Semiotics and its Masters. Volume 1

Kristian Bankov, Paul Cobley, Kristian Bankov, Paul Cobley

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781501503740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

This volume presents a broad range of topics and current frontline research by leading semioticians. The contributions are representative of the most cutting-edge work in semiotics, but project as well the developments in the near future of the field.

Section 1:
Semiotics in the world and academia

Paul Cobley

What the humanities are for – a semiotic perspective

Paul Cobley, Middlesex University, London

Abstract: In the wake of both 9/11 and the financial crisis of 2008, the humanities have been offered as constituents of higher education which, if more prominent and more strenuously promoted, might have prevented both events. At the same time, the humanities have undergone an assault from governments in the West, with massively reduced or wholly cut funding as part of an attempt to promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in universities. The response from parts of the humanities to these government initiatives has been strident, insisting that a thriving humanities or liberal arts curriculum is crucial to democracy, ethics and citizenship, and that the humanities should be an essential ingredient of science and business education. Contemporary semiotics’ deployment of the concept of Umwelt demonstrates that the contribution the humanities might make to theory, practice and social life remains indispensable. Yet this contribution is of a rather different character to that portrayed in the traditional defence of ’humanistic’ study. Indeed, the example of semiotics reveals that the humanities themselves are regularly misconceived.

Keywords:humanities, semiotics, ethics, humanism, umwelt

1Introduction

A personal story illustrates one of the main points in what follows. When I was about 10 years old, I was standing outside the surgery of the local general practitioner, looking at the plaque near the front door. I turned to my dad, asking why doctors need to have so many qualifications, why they have to leave school with a range of exams passed rather than simply focusing on the practice of medicine as their one and only subject. My dad, described on my birth certificate as a “wheel turner” for the Ford Motor Company, someone who had left school at 14 and was placed as one of the most lowly functionaries of late capitalism, was able to reply with a degree of insight which, unfortunately, seems to be beyond that of many senior managers in universities, education policymakers and powerbrokers. His reply to my questions was that it is necessary for doctors to demonstrate that their minds are active in other subject areas than just medicine so that their specialism is not merely a matter of niched competence, that it is informed from without and also because they need to be able to carry out the great many diverse tasks involved in their job.

In light of this, it is interesting to recall that one accusation frequently lodged at semiotics, both from within and outside the academy, is that it is insufficiently specialised. Semiotics does not always fit into disciplinary compounds or institutional enclaves, both of which latter are reified, although often of only recent vintage. In contrast to subjects in the humanities, semiotics has not become institutionalised. Some think it is synonymous with linguistics; others think semiotics’ home is in visual culture and the study of the non-linguistic; yet others see it as a literary ‘method’. Much of this is a hangover from the fashionable moment of semiotics from the period of, roughly, the 1960s to the 1980s, when semiotics seemed to many to be like a kind of magical decoding device. The one benefit for semiotics that lingers from that period is that semiotics, despite massive change and development in the last three decades, is still largely associated with the power of utility (pace the tedious arguments about ‘audiences’ meanings’ – see Cannizzaro and Cobley 2015). The humanities, by contrast, are currently under assault for their perceived lack of utility. As will be seen, the humanities are found wanting in the face of the putative utility of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and they are increasingly called upon to demonstrate direct economic use-value. Subject areas such as medieval history are seen by critics of the humanities as being arcane, over-specialised and divorced from the brute economic realities which are supposedly paramount in contemporary life.

Without wishing to draw too facile a distinction, semiotics is accused of being over-generalised despite having some of the flavour of practicality that is imputed to the sciences; the humanities are accused of being over-specialised and without demonstrable utility. Although the intent here is not to rely on this distinction, it does serve as a starting point to discuss the pratfalls of a knee-jerk defence of the humanities, and to suggest that a more nuanced response to the assault on liberal arts education in general – a response which might be decisively informed by semiotics – could be put centre stage in common understandings of what the humanities are for. That a more convincing response to the assault is desperately needed is demonstrated by the fact that the squeezing of the humanities, and the universities that house them, has accelerated even in the face of two key events in the last fifteen years.

First, in the wake of 9/11 there was a commonly-held view that the terrorists used education in a purely instrumental fashion; The 9/11 Commission Report assiduously lists the university affiliations of the main conspirators, all of whom studied science and technology, apart from Hani Hanjour who sojourned in the United States to study English and later took flying lessons. Indeed, some have pointed to the prevalence of ex-engineering students in terrorist attacks (Popper 2009, Gambetta and Herzog 2007), ultimately leading to the question “Is there something in an engineering education, such as that of 9/11 attacker Mohamed Atta, that, due to a lack of a component of humanities study, could lead to a lack of compassion for others?” (Bryson 2010).

Secondly, the financial crisis of 2008 brought to the fore much hand wringing that had been already fomenting in business schools (see Ghoshal 2005), centred on the dehumanizing process of business education. As the full extent of the catastrophe of subprime lending at the turn of the twenty-first century was becoming clear, many called for a renewal of the humanities and an infusion of liberal arts into business schools (for example, Colby et al 2011).

Yet such considerations have cut no ice with governments. In the UK, for example, a key plank of the post-2010 Tory government’s policy has been to cut all funding to humanities in universities through raising fees for all humanities subjects.

That the humanities as a whole is failing to articulate its worth in contributing to the activity of the mind in the current climate is cause for concern. Addressing this from the standpoint of semiotics, the following topics will be considered: ‘The humanities’ own public relations’; ‘The “other” humanities’, ‘Transdisciplinarity’, ‘Ethics’, ‘Anti-humanism’, ‘Agency and Umwelt’. Finally, I will attempt to formulate ‘What the humanities are for’.

2The humanities’ own public relations

The ‘rise’ of the humanities can be traced back to Cicero’s concept of humanitas – being good – and its development in Western education, particularly the trivium and quadrivium of medieval philosophy faculties, embracing humanities and natural sciences alike, as against the professions (medicine, law, theology). Closer to our time, though, the humanities in their most familiar form are a product of nineteenth-century Western education: they developed in tandem with the forging of a liberal hegemony in industrial society of that period and contributed to the reproduction, through instruction – in what is civilized and ‘good’ – of the bourgeois class in their mercantile and civic incarnations. Again, the philosophical faculty contained humanities as well as sciences (as is still the case in the Liberal Arts programmes in the US), while the natural sciences only became autonomous in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The decline of the humanities has arguably occurred steadily through the same period in the face of the rise of the natural sciences (Kagan 2009), but most rapidly with Western governments’ promotion of STEM in the academy during recent decades, managed through a crisis of funding.

As far as business schools have been concerned, the putative humanizing value of the humanities has been asserted repeatedly at crisis points in late capitalism. During the Cold War, McAllister’s quasi-ethnographic study Business Executives and the Humanities (1951) gave voice to numerous managers who valued, above all, a liberal arts/ humanities background for their recruits. These aspirations or requirements were echoed later in the decade by the Carnegie Foundation study (Pierson 1959) and the Ford Foundation study (Gordon and Howell 1959), each concerned with business and higher education. In the Reagan era, the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business report (Porter and McKibbin 1988) made similar noises, followed in turn by the report of the American Council of Learned Societies (1988). By the early twenty-first century, a full-blown crisis in business schools seemed to have developed globally, with numerous critics calling for the re-humanization of business education, usually by way of compulsory humanities modules. Ghoshal (2005) has already been mentioned; preceding him, Pfeffer and Fong (2002) and Mintzberg (2004) could be added, along with, later, Bennis and O’Toole (2005), Starkey and Tempest (2006), Starkey and Tiratsoo (2007) and Morsing and Rovira (2011) and those reporting inept practice by business school graduates (Feldman 2005; Blasco 2009). A recent milestone in this train of thought is the Carnegie Report, which concluded (Colby et al 2011: 5): “Like all undergraduates, business students need the ability to grasp the pluralism in ways of thinking and acting that is so salient a characteristic of the contemporary world”. That pluralism, which the report suggests is fostered by the humanities, is assumed to be lacking in business graduates but also, it might be said, among religious fundamentalists, particularly those who would inflict terror.

If the situation was not sufficiently overdetermined already, the last decade also saw a major crisis in Western universities as a whole. In another ethnography, lightly ‘fictionalized’, Tuchman (2009) pithily illustrated some of the nodal points of the crisis, witnessing the adversarial pitting of a management class against an intellectual class and the ‘deprofessionalization’ that has beset university professors in similar ways to its infliction on lawyers and doctors. With managers in the ascendant, along with context-free accountants scouring university spreadsheets (no doubt following an education in business that the authorities in the previous paragraph would deplore), it was unsurprising that questions began to be raised by apparent ingénues about what universities are for. In addition to asking whether it is really worth employing certain professors and buying certain equipment for universities, accountants’ questions about the contribution of certain subject areas to direct economic growth become inevitable. As Collini (2012: 144–5) notes,

[I]t’s usually at this point in the argument that an appearance is made by one of the more bizarre and exotic products of the human imagination, a wholly fictive place called ‘the real world’. This sumptuously improbable fantasy is quite unlike the actual world you and I live in. In the actual world that we’re familiar with, there are all kinds of different people doing all kinds of different things – sometimes taking pleasure in their work, sometimes expressing themselves aesthetically, sometimes falling in love, sometimes telling themselves that if they didn’t laugh they’d cry, sometimes wondering what it all means, and so on. But this invented entity called ‘the real world’ is inhabited exclusively by hard-faced robots who devote themselves single-mindedly to the task of making money. They work and then they die. Actually, in the fictional accounts of ‘the real world’ that I’ve read, they don’t ever seem to mention dying, perhaps because they’re afraid that if they did it might cause the robots to stop working for a bit and to start expressing themselves, falling in love, wondering what it all means, and so on, and once that happened, of course, ‘the real world’ wouldn’t seem so special anymore, but would just be like the ordinary old world we’re used to. Personally, I’ve never been able to take this so-called ‘real world’ very seriously. It’s obviously the brainchild of cloistered businessmen, living in their ivory factories and out of touch with the kinds of things that matter to ordinary people like you and me. They should get out more.

He is not wrong. Indeed, Collini’s characteristically witty observation should serve as the standard riposte to any blinkered imbecile who dares to hide behind the myth of the economically hard-nosed ‘real world’. However, as will be argued, Collini’s eloquent defence of the humanities as worthwhile amidst the university crisis – because they are “inherently” good or interesting – is not tenable on its own.

In response to the more recent attacks, the defence of the humanities has been undertaken by numerous of its representatives besides Collini in the last few years, often re-hashing jaded ideas from the very liberal hegemony which has lately sought to condemn the humanities to, at best, marginal status in society and, at worst, oblivion. Thus, the humanities have been cast by their defenders as the repository of ‘values’ (McDonald 2011) or, even more pointedly, ‘good’ values as opposed to “our current values and their devastating consequences on a precarious world” (O’Gorman 2011: 281). The humanities, it has been claimed, teach people how to live their lives (Andrews 1994: 163), they condense collective experience (Bate 2011: 66) and they preserve both democracy (Nussbaum 2010) and civilization (Watt 2011: 205). A further confection on liberal protestations in favour of saving the humanities is located at the intersection of national languages, ethics, and multiculturalism. Other languages, the argument goes, enrich our culture (Kelly 2011; Freeman 1994) and allow knowledge of ‘the other’ in a fashion that, at the very least, provides the platform for an ethical standpoint. The humanities are seen as crucial to promoting diversity – teaching students to work with others who are not like them (Tuchman 2009: 208) – because, unlike approaches in some business schools, for example, the humanities are putatively opposed, in their very existence, to de-humanization. Echoing psychologists such as Zimbardo and Milgram, as well as prominent critics of business education from within business schools, such as Ghoshal (2005) and De George (1994), Nussbaum (2010: 23) insists that “It i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of contents
• Preface
• Section 1: Semiotics in the world and academia
• Section 2: Semiotics, experimental science and maths
• Section 3: Society, text and social semiotics
• Section 4: Semiotics and media
• Section 5: Semiotics for moral questions
• Section 6: Questioning the logic of semiotics
• Section 7: Manifestoes for semiotics
• Section 8: Masters on past masters
• Index