments

After various phases in the development of sign studies across the twentieth century, commonly tagged “code semiotics” (or “decodification semiotics”) and “interpretation semiotics,” the boundaries of this field are now expanding to include studies that focus more closely upon the relation between signs and values. In truth, this relation is inscribed in the make-up of semiotics and in its very history. To concentrate on the relation between signs and values is important for a better understanding of expression, interpretation and communication in their specific difference and in their mutual interconnectedness. This is the aspect privileged in the present text. In any case, for an even broader view on the development of sign studies we refer the interested scholar to the Communication Theory Reader edited by Paul Cobley, published in 1996. With this volume Cobley offers a significant range of theoretical perspectives on signs and communication through a substantial collection of key texts by major authors, providing a welcome purview of theories from an array of different disciplines. Moreover, this work is continued and updated with another two volumes edited by the same Cobley, The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics, published in 2001, subsequently revised and enlarged in 2010 as The Routledge Companion to Semiotics.

But to return to the specific question of the relation between signs and values, Ferdinand de Saussure founded his sign theory on the theory of exchange value adapted from marginalist economics. Instead, Charles S. Peirce breaks with the equilibrium of equal exchange logic thanks to a sign model based on the concept of infinite semiosis (or, if we prefer, infinite deferral from one sign to the next). This approach is oriented by the logic of otherness. It allows for opening toward the other and for the concept of a signifying surplus. Charles Morris emphasized the need to address the relation between signs and values explicitly and oriented a large part of his own research in this direction (Morris 1956, 1964, 1988, 2012). However, official semiotics has largely emerged as a predominantly theoretistic or gnoseological science, a descriptive science with claims to neutrality. We propose to recover and develop that special bent in semiotics which is open to questions of the axiological order in the world of lived experience and which consequently aims at a global understanding of humanity and its signs.

The term “semioethics” captures the sense of this orientation (Petrilli and Ponzio 2003a, 2010). Semioethics evidences the relation between signs and sense, hence the question of significance as value. However, if we go back to the nineteenth century we soon discover that Victoria Lady Welby, a fascinating figure from the Victorian age, had already introduced the term “significs” for the same purpose, marking her distance from what was commonly understood at the time as both “semantics” and “semiotics.” In addition to the renowned classics just mentioned - Saussure, Peirce and Morris - Welby too deserves a place in the reconstruction of the history of semiotics for her invaluable contribution to furthering our understanding of signs and meaning not only from a historico-chronological perspective, but also in theoretical terms. In relatively recent times, she has been described as the mother-founder of modern semiotics alongside Peirce, the father-founder (Petrilli and Ponzio 2005a: 35—79, 80—137).

1.2 From “decodification semiotics” to “interpretation semiotics”

When considering the philosophical question of “communication” with reference to semiotics and the contribution that can come from it, contemporary commentators think less and less in terms of “sender,” “message,” “code,” “channel” and “receiver,” while practitioners of the popular version of the sign science still tend to cling to such concepts (Cobley 2010b). This particular way of presenting the communication process mainly derives from an approach to semiotics which would be better tagged “semiology,” given its prevalently Saussurean matrix. The approach I am alluding to is commonly identified with such expressions as “code semiotics,” “decodification semiotics,” “code and message semiotics” (Bonfantini 1981), or “equal exchange” (Ponzio 1973, 1977). It was amply criticized by Ferruccio Rossi-Landi as early as the 1960s in his monograph, Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato, 1968 (translated into English as Language as Work and Trade, 1983).

This orientation is counteracted by what is now commonly indicated as “interpretation semiotics,” thanks in particular to the recovery of Charles S. Peirce (1931—1958, 1992-1998) and his writings, consequently of such concepts as “infinite semiosis” and the dialogic relation between signs and interpretation. The interpretive approach describes interpretation as a phenomenon that results from the dialogic interrelation among “interpretants,” or, more precisely, among “interpreted signs” and “interpretant signs” (Ponzio 1990: 15-62). According to this approach, meaning is not preestablished outside sign processes, but rather is identified in the “interpretant,” in another sign that takes the place of the preceding sign. The interpretant, as a sign, subsists uniquely by virtue of another interpretant and so forth, in an open chain of deferrals. This movement represents semiosis as an open process dependent on the potential creativity of the interpretant in the dialectic-dialogic relation with the interpretive “habit,” convention, or “encyclopedia” of a given social community (Eco 1990; Eco et al. 1992). Unlike decodification, or code and message, or equal exchange semiotics, in the case of interpretation semiotics sign activity is not guaranteed by a code. This is because the code (including choice of an adequate code) only comes into play as a part of the interpretive process, as a result of interpretive practice and as such is susceptible to revision and substitution.

However, in terms of the possibility of committing to a global understanding of humanity and its signs - of humans in the totality of their relations to themselves, to the world and to others - interpretation semiotics also has its limits. Semiotics has characteristically tended to concentrate on the gnoseological aspect of signs and to neglect the problem of the relation between signs and values - which obviously cannot be reduced to the problem of “truth” merely in a gnoseological sense. From this point of view, semiotics has often presented itself in terms of theoretism, adopting a unilaterally and abstractly gnoseological approach to the life of signs, which implies neglect of those aspects that concern values different from truth value.

1.3 The relation between sign theory and value theory

Irrespective of the philosophical importance of dealing with the relation between signs and values, there are at least another two reasons - the first historical, the second theoretical - for treating the question of values in the context of sign theory: (1) research in this direction has already been inaugurated (especially by Peirceans); (2) an adequate critique of decodification semiotics calls for close study of the value theory that subtends it.

Sign theory as elaborated by Saussure in his Cours de Linguistique générale (1916),¹ the “official Saussure,” but actually written by a handful of students on the course, is based on the theory of equal exchange value formulated by the School of Lausanne with such representatives as Leon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto and marginalist economics (Ponzio 1986, 1990: 117—118). Consequently, Saussure associates language with the market in an ideal state of equilibrium. Language is analyzed using the same categories developed by “pure economics” which studies the laws that regulate the market leaving aside the social relations of production, what Rossi-Landi (1968, 1975a, 1992a) calls “social linguistic work” and its social structures. This approach orients the Saussurean sign model in the direction of equal exchange logic, establishing a relation of equivalence between signifiant and signifié and between communicative intention, on the one hand, and interpretation understood as decodification, on the other.

However, this particular sign model and the value theory it implies had already been radically critiqued by Rossi-Landi in Italy by the mid-1960s. Rossi-Landi evidenced the limits of language theories that ground linguistic value in equal exchange logic, in the light of historico-dialectical materialism. In other words, he applied theoretical instruments originally developed in the context of the Marxian critique of exchange value in relation to questions of a more strictly socio-economic order to the analysis of language (Rossi-Landi 1972, 1975a, 1985, 1992a). However, his critique can be traced back even further to his monograph, Comunicazione, significato, e parlare comune [Communication, meaning and common speech], published in 1961, where he discusses what he calls (with ironic overtones) the “postal package theory” (cf. Ch. 14). This expression was intended to underline the inadequacy of those approaches that describe signs, language and communication as messages that, like a postal package, are sent off from one post office and received by another. With this metaphor, Rossi-Landi aimed to critique communication analyzed in terms of univocal intentionality, that is to say, as though formed from pieces of communicative intention neatly assembled by the sender and just as neatly identified by the receiver.

Rossi-Landi’s work can be related to Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s research. Bakhtin’s name is commonly associated with a monograph entitled Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, published in 1929, by Valentin N. Voloshinov, his friend and collaborator. However, this volume only became accessible to a wider reading public in 1973, when the Russian original was at last translated into English, after having been surrounded by silence during the Stalinist period, sharing the same fate as other works by Bakhtin and his “Circle.”² In this book, but even earlier, in 1927 with Freudianism. A Critical Sketch (Voloshinov 1927), Bakhtin and Volos...

Table of contents

• Sign Studies and Semioethics
• Semiotics, Communication and Cognition
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Introduction - The semioethic turn in sign studies
• Part I: Critical semiotics, structures and models
• Part II: Signification, logic, iconicity
• Part III: Understanding, significs and dialogism
• Part IV: The centrality of translation for semiotics
• Part V: From global semiotics to semioethics
• Notes
• References
• Name and subject index