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Semiotic Investigations: Towards an Effective Semiotics
Alec McHoul
Part One
The Limits and Media of Semiosis
Chapter 1
Signifying History
Hardly anyone today will dispute the fact that meaning is not - as formal semantics would have it - an intrinsic property of signs but, rather, an aspect of their use. But what does this mean? To put the question another way: how can we sensibly use the idea of semiosis; the idea of meaning as the use of signs? In what "medium," we might ask, does semiosis have its being? And this will inevitably lead us - once the apparent "clarity" of formal semantics has been cleared away - to questions of history.
There was once a great deal of comfort to be had from formal semantics. That is, if we think of meanings as inhering in signs themselves, then we can comfortably leave aside all historical, social and political questions. We can do semantics, as it were, at home. Given the signs and given a previously reliable set of semantic rules, all that remains to be done is an application of the latter to the former. It is the same comfort that derives from pure mathematics. The analyst, in both cases, is involved in no more than an algorithmic manipulation: setting the parts of the machine in order and looking to see what they generate. This is an almost entirely self-contained enterprise. It is self-contained precisely to the degree that it is systematic: and in being systematic, it forgets the very medium of history in which signs play, move, shift, change, alter, develop, appear and disappear. So it is not merely that formal semantics neglects the "diachronic" dimension of semiosis. Rather, in leaving history unproblematic, it neglects semiosis itself as an always-already historical formation of human practice.
If formal semantic models are rejected, however, the question of method becomes more hazardous, less heimlich. Something from outside the tiny, self-contained world of algorithmic manipulation has to intrude. If we can no longer make up sentences in line with the analyses to be performed on them, there is a very basic question as to what we should be working on at all. From parsimony we move into a complex historical plenitude which can overwhelm us: the manifold and varied world of everyday language use. The shift from formal semantics to semiotics is therefore a radical one: rejecting what is, a priori, one particular and limited domain of "doing" sign manipulations and moving to the analysis of any sign manipulations whatsoever.
Quite clearly, then, there can be no simple solutions here. For our investigation will be the very opposite of the one undertaken by Descartes. Just as Descartes wished to strip away his learned, social, commonsense attire in order to see what remained, for him, as an essential relation between himself and the world, we are now faced with the question of how to put on the very clothing which he discarded. We have to re-dress the body of semiosis rendered naked by Cartesian linguistics which stripped it of the historical, the everyday, the contingent, the effective.
And just as Descartes arrived at nothing but a disguised tautology, a myth of the autonomous individual standing naked in relation to nature but connected to it by a thin filament of "thought," we must now face the opposite possibility: that we are nothing but the contingency of everyday signs, the bundle of rags which is hung on that stark Cartesian frame. If the king of philosophers had no clothes, we subjects of today may be nothing more than our garb. If no pure cognition underpins and guarantees social knowledge - or rather, if the complex myth of pure knowledge is just another vestment - then what are we to go looking for?
Later in this book, there will be a series of alternative answers to this question: in "community," in everyday culture, in film and in human conversation, to name only a few. But the first and most obvious semiotic principle is an historical one: namely that we use signs inherited from the past and under specific conditions. For this reason, and perhaps for many others, we cannot do just as we please with them. But what it is we have inherited is not so definite.1 Otherwise, there would be no investigation to make. Our legacy is, in each of its aspects, composed of coins of indefinite value. And this is the paradox. Any idea we might have of the limits and conditions of semiosis must always be given by and through the very kinds of signs we are trying, thereby, to understand. So, because it seems to be an operation where we must somehow pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, it looks as if anything goes. If there is nothing outside the text (the ensemble of signs), as some believe, then we can invent any histories or conditions which appear to fit. And we can be as playful as we like in making them fit.2 But this very quickly transgresses the historical principle we have just mentioned: the conditions of semiosis become so fluid that we lose all sense of their specificity.
This paradox is not new. In one form or another, it has plagued the so-called human sciences from their inception. The Presocratics wondered how each name could name one thing alone and how, conversely, each thing had one and only one name, when the worldly balance between things and names was manifestly out of equilibrium. Yet, how else could definite meanings be achieved? On one side, a dogmatic principle; on the other, a baffling array of complexity. If you begin to state the conditions under which signs have meaning, the statement you end up with always seems to look out of kilter with all the other things you could reasonably say. It is as if the ideal solution would be to step outside language in order to describe it - to say what you see, just as (according to traditional Cartesian ideas about science) language is supposed to step outside nature and say what it sees. But in the case of describing language itself, of course, nothing could then be described, since description is just one linguistic practice among many. One is always left with a remainder, a fragment of the "object" (language) which can never completely describe itself. It seems that, in this case, any ultimately scientific move would have to involve an utterly impossible form of transcendence.
Do we really know, then, that there are conditions and histories to semiosis, to our uses of signs? Here the paradox is that, without this idea, we end up with yet another kind of idealism. If no conditions, we think, then any sign can say anything. But this, in any specific and particular event we care to think of, is nonsense. And so our sense of the limits of semiosis does not, and cannot, stem from transcending those limits - something imposed from outside the domain of history, of human social practice. Rather, the limits must, themselves, be constructed historically, in and by human social practice. For all this, however, they are limits, like any others; just as the exact regularities of Lorenz's waterwheel in full flow cannot be predicted prior to the first drop falling but, from a certain point, we can begin to see their formation so that we can say with confidence, "It is now turning clockwise with such a force that there will be no sudden reversal in the next two seconds." This fact is arbitrary, for sure. Given very slightly different initial conditions, small variations in the timing and directionality of the first two or three drops of water, things could easily have been very different. But, in practice, as we look, they are not.3
This is a further paradox, then, for any effective semiotics. The conditions of semiosis appear irrevocable, intractable. We appear condemned to write, to paint, to speak, to film, and so on, in precise ways, according to precise codes. Yet at the same time, these ways and codes are historically contingent: they guide human practice, to be sure, but equally they arise out of the very practices which they guide, control or even determine. In turning to apparently fixed laws, we neglect the everyday medium of their continuing construction and reconstruction.4 But, on the other hand, in turning merely to an inspection of the (apparently free) vicissitudes of everyday life alone, as it were, we miss any idea of the conditions which make them possible.
Again, this situation is not unique to semiotics, or even to the humanities. It appears wherever questions of historical necessity and contingency arise. Evolutionary biologists, for example, now recognize that evolution is not some grand teleological design, moving from the most primitive to the most developed (even though the term "evolution" has become almost synonymous with "development"). In fact, given the most basic initial bacteriological conditions of which we currently have evidence, the chances of them producing anything even vaguely like human beings are infinitesimal, as Stephen Gould has pointed out.5 Once a species has occurred, we can see - that is we can describe - how it came about. But we cannot find an explanation for it in terms of a necessary reason for its existence. This is exactly like attempting to account for the use of a particular sign or utterance on a particular occasion. To remedy the situation, it would seem that an effective semiotics would have to be able to account for both the apparent fixity of the limits of semiosis and the historical plasticity which those limits always attempt - unsuccessfully - to fix.
In the history of ideas, no figure has been more important than Nietzsche for our contemporary sense that "things were not as necessary as all that" to quote Foucault's apt phrase.6 Nietzsche has been responsible, in this sense, for a wholesale modalization of our historical sense - by which I mean our sense that "X was not, but could have been, otherwise" - a form of thought which has only recently come to contest ideas of necessity and causality in science (for example, as we have seen, in evolutionary biology). To this extent it would be helpful to pay some attention to Nietzsche's idea of "effective history" (wirkliche Geschichte) to see if it can provide us with the beginnings of a history of semiosis. Or rather, since Nietzsche is the least likely source for any type of totalizing history: to see if his ideas can offer a way of understanding how semiosis is both historically located but, for all that, also "outside" strict historical necessity.
Nietzsche, especially in The Use and Abuse of History, makes strong arguments against Hegel whom he considers to be the philosopher par excellence of the rational telos. For Hegel, the present moment gets its meaning, truth and authenticity from being directly descended from the past: as though it were but the latest offspring of a long family tree. The present is, accordingly, like the most recent syntactic element (for example, the word one is currently reading in a sentence). Like that element, the present is supposed to be guaranteed by the grammar of history (the Spirit). However, moving towards a more Nietzschean position: just as the meaning of a word cannot be guaranteed simply by its location in a sentence, neither can the meaning of the present historical moment be guaranteed by the abstract Spirit or necessary grammar of history. Both history and language are contingent, for Nietzsche. To think history in this Nietzschean mode is to avoid a metaphysical conception of history based on the identity and presence of each event with respect to an underlying and necessary structure, system, telos, Spirit or grammar. It is, to invoke Derrida, to think history without a particular center - which is to say, a history with many candidate centers.7
Into Hegel's faith in the identity and presence of each event, Nietzsche inserts difference: the particularity and contingency of the event and, in terms of method, this means each event must be dealt with in a piecemeal fashion. Foucault calls this procedure "eventalization."8 And he allies this with the Nietzschean idea of a "general history" as opposed to a "total description."9 So Nietzschean history is a history of the difference of the present; not a history for which the present is totally explicable as a necessary next stage, as a mere effect of the past - its slave. Nietzsche even goes so far as to suggest that Hegel's history is an effect of the language which describes it - the language of necessity which haunts scientism's false will to predict and control nature, for example, or the future. This apparent mastery of history gives history its necessity, turning it into the true master. And so the language which does so is always in excess of history itself (if one can speak in such terms) since it always adds to it the supplement of necessity or, in other words, the gloss (an extra layer) of its own language. At the same time, Hegelian language is always less than history itself, for it misses the difference and uniqueness of the event, by subsuming that difference into its own totalizing gloss. In this case, Hegelian language needs, as part of Nietzschean history (or "genealogy"), to be problematized. To this extent, then, one of the initial connections between semiotics and history involves a realization of the very semiosic forms by which history comes to be written and is, therefore, made to appear in the first place. History - as the condition and medium of semiosis - is something which is not so much described and explained. Rather it is something for which the writer must take ethical responsibility, as I will argue in the final chapter of this book. Part of the effective engagement between the disciplines of semiotics and history, then, has to do more with responsibility than it does with formal methods for the correct description or explanation of signs.
Returning once more to Nietzsche: to be in history, to be a historical subject, is to be in a space of contradiction rather than of certainty; it is to be in the differential space of the present event. Under the historical umbrella of Hegelian certainty, progress and the future are guaranteed by their necessary extension or projection along the lines of a singular, given and fixed past. But to be in contradiction is to be in the space between what language and thought produce as the real, and the always unknowable constraints of "the real" (life) itself. This is as true of Hegelian language as it is of any other: there is no guarantee that any next event will be an exact derivation from all the previous ones. If history is like a syntax in any way at all, it is like that of poetry rather than of logic.10 There is always the space of ill-definition, contradiction and uncertainty over what being an historical subject is. Any philosophy or theory must, therefore, always be able to call itself into question. It is always, potentially, more, less and different from what it would ideally explain or describe. It is always a self-questioning fiction, construction, or creation (poesis). To refuse this calling-into-question leaves us with a closure, to be sure, but not a logical one: rather, a metaphysical one. In closing the meaning of an event, once and for all, we risk being over-purposive, over-efficient in our language. We risk missing the irremediable openness for which the conditions of history and semiosis provide.
At the same time, if the historian cannot accept a space of total free play, total anarchy or anti-method, then this is not because something utterly real constrains the inquiry - rather, it is because of the power of dominant metaphysical discourses, particularly that of scientism. It is the discourse of a certain dogmatic realism which constrains more than "the real" itself. To struggle against this metaphysics is to search for proliferation, difference and dispersion among theoretic discourses: to approach the anomic whose frequent avatar in Nietzsche is the animal, the beast who is language-less, truth-less, non-conscious, history-less. This struggle for the polymorphous, the diverse, replaces and goes beyond metaphysical notions of morality (good and evil) which attempt to fix those qualities into timeless and unitary forms. The struggle is also an affirmation of the undecidable present: and of the undecidability of presence. For semiotics, it means we must always ask the question, "What is semiosis?," over again, afresh on each occasion.
This is no more and no less than the discovery that the indefiniteness of meaning in principle (or, as we shall later call it, "indexicality") itself means that actual semiosic effects must always be produced in practice. Any sign (as with any present event) will only have meaning insofar as it is a practice (its own practice, its being identical with a practice). It is not as if one had the sign here and the practice there: such that the analyst's job would be to connect up the two. For that would assume the sign could have a definite meaning in principle (a telos), as it were, already trammelled up in it, ready to go, awaiting only the arrival of the practice (from where?) in order to unleash it. Instead of thinking of "a sign," we should think instead of "signing" in Derrida's sense.11 In this way, "sign" (like "event") is always already an activity, a practice, an action, in play, a carrying-through or a living-out. It is never, to use Wittgenstein's phrase, "on holiday" or merely "idling."12 So, from here on, we should use the word "sign" accordingly: not as inert "matter" (statics) but as active power or "energy" (dynamics). Without this version of things, the sign is nothing but a kind of dead script from which life must be "performed": but this is not how we actually speak or write, for example.
For traditional linear history, on the other hand, the present is no more than a gap between the origin (the real past and its necessary principle) and the fulfillment of its purpose: the end (the future). It looks, in this case, like an infinitesimal textual gap: a tiny unfilled point in a grand syntagmatic chain. To assert the importance of this gap, as Nietzsche does, against the metaphysics of linearity, is to make a preposterous move in traditional terms: as if silence were affirmed, difference, negativity, non-being. And hence the continual charges of nihilism against Nietzsche. But as it turns out, this gap is not nullity: it is the historically discontinuous space in which we find ourselves: constituted by the yet-to-be, the undecidable, the unforeseeable, the unplannable, the aleatory. And it is precisely this dimension of history (its distinction from the planned and the plannable) which no semiotics has yet fully embraced. The very idea of a system of signs always points in the opposite direction, towards certainty and the hope of definite interpretations.
Paradoxically for some, the natural scientists today are scarcely so confident. A few physicists have even suggested (against scientism) that physics involves a continually unsatisfied interrogation of nature ("reality") whose results cannot be known in advance. Nature does not easily conform to the requirements of uniformity, consistency and necessity which we may insist on from time to time. To quote one popular account of John Wheeler's views on this matter:
Wheeler evokes what he calls the "surprise" version of the old game of 20 questions. In the normal version of the game, person A thinks of an object - animal, vegetable or mineral - and person B tries to guess it with a series of yes-or-no questions. In surprise 20 questions, A only decides what the object is after B asks the first question. A can then keep choosing a new object, as long as it is compatible with his previous answers. In the same way, Wheeler suggests, reality is defined by the questions we put to it.13
The view may be controversial in physics; but in semiotics it ought to be practically a truism. Putting questions to the semio-historical world, that is, will always be an event in that world, altering it in some way, no matter how small. "Surprise 20 questions" reminds us that semiosis (everyday socio-historical action) cannot be fixed, cumulative or linear; and this "nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules."14 Physics may therefore have realized what semiotics still needs to know: namely that there can be no strict separation between any analyzing discourse and the object which it would (ideally) analyze.
Nietzsche's continual struggle was to work against his positive affirmation of discontinuity (eventalism) from being recuperated or rehabilitated back into metaphysics. To see this, we must follow Nietzsche's idea that the closed metaphysics (against which he moves) is not in fact a theory of time at all. Hegel's, for example, is a history without time: for to acknowledge time would mean acknowledging temporality, accidence, contingency and open-endedness. Hegel tries, instead, to free history from the contingencies of time and to provide a blueprint for an eternal history. By contrast, Nietzsche tries to return us to that contingency (against what he saw as the dominant "common sense" of his time, progressivism): to see that an event in the past did not have to happen as it did. Reality is not foreclosed by virtue of some principle of determination ("identity") but can always be otherwise - or, at least, to repeat Foucault's phrase, can always have been otherwise.
One of Nietzsche's tactics (or methods) for maintaining a differentialist view of history is that of remembering/forgetting. Perfectly describing the relation of semiotics to history, he writes:
[W]e must know the right time to forget as well as the right time to remember, and instinctively see when it is necessary to feel historically and when unhistorically.... [T]he unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary to the health of an individual, a community, and a system of culture.15
In this sense, as I noted above, if Nietzsche is right, there is no point in debating the importance of synchrony over diachrony or vice versa. Any attempt at a totally diachronic study will always be situated in its own present, as its own synchronic event. It will not simply deliver us a given and fixed history but will always take part in the field it would ideally describe. By the same token, a purely synchronic analysis will always have its own relation to history (even if it is one of denial). What I take Nietzsche to be saying in the above passage is this: the "pure forms" of the synchronic and the diachronic are never practically available to us; yet we can calculate the balance, work on tactics - and, indeed, intuitions - for when to work synchronically (forgetting) and when diachronically (remembering); and those tactics will always have to do with what it is we want to achieve, our responsibility as writers of history, how we want to construct a future, albeit locally. And this does not have to do with "what we know is" but with "what we want to be." The method, in semiotics/history, is always given ethically (not purely epistemologically or ontologically).
The ethical needs of the present determine (if anything) how the past is to be read - not vice versa. The present does as it must (not as it "likes") with the past: but it cannot completely forget it (pure synchrony) or totally describe its "truth" (pure diachrony). There must always be some element of remembering, of the diachronic: especially of the past as itself once-contingent (as a former synchrony). Remembering may, indeed, be to condemn. There is nothing to say whether the past should be treated with celebration or with violence. And forgetting is always forgetting something in particular (it is a synchrony of "just this"); it is not an aimless refusal to remember at all; not a cutting-off of the past; or an a priori limitation of one's investigation to the present for its own sake. This, it seems to me, is what Nietzsche means by "effective history"; and hence my goal in these investigations happens to be called "effective semiotics."
Much of what I want to say, here and elsewhere, is also informed by a Wittgensteinian view of language. But, to any reader, history is Wittgenstein's weak suit. Indeed my interests are not so much in rehashing the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations for an already-given semiotics. This has already been worked through, with limited results.16 Instead, what I'm doing here could be seen as a critical dialogue with Wittgenstein's earlier (so-called "transitional") text, the Philosophical Grammar. In this text, the "life" of the sign, its "use" (and so on) are seen to reside in its grammar. But this term "grammar" cannot be taken in its current, formal linguistic, sense.
To illustrate this, we can turn to Wittgenstein's lectures from 1930-32 where he was discussing many of the ideas to appear in the Grammar (written between 1932 and 1934). Ray Monk gives the following succinct account:
What replaces theory is grammar. During this series of lectures Moore made a spirited attempt to insist that Wittgenstein was using the word "grammar" in a rather odd sense. He presented to Wittgenstein's class a paper distinguishing what he took to be the usual meaning from Wittgenstein's use. Thus, he argued, the sentence: "Three men was working" is incontrovertibly a misuse of grammar, but it is not clear that: "Different colours cannot be in the same place in a visual field at the same time" commits a similar transgression. If this latter is also called a misuse of grammar, then "grammar" must mean something different in each case. No, replied Wittgenstein, "The right expression is 'It does not have any sense to say ...'" Both kinds of rules were rules in the same sense. "It is just that some have been the subject of philosophical discussion and some have not."17
Monk then goes on to quote from the relevant lecture:
Grammatical rules are all of the same kind, but it is not the same mistake if a man breaks one as if he breaks another. If he uses "was" instead of "were" it causes no confusion; but in the other example the analogy with physical space (c.f. two people in the same chair) does cause confusion. When we say we can't think of two colours in the same place, we make the mistake of thinking that this is a proposition, though it is not; and we would never try to say it if we were not misled by an analogy. It is misleading to use the word "can't" because it suggests a wrong analogy. We should say, "It has no sense to say...."18
Hence grammar is not merely a linguistic calculus; it is also a calculus in the domain of "sense"; that is, as we now say, in the semiosic domain. Hence, throughout the Grammar (by contrast, to some extent, with the better-known views of the Investigations), Wittgenstein refers to grammar in terms of the whole system of an expression's use: "The role of a sentence in the calculus is its sense"; "A proposition is a sign in a system of signs. It is one combination of signs among a number of possible ones, and as opposed to other possible ones."19 It is an uncharacteristically Saussurian moment in Wittgenstein's thought. And with it comes both a rejection of and a mistake about history.
In the Grammar, Wittgenstein uses "history" and "cause" almost synonymously. In rejecting the importance of the "cause" of a sign, an utterance, or a proposition coming to be used in a certain way, he also rejects its "history." Or else, Wittgenstein writes of the "mere history" of a sign's use, something inessential to its meaning. Hence:
Isn't it like this? First of all, people use an explanation, a chart, by looking it up; later they as it were look it up in the head (by calling it before the inner eye, or the like) and finally they work without the chart, as if it had never existed. In this last case they are playing a different game. For isn't it as if the chart is still in the background, to fall back on; it is excluded from our game, and if I "fall back on it" I am like a blinded man falling back on the sense of touch. An explanation provides a chart and when I no longer use the chart it becomes mere history.20
Instead, as we have seen: "What interests us in the sign, the meaning which matters for us is what is embodied in the grammar of the sign."21 But note that Wittgenstein refers here to "the" (I want to say "particular") "meaning which matters for us." As though there were others; such that there might be another "meaning" which was historical, which did have to do with the fact that a certain practice once involved the use of a look-up chart (though it no longer does today). And, quite simply, who is to say that a contemporary instance will be definitely, irrevocably, shorn of its connections with previous "technologies"?
Moreover: following Nietzsche, history cannot simply be confined to causes. Wittgenstein is, no doubt, rejecting an Hegelian and scientistic conception of history-as-cause and that is well and good. But this is only one version of history. If, contrary to this version, history is more like the sense of the temporality of the sign (that is, of the practice), then things start to look very different. Strategically, it means that remembering-forgetting (diachrony-synchrony) is crucial to the analyst, even if s/he is not interested in "causes" and confined to "the grammar" of the sign. The sign's temporality cannot be so simply detached from its grammar. Instead it would be a crucial component of it. Perhaps what this shows is that, if grammar is to be distinct from history, then it is the former term which is the more problematic of the two.
How far, then, are we to go along the Nietzschean track? Above all else, Nietzsche alerts us to what might be called the modal sphere in the history of semiosis ("It could have been like this..."). But this may only have one purpose: to point out its own self-evidence. And it can seem almost malicious when used in any other way - for example, to make us doubt, unreasonably, that certain conditions now prevail. A history without "causes" and, more especially, without an underlying historical principle - guiding it, from above history itself, like a sublime Newtonian equation, working itself out with one and only one possible solution - is still a history for all that. Objections here are like those of a builder who refuses to build on granite because, at one time, it was molten as hell. Our concepts are fluid, their boundaries blurred. There are times and places when, indeed, they are so fluid and blurred, when nothing, moreover, seems clearly to occupy their centers, that the world looks like nothing more than a lattice of fuzzy boundaries, a fragile honeycomb with no occupants, ready to fall to dust with the next gust of wind. But there are, equally, times and places when the boundaries are sharp and firm and the specific contents are clear and distinct.
Allow me to speculate. Semiosis shifts historically, to be sure. Any etymologist or lexicographer could tell us that. But what is more radical is the realization that the conditions of semiosis can shift. And since, after Nietzsche, there can be no universal principle guaranteeing such shifts and no necessary pattern to them, we must conclude that they occur and are constructed relatively locally and in a piecemeal way. The locus or agency of this process I would like to call, for want of a better word, and with deep reservations, "a community." More radically still, communities may be what they are, in their distinctness (in what is sometimes called their "cultures") because of the specific ways in which, historically, they produce, reproduce and replace their semiosic conditions.
To put this another way, semioses (the ways in which a sign is used) will be both historically and locally specific. The practices and actions which produce this specificity can be thought of as varieties of local technology - ways of doing things or methods that are relatively peculiar to those who do them. It is this specificity that I want to mark by the term "community." To be sure, the term has an unfortunate connotation for some: it seems to invoke a sense of harmony and singularity of purpose. In fact, it seems to presuppose, from the outset, a consensus model of society-in-general. However, the notion of community that I want to offer here should not be thought to contain, by necessity, any such elements. If meanings are constructed in (or as) social uses, this does not mean that they have to be consensual or to produce agreement or semiotic unity - as we shall see many times later on, on the contrary. All it means is that semiosis, including semiotic contestation, occurs in the form of methodic activities. A "community" is simply a name for whoever, locally and contingently, carries out or materially embodies such methodic activities. In this sense, the term bears comparison with Wittgenstein's notion of a "form of life." Community is an empirical concept in this sense: it means "whatever" or "whoever" (in the plural). Community, then, is a semio-historical locale.
To exemplify this, I want to mount, in the next investigation, some initial attempts to show what an effective semiotics (in the Nietzschean sense) would look like in analytic practice. When it comes down to analytic practice, is it so easy just to follow Nietzsche into - or out of - history? Can his theoretical rejection of historical origins and geneses be followed in the course of an empirical analysis? Or is it rather that their pure forms are unavailable to the analyst who must, nevertheless, make do with reference to their local remainders? Can we simply reject historical and semiotic realism in favor of a politicist relativism which, in extremis, would argue that signs and events can mean whatever a political system would want them to mean? As we will see, the question is particularly acute in the case of visual signs. And indeed, for some time, social semiotics has been moving away from the analysis of purely verbal objects and towards the inclusion of visual texts.22 In order, then, to throw the idea of an effective semiotics into contrast with other forms of analysis - and in particular the fashionable view that semiotics is or should be "political" merely by virtue of a kind of anti-realism23 - my focus of attention is a collection of photographs taken in the last quarter of the 19th century for Dr Barnardo, founder of the well-known British institutions for orphans and street children. In particular I examine, as historical and political texts, the individual portraits of the children he "rescued" from street middens. A paradigmatic case is looked at in some detail, a photograph taken by Thomas Barnes or Roderick Johnstone on 5th January 1883 of a young girl called Sarah Burge.
=> chapter 2
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