Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign
A friend of mine recently asked me about semiotics and some recommended reading on the subject and I came up blank. I studied semiotics a bit as an undergrad or at least was taught a semiotic method by some of my professors when it came to essay writing, but I found myself not really knowing what that meant. However, while flipping through the large and rambling “Philosophy” section at my local bookstore, I ran across a slim volume under a “Postmodern Encounters” series titled Thomas Sebeok and the Signs of Life from Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio that promised to enlighten me about “the scholar who has contributed most to establishing semiotics as an interdisciplinary field.” Here are some thoughts.
I haven’t read any of Sebeok’s works, but this volume does a good job covering a lot of ground and I feel like it gives a decent overview to some key takeaways in a way that is fairly comprehensive. Mostly, it talks about the ways in which Sebeok diverges from other semioticians and thinks of semiotics as applying to biological sciences, human verbal and non-verbal signs, unconscious signs, multifarious signs, multiplicitous signs, and master signs (20-22). While I don’t want to simply repeat the book here, suffice to say that signs can be found in many places. This is the primary way I was taught semiotics (signs are everywhere to be interpreted by the seeking semiotician), but this seems to diverge from those who would just search for signs in anthropocentric arenas.
Which is the part of this investigation that I find most compelling. For the most part, I found this overview pretty dry and uninspiring. Lately I’ve been more interested in Posthuman theories, so the idea of moving away from anthropocentric readings is commonplace to the point of triteness. Towards the end of this book, however, things pick up a bit and become more interesting, and one line made me think of Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker’s excellent book The Exploit:
“On the basis of this model, comparable to a diagram or a map, the human mind may orientate itself by shifting from one node to another in the sign network, choosing each time the interpretive path considered most suitable.” (Thomas Sebeok and the Signs of Life, 52. Emphasis mine.)
And later
“With some probability, sign processes building limitless interpretants may continue in machines independently of humans.” (63)
These statements are very clearly getting into posthumanist theory and moving away from anthropocentric models of sign interpretation that depend upon a person at the center interpreting the significance of multiple signs and the ways they interact with one another. This model considers signs as part of a network and lays them out as such, with none more important than the other but all interconnected and affecting one another continuously. For this reason, the human arguably becomes just another sign/node communicating with others that could cease to exist without much effect on the overall network.
For the most part, however, I find this book pretty uninteresting since I’m not really a semiotician. For those entrenched in this discourse, thinking of sign-reading in terms that apply more generally to multiple disciplines might be more compelling, though I’m doubting there is anything revolutionary here since most of the texts they reference are 20+ years old. Ultimately, this volume is worth a read for some basic info in a short space, and I would be interested in reading some of Sebeok’s works to find out more, but there’s little here to blow your mind. Looking for that from a book that brands itself as a retrospective of Sebeok’s life and work is probably asking a bit much, though, so it all depends on what signs you seek.