Course paper

CHAPTER I . GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF CULTURAL SEMIOTICS

1.1 General information of cultural semiotics The English word “semiotics” designates the science of signs. Signs are objects that convey something a message. They presuppose someone who understands them – an interpreter. The processes in which signs and interpreters are involved are called “sign processes”. A set of interpreters together with the signs and the messages interpreted by them, as well as the further circumstances relevant to the interpretation is called a “sign system”. Thus, semiotics studies sign The English word “semiotics” designates the science of signs. Signs are objects that convey something a message (see Jakobson 1975); they presuppose someone who understands them an interpreter. The processes in which signs and interpreters are involved are called “sign processes” A set of interpreters together with the signs and the messages interpreted by them, as well as thefurther circumstances relevant to the interpretation is called a “sign system”. Thus, semiotics studies signs with respect to their functioning in sign processes within sign systems. The English word “culture” Latin( culture, ‘cultivation’, ‘refinement’, ‘education’)can be traced back to the Latin verb colere, ‘to cultivate’, ‘to refine’, ‘to venerate’. Johann Gottfried Herder (1784-91) used it thus to designate the process of self-education of the individual and of society (which is to say, of all humankind; see Wefelmeyer 1984). Since Edward B. Taylor the word has also been applied to the means of this self-education: “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and all other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”. The term “cultural semiotics” has been used since Ernst Cassirer (1923-29) suggested describing certain kinds of sign systems as “symbolic forms” and claimed that the symbolic forms of a society constitute its culture. Cultural semiotics is that sub discipline of semiotics which has culture as its subject. According to Cassirer, it has two tasks:

a) the study of sign systems in a culture with respect to what they contribute to the culture,

b) the study of cultures as sign systems with respect to the advantages and disadvantages which an individual experiences in belonging to a specific culture.If one designates the totality of all sign systems in the world as the “semiosphere” one can say that cultural semiotics studies cultures as parts of the semiosphere. Cultural semiotics offers the theoretical foundations required for answering these questions. It provides a scientific framework for the empirical investigation and comparative description of all cultures in the world . The semiotic approach to culture competes with the traditional procedures of the humanities, the social sciences, and the normative disciplines. It tries to explicate their results insofar as they can be rendered theoretical. Within this framework one can analyze cultural phenomena without relying on problematic concepts such as ‘human soul’, ‘social role’, or ‘norm’, and also without resorting to theory less listings of incompatible phenomena, as often found in cultural histories. Having too often been associated with a particular nation, social class, ethnic group, or animal species (see for example the contrast between “German culture” and “Western civilization”, the word “culture” is now becoming a theory -based general concept which no longer obstructs a rational analysis of cultural phenomena in humans, animals, and machines. As such, I will not choose between the two apparently alternative models of “semiotics” and “semiology,” with the term “semiotics” referring to the logical-philosophical discipline studying semiosis, and “semiology” as the linguistic-structural discipline studying signs as a part of social life. As I have already mentioned, this book will tackle semiosis as a social institution, continuing Saussure’s work, taking into account the social life of the signs, but I will also be questioning– as Peirce suggests the logic of meaning, that is, the dynamics of interpretation, the interpretative habits, and the regularization through which semiosis lives. From my point of view, there is no advantage in setting out semiotics and semiology as two opposing factions, and I will use the term “semiotics” simply because it is now more commonly utilized than “semiolgy” (which is prevalent only in the French tradition). I must, instead, recognize the compatibility between the two, and their potential for mutual enhancement, just as Umberto Eco has aimed to do with his theory of semiotics. A cultural perspective in semiotics is not, in any case, a new one, even in the Anglo-Saxon world. In 1977, Thomas Sebeok used the expression “Semiotics of Culture” in an article that summarizes the research in which he found that the anthropological circles of the United Kingdom and United States had taken on a “semiotic sensitivity.” Sebeok, at that time, believed firmly in this convergence of anthropology and semiotics, and viewed J. L.Peacock’s embrace of symbolic anthropology and Clifford Geertz’s interpretative anthropology in the same light. He quoted Turner and his “comparative symbology,” and Singer, who makes explicit reference to “semiotic anthropology.” However, it is clear that Sebeok’s main theoretical reference is the Tartu school into more detail on this in chapter. Ever since it was first introduced by a group of Soviet semioticians meeting in Tartu in the seventies, the term 'semiotics of culture' has been appropriated by a rising number of anthropologists, sociologists, linguists, and outright semioticians: but it seems to me that, in general, the term has simply been used to designate what has long been called anthropology, ethnology, sociology, and so on. At best, some concepts and ideas stemming from semiotics proper have been added. Conceptually, this is undoubtedly an adequate maneuver, for all the disciplines mentioned should rightly be considered 'semiotic sciences', in Prieto's apt term, rather than either social or human sciences. But science being an institution, and institutions being notoriously inert, there is not much hope of getting out of the present conceptual muddle by pushing through such a sea change. This is why I will propose to give a much more specific and limited meaning to the notion of a semiotics of culture. In my work on cultural semiotics, I have retained two lessons from the Tartu school, which seem to have been largely forgotten by the school itself: that it is not about Culture per se, but about what the model members of a Culture make of their Culture; and that this model itself is more involved with relationships between cultures (as well as subcultures, cultural spheres, and so on) than with a Culture in its singularity. This is not to deny that a model of Culture easily becomes a factor in Culture; thus, for instance, those who insist that contemporary Culture is an information society and/or a global village certainly contribute to transforming it into just that. Indeed, if semiotic systems are points of view on the material world, as Saussure (1968-1974: 47) claims, then cultural semiotics is a point of view on these points of views. It is easy to imagine this second-hand point of view contaminating the former. As to the second limitation, if it is not all too unfashionable to retain some aspects of the structuralist lesson, relations between cultures may be seen as partly defining what cultures are. As general semiotics and especially that most endeavored constructing a theory of cultural meaning ,structural and generative semiotics – faces, like most contemporary humanities, a post – globalization culture atmosphere, characterized by increasing mistrust in the homogeneity of human productions and practices of meaning, the answer to such skepticism does not consist in abandoning semiotics as a cultural project in order to turn it into reductionist pseudo-scientific discourse does not consist in relinquishing semiotics as humanist project in order to transform it into self –celebratory micro- ethnographic discourse ,but does not consist either in re-proposing. On the contrary, avoiding extremes and adopting an intellectual ethics of complexity ,semioticsshould turn into cultural semiotics ,that is ,a semiotics that does not claim itself capable of discovering once and for all the biological roots of culture, does not give up its humanistic presupposition of the heterogenety of human meaning . From this point of view ,’cultural semiotics’ should sound like ‘cultural anthropology ‘ and connote a semiotics aware of the cultural limits of its generalizations.