Introduction: What is sociosemiotics?*

Transcription

1 Introduction: What is sociosemiotics?* PAUL COBLEY and ANTI RANDVIIR What is sociosemiotics? It is not the easiest question to answer and any response will necessarily be incomplete. However, the current special issue of Semiotica attempts to address the question, partly derived from a groundbreaking panel of some of the world s leading sociosemioticians at the ISI conference in Imatra, Finland in To begin with, it is not clear what the name of the object in question is. Is it sociosemiotics or is it social semiotics? The former term tends to be dominant in the European tradition although, ironically, it echoes the predominantly Anglophone tradition (notwithstanding Gumperz, among others) of sociolinguistics. The latter tends to be associated with the Anglo-Australian, Hallidayan perspective in communication and sign study, although not exclusively so. (One contributor to this special issue even insists on social semiotics as the key term because sociosemiotics is more closely associated with Greimas and Courtés idea of an isolated and subjectivist semiotics.) Since one of the aims of this special issue is to bring together endeavors in the field from a number of locations, especially those that are infrequently acknowledged in the Anglophone world, we have alighted on sociosemiotics as our designation. It is possible that this will become the preferred designation. Certainly, it is a less unwieldy term in the sense that one seldom hears reference to social linguistics (despite an occurrence of the term in one of the contributions in this special issue). 1. Defining sociosemiotics Yet, the choice of a name is one of the least troubling aspects of understanding what sociosemiotics is. Sociosemiotics clearly stands in relation to semiotics, a term that is itself infrequently defined with any great rigor. Furthermore, it also has a close relationship with di erent kinds of Semiotica 173 1/4 (2009), /09/ DOI /SEMI Walter de Gruyter

2 2 P. Cobley and A. Randviir applied semiotics (cf. Pelc 1997) and their attempts to reconfigure sign study as the appropriate means for closely studying the phenomena of everyday life. Among the very few explicit definitions of sociosemiotics is that of Lagopoulos and Gottdiener who state, simply, that sociosemiotics is materialistic analysis of ideology in everyday life (Gottdiener and Lagopoulos 1986: 14). This definition, however, may be open to accusations that it is too materialistic in the sense that in semiotic analysis it is impossible to escape either from everyday life and the consummation of signs at the stage of data collection (see, for example, Danesi and Perron 1999: 293). Nor is it easy to escape from the necessarily pragmatic angle of semiotic studies (see, for example, Morris 1971: 43 54) in which the context, embedded in sign use, should be an important guide to interpretation. Stressing ideology may have also encouraged Gottdiener and Lagopoulos to distinguish sociosemiotics from so-called mainstream semiotics by associating the former exclusively with the analysis of connotative signification connected with ideological systems. Yet, one would be hard-pressed to find a cultural phenomenon in which denotative aspects were deprived of connotative codes. Frequently, sociosemiotics is left undefined, despite the fact that it appears in the titles of numerous publications (e.g., Halliday 1978; Hodge and Kress 1988; Alter 1991; Flynn 1991; Riggins 1994; Jensen 1995). Clearly, it must at least be a matter of a critical sign study that is aware of the specific and strategic ways in which signs are deployed in social formations. The opposites of this definition are probably implicit: that is, first, study of signs in nature (as if nature did not feature sociality ) and sign study in social formations that is not aware of the specific/ strategic deployment of signs (a straw man for some versions of sociosemiotics that deplore the supposed apolitical nature of some semiotics). In various ways, a good paradigm is provided by the evolution of language study in the twentieth century, especially in relation to anthropology. Influential here, but by no means watertight, has been the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Along with his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf ( ), the linguist Edward Sapir pursued the argument that, in brief, the language one speaks influences the way one thinks. Concomitantly, the thought processes of one culture are separated from another by virtue of the language in which each thinks and conceives the world. The idea was principally derived from the huge di erences Whorf perceived between European languages and Native American languages like Hopi ( Whorf 1956). The idea of linguistic relativism (Gumperz and Levinson 1996; Lee 1996), in which language is seen to be responsible for many key cultural di erences, clearly chimes with social specific uses of signs.

3 Introduction 3 Indirectly, then, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, influenced the development of sociolinguistics and, in turn, this influenced part of the development of sociosemiotics. Coupland and Jaworski s list of sociolinguistic principles is illustrative of some of the imperatives that would be passed on to a full-blown sociosemiotics: How are forms of speech and patterns of communication distributed across time and space? How do individuals and social groups define themselves in and through language? How do communities di er in the ways of speaking they have adopted? What are typical patterns in multilingual people s use of languages? How is language involved in social conflicts and tensions? Do our attitudes to language reflect and perpetuate social divisions and discrimination, and could a better understanding of language in society alleviate those problems? Is there a sociolinguistic theory of language use? What are the most e cient and defensible ways of collecting language date? What are the implications of qualitative and quantitative methods of sociolinguistic research? What are the relationships between researchers, subjects, and data? (Coupland and Jaworski 1997: 1 2) As can be seen, the list not only identifies the interface of signs and the social, it also implicates methodology in the relationship. Furthermore, that methodology is itself a hybrid, derived from various disciplines within the human sciences. Thus, if sociosemiotics is to be understood as a term despite the fact that, even as a loosely recognized term, it is able to unite an array of formidable scholars such as those in this special issue of Semiotica itis worth mentioning what is involved in any attempt to outline its boundaries. To do this, it would be necessary to briefly consider the development of the humanities, especially as these converge, crisscross, and diverge during the tense period at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this perspective, special attention would have to be paid to (cultural) anthropology, semiology and semiotics, early sociology, and other social sciences. The first step, though, would involve an examination of di erent subsemiotic trends in the context of the contemporary state of semiotics in order to distinguish the grounds for the (re)creation of a (new) field of sociosemiotics.

4 4 P. Cobley and A. Randviir 2. The contemporary field of semiotics: A very brief note There existed a relatively long period in the humanities of the twentieth century during which only two main authors were considered as the founding fathers of semiotics and semiology: Charles S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure. Locally, in areas such as Northern European and North American cultural studies, figures such as Barthes and representatives of poststructuralism were thought to represent contemporary semiotics on their own. E ectively, though, Barthes was often made to stand in for Saussure or semiotics (in truth, semiology ). It is worth pausing briefly to untangle these relations in respect of sociosemiotics. First, the relation of semiology and semiotics has frequently been treated as antagonistic. Singer compares semiotics and semiology in the following manner: Table 1. Comparison of semiotics and semiology (Singer 1984: 42) Point of Comparison Semiotic (Peirce) Semiology (Saussure) 1. Aims at a general theory of signs 2. Frequent subject matter domains 3. Signs are relations, not things 4. Linguistic signs are arbitrary 5. Ontology of objects of signs 6. Epistemology of empirical ego or subject philosophical, normative, but observational logic, mathematics, sciences, colloquial English (logic-centered) a sign is a triadic relation of sign, object, and interpretant but also include natural signs icons and indexes existence presupposed by signs included in semiotic analysis a descriptive, generalized linguistics natural languages, literature, legends, myths (language-centered) a sign is a dyadic relation between signifier and signified but appear necessary for speakers of the language (Benveniste) not given but determined by the linguistic relations presupposed by but not included in semiological analysis Second, and more confusing still, as mentioned in relation to Barthes and cultural studies, semiotics has often been taken to be semiology, without any reference to the Peircean tradition. But the confusion of semiotics/ semiology as conflated or antagonistic is further compounded in the case of sociosemiotics. Saussure s understanding of the sign, clearly evinced in the Course in General Linguistics, is psychologistic, based on the unity of concept and sound-image in the mind. Peirce, on the other hand, has a more materialist understanding of the sign as exemplified in the object component of his triad. For some anthropologically-oriented contributors

5 Introduction 5 to the general field of sociosemiotics, this was potentially a boon. Put simply, the sign could be demonstrated to have a clear e cacy in everyday life and material culture. Yet, oddly enough, sociosemiotic investigations still managed to flourish as materialist studies using the semiological tradition, often in blissful and hubristic ignorance of Peircean semiotics. Barthes highly influential primer on Saussure, translated into English in 1967 as Elements of Semiology, re-presented the Saussurean signifiant as a material entity, a substance in the circulation of signs. One important branch of sociosemiotics that relied on Barthesian semiology, among other things, was the Anglo-Australian tradition of social semiotics. Drawing, too, on the work of Halliday, general sociolinguistics and, later, Foucault and contemporary studies of the media, this tradition gained enormous influence especially in Northern Europe, North America, and Australasia, augmenting a burgeoning field of discourse theory that includes a plethora of robust journals (Discourse and Society, Social Semiotics, Discourse Studies, etc.), subdivisions such as critical discourse analysis (CDA), and a defined career path for those who wish to master and reproduce the discourse theory register. Yet, the separation and the conflation of semiotics/semiology are, at least in one sense, misguided. Human signs and semiosis are located in the mind, and concepts and sound-images are in connection, on the one hand, with sociocultural sign systems in terms of expression and, on the other hand, with either concrete or abstract referents, such that they are always implicated in the semiotic reality of a community. The tension of di erent regimes of semiosis really arises from relations between sociocultural reality and institutionalized sign systems on the one hand, and the internalized relations and individual applications of signs on the other. Another major figure in semiotics, although aligned most closely with Peirce, has produced work that proposes to solve the problem of di erent regimes of semiosis and di erent realities. Thomas A. Sebeok s career has consisted not just of his publishing and teaching ventures. His massive project of promoting disciplines and bringing together its representatives is well-known and well-documented. This included bringing together workers in the field of Chomskyan linguistics and sociolinguistics, as well as his work in convening biosemiotics and an impressive array of textual semiotics. Semiotics as redefined by Sebeok drew from the example of Peirce and the reference points of John Locke. Peirce s triadic version of the sign, his typologies of sign functioning, and the design of his sign theory to cover all domains, provided the groundwork for Sebeok to make his work amount to an outline of the way that semiosis is the criterial attribute of life (see Sebeok 2001; cf. Petrilli and Ponzio 2001). Semiotics in this formulation was not just a method for understanding some

6 6 P. Cobley and A. Randviir artifacts of interest to arts and the humanities. Rather, it evolved as the human means to think of signs as signs, whether they be part of communication in films or novels, the aggressive expressions of animals or the messages that pass between organisms as lowly as the humble cell. To be sure, the communication that takes place in the sociopolitical sphere is of utmost importance and the future of the planet currently depends on it. However, after Sebeok it is necessary to understand that human a airs are only a small part of what semiotics proper object is. The biosemiotics encouraged by Sebeok draws on the work of the Estonian-born German theoretical biologist, Jakob von Uexküll. Most importantly, perhaps, von Uexküll s work foregrounds the theory of Umwelt: the environment of species according to their specific modeling devices. For Sebeok, the closest English version of Umwelt is model, a term that has been bestowed with specific resonance by the Tartu- Moscow School of semiotics. The modeling device of humans for using signs and apprehending their environment is what is understood as language, a primary capacity of which is nonverbal. As is well-known, Tartu semioticians were interested in the links between di erent levels of modeling, particularly the level of cultural modeling ( tertiary, see Sebeok 1988), which was derived from the levels of verbal and nonverbal ( secondary and primary ) modeling. Already, in this division of modeling systems, there is the schematization of di erent kinds of semiosis and, possibly, the di erent semiotics needed to treat them. Hence, Sebeok encouraged specialism in semiotics: partly because he understood that academic endeavor has an aptitude for proceeding in this way, but also because subsemiotic branches one would include sociosemiotics among them were crucial to the work of semiotics as a whole. 3. Subsemiotic branches Yet, to complicate matters, subsemiotic branches of study have a longer prehistory than the theoretical formalization of modeling systems. Thus, the main way in which subsemiotic branches of research have emerged is through the logic of information channels (e.g., the optical channel; see Landwehr 1997, the acoustic channel; see Strube and Lazarus 1997, the tactile channel; see Heuer 1997, etc.). Also terms like visual semiotics, semiotics of space, and the like, similarly point at the possibility of differentiating between objects on the basis of the channels of human perception by which the world is turned into signs. However, it is doubtful that these channels can be actually studied separately (see, for example, Krampen 1997). Furthermore, di erent areas of semiosis have been

7 Introduction 7 articulated that lead to, and are included in, the cultural processes of anthroposemiosis: microsemiosis, mycosemiosis, phytosemiosis, zoosemiosis (see Wuketis 1997). So, the problem arises once more that sociosemiotics is always embedded in general semiotics. Jerzy Pelc (1997) attempts to address this question. According to Pelc, there exist more general levels of semiotics, such as frameworks and metastructures, and applied semiotics that also includes the field of sociosemiotics (Pelc 1997: 636). Pelc s argument follows the ideas of Morris (1946) in that the application of semiotics as an instrument may be called applied semiotic and applied semiotic utilizes knowledge about signs for the accomplishment of various purposes ( Pelc 1997: 636). Pelc states that... one may also have in mind not only semiotic methods but also definitions and statements contained in theoretical semiotics which then become a common basis for various applied semiotics (Pelc 1997: 636). This again points at the impossibility of introducing di erent trends of applied semiotics without support from, and integration with, general theoretical semiotics. Likewise, it seems that there should always be a ground for creating the above-named subsemiotic disciplines. Thus, it may still be questionable to a degree whether the term applied semiotics can be used because of a necessarily strong link with the theoretical impetus (otherwise, the applications obtain such an ad hoc nature that they start lacking common methods and principles). Pelc adds:... each individual applied semiotics has its own theoretical foundations. And since some of the applied semiotics are humanistic disciplines (e.g. semiotics of theater), others are social (e.g. sociosemiotics), still others natural (e.g., zoosemiotics) or formal sciences (e.g., the study of deductive formalized systems), their theories too di er as regards methodology. (Pelc 1997: 636) But, while Pelc s understanding of the general and the subsemiotic disciplines relies on attention to the intrinsically reflective nature of di erent semiotic trends with regard to the general semiotic paradigm, he suggests that sociosemiotics is to a great extent characterized by features typical of theories in the social sciences ( Pelc 1997: 639). As such, sociosemiotic research includes the methods of all disciplines that allow the study of the di erent levels of sign production and exchange as presented by Saussure (according to Bally and Sechehaye). These levels include psychological, physiological, and physical processes (Saussure 1959: 11 12), and link up with Peirce s discourse on logical and semiotic processes, as well as the above-mentioned areas and channels of semiosis. One area where levels and processes of interaction brought forward in sign creation and exchange has been considered is in late twentieth-

8 8 P. Cobley and A. Randviir century communication study. The processual stages of sign exchange as communication have been articulated by those influenced by the classical model of communication found in Shannon and Weaver (1949). While such processual models can principally be traced back to Saussure s sketch of oral speech, other types of communication models center on the functions of interaction as presented by Roman Jakobson (1960). Yet others focus on perceptions and events (Gerbner 1956) or on particular occupational communication (Westley and Maclean 1957). On numerous occasions, Sebeok argued that semiotics in general and communication theory are the same thing. Certainly, as Dan Sperber argues, there were many in the 1940s and 1950s who believed in and sought a unified science of communication based on semiotics, cybernetics and information theory (1979: 48). In light of this, it might be perceived that sociosemiotics is the equivalent to a more sociologically-orientated communication, an approach that is subsemiotic ( signs in society ) and whose methodology is defined by its objects ( signs in society, again). There is some truth in this; however, it is not the end of the matter since sociosemiotics sources, influences, and correspondences are also located elsewhere than sociology. 4. Sources and correspondences Apart from those areas mentioned already (notably, sociology, sociolinguistics, and communication theory), it should be noted that sociosemiotics has its sources and correspondences in the following areas: cultural anthropology (Kluckhohn 1961; Goodenough 1980 [1970]; Keesing 1972, 1974; Rosaldo 1993 [1989]), cultural semiotics, (Shukman 1984; Randviir 2004), sociology and the social sciences ( Kavolis 1995; Nikolaenko 1983; Ruesch 1972), Marxism ( Ponzio 1989; Rossi-Landi 1986a, 1986b, 1990), pragmatics (Verschueren 1999; Davis 1991; Morris 1938), pragmaticism (EP 2: ; cf. Schutz 1967 [1932] and Garfinkel 1967), as well as constructionism (see Gergen and Gergen 2003; Gergen 1985; Potter and Wetherell 1987) and the linguistic turn (Rorty 1967). A few words on each may help in the definition of contemporary sociosemiotics Cultural anthropology In attempting to define the content of culture for contemporary semiotic analysis, it is di cult to avoid commenting on the development of cultural anthropology during the twentieth century. The expanding range of

9 Introduction 9 cultural anthropology is related to the way in which sociosemiotics (as well as mid-twentieth century semiotics, generally) found its objects. European cultural anthropology had roots in early sociology and Saussurean semiology that are revealed in structural anthropology. Furthermore, principles of semiology, structuralism, and formalism are evident in the parallel development of cultural semiotics. Semiology is important both for structural anthropology (cf. Leach 1976) and for cultural semiotics (cf. Lucid 1997), since it has directed culture studies toward the analysis of sign systems as cognitive social systems. A gradually increasing emphasis on the description of cultural phenomena as the outcome of individually (or communally) articulated social sign systems led to the burgeoning currency of schools in cultural analysis associated with cognitive trends in cultural anthropology. Thus, there was a steady movement from the late nineteenth century description of cultures as sets of artifacts organized according to cultural patterns toward the interpretation of cultures as ideational systems (Geertz 1993). This means that cultures were no longer understood to be made only at the meta-level, through the organization of relations between cultural phenomena in scientific discourse. Indeed, while cultures could be viewed as theories in Kluckhohn s sense ( Kluckhohn 1961), throughout the development of the humanities there has been an increased attention to cultures as abstractions existing at the level of the cultural object. This has been characteristic of schools analyzing cultures as ideational or semiotic systems. Sociocultural systems are reflective systems and the overt behavior revealed in cultural traits depends on the covert behavior directed by cognitive structures such as image schemata, values, behavioral schemes, etc. Thus, the aim of understanding cultures has been to describe them as systems of knowledge, intersemiotic sign systems, reflective systems. In the fashion of the cognitive anthropologist Ward Goodenough, cultures can be seen as sets of decision standards, intellectual forms, perception models, models of relating, interpretation models, preference ratings and organizational patterns (see, for example, Goodenough 1961, 1980 [1970], 1981 [1971]). For a unified cultural anthropology, these cognitive structures would converge into sociocultural systems defined as systems that... represent the social realizations or enactments of ideational designsfor-living in particular environments ( Keesing 1974: 82). An important feature of the development of the humanities has been the widening of the scope of culture study by new methods, a process that is not unconnected to the development of semiotics. Rosaldo presents an understanding of the development of ethnographic and social thought as having its roots in the epoch of the Lone Ethnographer deeply immersed in fieldwork, the results of which were used by armchair

10 10 P. Cobley and A. Randviir theorists as information storehouses. The period of the Lone Ethnographer, according to Rosaldo, was followed by the classic period lasting in anthropology, from approximately 1921 to 1971; this was characterized by the objectivist research program, which viewed society as a system and culture as a coherent set of patterns: Phenomena that could not be regarded as systems or patterns appeared to be unanalyzable; they were regarded as exceptions, ambiguities, or irregularities ( Rosaldo 1993 [1989]: 32). Similarly, as Kluckhohn pointed out, the sudden expansion of the range of objects for culture analysis took place in tandem with the arrival of new methods allowing explanations of diverse phenomena supposedly outside the mainstream domain of culture, e.g., psychoanalysis ( Kluckhohn 1961). On the other hand, categorization of certain phenomena as not representative of a cultural system would principally allow descriptions of given systems by way of a principle of negation. This is not dissimilar to the predilection of both psychoanalysis and poststructuralism for the marginal as a repository of meaning by which to understand the mainstream. From this perspective, exceptions, ambiguities, and irregularities gain specific significance for the analysis of both the object-level (the socalled wastebasket method ) and the meta-level. Discussions in cultural anthropology about the range of objects for the study of culture and society have been of great value for the social and human sciences. Whereas one can find fault in Western scholarship for its primitivization of certain cultures and societies until at least the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, extending the range of research objects was of crucial importance in placing Western cultures and societies under the anthropological microscope. In a critical vein, Marcus and Fischer (1986: 20) have labeled this the salvage motif of ethnography. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, indigenous cultures were taken as research objects for Western humanitarian scholarship. So-called primitive cultures tended to be described as cultural groups rather than societies. The Western population that lived in societies was deemed, at the same time, too elaborate to study. Complex developments in Western civilization at the object-level (industrialization, inventions, and discoveries that brought technology, medicine, natural science to levels that inspired confidence modernity) induced new attitudes at the meta-level: society became a proper object of study alongside culture. Yet, more farreaching still has been the self-reflexivity of anthropologists later in the twentieth century (e.g. Cli ord 1988; Marcus and Fischer 1986). What became apparent to cultural anthropology was not only that the phenomena studied in culture are semiotic in their bearing, but so too was the way in which investigation of such phenomena took place, by partaking of

11 Introduction 11 procedures that were as equally semiotic (or, in a more limiting way, discursive) as the phenomena under question: The primary data of ethnographic analysis consist of informants statements about the code and records of their speech behavior... All available data, including behavioral records, the ethnographer s intuitions/and speech behavior, provide evidence from which an underlying cultural code can be inferred, and against which descriptions can be tested. (Keesing 1972: 301) What anthropology came to realize, partly influenced by sociosemioticallyoriented ethnographers such as Hymes, was that it was dealing not so much with the subject and object, but with the triplet of object, researcher, and informant. This has been a pretty salient point within the perspective of sociosemiotics Cultural semiotics While Western cultural anthropology widened its objects of analysis and adopted a more interpretative bent, sociosemiotics also drew inspiration from work carried out in more constricting circumstances. Indeed, it may have been such circumstances that prevented cultural semiotics as developed by the Tartu-Moscow school from being overly transparent, despite the clarity and breadth of its principle theses (Ivanov et al. 1973). What is central, however, is the conceptual floating of the elementary notions of metalanguage (see Levchenko and Salupere 1999). Cultural semiotics as a discipline developed in the context of a totalitarian regime, also involving other, explicitly political spheres. Under totalitarian conditions it was largely impossible to present the kind of breadth to approaching research objects that might have been achieved in less constraining regimes. Whereas it might be possible to openly promote philology or literature studies, it was simply not possible to promulgate semiotics as an individual field of scholarship with an identifiable structure and featuring the usual academic paraphernalia such as research projects, monographs, and textbooks. Any monolithic semiotic paradigm having to do with the analysis of society and culture would sooner or later have to get involved in the examination of power and ideology, social and cultural structure, and political developments. Scholarship via articles (as in the case of Sign Systems Studies, the oldest journal of semiotics in the world) was fruitful but prevented the development of a unified metalanguage even by members of the same school of scholarship. Of

12 12 P. Cobley and A. Randviir course, this is not uncharacteristic of textbooks and anthologies in different disciplines that have developed in free societies and in the tradition of long-term institutionalization (e.g., psychology, sociology). Yet, in those cases, variation at least worked within a certain established framework; adjustments and innovations served to make the paradigmatic and methodological boundaries of a discipline continuous more exact. The circumstances of cultural semiotics gestation forced it to be wary of social and political structures when it might have been self-reflexively defining its parameters and methodologies (see, for example, Cherednichenko 2000). Problems in terminology and methodology that concern the definition and study of cultural phenomena under the label of cultural semiotics are, on the other hand, related not only to the unfavorable political environment in which the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school was to operate, but also to the relatively complicated and rapid development of the social sciences and humanities in general. The evolution of cultural semiotics represents an interesting dynamism in which multiple scholarly traditions were involved. Distinctions can be made between the several predecessors of cultural semiotics according to certain political, geographic, and possibly also linguistic factors. There is an added complexity to the case, of course, in that the representatives of cultural semiotics were largely isolated from trends in scholarship that directly pertained to their study at the object and meta-levels (e.g., Western cultural studies, cultural anthropology, etc.). Thus, structuralism in relation to the Tartu-Moscow school cannot be really considered on the same terms as, say, the French tradition. Nevertheless, French structuralism, Tartu-Moscow cultural semiotics, and (American) cultural anthropology, could be said to be at least analogous in their ideals and range of objects, and prefigure the principle methodological standpoints of sociosemiotics. The main importance (if not appeal) of cultural semiotics probably consists of individual notions and concepts that can be used to describe semiotic systems, while, at the same time, the multiplication of these ideas sometimes renders cultural semiotics confusingly diverse. It features descriptive concepts familiar to most of sociosemiotics, such as textuality, intertextuality, code, secondary modeling systems, and so forth; but it lacks a consistent, unified methodology for the study of sociocultural phenomena. One problem which seems to have prevented cultural semiotics from metamorphosing into a fully-fledged sociosemiotics is the generality of its objects of analysis (e.g., semiosphere ; cf. Randviir 2004: 67 70). Sociosemiotic studies particularly the successful ones have seemed to benefit from their insistence on specificity of objects, a quality shared with disciplines within the social sciences.

13 4.3. Sociology, the social sciences, and social psychology Introduction 13 As with cultural anthropology, the seemingly straightforward discovery that humans are semiotic beings has had a profound impact on the whole topic of empiricism in all walks of scholarship. The interpersonal and social nature of signs in culture and the communicatively competent logical procedures applied to their syntagmatic organization now goes without saying. The classificatory study of signs is now e ectively untenable. However, the rate of empiricism in the social and human sciences, and in all scholarship eventually, has to do with the relation of humans, their sociocultural reality and the so-called reality out there. If human semiotic systems filter human semiotic reality in communication, then human cognition is, to a large extent, defined through language and languagebased sign systems. If the human s perceptual abilities have been shaped by those very systems, then, what is called reality is always inevitably mediated and arbitrated. This does not lie at odds with the biosemiotic paradigm convened by Sebeok, by way of von Uexküll, in which the human Umwelt consists of the unique combination of verbality and nonverbality. Yet, the realization of the semiotic determination of the human relation to reality is part and parcel of a pragmaticist understanding that has penetrated into various fields from linguistics to sociology. Indeed, it has altered the position of several disciplines in their relation to objectivity (in the sense of empirical study of reality ). What is empirical in the characterization of the human and his/her sociocultural environment can be analyzed in terms of semiotics and other disciplines studying sign systems. The same goes for the investigation into the reality surrounding human beings as unique in their social essence. Thus, the disciplines commonly regarded as hard or devoted to the research of the physical and chemical features of the Earth gain the position of being speculative, if not hypothetical. They attempt to characterize the human and his/her reflective abilities rather than those structures and phenomena that cannot be switched into the chain of communication (cf. Russell 1948: ch. 3 and 7). Mead seconds this: The whole tendency of the natural sciences, as exhibited especially in physics and chemistry, is to replace the objects of immediate experience by hypothetical objects which lie beyond the range of possible experience (Mead 1938: 291). From this standpoint, then, the social sciences and semiotics, especially, if it is, through sociosemiotics, placed within the social sciences must be seen as the empirical paradigm par excellence. Its objects and its empiricism are rooted in the mediatedness of physical and sociocultural reality and, while studying the mediation of these realms in

14 14 P. Cobley and A. Randviir communication, such study does go as far as possible in its search for objective empirical reality. The context-sensitivity of sociocultural phenomena on the one hand, and the very same complementarity in the organization of semiotics on the other, point at the need of understanding social and cultural entities in terms of processes and functions that vary in space and time. In the era of striving towards a unified science, this awareness was made explicit in works by numerous eminent scholars who are nowadays considered as the founding fathers of quite diverse disciplines that they would not have identified themselves. Instead, they dealt with sociocultural topics and phenomena as such without any disciplinary restrictions. The above-mentioned connections between disciplines such as sociology, semiotics, psychology, anthropology are not coincidental. Similarly, the social sciences have come to recognize and develop many of the pragmatic/semiotic principles inherent in these disciplines at their inception. The first fifty years of the twentieth century witnessed the growth of pragmatism (and pragmaticism) within several disciplines; as such, traces of semiotics and its vocabulary can be identified in the majority of contemporary paradigms studying culture and society. At the same time, though, the acceptance of the social nature of sign systems, and the pragmatic dimension of semiotics along with the semantic and syntactic aspects of study, is sometimes lost in the focus on objects. The comprehension of society and culture in terms of processes has often been replaced by a stress on structures. In this respect, it is unfortunate that contemporary semiotics is repeatedly associated with structuralism, a false consciousness that dissipates with a more informed return to the sources of semiotics, especially pragmatic aspects of research. The socio- as a prefix in the comprehension of some practices of semiotics may serve the purpose of returning to the sources. Although there are clearly sign systems in nature, all sign systems recognized as such are social, all texts are created in a social context, their sociality bound to physical or semiotic subjects by virtue of the fact that it is humans who are researchers. Therefore, and taking into account that no propositions have been made for semiotics of society, arguably there seems to be no utility in the term social semiotics at most, this expression is simply tautological and hence of no heuristic value. Sociosemiotics, on the other hand, implies sociality, but must simultaneously entail reference to the pragmatic aspect of semiotic studies that orients semiotics to the social sciences (and e ects methodological control as one of its most important facets). On the other hand, the sociality of semiotics indicates the role of sociosemiotics as a metadiscipline in the sense that sociosemiotics can serve as a methodological toolkit enabling researchers to outline the

15 Introduction 15 boundaries of any study of sociocultural phenomena and sign systems. The fact that social behavior or sign systems can be and are metaphorically found in extremely wide areas concerning both living and inorganic systems, does not from the viewpoint of sociosemiotics guarantee their semiotic essence or features. The scientific analysis of social behavior... must survive direct tests, if practicable, or any tests of derived propositions no matter what their domain ( Nicholson 1983: 79). The recent extension of semiotic vocabulary to the whole biosphere has been fruitful but not without risk: namely, the animation and anthropomorphization of species and phenomena that are ultimately outside the scope of human understanding and frequently outside the parameters of testing in terms semiotically and communicationally graspable by the perceptive and cognitive powers of homo sapiens. Even within the limits of human societies, metaphorical extrapolations are fraught with danger: There are... important homologies between the personality and the social system. But these are homologies, not a macrocosm-microcosm relationship the distinction is fundamental. Indeed, failure to take account of these considerations has lain at the basis of much of the theoretical di culty of social psychology, especially where it has attempted to extrapolate from the psychology of the individual to the motivational interpretation of mass phenomena, or conversely has postulated a group mind. (Parsons 1952: 18) Individual behavior cannot be explained by the extrapolation of truths pertaining to social psychology; likewise neither can societies nor social groups be described in the generalized terms of individual characteristics and behavioral regularities. Society is not a giant human, human beings are not small societies. On the other hand, the sociality of semiotics is derived from the very definition of the sign (as the object of any semiotic study), and represents the caution to be borne in mind in the study of reality. While pragmatic and semiotic principles constituted the social sciences from the outset, philology, conversely, pronounced its sociality. Saussure positioned the study of language alongside social psychology. Thus, it is no coincidence that the study of language, having been associated with the study of speech (e.g., Austin 1961), had to conclusively embed itself in the study of sign systems in sociocultural contexts. The study of sociocultural environments and institutions, on the other hand, has been bound with fluctuations to the analysis of language and speech (from Vygotskian to Bakhtinian perspectives). The realities in which humans live are socially, culturally, linguistically constructed, and are fundamentally semiotic. This deceptively simplistic proposition has generated complex studies, inter- and transdisciplinary, involving the improbable

16 16 P. Cobley and A. Randviir task of clustering individual scholars according to specific areas of study, along with the di culties inherent in drawing disciplinary boundaries (to mention just a very few: Berger and Luckmann 1972 [1966]; Grace 1987; Wertsch 1991; Searle 1995; see, also, Gergen and Gergen 2003). Understanding human environments as (semiotically) constructed, or at least accessible via signs, has lead to a common conception of the whole of research objects. While the expressions used for the holistic web of mutually dependent and connected objects of study are often pretty diverse, they represent very similar treatments of humans, culture, and society. Consider social world (Schutz 1967 [1932]), social system ( Parsons 1952), culture ( Kluckhohn 1961), Lebenswelt (Garfinkel 1967), semiosphere ( Lotman 1984), mundane reason (Pollner 1987), semiotic reality (Merrell 1992), even the semiotic self (Wiley 1994) or signifying order ( Danesi 1998). These notions indicate that despite the disintegration of the social and human sciences into diverse individual disciplines that happened alongside socio- and geo-political developments attendant on the end of World War II, the study of social structure(s) always tends to be functional in one sense. In the discussion above, certain types of objects (gender, media, etc.) frequently associated with sociosemiotics were mentioned. The features of the analysis of culture and society outlined here suggest that, through the process of socialization, social structures become functional in respect to the meta-level. Ideological fluctuations that spotlight certain developments in society and culture (e.g., feminism, the emergence of transvestism, actualization of (in)di erences between races, social groups, sex-roles, etc.), can and have lead to insular fields of research. The sociosemiotic understanding of the study of culture and society, however, calls for the holistic complex perspective that some scholars have striven for in the last hundred years Marxism In contrast to the Tartu-Moscow school of cultural semiotics where Marxism was not too flavorsome an adoption for a semiotic discourse, it is well-known that Marxist ideas have been quite popularly semiotized in Continental and even in Anglo-American semiotic circles (some of the most well-known include Lefebvre 1968 [1939], Althusser 1975; and, the most explicitly semiotic in orientation and knowledge, Rossi-Landi 1990 [1982]; see, also, Posner 1988 and Ponzio 1989). Semiotized Marxism has sometimes been studied as structural Marxism (e.g., Benton 1984); it has also been associated with the analysis of dynamism between culture and society as holistic units, and labeled as belonging to the social systemic

17 Introduction 17 approach to culture in cultural sociology (see Kavolis 1995: 4 6). Of course, it is not di cult to discern meaningfulness in any system of (human) communication, be it communication accomplished by immaterial or material sign-vehicles. The semiotic nature of material phenomena is evident in communication systems in Marxist terms, but just as well in anthropological analysis or in the study of material culture (for example, early study of the Kula ring, Mauss 1969; Malinowski 1999 [1922]). It is also detectable in any material phenomena forming the context for communication and everyday life (see, for example, Riggins 1994). Furthermore, the material environment that both forms and is being formed by sociality does follow a certain logic that is grounded in semiotic considerations (see, for example, Gottdiener 1985; Hillier and Hanson 1993 [1984]; Lefebvre 1991 [1974]). Rossi-Landi asserts that Karl Marx made a remarkable contribution to the study of symbolism in general and to the theory of social communication although he qualifies this by adding that he made it in a most indirect way (Rossi-Landi 1986a: 482; cf. Ponzio 2001). Too mechanistic a relation between Marxism and semiotics presents fairly obvious perils. In particular, it might promote a search for the true meanings behind the appearances, the return of the Era of the Lone Ethnographer (Rosaldo 1993 [1989]: 32) and so-called armchair scholarship. Such work has had its influence, indeed an enormous one. Identified chiefly with the myth criticism of Roland Barthes, designed to expose the naturalizing influence of bourgeois culture (with connotation being the foremost bourgeois weapon), this perspective still has a hold in areas where international semiotics is insu ciently well-known. Such a hold has been superseded; indeed, Barthes Mythologies (1973), with its undermining of the tenets of 1950s French cultural artifacts, was e ectively laid to rest by Barthes in 1971 when he lamented how facile myth criticism had become in the intervening years, calling, instead, for a more comprehensive semioclasm (1977). Notwithstanding this, Barthes semiotized Marxism is still widely taught and Mythologies remains a popular paperback book. This is largely because it is undeniable that signs do have connotations and that they are enforced connotations. But, as with structuralism, the actual meanings revealed in work from this perspective are invariably just as arbitrary as those enforced by bourgeois culture. Semiotized Marxism s main problem has been its instrumental vision. Sign systems cannot operate through some clear-cut and unambiguously explicable rules or grammars. Moreover, this is not in direct causal relationship with the ways governments, political orders, and social institutions are willing to manipulate their citizens. Nor can the functioning of sign systems be altered rapidly and neither can ideologies run at the same

18 18 P. Cobley and A. Randviir pace as semiotic systems (for example, Soviet Russia, even as an ideology in power was forced to co-habit with traditional semiotic/ideological systems: Russian orthodoxy and Tsarism continued to exist in lieu of the enforcing of a proper Soviet discourse geared to balancing denotative and connotative codes). Nevertheless, in the first instance, semiotized Marxism has informed sociosemiotics by being forthright in drawing attention to the existence of a very strong relation of ideology and culture, even though that relation is not quite as it first seemed. There is another major bequest from semiotized Marxism to sociosemiotics. This is the argument that all sign systems are, in one way or another, material. Lévi-Strauss s (1968) treatment of homologies between settlement space, social structure, cooking, and worldview constitutes an early example of both the close relation of ideology and culture plus the materiality of sign systems. To some extent, this kind of reasoning has cemented the relation of structuralism with the study of symbolic discourse in the Marxist sense, in turn giving an impression of the proximity of semiotics and Marxism (for example, De George and De George 1972; cf. materialistic semiotics in Rossi-Landi 1986b, Ponzio 1989: , cf. Heim 1983). Sign systems (if not the individual sign) can be understood as material even in Saussure s division of the sign process into three levels: psychological, physiological, and physical (Saussure 1959: 11 15). Sign systems are often materialized in normative and/or descriptive grammars; this is not unconnected to the understanding of sign systems as formal or informal institutions (cf. Ruesch 1972: ). Another important area concerning the materiality of signs has rather to do with neuropsychology, an insu ciently explored domain in semiotics. Ideas associated with memory traces, synaptic transfer, and the like, up to cerebral dynamism (also on the sociocultural level), apparently have direct connection with sign processes in terms of Peirce s category of Firstness (cf, however, e.g., Lotman 1983; Nikolaenko 1983; Jorna 1990; Davtian and Chernigovskaya 2003). Apart from the possibility of discussing the materiality of the neurons, materialistic semiotics shares most of the principles of sociosemiotics that have been discussed above. Rossi-Landi sums the matter up concisely, although he introduces another problem: The program, then, is that of a semiotics founded on social reality, on the actual ways in which members of the human race interact among themselves and with the rest of the living and inanimate world. Such an approach cannot examine sign systems apart from the other social processes with which they are functioning all along. It cannot make everything rest on signs by themselves. (Rossi-Landi 1986b: 486)

19 Introduction 19 This o ers a seductive definition of sociosemiotics as a matter of analyzing signs ( possibly seemingly trivial ones such as those attached to toys for infants or those in arithmetical textbooks) and revealing their embeddedness in relations to non-signs (inescapably important forces such as the relations of production and the exercise of power through institutions). This would be a good working rule to allow the conclusion that sociosemiotics is simply semiotized Marxism, were it not for the simple fact that the relation of signs to non-signs always already renders the latter as signs. Sociosemiotics, then, is not merely the study of the relation of signs to non-signs, nor is it sign study plus context Pragmatics The relation to context in sociosemiotics is more a matter of its pragmatic heritage, especially the initial division of linguistics made by one of semiotics key conveners. The semiotician Charles Morris, in an influential formulation, suggested that the study of language could be split into syntactics (the study of the relation of signs to other signs), semantics (the study of the relationships of signs to their objects), and pragmatics (the study of the relationships of signs to their interpreters or users) (Morris 1938). Taking the third of these, the project of pragmatics has frequently been thought to be devoted to series of topics or categories in linguistics such as propositions and principles in speech, interactive implicatures, deixis, politeness, speaker roles, speech acts, and context. Many of these interests overlap with sociolinguistics and for some pragmatics is a part of sociolinguistics in the same way as discourse analysis or CDA are (e.g., Coupland and Jaworski 2001). Verschueren (1999, 2001) argues that pragmatics appears to have no real object of study and that, in truth, it is more sensible to treat it as a perspective. What this perspective focuses on, for Verschueren, is choice, variation, and adaptation, a set of phenomena that actually allies pragmatics to Anglo- Australian sociosemiotics in particular, especially in respect of the latter s systemic-functionalist heritage. What Verschueren calls for, then, is an understanding of pragmatics as an interdisciplinary perspective comprising the study of cognition, society, and culture. Following Verschueren s argument, then, one could say that the perspective of pragmatics su uses sociosemiotics in the same way in which it has been present in, and since the inception of, the social sciences. Indeed, one could argue this is what positions semiotics among the social sciences. Sociosemiotics is not so much a matter of signs plus non-signs, then; nor is it a matter of signs plus context. Rather, its principles and