Semiotics

2023-01-15 – I.W.

the purported usefulness of semiotics

this page is not a complete argument or lit review. it's a map of some things i've figured out so far, and the point of clarifying them is to open up further research. i include books here that i've only flipped through or that it's been too long since i read but might want to revisit. hopefully it can help others orient themselves too, but it might also be wrong in some way, and it's certainly under-cited.

the literature on Peircean or triadic semiotics is full of big claims about what benefits its program offers. to summarize a few of these that i find interesting:

even if these claims are attractive, it's reasonable to be skeptical, and imo there are significant pitfalls. the biggest problem is people trying to "do semiotics" without having real mastery of it. rather than adopting the semiotic point of view consistently, some take an eclectic attitude in which they restrict semiotics to the description of only certain phenomena and switch it out on an ad hoc basis with other theories. they may restrict it to linguistic phenomena (Saussurean semiology), human culture (some semiotic anthropology, at least in practice), or life in general (biosemiotics). i find any such restriction an arbitrary limitation. it's not that i want to defend a strong metaphysical claim about the semiotic nature of existence (though i think we can learn from those who do) but that i think people are overstating the metaphysical implications. insofar as semiotics (not semiosis) is itself a discourse, a linguistic practice, we can do semiotics on anything we want, and there are advantages to doing so—ones which may affect the non-linguistic parts of our practices as well. semiotics is a different way of handling regularities in the world and our names for them, a way of asking different questions. consequently it could "work" as easily in geology as in logic, though i have no particular stake in geology and don't have time don't currently intend to go stepping on geologists' toes.

it's somewhat understandable that people fail to master it, since Peirce has been made inaccessible by a complex publishing situation and his own obtuse, proliferating, inconsistent terminology and idiosyncratic metaphysical investments (the mania for threes). it's also hard when the literature on semiotics has so many programmatic statements and so little practical guidance to back them up. this is ironic, since semiotics is part of Peirce's pragmati(ci)sm, and that would lead you to expect a more pragmatic attitude to concepts—they're not even meaningful if they're not usable. combining big promises with the gatekeeping effect of difficult to master terminology is a recipe for an insular faction invested too much in its own identity. no one would be allowed to criticize semiotics before sinking time into it, and the desire to maintain the value of that time investment would motivate them not to criticize. i don't think this is a huge problem, since as far as i know, semiotics hasn't gained any particular hegemony. rather, semiotics heads keep restating generalities because their institutional marginalization keeps them on the defensive. but it's a danger to have clear consciousness of.

another issue: i find certain of the things semioticians are attached to to be less profound or exciting than they seem to think. for instance, the idea of "self-organization" or "emergence" has already been thrown around enough by lovers of cybernetics and systems theory. give it a rest!! i'm wary of how the concept implies a progression from an indeterminate state to determinacy, like daoist cosmogony. we need to emphasize that there is no basic layer or backdrop of existence; determinacy is relative and only holds from within the "loop" of a system, which is ultimately empty. for buddhist or marxist reasons i care more about dismantling systems than marveling at them. let systems theory guys handle the fight for emergence in the abstract; if semiotics has anything to offer, it's the ability to concretely describe emergence by grounding levels of existence inside each other.

also, biosemiotics probably needs to be explicitly critical about its central term of Umwelt, which it has inherited from Jakob von Uexküll, and not participate in the revisionist whitewashing of his Nazism. just because Uexküll pluralized the Kantian subject into species-specific worlds doesn't mean he understood subjectivity as an ongoing transindividual construction process. his idiosyncratic quasi-Kantianism and anti-Darwinism are not facts irrelevant to his more appealing features—he was a Nazi whose ideology of nature attached each animal to an unchanging environment according to "a universal principle that he calls Planmäßigkeit, a 'conformity with plan.'"Schnödl and Sprenger, Uexküll’s Surroundings, 31.

 he was intent on guaranteeing a certain subjective freedom to the individual in creating its environment, and chose Umwelt in opposition to terms like environment and milieu that allowed for more determination of the individual by the outside. (A Thousand Plateaus and yogācāra are probably good counterpoints to this.)

much of the positive rediscovery of Peirce has been in reaction to the twentieth-century failure of Saussurean semiology and the morass of french structuralism and post-structuralism. to recap the common assessment: where Saussure's idea of the sign is in two parts (signifier, signified), Peirce's is in three: sign-vehicle (just sign for short), object, interpretant. the intepretant is the effect which the sign has, insofar as it stands for its object. in the most familiar example, the relationship between a spoken statement (sign-vehicle) and the state of affairs to which it refers (object) has its interpretant in the hearer's mental conception of that state of affairs. whereas dyadic semiology derealizes itself into pure formalism and in crypto-idealist fashion is unable to speak of the reality of the referent, triadic semiotics affords the referent (object) a fully real but virtual existence. there's no need to ask "is the referent real? can the referent really enter into language?" because we know by definition that the referent is exactly real enough to determine the sign to cause the interpretant, however large or small of an effect that is. where dyadic, synchronic semiology is confined to a single slice of time, triadic semiotics is up to the task of describing temporally-extended chains of signification and sign-relations that incorporate other sign-relations in various ways. where semiology is trapped by human language, semiotics explicitly addresses not only symbols (signs linked to their objects by convention) but indexes (signs linked to their objects by contiguity or causality) and icons (signs linked to their objects by shared qualities, or resemblance).

i think most of this assessment stands. however, again i think a certain amount of care is required. a lot of people start to grasp the icon/index/symbol distinction and go wild with it, then come up against confusions that would have been resolved if they listened to Peirce for slightly longer. for Peirce, the icon/index/symbol trichotomy is one of three such trichotomies, namely the one concerning the sign-object relation. the other two are qualisign vs sinsign vs legisign (concerning the nature of the sign-vehicle itself) and rheme vs dicent vs delome (concerning the sign-interpretant relation, i.e. the way the interpretant itself represents the connection between the sign and its object). all of these are to me only heuristic distinctions, but they're very useful ones and should be basic required knowledge for doing semiotics, though i'm not going to go into excessive explanation of them here.

when we try to use Peirce to do anthropology (or biology or whatever), we need to remember that this wasn't his own goal. just as Saussure's interest is in language, and this probably accounts for both strengths and weaknesses of his analysis, Peirce cares firstly about scientific reason. he's interested in how we come to have correct knowledge of an object, not by direct communion with it, but as the outcome of a gradual negotiation with perceived qualities, natural signs, and human symbolic communications. the specific normativity of correct correspondence is kind of taken for granted. but a lot of the social behavior we want to study semiotically isn't governed by correctness, but some other norm of efficaciousness! we need to be clear about what kind of norms those are if we want to avoid disastrous confusion—Paul Kockelman does have a semiotic theory of meaning which i think is helpful here. we also need to be reflexive about the goals of our own research practices, and while Peirce might again help address the "how" of that, i don't know that he has the answers for "whys."

book recs

ideally i would format this as a proper annotated bibliography, but that's too complicated for me rn. instead this section is lightly adapted from a response i gave somebody who asked for book recs on semiotics.

so to recap

bibliography

Ball, Christopher. “On Dicentization.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 24, no. 2 (2014): 151–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12046.
Cumming, Naomi. The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification. Advances in Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
D’Amato, Mario. “The Semiotics of Signlessness: A Buddhist Doctrine of Signs” 2003, no. 147 (November 18, 2003): 185–207. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.2003.090.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. A&C Black, 1987.
Guattari, Félix. The Machinic Unconscious. Semiotext(e), 2010.
Kockelman, Paul. Agent, Person, Subject, Self: A Theory of Ontology, Interaction, and Infrastructure. OUP USA, 2012.
———. The Art of Interpretation in an Age of Computation. Oxford University Press, 2017.
Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Univ of California Press, 2013.
Lazzarato, Maurizio. Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents 1.0. MIT Press, 2014.
Peirce, Charles Sanders, and Francesco Bellucci. Selected Writings on Semiotics, 1894-1912. Walter de Gruyter, 2020.
Rambelli, Fabio. A Buddhist Theory of Semiotics: Signs, Ontology, and Salvation in Japanese Esoteric Buddhism. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
Schnödl, Gottfried, and Florian Sprenger. Uexküll’s Surroundings: Umwelt Theory and Right-Wing Thought, 2022.
Tomlinson, Gary. A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity. MIT Press, 2015.
Vasantkumar, Chris. “Towards a Commodity Theory of Token Money: On ‘Gold Standard Thinking in a Fiat Currency World’.” Journal of Cultural Economy 12, no. 4 (July 4, 2019): 317–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2019.1614086.