Peirce's Semiotics

Global Semiotics Bridging Different Civilizations THE 11TH WORLD CONGRESS OF THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR SEMIOTIC STUDIES Under the Auspices of THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR SEMIOTIC STUDIES THE CHINESE ASSOCIATION FOR LANGUAGE AND SEMIOTIC STUDIES THE CHINESE SEMIOTIC RESEARCH CENTER OF NANJING NORMAL UNIVERSITY THE INTERNATIONAL SEMIOTIC RESEARCH INSTITUTE OF NANJING NORMAL UNIVERSITY School of Foreign Languages & Cultures Nanjing Normal University, No. 122, Ninghai Road, Nanjing, China October 5-9, 2012 NANJING CHINA Plenary Speeches 大会发言 1 Signs and Phenomena. Phenomenological-Semiotic Considerations Bernhard Waldenfels Both, phenomenology and semiotics have to do with the basic question as to how our experience is functioning. But considering the fact that phenomenology tries to go back to the intuitively given things themselves, whereas semiotics stress the mediating role of signs, there remains a certain tension between both approaches. This tension leads to unbridgeable conflicts only if one side tries to dominate or to replace the other. In this case the extreme attempt to proceed ultimately without using signs clashes with the opposite presumption that basically everything is made of signs or words. However, in my view we should and can seek the so-called things themselves through the medium of signs, of words, and of pictures and so on. There is an intermediary sphere closely connected with our own body and with the relations between one’s own and the Other’s body. This basic assumption shall be tested by referring to a series of key issues like saying and showing, materiality of signs, sign and trace, sign and affect, use and creation of signs. We will cite authors like Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau- Ponty, Derrida and Wittgenstein and, on the other side, authors like Bachtin, Bühler, Jacobson and Peirce. As to the bridging over civilisations, our considerations will by no means lead to a global form of being everywhere, but rather to the chance to be at once here and elsewhere, leaving room for singularity and otherness. 1 2 Eero Tarasti: Semiotics as the Transcultural Metalanguage Plenary speech for the Nanjing World Congress of the IASS/AIS The challenge of semiotics, in whatsoever school or conceptual system, is in the problem whether it transgresses the boundaries of the culture which created it. In the cultural studies approach even the abstract symbolic forms such as scientific methodologies are stemming from their context, in other words, they are seen as absolutizations of personal experiences of their authors. This means to put the quest of universality of the semiotic approach in other terms. If we think of such semiotic theories, as Peirce, Saussure, Greimas, Lévi-Strauss, Lotman, Eco and others of our own time, my own existential semiotics included therein, we must ask whether they hold true for all cultures. This problem has also its pragmatic side, namely whether semiotics can be used as a theory of multiculturality, guaranteeing the peaceful cohabitation of world cultures, as the counterforce to the idea of clash of civilizations. If we think of history of semiotic theories - whether they emphasize communication or signification - they are largely focusing on the fact there is something looming behind the sign. For structuralists the essential issue was structure itself which was hidden in the deep structure beyond the immediate perception. Even Peirce’s semiotics, albeit not a structuralist one, supposes that there is behind the triadic semiosis the so-called dynamic object which ‘kicks off’ the process of signification. Yet, not all semioticians have accepted this episteme in which the phenomena of the reality are reduced to some postulated abstract entity. The other idea, likewise questioned by mane scholars – in the side of deep structure – is that signification has a center. However, I shall first discuss the problem of deep structure. The phenomenological turn of semiotics rendered talk about deep structures problematic, that occurred a.o. in the Paris school; nowadays, one may also speak of ‘cognitive turn’ or ‘existential turn’. The famous doctrine of linguistic turn – one of the criteria of any theory to be considered ‘analytic philosophy’ – has got a new shape; it is now possible to study the surface of the reality and its expressivity and signifiance as such. Even if there were looming in the background something transcendental, even it is has to become actualized or realized (as the Polish scholar Roman Ingarden taught) in the individual and unique. Is it possible to make a science of it? In other word are we able to elaborate a scientific metalanguage accounting such issues, the meaning as experience, and not only the inherent structures making the meanings possible (U. Eco). What is involved is the problem of what is pertinent: signification as experience or signification as generation. If they fall in conflict, which one will win? To which extent a meaning which is a kind of ‘genosign’ (in the sense it carries along all the phases which lead to its creation), is still credible ad hoc, although the meaning as phenosign would be against it? The Hegelian dilemma: if facts do not fit to theories, the worse to the facts. There is also the possibility that meanings i.e. geno- or phenol-signs can get beyond the control. Generation can be so complicated and hierarchical a process that subject is no longer able to direct and master it. On the other hand, the surface experience can be so strong that causes a turn around, a change, a transformation from which there is no return. Big realms have collapsed due to the gap of surface level and structure. Karl Jaspers, German hermeneutic and existential philosopher used the term Scheitern or collapse, breaking down of such an experience. Centralized government management no longer corresponds to the experience on surface i.e. in the reality itself. People suddenly stop believing in Mr. Deep Structure. In fact, the idea that the process of 2 signification could be controlled and mastered is an illusion. From errors positive things can follow like the Persian semiotician Reza Hamid Shairi has stated in his paper at our recent Imatra congress of semiotics. Correspondingly to be in right can lead into catastrophes. In next, I shortly present some major semiotic models regarding the aspect of generation and center whereform they unfold. In Heidegger’s philosophy all is derived from being, wherefrom he could ‘generate’ the phenomena of Dasein. In principle, this process is organic but it could also be distorted and transformed into das Man Sein. In semiotics Greimas’s ‘generative course’ was basically of same type: from a deep level or isotopies one could infer all the signs and meanings. (In music theory this model is known in the so-called Schenker theory, which claims that in musical texts all was improvisation from the primal nucleus , Ursatz). In linguistics the model was crystallized by Noam Chomsky by his tree model, which was also the ideal of Greimas in the 1980s.) At the same time in Tartu- Moscow school one arrived at a model of structure of cultural texts and levels from, down to up: phonetics, metrics, syntax, semantics, symbols...and ultimately the semantic gesture (Jan Mukarovsky) or dominant (Roman Jakobson) as the all-pervading and centralizing principle. Kristeva’s model of ‘iceberg’ is of same nature but she returned the entities upside down: low in the depths was the realm of khora, and above it, the symbolic order. Nevertheless, these are all centripetal models, they all postulate a center of signification. In Jaan Valsiner’s cultural psychology likewise there is a model of personal boundaries around the core self. Moreover, the Saussurean semiology shares the basic vision of such an hierarchy in the respect that behind the chain of signifiers there looms the world of signifieds, the origin of all. However, if in this thought the center disappears, then no sign alone and as such is the core of being but signs have value only in relation to other signs (Therefore axiologically speaking the Saussurean value theory which serves as the implicite theory of present globalized world of communication, is a relative theory, not absolute one, the values are what a community decides). In the Shannon and Wiener model of communication, and its consequent Roman Jakobson’s model, the center can be either in the sender or in the receiver or in whatsoever member of the chain, when we also get different functions of communication. The Uexküllian biosemiotic model is also de-centric: subject or organism and object of Umwelt are in interaction of Merken und Wirken and therefore , what is involved, is a process without a center. Dialogue does not have a center and therefore it cannot be dominated, its end result is always unpredictable as Mihail Bakhtin already argued in his semiotics of disputes. Instead, the British cultural studies view on culture is centripetal: in the center stays our own globalized Western culture with its concepts, issues, interests, values; all the other cultures and previous historic phases of our own culture are its derivatives. In this manner models of power, discourse, gender, genre, narrativity are straight ahead projected to other cultures without paying attention if they were anachronistic or articifical when implanted to different contexts. It is typical of this theory that it underlines the role of theory without any own theory whatsoever (see Barker 2008:37). It also quotes great semioticians from Lévi-Strauss to Barthes and Foucault but only as individual genius scholars and not as semioticians stemming from this tradition of thought. All postmodern models of signification are ex-centric, i.e. subject has abandoned its central position. Deleuze- Guattari’s vision of cultural rhizome is a passionate argument against the generative tree model, which they interprete to be a kind of metaphor of the nocious centralization: “Chomsky’s grammaticality...is more fundamentally a marker of power than a syntactic marker…(D-G 1987:7)… rhizome is made only of linear,.

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