Semiotics Seen Synchronically: The View as of 2010

Abstract

Abstract Semiotics as a general phenomenon of intellectual culture took root in the 20th century. The earliest figure in that enrooting was Charles Peirce (1839-1914), but the foregrounded figure was rather Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), who plotted a narrower course under the label "semiology". It was Thomas Sebeok (1920-2001) who made unmistakable the " pars pro toto" fallacy of Saussure's standpoint, and who cleared the way for the full development of a "doctrine of signs" under the broader label of "semiotics". Thus, as Susan Petrilli pointed out in her Sebeok Fellow Address of 2008, it is "we today who have lived in both the 20th and 21 st century" who "have witnessed and participated in" the original establishment of semiotics as knowledge thematically developed from the consideration of the action consequent upon the being proper to signs. This essay aims to provide a record of the 20th century founding of semiotics, through the interplay of the work of the key players in the drama that unfolded between the birth of Peirce and the death of Sebeok-such diverse thinkers as Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), Roman Jakobson ( 1896-1982), Charles Morris (1901-1979), Feruccio Rossi-Landi (1921-1985 ), Algirdas Greimas ( 1917-1992), Juri Lotman ( 1922-1993 ) , Jeff Bernard (1943-2010), along with a few survivors of the "founding era" who yet remain on the current scene of "unfolding synchronicity" - the "land of the living"-within semiotics. The essay makes clear that semiosis depends upon the being of signs as irreducibly of a triadic relational structure, as Poinsot (1589-1644) seems earliest to have demonstrated, and Peirce independently established as the "model" required fully to develop the doctrine of signs as a " science" presupposed to "science" in the modem, ideoscopic sense. Perhaps most important of all is the discovery that interdisciplinarity, wherever it occurs and to whatever extent it is possible, is a direct consequence of semiosis, and the reason why semiotics provides the only inherently interdisciplinary perspective antidotal to the specializations required for ideoscopic advances in science. How the universities, shaped by modem scientific specializations, will eventually accommodate this "semiotic singularity" remains to be seen.