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Review: Semiotics and Semantics Author(s): Joseph F. Graham Reviewed work(s): A Theory of Semiotics by Umberto Eco Source: boundary 2, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Winter, 1978), pp.

1 Review: Semiotics and Semantics Author(s): Joseph F. Graham Reviewed work(s): A Theory of Semiotics by Umberto Eco Source: boundary 2, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Winter, 1978), pp Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: Accessed: 31/10/ :58 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to boundary 2.

2 Semiotics and Semantics* Joseph F. Graham This book has a relatively long and complex history extending, in both time and place, over many of the major developments which have brought the doctrine of signs to a recent, almost instant and rather difficult maturity. As explained in the foreword, the work began more than ten years ago with a study of visual and architectural signs (Appunti per una semiologia delle comunicazioni visive, published in 1967). A second and somewhat more stable version (La struttura assente, 1968) was to elaborate on the theory and to include a notable discussion of structuralism. Corrections and revisions were then made in a series of translations (the French published in 1972) with some further considerations to appear as a collection of essays (Le forme del contenuto, 1971). What is now in English was once supposed to be just another rendition of La struttura assente, but it has since been so thoroughly rewritten as finally to warrant being translated back into Italian (Trattato di semiotica generale, 1976). *Umberto Eco. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

These details are mentioned here not for any real curiosity, either bibliographical or biographical, but simply to suggest some of what has gone into and even some of what is gone from this general

3 These details are mentioned here not for any real curiosity, either bibliographical or biographical, but simply to suggest some of what has gone into and even some of what is gone from this general treatise in semiotics. The present text is actually a patchwork of various passages, new and old, translated and transposed, with a design to represent both constant and current interests in the subject. Very little remains from the debate (mainly with Levi-Strauss) about the epistemology of structural analysis, whereas the discussion (mostly of Katz and Fodor) on the semantic component for generative grammar has been expanded. But these and other shifts of emphasis are clearly significant for their theoretical substance as well as their local relevance, especially since the two happen to coincide. In a field so vast and varied, some knowledge of geography is necessary, and few know more than Umberto Eco. The basic question is raised, near the beginning of the introduction, whether semiotics be a specific discipline or merely a field of studies, the one being inductive, the other deductive in conception and definition. This first question is never answered directly, but in describing his own project, near the end of that same introduction, Eco imagines a landscape already settled and labored by previous efforts. Here is the broad field of semiotics, in the present state of the art, which he proposes not only to survey but also to shape in some way, thereby leaving his mark. This idea is set against an image of the sea which appears deep, but indifferent, with hardly a trace of any passage. Here is the discipline at its most rigorous, an abstract theory of pure competence, perfectly coherent and consistent. There is no reason to doubt where Eco shows his sympathy and throws his favor, on solid ground, with an art of the possible, for practical reasons, full of modesty, but there is still reason to believe that he is also drawn out beyond landmarks to a more ambitious if more dangerous task of full reconstruction. And his, after all, is a real theory of semiotics, not simply a review and certainly not a preview; it is a work for specialists, drawing on the work of other specialists, not just to report or to collect 'some exotic information but to provide solutions through synthesis. The premise has to be that a variety and diversity of phenomena can find unity in a semiotics both special and general. This is the very principle announced by Peirce and Saussure, shared by Morris and Jakobson, as now served by Sebeok. And this is the grand tradition to which Eco surely belongs, but the times have changed so that the conditions are more difficult than ever. The principle of unity has become a real problem in practice due to the very expansion of semiotics. The present generation suffers from success. It is now virtually impossible to follow each and every development in the field with any confidence, even for those who actively participate in one or more. Eco provides a long list with specific references. To know it all would be to know a lot of zoology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, logic, folklore, art, music, 592

4 film, and literature. Eco may come as close as anyone, probably second only to Sebeok, but his purpose is rather to suggest a method or a model which would bring most of this material into common focus. And despite vivid examples to illustrate and thought experiments to elaborate, the procedure is essentially analytic and the structure architectonic. The problem is no less acute, since the same expansion of semiotics has strained the original foundations and revealed many hidden faults. It has even come to the point where the very concept of the sign itself may no longer hold. Eco gives some sense of this crisis, to the extent that he argues against the established idea of the sign, replacing that entity with a function, but he does not explain the full context for his own position. He might expect his readers to know that situation, since he already expects so much, and yet that very situation could only be taken for granted if it were also given as such. But in this case, the problem and the solution are not separate, like a situation and a strategy, for they rather constitute a new and different complex as a direct result of the confrontation between semiotics and semantics. In some sense, Eco has created his own problem by forcing such a crucial issue, though much to his own credit, so that he may well be excused for the trouble, though not without consequence. The reader may wonder why all the fuss, unless he already knows and then refuses such a smooth resolution. The shape and the purpose of the book, its combined strength and weakness, are more easily if not just better understood against the background already presumed. The situation of semiotics is necessarily historical as well as theoretical, and the mark of its maturity lies in that necessity together with its difficulty. Quite contrary to received opinion, modern science cannot afford to forget its past. Through the efforts of Eco and others, the original idea for semiotics has now emerged in full force to encounter the empirical wealth and rational power of established disciplines. It has at the same time developed according to its own dynamic, working out the flaws and strains of its constitution. A simple story of semiotics could be told about a rivalry between two presiding spirits who returned years after the birth to claim their due. In this fairy tale, Saussure and Peirce would represent ordinary language and formal logic now in dispute over the nature of meaning. The course of events during the last ten years, so clearly reflected in the revisions of this book, does establish a trend leading away from a European structural linguistics and toward an American logical semantics. The real dilemma for Eco is not so much having to choose between these two, for he actually tries to strike a compromise and even to effect a reconciliation by dividing his theory in two, with signification on one side and communication on the other. And he has an almost unique capacity to succeed in his very ability to move back and forth, equally familiar with linguists and logicians, both European and American. His problem is rather different, though he is still caught in his own project; it is another problem of consequence. His 593

5 theory would in effect deny the very history on which he has to rely. In his initial and probably essential thesis, Eco requires that a general semiotics contain two major parts or components: a theory of codes and a theory of sign production, which correspond directly to the difference between signification and communication. His text is also divided accordingly, with long central chapters for each, flanked by shorter introductory and much shorter concluding chapters. To distinguish his principal distinction from others, he just maintains that it should not be confused with any of the following: langue/parole, competence/ performance, syntactics (semantics)/pragmatics; and he then claims to solve their common problem so as to dissolve the others into his own. The history of that problem can actually be read off that same list of alternatives, though hardly by chance, for it is simply assumed without mention. Saussure began with langue (language) and parole (speaking) to define the proper object of linguistics. The former is a social unity, a general system of signification shared by a given community, something potential and fixed like a code; the latter is an individual activity, an act of communication by a specific person to produce something actual and variable like a message. Saussure then describes language (in the technical sense of langue) as a system of signs in which the structure determines the elements, as would not be the case with units of definite or separate substance, like so many tags for so many things. This principle of structure is argued against a naive but stubborn theory which represents language as a nomenclature, with labels attached to items. As conceived by Saussure, the linguistic sign is uniquely constituted by a signifier and a signified, an expression and a content, neither of which have any real identity apart from their special relation in language which is doubly arbitrary, since they are both heterogeneous and discrete. In his theory of codes, Eco retains the force of conventionality which holds the system of language together, and even insists that it apply as the general principle for all signification. As a result, mere information and natural inference are excluded, simply because they do not involve any correlation of expression and content recognized by a human society. Without such a code, there can be signals but no signs in this stricter sense, a sense more restrictive than either Peirce or Sebeok would wish, and probably more idealistic, despite realistic intentions. In the strictest sense, Eco continues, there are no signs but only sign-functions. Here is a radical departure from the tradition of Saussure, one prepared though not justified by Hjelmslev, who introduced both functions and functives to explain the workings of the sign. This particular move is crucial for the attempt to meet a series of difficulties encountered when the model of language was first applied to other systems. The analogy failed on several counts, revealing how different language really was. There was simply nothing comparable to its complex structure, with minimal 594

6 units and double articulation. The idea of the sign as a specific and discrete unit of meaning does not seem to apply with material, like film, where the system is really more functional than structural. Another problem, foreseen by Saussure, was the difference among various types of sign, those which Peirce had distinguished as icon, index, and symbol. It has proven almost impossible to identify such differences with any consistency or regularity. In a fairly long critique of iconicity, again Eco argues that the concept of the sign as a fixed entity should give way to the more flexible idea of function, and further by consequence that the traditional typology would then classify modes of sign production instead of signs. The final objections to that system of signs, first described by Saussure, have more to do with language as such. It may have served well for phonology, but it was still very close to a naive semantics of naming, and then it had no real syntax at all. These faults remained, through Bloomfield and Harris, as long as language could only be conceived as some elaborate taxonomy. Chomsky was able to prove the inadequacies of that model for any full representation of language. He went on to set a new task for linguistics by proposing a different object for theory. His was to be a grammar of rules for sentences, rather than structures for signs, and thus a theory of competence. There is no reason to rehearse the rest of the transformational-generative program, especially since it does not figure directly in most work on semiotics. Chomsky has been indifferent himself to the whole problem of signs. But his impact has been felt in the European tradition, even where Saussure is most influential, though it has been received as one of several reasons to revise the idea of langue. In France, Benveniste and Greimas have been quite receptive to such criticism and active in promoting a compromise similar to that now advocated by Eco. Benveniste in particular has suggested a dual theory of language, both semiotique and semantique, to include signification and communication, signs and sentences. His semiotic is the system of Saussure, internal and structural; his semantic is external and functional to accomodate not only the syntax of Chomsky but also the pragmatics of Austin, Grice, and others. The general sense is simply that language has definite rules that apply to the use of sentences by persons for different purposes, and that as a consequence the domain of linguistics has to be extended beyond those narrow limits first prescribed by Saussure. And if this be important for linguistics, Eco would add, it is all the more urgent for semiotics. This concern for linguistics may seem excessive, even obsessive, since language is but one of many systems under study in semiotics. And Eco does oppose quite vigorously the colonial and imperial designs of a structuralism which would impose its regime in the name of science and progress. His theory of codes has breadth enough for text and discourse, and his theory of sign production does include translinguistic phenomena which modify codes in turn. There are sections on literature (rather 595

7 disappointing), rhetoric, and ideology (more interesting). Though he stops short of a full critique like that of Kristeva, who appears on the horizon at the end, Eco has come some distance from the almost complete dependence on Saussure and Hjelmslev where Barthes once began. Linguistics has also changed, however, under similar conditions. But the point is not priority so much as rigor, and the fact remains that the study of language still holds the lead on that count, if only because it has recently attracted such keen philosophical interest. There is a whole new league in town, with teams of logicians playing at linguistics. Eco now faces a different type of competition, which he surely welcomes, as he shifts his allegiance from Saussure (the linguist) to Peirce (the logician). It was actually Chomsky who opened the way for logic, though he argued from the beginning that the syntax of natural languages was autonomous and thus irreducible to either logic or semantics. A sentence could very well be grammatical and yet illogical or meaningless. But once the work began (with Katz and Fodor) on the semantic component for a generative grammar, it became more and more difficult to hold any of the lines between syntax, semantics, and pragmantics, which had served as a bulwark against the horde of problems gathered around meaning. In the breach of generative semantics, the entire analytic tradition has been introduced and applied to linguistics, including Frege, Russell, Tarski, Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Montague, Putnam, and Kripke. At issue is simply the representation of meaning in natural language, but that issue in itself is hardly simple, being rather split between meaning (in a more restrictive sense) and reference, ever since Frege first proposed to distinguish the two as Sinn and Bedeutung. Taking sides on this central and crucial matter in the philosophy of language, which Saussure had tried to avoid, Eco presents a revision of the interpretive (as against generative) theory of semantics still defended by Katz. This is essentially the design for something like a dictionary within generative grammar; it is both compositional and intensional, providing definition and distinction for the specific range of linguistic meaning. The rest is left to performance and reference. Eco later presents (under sign production) a pragmatic theory of mentions. Here, he follows the distinction drawn by Strawson, in argument against Russell, between sentences and statements, such that mention or reference involves the actual use rather than any property of a given expression. There are virtues and vices in each of these proposals, but they may never be discussed adequately, just because the center of debate has since changed ground. It would seem as if the ground itself were shifting, to the extent that many of the most basic concepts are now subject to serious doubt. A new logic of intension has redistributed terms like a priori, necessary, and analytic, proving certain propositions to be necessary and synthetic. It has been further shown that some of the most common words in natural languages have reference without any definite description. 596

8 Words such as "tiger" and "lemon" have denotation like proper names but no designation like concepts. The effect on linguistics has been to reassign the place of reference and to bring knowledge of language and knowledge of the world closer together, such that they may be indistinguishable at the limit. One can easily imagine Eco already back to work at revision, so that next time we will have some coverage of modal logic, natural kinds, and other hot topics. This is meant neither to disparage his effort nor to suggest that the latest is always the best. There is, however, no escape from the historical condition of current work in linguistics, where things move very fast. And as long as semiotics depends on or derives from linguistics, we will all have to keep up - and for help in that we may thank Umberto Eco. But we may come to ask where this will eventually lead. Already, in France, there have been some notable defections. Barthes has abandoned the field, and others are bound to follow. Has the great adventure come to an end so soon? Has it failed? These are serious and sobering questions which have no easy answers. We might even take heart at these latest indications of change in the discipline. Exit all amateurs! When the going gets tough.... And then this book could mark a new beginning. We will have to start again, learning the skills of formal logic, and revising our sense of purpose. This last may be the most difficult, for until now it has been possible to follow the trends without losing all contact with the common language of an educated audience. Eco is certainly readable but fully comprehensible only if you work at it seriously. And this type of accessibility may not last, for his attempt to bring it all together may well be the last. Semiotics will perhaps disperse in maturity. We might then choose to go our separate ways, leaving behind a monument to past grandeur, when we still believed in the possibility of one theory for everything that signified, a general science of signs. Whatever may happen indeed, this work will have definitely contributed to that happening. SUNY-Binghamton 597

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Terminology. - Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata, or meaning

Terminology. - Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata, or meaning Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of cultural sign processes (semiosis), analogy, metaphor, signification and communication, signs and symbols. Semiotics is closely related