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Basics of Semiotics BASICS OF SEMIOTICS ADVANCES IN SEMIOTICS Thomas A. Sebeok, General Editor BASICS OF SEMIOTICS John Deely INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington & Indianapolis ©1990 by John Deely All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48­1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging­in ­Publication Data Deely, John N. Basics of semiotics / John Deely p. cm.—(Advances in semiotics) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0­253­31676­6 (alk. paper). ­ ISBN 0­253­20568­9 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Semiotics. I. Title. II. Series. P99.D398 1990 401'.41—dc20 89—45354 CIP 3 4 5 6 96 95 This book is dedicated to Brooke Williams who edited the whole raising questions as she often answers them —like bursts of light and Ralph Austin Powell who made the whole theoretically possible and before that best taught me how to philosophize CONTENTS Preface ix Thematic Epigraphs xvii 1. LITERARY SEMIOTICS AND THE DOCTRINE OF SIGNS 1 2. SEMIOTICS: METHOD OR POINT OF VIEW? 9 3. SEMIOSIS: THE SUBJECT MATTER OF SEMIOTIC INQUIRY 22 4. SIGNS: THE MEDIUM OF SEMIOSIS 33 5. ZOOSEMIOTICS AND ANTHROPOSEMIOTICS 50 A. The Content of Experience 51 B. Species­Specific Objective Worlds 59 C. Species­Specifically Human Semiosis 62 D. The "Conventionality" of Signs in Anthroposemiosis 65 E. Criticism as the Exploration of Textuality 71 F. A Matrix for All the Sciences 74 G. A Model for Discourse as Semiosis 77 H. Summation 81 6. PHYSIOSEMIOSIS AND PHYTOSEMIOSIS 83 7. RETROSPECT: HISTORY AND THEORY IN SEMIOTICS 105 A. Theory of Semiotics 105 B. History of Semiotics 108 1. The Ancient World and Augustine 109 2. The Latin World 110 3. The Iberian Connection 111 4. The Place of John Locke 113 5. Saussure, Peirce, and Poinsot 114 6. Jakob von Uexküll 119 References 125 Index 143 Page viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FIGURE 1. The Levels of Semiosis 32 FIGURE 2. The Pyramid of Anthroposemiosis 78 FIGURE 3. The Planes of Semiosis within Discourse 79 FIGURE 4. Abstract Version of the Semiotic Triangle 88 FIGURE 5. Concretization of the Triangle within Animal 89 Experience FIGURE 6. Concretization of the Triangle within Human 90 Experience FIGURE 7. Concretization of the Triangle within the 90 Environment FIGURE 8. Semiosic Activity and Relational Phenomena 99 Preface The last half­century or so has witnessed an increasing interest in semiotic inquiry, with a concomitant scholarly production around the world of books, journals, and articles devoted to the endless facets of the subject. The image of astronomy in 1611 conveyed by John Donne has been suggested as the image of the modern semiotic universe: "Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; / All just supply, and all Relation". For conspicuously absent in the burgeoning semiotic literature has been a unified treatise laying out the basics behind the very idea of semiotic inquiry in general, a treatise providing a map of semiosis as an integral phenomenon (it being understood that semiosis is but the name for the action of signs, which provides the common subject matter for the whole range of inquiries covered by the umbrella term "semiotics"). This book is a remedy for that absence, a first approximation to a comprehensive rationale for the linking of semiosis at the levels of culture, society, and nature organic and inorganic. I have tried to have a fair regard for contemporary and historical scholarship, but nothing has been included here just for the sake of being included. I have not followed the practice of allowing the sociological prestige attained by the application of special methods within semiotics, or by celebrated idiosyncratic preoccupations of individual authors, to enter eo ipso into the account. I have tried to allow the requirements of the subject matter to dictate the references at every point. So if there are some strange omissions, as may seem, the reader is asked first to entertain the hypothesis that the omissions are due less to ignorance than to the objective of answering the question of what is really basic in the outline of this subject matter. There can be disagreement over basics, but, for the disagreement to be fruitful, someone has first to make a stab at saying what the basics are. Here is my guess at the riddle of how all being "pieces" and "relation" can yet supply a coherence of substance. The aim of the book, then, is to fill the need for an answer to the question of just what is the essential nature and what are the fundamental varieties of possible semiosis. The substance of the answer to this twofold question is contained in chapters 3 through 6. Corresponding to this answer is the answer in chapter 2 to the prior question of what semiotics Page x itself—the knowledge corresponding to the subject matter—basically is. And bracketing this whole discussion by way of opening and closing is a kind of sociological look at semiotics today in chapter 1, balanced by a historical look at semiotics in retrospect and prospect in chapter 7. This is a book I have long wanted to write and one that has, for even longer, needed to be written; but, at least for this author, only recently have the essential insight and opportunity come together for expressing in a coherent overall framework the basic concepts of semiotics. I believe the book effectively demonstrates the thesis Sebeok advanced in his 1975 "Chronicle of Prejudices" (156): Movement towards the definition of semiotic thinking in the biological and anthropological [and, I would add, physical environmental] framework of a theory of evolution represents . the only genuinely novel and significantly wholistic trend in the 20th century development in this field. The twenty­first century, I hope, will bear this out, and we will see an end to the "sad fact" recorded by Sebeok more recently (1989b: 82)that "the contemporary teaching of semiotics is severely, perhaps cripplingly, impoverished" by "the utter, frightening innocence of most practitioners of semiotics about the natural order in which they and it are embedded." Semiotics indeed "will surely shrivel and wither unless this lesson sinks in", but the optimism and message of this book is that the lesson, being inscribed in the very object of semiotic inquiry, has to sink in as the inquiry continues to be pursued. Debts in writing a book are normally theoretical or practical. In this case, one debt, like semiotics itself, straddles the two—the work of Brooke Williams in editing the manuscript. The theoretical debts should be clear enough from the references in the text itself and from the dedication. Here I will mention only the main practical debts, after first noting a terminological point that might otherwise cause the English reader some confusion. This book was conceived and written in Brazil, while I was a visiting professor on the Faculdade de Letras of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte (UFMG). In the background to all that is written here is the recurring linguistic problem of the final "s" often added nowadays to the technical term "semiotic". Although English readers tend to take it that way, the "s" on this word is not a plural form, but rather a kind of malformation puristically speaking. Since the malformation is inevitable anyway in popular consciousness, in earlier writing for English­speakers, I have taken the occasion of the linguistic accident of the two forms to convey a difference between foundational and superstructural inquiries in the field. That strategy is unworkable in Portuguese. There is no way to accommodate the distinction of these two forms ("semiotic" vs. "semiotics") at Page xi the level of a single lexical item, because the Portuguese term ''semiótica" is required equally for both. To insist in the context of a Portuguese speaking audience on the form of the distinction as earlier established in English, therefore, would be tantamount to making an at least twofold grammatical accident (first of the peculiar class of "ics" words, second of contemporary popular English) into an obstacle to the effective presentation of the broadest and most fundamental issues. In the present work, accordingly, an accident of Portuguese has led me to strike a compromise which extricates us from relying overmuch on an accident of English. While I have varied the two forms in context in ways that could be shown to be consistent with earlier specialized discussions in English, I have not made an issue of the two forms in their variation in this work—a variation which disappears in the Portuguese. Instead, my concern in the present work has been, rather, to convey and to establish the overlap and common core in the comprehension of both of the forms as they occur in general use today, and hence to use them even in their difference as suits the conveyance of the single form "semi6tica" (or semiotic, or semiotics) for a presentation of the broadest and most fundamental issues leading to an integral doctrina signorum today. In view of the practical circumstances which concretely gave rise to this book, I must thank first of all the members of the Fulbright Commission in the United States, who appointed me to the UFMG, and second of all Dr.
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