The Semiotic Processes of the Formation and Expression of Ideas

Abstract

Several peculiarities of a semiotic nature add themselves to the numerous contradictory characteristics of our epoch. Although language continues to exercise a dominant role in sociocultural processes, a variety of other sign systems (such as those of art, of social and political forms of ceremonial, of new rites imposed by the media of communication or the artificial media connected to computer technology) tends to occupy a role comparable to that of the language called natural. These other sign systems even limit language’s sphere of action. The credibility crisis language is going through and the imposition of these new sign systems (some strictly normative) in sociocultural practice are two phenomena which are evidently connected. The resurrection of interest in semiotics is in turn explainable in this context. Although belief in language as a means of communication has declined, the objective process of social development is characterized by an accentuated semiotization. The relationship of the human subject, as an individual and as a social being, to the object in its varied forms of existence (including the subject as object) is more and more mediated through signs. Instead of direct action on the labor object (raw material, processed material, nature), mediated action is imposed, at the beginning through tools and machines and at present through action algorithms. Education, culture, and political practice are coming through less directly; mediation takes place through signs, and practice becomes a matter of interpretation. The consequences of this process of semiotization—as a form of (wo)man’s alienation corresponding to a new stage of his/her evolution—are difficult to anticipate.