Take the sign apple. It consists both of the sound-image apple and also of a kind of general impression of apples you have known, embodying qualities of roundedness, redness, shine, texture, and sound of apple flesh at bite and pop of apple-skin against teeth, tart-tang taste, and so on.*
One’s world is thus segmented by an almost unlimited number of signs, signifying not only here-and-now things and qualities and actions but also real and imaginary objects in the past and future. If I wish to catalogue my world, I could begin with a free association which could go on for months: desk, pencil, writing, itch, Saussure, Belgian, minority, war, the end of the world, Superman, Birmingham, flying, slithy toves, General Grant, the 1984 Olympics, Lilliput, Mozart, Don Giovanni, The Grateful Dead, backing and filling, say it isn’t so, dreaming …
The nearest thing to a recorded world of signs is the world of H. C. Earwicker in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
VIII
In a sign, the signifier and the signified are interpenetrated so that the signifier becomes, in a sense, transformed by the signified.
Saussure gave a formal analysis of the dual nature of the sign. It remained for Werner and Kaplan and other writers to describe the dynamic process by which the signifier and signified are interpenetrated and the former transformed.
If you do not believe that the word apple has been transformed by the percept apple, do this experiment: repeat the word apple aloud fifty times. Somewhere along the way, it will suddenly lose its magic transformation into appleness and like Cinderella at midnight become the drab little vocable it really is.
Further evidence of the interpenetration of signifier and signified is false onomatopoeia.
Words like boom, pow, tick-tock are said to be onomatopoetic. But what about these words: spatter, slice, brittle, limber, blue, yellow, high, low, rattle? Many people would say that there is some resemblance between these words and the things they signify. Blue sounds more like blue than yellow. Brittle sounds brittler than limber. But there is no such resemblance. Or rather, what resemblance there is, is far more remote and problematical than it appears. The resemblance occurs because the signifier and signified have been interpenetrated through use by the sign-user.
Slimy does not sound slimy to a German speaker.
IX
Signs undergo an evolution, or rather a devolution.*
At first, the signifier serves as the discovery vehicle through which the signified is known, e.g., Helen Keller discovering water through water—or any two-year-old learning the name of a new object — Peirce’s example:
BOY: What is that?
FATHER: That is a balloon.
Note that when a child hears a new name, he will repeat it; his lips will move silently while he frowns and muses as he considers how this round inflated object can be fitted into this peculiar utterance, balloon.
Next, the signifier becomes transformed by the signified: the signifier balloon becomes informed by the distention, the stretched-rubber, light, uptending, squinch-sound-against-fingers signified.
Next, there is a hardening and closure of the signifier, so that in the end the signified becomes encased in a simulacrum like a mummy in a mummy case.
FIRST BIRD WATCHER: What is that?
SECOND BIRD WATCHER: That is only a sparrow.
A devaluation has occurred. The bird itself has disappeared into the sarcophagus of its sign. The unique living creature is assigned to its class of signs, a second-class mummy in the basement collection of mummy cases.
But a recovery is possible. The signified can be recovered from the ossified signifier, sparrow from sparrow.
A sparrow can be recovered under conditions of catastrophe.
The German soldier in All Quiet on the Western Front could see an ordinary butterfly as a creature of immense beauty and value in the trenches of the Somme.
A poet can wrench signifier out of context and exhibit it in all its queerness and splendor.*
Cézanne recovered apples from the commonplace sign, apples.
Scientists recover the inexhaustible mystery of the signified from the mundane closed-off simulacrum of the world-sign.
One sees a line of ants crossing the sidewalk and sees it as—ants crossing the sidewalk. Fabre saw ants crossing the sidewalk and stopped to wonder where they came from, where they were going, how they knew how to get there, and why. Then, like von Frisch and his bees, he discovered there is no end to the mystery of ants.
X
Consciousness: Conscious from conscio, I know with.
Consciousness is that act of attention to something under the auspices of its sign, an act which is social in its origin. What Descartes did not know: no such isolated individual as he described can be conscious.
It is no etymological accident that the prefix con- is part of the word, since the origin of consciousness is the initiation of the sign-user into the world of signs by a sign-giver.
It is also not an accident that grammatical usage requires that conscious and consciousness are generally followed by of. One is always conscious of something.
It is also the case that one is always conscious of something as something — its sign.
If a hunter is conscious of an animal in the field, it is part of the act of consciousness to place it — as a rabbit, fox, deer. The signing process tends to configure segments of the Cosmos under the auspices of a sign, often mistakenly. It is often possible to see a certain pattern of light and shadow as a rabbit, ears, and all. The hunter coming closer may say with surprise: “I thought it was a rabbit.”
Deer hunters, who are increasingly shooting each other more often than deer, invariably report: “But I saw a deer!”
XI
If the sign-user first enters into an Edenic state by virtue of his discovery and constitution of the world by signs, like Helen Keller or any normal two-year-old, and if aboriginal sign-use is a joyful concelebration of the world through an utterance in which the ancient environment of the Cosmos is transformed and beheld in common through the magic prism of the sign, it is also, semiotically speaking, an Eden which harbors its own semiotic snake in the grass.
The fateful flaw of human semiotics is this: that of all the objects in the entire Cosmos which the sign-user can apprehend through the conjoining of signifier and signified (word uttered and thing beheld), there is one which forever escapes his comprehension — and that is the sign-user himself.
Semiotically, the self is literally unspeakable to itself. One cannot speak or hear a word which signifies oneself, as one can speak or hear a word signifying anything else, e.g., apple, Canada, 7-Up.
The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally.
You are Ralph to me and I am Walker to you, but you are not Ralph to you and I am not Walker to me. (Have you ever wondered why the Ralphs you know look as if they ought to be called Ralph and not Robert?)