(g) A Dublin Catholic
(h) A Belfast Protestant
(i) A housewife who watches five hours of soap opera a day
(j) A housewife who attends a well-run consciousness-raising group
(k) A member of the Tasaday tribe in the Philippines before its discovery by the white man
(l) A Virginia Episcopalian
(m) An Orthodox Jew
(n) An unbelieving Ethical Culture Jew
(o) A Southern poet who has sex with his students
(p) A homosexual poet who calls himself a “flaming fag”
(q) A homosexual accountant who practices in the closet
(r) A four-year-old child
(s) A seven-year-old child
(t) A twelve-year-old child
(u) An Atlanta junior executive who fancies he looks like Tom Selleck, dresses Western, and frequents singles bars
(v) A housewife who becomes fed up, walks out, and commits herself totally to NOW
(w) A housewife who sticks out a bad marriage
(x) A New Rochelle commuter who quits the rat race, buys a ketch, and sails for the Leeward Islands
(y) A New York woman novelist who writes dirty books but is quite conventional in her behavior
(z) A Southern woman novelist who writes conventional novels of manners and who fornicates at every opportunity
(aa) A Texan
(bb) A KGB apparatchik
(cc) A white planter in Mississippi
(dd) A black sharecropper in Mississippi
(ee) A Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus
(ff) None of the above, for reason of the fact that, whatever the impoverishing and enriching forces, it is impossible so to categorize an individual self — except possibly (r), and (bb), but even there, one cannot be sure. As anyone knows, a person chosen from any of the above classes may turn out against all expectations to be either a total loss as a person or that most remarkable of phenomena, an intact human self
(CHECK ONE OR MORE)
*Semiotics might be defined broadly as the science which deals with signs and the use of them by creatures. Here it will be read more narrowly as the human use of signs. Other writers include animal communication by signals, a discipline which Sebeok calls zoo-semiotics. But even the narrow use may be too broad. There is this perennial danger which besets semiotics: what with man being preeminently the sign-using creature, and what with man using signs in everything that he does, semiotics runs the risk of being about everything and hence about nothing.
At best a loose and inchoate discipline, semiotics is presently in such disarray that all sorts of people call themselves semioticists and come at the subject from six different directions. Accordingly, it seems advisable to define one’s terms — there is not even agreement about what the word sign means — and to identify one’s friends and foes.
The friends in this case, or at least the writers to whom I am most indebted, are: Ernst Cassirer, for his vast study of the manifold ways in which man uses the symbol, in language, myth, and art, as his primary means of articulating reality; Charles S. Peirce, founder of the modern discipline of semiotics and the first to distinguish clearly between the “dyadic” behavior of stimulus-response sequences and the “triadic” character of symbol-use; Ferdinand de Saussure, another founding father of semiotics, for his fruitful analysis of
the human sign as the union of the signifier (signifiant) and the signified (signifié); Hans Werner, who systematically explored the process in which the signified is articulated within the form of the signifier; Susanne K. Langer, who, from the posture of behavioral science, clearly set forth the qualitative difference between animal’s use of signals and man’s use of symbols.
*I am grateful for the important distinction, clearer in the German language and perhaps for this reason first arrived at by German thinkers, between Well and Umwelt, or, roughly, world and environment, e.g., von Uexkull’s Unwelt as, roughly, the significant environment within which an organism lives, and Heidegger’s Welt, the “world” into which the Dasein or self finds itself “thrown”; also, Eccles’ “World 3,” the public domain of signs and language within which man — uniquely, according to Eccles — lives.
The foes? If there are foes, it is not because they have not made valuable contributions in their own disciplines, but because in this particular context, that of a semiotic of the self, they are either of no use or else hostile by their own declaration.
The first is the honorable tradition of American behaviorism, once so influential, and latterday behaviorist semioticists like Charles Morris — honorable because of their rigorous attempt as good scientists to deal only with observables and so to bypass the ancient pitfalls of mind, soul, consciousness, and self which have bogged down psychologists for centuries. I start from the same place, looking at signs and the creatures which use them.
My difficulty with the behaviorists is that they rule out mind, self, and consciousness as inaccessible either on the doctrinal grounds that they do not exist or on methodological grounds that they are beyond the reach of behavioral science.
It is not necessarily so. The value of Charles Peirce and social psychologists like George Mead is that they underwrite the reality of the self without getting trapped in the isolated autonomous consciousness of Descartes and Chomsky. They do this by showing that the self becomes itself only through a transaction of signs with other selves — and does so, moreover, without succumbing to the mindless mechanism of the behaviorists.
The other semiotic foe is French structuralism — some of its proponents, at least — and its whimsical stepchild “deconstruction.” The structuralists, in high fashion — at least until recently — seek to apply the methods of structural linguistics to such diverse matters as literature, myth, fashion, even cooking. Whatever the virtues of structuralism as a method of linguistics, ethnology, and criticism, it is the self-proclaimed foe, on what seem to be ideological grounds, of the very concept of the human subject. Lévi-Strauss boasts of the dehumanization which his structuralism implies. Michel Foucault argues that with the coming of semiotics the concept of the self has vanished from our new view of reality.
But this may not be the case.
I do not feel obliged to speak of the deconstructionists.
Finally, a terminological confusion needs to be straightened out. There is an almost intractable confusion about the terms sign and symbol. We may know what we mean when we say there is a difference between my dog’s understanding of the word ball—to go and look for it — and your understanding of the same utterance — you may say “Ball? What about it?”—but we need to agree on what words to use to express the difference. Some writers (e.g., Peirce and Langer) would call the former ball a sign and the latter ball a symbol. Others would call the former a signal, the latter a sign. Though I have followed Peirce’s usage in earlier writings, I propose here to use the word signal for the former and, following Saussure, the word sign for the latter, and to avoid symbol as much as possible. This usage seems advisable for two reasons. One is that symbol for most people seems to connote something emblematic like the flag or the cross and not the radical sense in which the common nouns of language are understood as symbols by Peirce, Cassirer, and Langer. The other reason is that the latter usage will be easier to reconcile with Saussure’s valuable dissection of the sign into its two elements, signifier (signifiant) and signified (signifié).