In Defense of Semiotics: The Dual Asymmetry of Cultural Signs

Abstract

rT _HE SITUATION of semiotics today is paradoxical. Emerging in recent years from relative obscurity, semiotics is beginning to gain the scholarly respectability envisioned by its early pioneers. A veritable avalanche of publications in some dozen languages presents semiotics as the intellectual panacea of our age-a general matrix for all human knowledge. At the same time, however, critics have attempted to discredit it. By exposing the metaphysical presuppositions underlying current theories of the sign, they have succeeded in deflating much of the semiotician's grand design. From their perspective, semiotics is a mere episode in intellectual history, of interest only to those who wish not to repeat the mistakes of the past. I would like to consider several of the serious charges that have been leveled against semiotics and to offer a model of the sign that I hope will rectify the insufficiencies of previous models. My ultimate goal is to defend the project of semiotics, to show its viability, to demonstrate that the problems threatening the imminent demise of sign theory are merely passing and not essential. Any account of semiotics' detractors must confront the work of Jacques Derrida. According to him, the price that semiotics has paid for its acceptance among the established disciplines is substantial: it has yielded to the metaphysics of presence. This tag is Derrida's term for the privileged position accorded by our culture to whatever presents itself directly to our consciousness. Western metaphysics would seem to be antisemiotic: the sign by definition violates the immediacy of self-presence. The essence of the sign is its otherness, for the sign is an entity that stands for another entity, that represents this other inevitably through spatial and temporal displacement. Suspicious of the sign, Western scholars have conceived of it in such a way as to obliterate its mediating quality. Western philosophy, Derrida argues, eliminates signs by making them derivative; it annuls reproduction and representation by making signs a modification of a simple