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Semiotic Investigations: Towards an Effective Semiotics
Alec McHoul
Part Two
From Formalism and Ethnomethodology to Ethics
Chapter 8
Intelligibility, Actionability and Historicity
It seems to me that Hartland's conjecture which we investigated in earlier (to the effect that R1 and R2 are reflexive) is unassailable. By a very rough method of reductio ad absurdum: if R1 were not reflexive, members would be unable to rely on methods from occasion to occasion. They would effectively have to create the entire social world anew for each and every situation - and such that situations would be, as a consequence, totally independent of one another or discrete. If discrete in this way, then situations could not leak into one another but would instead be finite and specifiable quanta; as it were, "packets" of social action. But in this situation members would have to at least carry some notion of "packet" from packet to packet in order to be able to see that each was in fact a new one. If this could happen, then at least one method (the method of discerning packets - whatever that would look like!) would be occasion-independent, leaving us with a contradiction. Hence R1 is a reflexive relation.
A similar argument could be made from the second consequence of R1 being reflexive: namely that activities can be utterly unique, creative and context-dependent without, therefore, being unintelligible. If R1 were not reflexive, all context-dependent activities would be unintelligible. If there is at least a context-dependent social activity which is intelligible (which we must assume, since semiotics is the investigation of precisely that), then R1 is reflexive.
The argument for R2 being reflexive is not so clear cut for, as we shall see, it depends on the assumption that social practice is absolutely "secular"; that is, completely severed from the action of metaphysical forces. If methodic activities could not possibly be reflexively related (as solutions) to socio-logical problems, then those methodic activities, though intelligible (R1 being reflexive), would be entirely conducted for their own sake. They would have no purpose other than to display their own intelligibility. If we assume that some methodic activities are of this kind (and I think it reasonable to conclude this - both from Hartland's investigations and from the self-evidently reasonable assumption that not every social activity will have a purpose outside itself where some cases of mathematical calculation, sociological investigation, chess-playing and so on could conceivably be cases in point), it does not, however, mean that all methodic activities can be of this kind. There must be at least some methodic activities which solve socio-logical problems: otherwise there would be no quotidian way of solving such problems. Magistrates, to return to Hartland's example, would always order prison sentences; pre-competent sexualities would remain as that forever - excluding acts of God. (And no doubt there are those who would thank God for not being sent down; and those who would thank Nature for making them sexually competent.) Barring those acts: insofar as there are socio-logical problems, methodic activities must be what exist as solutions to them.
The only other possibility is to hypothesize a "controlling hand" in social life which "magically" solved socio-logical problems on our behalf. This would have to be something like a transcendental structure or principle of history; for the "medium" in which socio-logical problems exist is history, just as the "medium" in which methodic activities exist is everyday life. This would mean imagining an underlying mechanism which guided historical change such that, when socio-logical problems were solved, we would say that the principle was acting on our behalf, and vice versa when they were not. Then we would have to imagine a meta-principle which would be the principle by which the first historical principle "decided" whether or not the problem would be solved (whether history would be beneficent or not). And I'm not sure that the iteration of meta-principles would stop here, such that we might have to hypothesize a final and absolute principle of history which stipulated where it did stop. That is, we would need to have a decidedly anthropomorphic conception of history which was, at the same time, divine and totally outside collective human agency. In effect, this would amount to saying that there are methodic activities (such as making decisions, stipulations and so on) which go on without an agent (or which have a very ghostly agent). And here we reach a fundamental limit - an ethical limit. One either imagines ghostly agents (who happen to act just like human beings, as it turns out - only on a "bigger" scale such that R2 is no more and no less than God's version of R1) or one does not. Since the social world would look identical under both hypotheses and - perhaps more importantly - since there seems to be some empirical evidence that everyday methodic activities can, for some class of occasions, solve socio-logical problems, it would appear to be fairly clear that the "secular" version is going to be more productive. Without it, for example, there would be no possibility that any variety of semiotics could have strategic value for social intervention. Indeed, the very notion of social intervention would disappear.
Hence I believe there to be conclusive grounds for taking R1 as reflexive. And, since R2 does not exist for methodic activities which do nothing other than display their own intelligibility, there are at least compelling grounds for assuming that, when R2 exists, it is a reflexive relation. Henceforth I will assume both of these to be the case. But this leaves us with the question of R3 (the relation between R1 and R2).
There is a straightforward answer to this question: since R1 and R2 are both reflexive, R3 would be the very reflexivity which binds them. The answer may be correct: but if so, it is trivially so. Perhaps the argument could be left at that; but the consequences would be somewhat devastating for our investigations since, as we have seen, R3 is held to be the meaning of a sign (but see below for a refinement of this view). If R3 were no more than a statement of the ubiquity of reflexivity in general, then all we could say about the meaning of a given sign was that it displayed reflexivity-in-general - this would be all that it would "do," its only and ultimate use. This has, to some extent, been the kind of conclusion drawn by some ethnomethodologists - namely that reflexivity is only a general principle and not open to investigations which will deliver "news" as their findings.1 This suggests to me as follows: if the Hartland conjecture is correct, as I assume it to be, then "reflexivity" is in fact two things (R1 and R2). This is precisely what makes it empirically investigable. However, R3 is neither a third type of reflexivity, nor is it reflexivity-in-general. Instead, I want to offer the following conjecture: R3 is recursive.
A recursive operation is "a process that operates on the product of its own operation."2 This broader notion of recursivity dominates popular accounts of chaos theory - the analysis of complex, non-linear systems.3 In the stricter mathematical sense, "recursivity" is the near synonym of "computability," "algorithmicity," and "effectivity." A set of natural numbers (for example the set of even numbers) which can be generated by an algorithm is called "recursively enumerable": a given algorithm works on a first number (the smallest natural number of the set) in order to generate, as its product, the next number of the set. It then works, recursively, on this product of its own prior operation in order to generate the next number of the set and so on. In the case of the set of even numbers, we can see that the algorithm in question would involve the addition of two (x' = x + 2). If such an algorithm can be found for a given set, then the set can be computed; it is "effective."4
I do not want to argue that signs are effective in exactly this way: though, of course, a limited number of them will be within the restricted domain of mathematics (or even within some of its even more restricted sub-domains). However, I do want to argue that R3 is a process. R3 is an historical process, in the sense used above. More specifically, it is the process which relates historical to quotidian processes. And this historicity is made possible (1) by the fact that methods (as opposed to the specific activities they produce) are context-independent and therefore, to whatever limited a degree, diachronic and (2) by the fact that such methods can be deployed from one occasion to another as solutions to socio-logical problems. Accordingly, a sign has meaning insofar as it is a reflexive methodic activity which is reflexively connected (as a solution) to a socio-logical problem of a general, community-wide, or historical kind. R3, if recursive, would then be equivalent to how a community "learns," to its "popular memory" (the "folk wisdom" of teenagers, for example, or the "unspoken know-how" of magistrates). Or in other words: insofar as a methodic activity can be used to generate a product (in the form of a problem-solution), it can also be used again to operate on that product, and so on recursively. It therefore becomes a generally available methodic activity for its community - available for use in the solution of problems, as yet unknown, but which will be generated out of social practice (where "social practice" means the use of methodic activities - either simply for the sake of displaying their own intelligibility, or for the sake of solving socio-logical problems). Accordingly, it is quite possible that some problem-solutions will be used discretely and uniquely, as "once-offs": in which case they will have no relation, R3. Or, to put it another way, R3 will be null. However, in cases where a problem-solution is effective on more than a single problem, R3 will be recursive: assuming that the problems it is effective on will be generated out of the very methodic activities which provide for R3. Hence we can see that:
R1 is reflexive and necessary - all social activities are methodic; all methods generate activities;
R2 is reflexive and contingent - it will not exist in cases of merely auto-intelligible methodic activities but will in cases which provide problem-solutions;
R3 is recursive and contingent - it will not exist in cases where problem-solutions constitute singularities but will in cases where they are "stored" or reusable on community-generated problems.
Examples of R3 would occur, then, wherever a community treated a socio-logical problem as one of a genre of problems, such that genres of solutions to it would be known to be available. R3 is the domain of socio-historical knowledge within a community: or, to use a short hand, "popular memory." Clearly, analytic work in this domain will involve more than any semiotic formalism or systemics can guarantee. Such matters will not be easily read from the surface of social texts. Instead they will require more painstaking inquiries and involve what might even be called an "historical sensibility." In many cases, they will no doubt demand of the investigator that she or he be absorbed in community practices for some considerable period. Accordingly, distinctions between "investigator" and "community" might become, productively, blurred.
An example of R3 in operation concerns the availability of "secondary systems of elaboration" as I have called them in reference to the sexual competence problem. That is: the graffiti, dirty jokes, locker-room talk, voyeuristic practices, pornographic circulations and so on, constitute a collection of solution-types. They are collected by virtue of their quasi-unofficial status such that they can elaborate the primary (or official) modes of elaboration open to sexually competent community members. Hence members can know "in future" that "naturally unknowable" (but essential) aspects of community membership may be accessed by secondary systems of elaboration; remembering that this term is no more than an analytic collecting device for numerous varieties of quite specific and precise methods.
A consequence of what we have ascertained so far would be that many signs are meaningless! In fact, only signs which display R3 would be meaningful in the strict sense. And to an extent, I want to preserve this formulation - so that the term "semiotics" is strictly used only for the analysis of sign-uses as solution-types in a particular community's history. This would be the strict definition of a sign's meaning. However - since R3 is a function of the relation between R1 and R2 - it is also possible to think of all three relations (R1, R2 and R3) as forms or types of meaning, or as "contributing" to a sign's meaning. In one sense, it is also true to say that the three "values" of R are separated only by a kind of temporality; one which is co-extensive with social time. Accordingly, R1 is intra-locally temporal; R2 is inter-locally temporal; and R3 is supra-locally (or historically) temporal. Note that all signs which display R3 must also display R2 and R1; that all signs which display R2 must also display R1 and that all signs must display at least R1. That is: all signs are intelligible; some of these act as solutions to socio-logical problems; and some of these solutions become part of "popular memory."
If we allow all three forms of R to constitute a sign's meaning, then the types will be distinguished as follows. R1 is meaning (as use) as intelligibility (the mutual intelligibility of methods and activities); R2 is meaning (as use) as a problem-solution in social-actional practice; R3
is meaning (as use) as a community-historical possibility. However, in what follows, unless it is clear that some other theory of meaning is being discussed, I will reserve the term "meaning" (or, to distinguish it, "historical meaning" or "historicity") for R3 and refer to the other two domains, R2 and R1, as "actionability" and "intelligibility" respectively.5 These "levels" are the topic of the next chapter where they are further unpacked in relation to the ethnomethodological concept of indexicality.
=> chapter 9
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally hosted at freotopia.org/people/alecmchoul/seminv/8.html. The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.