People/alecmchoul/seminv/preface.html
< People
Semiotic Investigations: Towards an Effective Semiotics
Alec McHoul
Preface
By "effective semiotics" I mean the investigation of effective semiosis: the ways in which signs have meaning by virtue of their actual uses. 1 These uses take place in a number of "media": the most important of which is the medium of history - so important, in fact, that it catches up all the other possible media of semiosis including everyday life and language, fiction, film, talk, art, mathematics, photography and so on, as well as the "communities" which practice these forms. And, importantly, this relation of semiosis to history is definitional; for, by "history," I mean the medium-in-general of semiosis. But still, the definition is not unproblematic; for there are "relations" (a number of them) between semiosis and its most general medium - and a discussion of these relations is the central topic of chapter 1 of this book.
That chapter begins with a brief statement about the idea of semiosis as meaning-as-use (as opposed to those formalist views about meaning to be found in linguistic semantics); it then goes on to explore a non-linear and non-teleological view of general history based on Nietzsche. Finally, it turns to Wittgenstein's conception of grammar - since his rather odd use of this term to convey the sense of a grammar-of-use could easily, in itself, form the theoretical base of the present investigations were it not for the fact that the idea of history itself is almost absent from Wittgenstein's considerations on this topic.
By connecting Wittgenstein's idea of a use-grammar to Nietzsche's view of history as necessarily undecidable, I establish the major principle of these investigations: the idea that we can never find an absolute answer to the question "What is semiosis?" For if semiosis is more of a family-resemblance phenomenon and less of a fixed entity, questions about its defining characteristics will be pointless. Instead, we have to ask the question separately when we begin each new semiotic investigation. So, as we will see, what semiosis is in the case of, say, human conversation will be a very different question from what it is in the case of (again, for example) comics, films, photographs, logical propositions or toilet graffiti.
To take one example of this historical process, I turn, in chapter 2 to the case of single photograph: a picture of one of the children kept in Barnardo's Homes in the 1880s. What I try to show there is that the meaning of this photograph cannot be either just its referent alone (the girl herself) nor a fixed set of historical conditions out of which it was produced. Rather the meaning of the photograph alters and changes (and, at times, remains stable) depending on the practices inside which it is taken up. Hence, the photograph means one thing when used as a form of institutional record-keeping and another when used to illustrate a lantern-slide lecture, and so on for a very broad range of semiosic technologies. The referent, then, turns out to be a possible thing which may give the photograph its meaning: but only if some particular community treats it in this way. The referent is, to use a concept introduced later in the book, only one potential "not-sign" which particular communities use as the outside-the-space-of-the-sign. Other communities might, on the contrary, find, for example, deeper aesthetic possibilities in the picture, and hence their use for the referent as a particularly privileged not-sign would be minimal. But what are these communities that seem to be so crucial to the empirical work of effective semiotics? Are they anything like cultures, for example? To ask this question, the book moves on, out of a purely historical mode, and into the problem of concepts for understanding the meanings (uses) of signs. And the first of these concepts is that of community. This is followed in short order by a discussion of the concept of the not-sign and, then, of the activity (as opposed to the concept) of reading.
The idea of community is a highly problematic one. But what I want to show (in chapter 3) is that, unlike the concept of culture (or even of a culture), it can be an important one for the analysis of local semiosic practices. While the concept of culture - particularly in Cultural Studies - is susceptible to totalization, to coming to be thought of as singular and monolithic, or as a definite substance, the concept of community, by contrast, can be detached from its rather general sense of a consensual grouping of persons who inhabit the same topographical space and time. Recent work (discussed in detail in chapter 3) on the idea of community has shown that it can be used to think of disparate groupings: not just of persons, but also of forms of knowledge with quite loose (even barely recognizable) affinities. I refer to this re-thinking in terms of communities as "collections of what happens"; that is, as effective loci rather than physical groupings of co-present individuals.
This reconstruction of community allows me to argue, in chapter 4, that signs cannot "mean" by virtue of the existence of necessary others (or not-signs) to which they are somehow attached - and such that the work of semiotics cannot be to find the general form of that attachment. Nor - again in principle - can signs ever mean by being completely detached from any contingently available not-signs, even though - in practice - we may find cases of actual communities which do use signs in this way. Rather, the question of "attachment" or "detachment" - the question of the not-sign or its absence - is an empirical matter. It varies from sign-use to sign-use, within and between specific communities. If the term "community" comes to mark, as I argue, a space of difference rather than of pure human presence, then it can be mobilized as the always differential locus of the relations between signs and their locally, contingently, pragmatically and/or effectively relevant not-signs. Those relations, however, cannot be specified in their general form or fixed, once and for all, in advance. Rather they exist - neither in the space of the sign-proper, nor in the space of its de-signed exterior - but in the frame of effectivity between these supposedly pure and ultimate locations. To this extent, the concepts of community and not-sign work hand-in-hand to destabilize the theoretical idea of the sign-in-general. They point towards the ineluctability of the practical or effective space of semiosis and towards an empirical analytics of sign-usage.
To show this in chapter 5, I contrast some theoretical arguments about what it must mean for someone to be able to read (as if there were a universal essence of reading) with what it is, within a definite historical locus, to read in a classroom. Here I try to show just how specific a case of reading can actually be: how the criteria for its "success," for its bona fide status as a case of reading, depend on highly local community relevances. And so we are left with what is, by this stage, a familiar dilemma: historical vs. local relevances as the crucial "framing" space of sign-use.
In Part Two of the book, then, I begin to deal with these matters. Firstly, in chapter 6, I attempt to put the question of local vs. historical relevances into a kind of formalism. To be sure, this partly contradicts the criticisms of formalist semiotics with which I began this series of investigations; but on the other hand, it is still intriguing to wonder whether the newer semiotic spaces opened up in Part One can actually be formalized in a way which is responsive to (to name those newer spaces) the double determinacy/indeterminacy of semiosis and to its double locality/historicality.
In order to work this way, I turn to the ethnomethodological concept of reflexivity, in several of its possible meanings. Ethnomethodology appears at this point simply on the grounds that it is one contemporary form of discourse analysis which has been highly responsive to the need to investigate local and particular forms of making meanings. Yet, as with Wittgenstein, ethnomethodology has almost no historical consciousness. In accord with its parents, phenomenological social theory and ordinary language philosophy, it lives in the here-and-now of the interactional things-in-themselves - almost to the point of analyzing the social-situatedness of (for example) talk in terms of the physical space of its occurrence. This contrasts with the other currently dominant mode of discourse analysis, Foucauldian archaeology/genealogy. But, in this field, the term "discourse" is used quite differently. It does not mean anything like communication. In fact, the early, archaeological, Foucault specifically denies such semiotic concerns:
What I am analyzing in the discourse is not the system of its language, nor, in a general way, the formal rules of its construction: for I am not concerned about knowing what renders it legitimate or gives it its intelligibility and allows it to serve in communication.
Instead, for Foucault, discourses are formations of knowledge which constrain and enable the production of types of subjects. They are historical/epistemic in form rather than ostensibly semiosic. He goes on:
The question I ask is not that of codes but of events: the law of existence of the statements, that which rendered them possible - them and none other in their place: the conditions of their singular emergence; their correlation with other previous or simultaneous events, discursive or not. 2
Genealogical-archaeological work, then - even though we must concur with its prioritizing of events over codes, of singularities over totalities - still trades in "laws," "conditions," and "correlations." To this extent, its version of specificity is incomplete; it can still miss the lived interactional specifics of local forms of semiosis. Can, as I ask in chapter 7, Foucault's concern with discourse-as-history begin to approach ethnomethodology's concern with the present moment? And, vice versa, can ethnomethodology's acute sense of the local be given an equally specificist concern with history such as that advocated by Foucault? If so: an effective semiotics may be able to tap into both of those traditions of discourse analysis - albeit in a way unrecognizable to either - in order to be able to generate a third form of that "discipline" which runs between (or in the space of the frame of) the historical conditions of possibility of semiosis and its everyday instanciations. Again, if this is possible, I ask in chapter 7 whether the resultant analytic form(alism) could be used to investigate (as with learning to read - chapter 5) cases of young persons acquiring a particular material ability - in this case the ability to have sex competently.
The problem of learning sexual competence is a particularly poignant example, for it shows that we cannot deal with semiosis simply in terms of methodic activities or in terms of generally available disciplinary formations. Neither ethnomethodology nor Foucault can quite touch on the "level" at which it happens. It seems to happen between the two: at the level of what I call "socio-logical problems and solutions." And so I argue in chapter 7 that there is a middle realm - between ethnomethodology's interest in the intelligibility of signs (as methodic practices) and Foucault's interest in discourses (as historically situated formations of knowledge) - where the two may "meet."
To sort out these distinctions in chapter 8, I return to the formalist position outlined in chapter 6, mapping ethnomethodological concerns about methodic practices on to the idea of intelligibility (semiosic relation, R1) and Foucauldian concerns with the comparative durability of discursive conditions of possibility on to the idea of historicity (semiosic relation R3), leaving the common intermediate realm of socio-logical problems and solutions (semiosic relation R2) as the field of actionability. These three "levels" of semiosis then become the main building blocks of effective semiotic theory - and such that (1) the site of particular analyses is clearly demarcated as the "middle term," the realm of problems and solutions while (2) the main goal of these analyses is to be able to say something about community histories in a non-speculative and empirically grounded way.
However, the idea of "intelligibility" (R1) - Foucault notwithstanding - needs some attention in its own right prior to this, since it is the primary "building block" out of which socio-logical problem-solutions are built. Here the ethnomethodological concept of "indexicality" ("context-sensitivity") is seen to be crucial for our understanding of intelligibility as a "property" of practices. However, in chapter 9, I also go on to explore the possibility that indexicality may have effect at all three "levels" of semiosis. This means shifting the terrain of ethnomethodology slightly, away from the description of signs as (merely) intelligible and towards the idea of a critical understanding of actionability (R2) and historicity (R3).
The shift towards "critical theory" is made by comparing Derrida's concept of différance with Garfinkel's idea of indexicality. These seem to involve a common position: the in-principle instability of the sign. However, while ethnomethodology's goal is to show how this instability (as indexicality) is firmed up and all but repaired in practical circumstances of social communication, the goal of Derridean deconstruction appears to be quite the opposite: to show how seemingly "closed" texts can be reopened to display their necessary dependence on a principle of différance (of difference-in-general). Does semiosic instability in principle lead to signs as forms of identity or signs as forms of difference? This question sounds as if it should inaugurate a debate between two opposed general theories of meaning. But what I try to show in chapter 9 is that which of the two happens to be operating, in any specific situation, is an empirical matter. Signs may be unstable in principle; but in practice, that instability may be augmented or diminished. Different community practices can, that is, open up the "indexical potential" of signs, or else they can close them down - to use a shorthand. Whichever happens is whichever happens - empirically. This is, therefore, one of the matters which effective semiotics sets out to investigate.
A propos of this, in chapter 10 I look at a particular case of a community which reads the indexical potential of its "own" signs in such a way as to open up that potential towards indefiniteness (rather than "fixity" or "repair"). The community in question is exemplified by a cinephilic reading of a song and dance sequence from the musical film, Singin' in the Rain. What I try to show is that such readings actually require certain objects within the film-text's diegetic space to be movable, unstable in time and space, and therefore "illogical" according to any professional or commonsensical version of topography and geometry. While being geometrically nonsensical, for the community which routinely uses them (that is, reads or views them), these filmic elements are expectably unstable and illogical. The point is simply to show that indexical particulars can be as much exploited for their indeterminacy as they can (on other occasions, in other communities) be "repaired" or brought to practical semiosic ends; and that that "exploitation" is a routine part of "life as usual" for such communities rather than something special, rare or disturbing.
However, this "life-as-usual" character of sign-usage can be slightly different in other communities. In chapter 11, I look at fans of the comic book Batman to see how they are prepared to go so far and no further in opening up the indexical potential of the texts they read. What I am after here is the limit point: the threshold beyond which semiosic polyvalency cannot go, beyond which a reading ceases to be "competent" within that community's relevances. "Theoretical" readings of Batman, especially in Cultural Studies, have argued that popular texts (such as comics) are highly polyvalent, subjectable to multiplicities of reading practices, highly unstable in terms of their readability. 3 Further, some forms of Cultural Studies have argued that this instability constitutes a form of resistance on the part of active consumers of popular textual materials. What I want to show in chapter 11, against this rather voluntaristic version of things, is that actual communities of readers do have limits. It may be that they can exploit the indexical potential of the words and graphic images to be found on the pages of Batman comics - and it may be that such "exploitation" works counter to, or in the face of, the design-strategies of the cultural industries which produce them. But this does not mean that, as a competent reading, anything goes. On the contrary, my investigation in chapter 11 shows not only that there is a considerable degree of consumer-producer co-design (through, for example, the letter pages in Batman) within the historical development of this comic form, but also that limits to semiosic polyvalency are in order for Batfans. My question is, in the case of a particular issue of the comic which approaches those limits: where do the limits lie, and what are the socio-logical problems and solutions used by community members in making them happen? Hence what a community is is highly imbricated in (a) the methods it has available for making texts intelligible (R1); (b) the socio-logical problem-solutions (R2) it uses to find the limits of intelligibility; and (c) the ways in which these problem-solutions come to be historically embedded as generally available community methods for reading (R3).
This is all very well in the case of intra-community communications. But what happens when different communities with quite different interests and relevances come into contestation (or potential contestation) over how particular signs are to be used? Intra-community semiosis is the topic investigated in chapters 12 and 13. In the first of these investigations, I look at how "gatekeeping" occurs in popular accounts of science. These texts have something of a contradiction built into them. They often want to show that scientific concepts, ideas, formulae, constants and so on, have quite specific values and positions inside a conceptual whole (a discipline or a discourse) and that misunderstandings of them can lead to false conclusions or just sheer bad science. But at the same time, by popularizing science, they are making complex ideas available to the "laity," to readers from non-scientific communities. In fact, they are specifically designed to do this. How can both of these aims hold in the same textual space? For popular science writers, this is a socio-logical problem and one which has to be managed by definite rhetorical strategies. But in the case under investigation here (Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind), we can see that the rhetoric does not always come off. That is, the rhetoric itself (in this case an argument for mathematical realism) is also interpretable by non-scientists. Adopting a counter-realist position (known in mathematics as "intuitionism"), I try to show how Penrose's defense remains contradictory in his own terms. At root, his faith in mathematical realism turns out to be just that - a faith - and one which can be countered by adopting an antithetical belief structure.
If scientific forms of semiosis are sufficiently fragile as to be contestable from without, if the methodic activities they are built upon are challengeable, in principle, from the standpoint of alternative community relevances, then can we find actual cases of such contestation in everyday life? How do these operate? Surely in such cases, we are coming to the very limits of communication?
But if we assume this, we are relying on the idea that communication arises out of common grounds or forms of consensus - principles which appear to be "agreed," as it were, prior to entering into semiosic exchange. What I try to show in chapter 13, via an investigation of a set of conversational transcripts, is that communication (as community membership) does not necessarily have to rest on such grounds. At the supposedly "deep" level of consensus and agreement, we can actually find such things as conflict, contestation, contradiction, discord, disharmony and friction. But this does not mean that notions of community have disappeared. On the contrary, my investigation of inter-community semiosic conflict is designed to show the very opposite: that community positionings, relevances and interests often become clearer and more obvious when put into contestation with one another. Intra-community forms of life as usual (as ethnomethodology has shown us) are unremarkable. They rely upon a seen-but-unnoticed background of common relevances and expectancies (to use Garfinkel's terms). But inter-community exchanges can, in some cases at least, bring fundamental differences between such "backgrounds" to the fore. So again, it would be simple to say, in such cases, that "communication" is not taking place. I want to show otherwise: that communication itself may have dissensus and dissonance at its very core. Happiness may be a result of communication in some circumstances; but it is not a prerequisite for its occurrence.
By this stage we will have seen a variety of different communities and communications at work - in science, in conversation, in photography, comics and film (among others). But this neglects a crucial self-reflection. What kind of community is semiotic analysis itself? How does it relate to its "object" communities? This raises the question of the ethics of analysis. Can an effective semiotics have anything to say on this question - can it "help itself" by an analysis of the ethical? This is the final question of the book.
However, in order to delineate this limited analytic ethics, it is necessary to look at what philosophical ethics, specifically in its so-called "postmodern" varieties, has to offer us. And further: in order to see how contemporary ethics arrives at what turn out to be a series of paradoxes and problems, it is also necessary to situate it in terms of its subjectivist and objectivist opponents. The ultra-paradoxical nature of "postmodern" ethics turns out to have valuable lessons for the more limited analytic ethics I finally propose: an ethics which is different from post-ethics in terms of its positivity as well as its unashamedly empirical basis.
But, after (or before) all this, what is the point? Why do semiotics at all, let alone the unconventional version of it which I am trying to establish in these pages? As I try to argue at the very end of this book, semiotic analysis may be of no use to anyone but the analyst. It may be no more than an exercise in (and of) the self: a way of coming to understand the world and one's own position in it differently via an understanding of how different communities of sign-users understand themselves and their positionings. Again, as I claim at the end, this may not be a completely useless end in itself. This may be the limits of an empiricist ethics.
But at the same time, there is always a possibility (no more than a possibility, for we are now in the realm of the unpredictable effects of a text and its uptake) that effective semiotic analyses of the intelligibility, actionability and historicality of sign-uses will themselves have effects on both the various other analytic communities they draw upon (general semiotics, linguistics, discourse analysis, ethnomethodology, archaeology/genealogy, critical theory, and postmodernism in particular) and the communities they investigate (including comic readers, users of photographs, cinephiles, mathematicians, and so on). That is, they may come to be incorporated into the activities (methodic practices, socio-logical problem-solutions) actually used in those communities as historically embedded and available forms of action. At the limit, they may even constitute - in cases of social injustice marked by Lyotard's concept of the différend - counter-archives of means by which resistances to (and transgressions of) injustices can be brought off in quite practical and effective ways. But this always remains a hope - something out of my hands and dependent on so many factors outside the aims of this book: aims which remain almost completely methodological.
So why, then, look for a new method of semiotic analysis? A passage which immediately caught my attention, when starting this project, comes from Saussure's letter to Meillet of 1874. Saussure writes:
But I am heartily sick of it all and of the general difficulty of writing even ten lines of common sense on linguistic matters. For a long time I have been particularly concerned with classifying linguistic facts and the viewpoints from which we treat them. And I am more and more aware both of the enormous amount of work necessary to show the linguist what he is doing, by reducing each operation to its appropriate category, and of the ultimate futility of what can be accomplished in linguistics.
Ultimately, the only aspect of a language that interests me is its picturesque or quasi-ethnographic side - what distinguishes it from others as the property of a particular people with certain origins. But I have lost the pleasure of unreservedly devoting myself to such study and appreciating a particular fact pertaining to a particular milieu. 4
At this point in the letter, Saussure proposes to undertake the investigations reported in his Course in General Linguistics. 5 "Only then" - that is, after the Course is complete - "I confess, shall I be able to resume my work where I left off." That work (Saussure's central interest) is presumably the investigation of language's "picturesque or quasi-ethnographic side." Yet unfortunately, that work was never taken up again. His quasi-ethnographic semiotics was abandoned in favor of a formal investigation of the system of langue. 6 But imagine this abandonment not occurring! Then we should perhaps have had something like an effective semiotics from Saussure himself. My question is simply: what could such a semiotics look like?
Traditionally, semiotics has asked: what is the relation between an expression (signifier) and what it expresses (signified) - and the latter is usually thought of as something akin to a mental state. What I want to ask instead is: what is the relation between an expression and its effect? Here the concept of effect is always thought of as quite concrete and material (but does not therefore preclude the mind, since it too can be considered materially). This is what I think semiosis is: something effective, that which works, is wirkliche. Again, because expressions are acts (of expressing), they too are material practices. The whole of semiosis is material, not a separation of thing and mind, self and world, subject and object. It is fundamentally not binaristic. Expression-effect is one material thing.
Yet in offering these bare outlines of what I mean by effectivity, I don't pretend that my work would be anything like what Saussure proposed and abandoned. Nevertheless it does constitute one possible way of taking up that challenge. Here we should note previous "social semiotic" attempts to restore this missing (quasi-ethnographic) dimension to Saussure's machinery." 7 Their project was to attach a social geometry to a pre-existing Saussurian linguistic geometry - producing an always divided theory rarely able to cope with the fundamental idea that semiosis is never not social. It is social (practical, historical and political) from the ground up. And since this happens specifically, "eventally," at local sites, no formal geometry will capture its operations. In place of anything like a "geometry," then, I want to propose, in the first instance, a description of actual practices of how semiosic figures are made. Then it might be possible to think of scrapping the Saussurian machinery, plus the recent renovations and additions which have made it a very ugly vehicle indeed, and so build anew, as it were, from the beginning. But where is the beginning?
Each investigation in this book sets out as a new beginning. The chapters are not linear or sequential. As each begins, the question is asked anew: how can we construct an effective semiotics? Thus the question may have different answers for each of the empirical and theoretical objects it inquires about: one semiotic method for analyzing conversations, another for analytic ethics, still another for comics, and so on. Yet the reader may discern among these investigations (each striving to begin anew) a loose and implicit continuity. The struggle to begin afresh each time inevitably fails: some terminology, for example, persists despite my best efforts to repress that persistence.
The inevitable looseness and lack of linear continuity which this produces in the book will be a hindrance to some readers' understandings of it. But as Nietzsche writes: "One does not want only to be understood when one writes but just as surely not to be understood." 8 A book which is merely understood adds nothing, leaves no puzzles, and no interesting ways for readers to solve those puzzles. Understanding (semiosic closure) and not-understanding (semiosic openness) are always both in play when one writes or reads, teaches or learns. And so neither is ever complete. So to simply be understood would be to put oneself outside the domain of semiosis itself and into an unthinkable space of pure knowledge. If a book were only ever understood, it would have a single reading - it could never be read otherwise. But it is a condition of history that any event is always open to being otherwise, at least in principle. It is, therefore, also a condition of meaning. An impossibly complete understanding would mean that a book had no history, no semiosic potential. It would be a kind of tautology: always true, adding nothing. To add something is, on the contrary, to risk contradiction. This is what might be meant by the term paralogics, where "para-" would point to the double ideas of (a) being alongside or beside logic and (b) being false or contradictory. 9 A paralogic position would be the position of one who walks beside, prompting, arguing, contradicting, creating a puzzle or problem with what one says. And this is precisely the position I want to adopt in relation to both formal and social semiotics.
Instead of assuming, then, that a book has a merely linear and singular effect, we might turn to Foucault's account of writing:
A book is produced, a minute event, a small handy object. From that moment on it is caught up in an endless play of repetitions; its doubles begin to swarm around it and far from it; each reading gives it an impalpable and unique body for an instant; fragments of itself are made to stand for it, are taken to almost entirely contain it, and sometimes serve as refuge for it; it is doubled with commentaries, those other discourses in which it should finally appear as it is, confessing what it had refused to say, freeing itself from what it so loudly pretended to be. 10
As I argue later in this book, some disciplines (especially the sciences) are predicated on the idea that the semiosic materials they "own" should be kept from interpretation, while others (which we might call "poetic") deliberately open up their "own" materials to alternative readings and versions. In the face of Foucault's writing conditions, this means either "policing" a book's possible repetitions or else encouraging them. Effective semiotics, as I conceive it, takes the latter course. It situates itself as a poetics rather than as a science of semiosis. Many disciplines - not just this one - are in a constant state of starting afresh. One way, then, to mark one such fresh departure is to pluralize it from the start: to offer an initial way into it; then, instead of pushing on, going back to the start again and heading into a new space - avoiding mastery and any claim to definiteness. In this connection, my model here and elsewhere has always been Harold Garfinkel's Studies in Ethnomethodology, albeit one whose clarity, economy and importance I could never hope to attain. 11 Let me offer, then, a further outline of the principles on which I have begun my semiotic investigations (against traditional semiotics, but in a direction suggested by Saussure's abandoned project):
1. Meaning is a practice or practices - not an inherent property of linguistic materials. (Saussure's "sickness" with formal linguistics.)
2. Inquiries into meaning are necessarily investigations of specific local practices. (Saussure's idea of a "quasi-ethnographic" semiotics.)
3. Which practices are pertinent to meaning in any local circumstance is a matter specific to the community operating in that circumstance. (Saussure's "particular people with certain origins")
4. How meaning is produced depends on the piecemeal application of the methods routinely available to a particular community. (Saussure's skepticism about the very possibility of a general linguistics.)
5. While the "objects" about which meaning is made by communities are semiosically indeterminate "in themselves," a semiotic analyst cannot say in advance whether meaning will be produced by resolving that indeterminacy, leaving it as it is, or amplifying it. (One community - as with "scientific" linguistics itself - may crave fixed and logical conditions, while another may prefer Saussure's "picturesque" version of its semiosic positioning.)
6. Communities do not have to be co-present. They can be: but they may be consocial strangers. For example, they may be "audiences." (Saussure's wish to investigate a "particular milieu.")
7. Because the analysis of meaning is dependent on the in-principle indeterminacy of objects' meanings and the local communitarian workings of that indeterminacy, there are no definite methods of semiotic analysis which are generic or omni-relevant. Instead, each inquiry must ask the question of what semiosis is afresh, every time it starts.
I would like to think that these basic assumptions would mean that the "linguistic" and the "cultural" can never be entirely separate matters - though, later in this book, I will have cause to move away from the idea of semiotics as in any sense purely linguistic and to cast some doubt on the analytic utility of the concept of culture. Nevertheless, many of the forms of "cultural analysis" available today do "jump off" one form or another of linguistic analysis, especially when they attempt to ask questions about how communication is realized. If effective semiotics is one such form of cultural analysis, it is one which offers a relatively unique version of how communication is possible (insofar as it is possible). That version is: for any community, the means of producing a semiosic object are identical with the means of recognizing it. That is: I can understand you when I would do as you do if I were to be saying what you say. Interestingly enough, as I show in chapter 13, none of this presumes or necessitates the idea that consensus is what underpins or defines communities.
Meaning is not a matter of similarities or identities between signs and objects, or signs and mental acts, but between how signs are made from one occasion to another. This "how made" can be (but need not be) expressed as rules. Rules are an analytic convenience for expressing this "how made" after the fact. And they have the drawback - which is expressly against my intentions here - of leading analysis to assume that consensus is the key to communication.
This is most clearly seen in the learning of the use of signs of all sorts. I have taught someone the use of a sign when she or he goes on to use it just as I would were I in those situations. 12 Here I am teaching not simply the use of signs but also, at the same time, membership in a community. Hence the emphasis in many of my investigations on young persons and their training. 13
These, then, are what count for me as "reasons" for trying to do effective semiotics. But - to shift the terrain to more biographical matters - I have not been alone in my work. Anne Freadman, John Frow and Ian Hunter offered me many helpful suggestions during several trips to Brisbane. Along with them, a more local community of friends and colleagues has been beside me throughout - sometimes in agreement and sometimes not, but always in a position of giving aid and comfort. Among these have been Niall Lucy, Tom O'Regan, Toby Miller, Horst Ruthrof, Bob Hodge and Garry Gillard. Each read the manuscript in different draft forms, and each had their own important effects on my attempts to think the effective. Above all, Claire Colebrook's fine attention to detail helped clarify my writing. I owe her many things.
Lastly - yet historically prior to all this - this book came out of a meeting I had in Amsterdam in July 1991 with my friend, colleague and teacher, Rod Watson. In his characteristically Yorkshire way, he asked me why I had criticized so many positions without adopting one myself. This book is my answer - for Rod - though I don't doubt he'll disagree with, and I hope criticize, almost everything in it.
Fremantle
April 1995
Acknowledgements
Some data and analyses used in this book have appeared in earlier versions in a number of journals - though they are all substantially reworked and rewritten in their current versions. I would like to thank the editors of the following journals for allowing me to return to those materials: Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture (Chapter 2); Theory, Culture and Society (Chapters 7 and 9); Southern Review and my co-author there, Tom O'Regan (Chapter 11). Chapter 5 is a substantial reworking of a piece that appeared in Carolyn D. Baker & Allan Luke eds., Towards a Critical Sociology of Reading Pedagogy: Papers of the XII World Congress on Reading (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991). While I was still working on it, Herman Parret asked me to contribute Chapter 13 (again in a modified version) for publication in his edited collection Pretending to Communicate (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1993). My thanks to those editors and publishers.
=> Chapter 1
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/preface.html. The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.