DOI: 10.24308/iass-2014-058

University of Tartu, Estonia

randviir@ut.ee

Abstract

The emergence of sociosemiotics in the second half of the 20th century was of a controversial nature. It came along in the process of specialisation in the social and humanitarian sciences, accompanied by the discovery of new research areas and objects, oftentimes of ad hoc essence. Due to relatively specific studies, the paradigm of sociosemiotics did not appear in clear theoretical structure, nor was it featured by fine boundaries. It was char­acteristic that understanding this vague area was even echoed in terminology – sometimes this new land was and is being called social semiotics, sometimes sociosemiotics. Yet there are some decisive and essential arguments for preferring the latter.

On the other hand, search for the roots of sociosemiotics takes us back to the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. There we can find movements in the study of man, culture and society that were driven by aspiration for a holistic paradigm. The pragmaticist context of the birth of modern semiotics set up a completely novel understanding how to study meaningful phenomena and was defined by the pragmatic dimension of semi­otics. This understanding was shared by ground-breaking works that formed ground for the birth of several disciplines individual disciplines during later years. Yet the foundation of psychology, cultural anthropology, sociology, philology was the same essentially semiotic soil.

The introduction of sociosemiotics is an example of the logic of disciplinary evolution in the course of formation, separation, joining and re-formation of research areas characterised by terms as multi-, poly-, cross-, inter-, transdisciplinarity. In the context of sociosemiotics as a possibility to again join together the semiological and the semiotic trends, it seems important to understand the fundamental need to study man, culture, society and environment from a coherent and holistic perspective. That, at the beginning of the 21st century, leads us back to certain fundamental scholarly principles the held a century ago.

1. Conversion or dispersion?

The emergence of sociosemiotics in the second half of the 20th century was of a controversial nature. It came along in the process of specialisation in the social and humanitarian sciences, accompanied by the discovery of new research areas and objects, oftentimes of ad hoc essence. Due to relatively specific studies, the paradigm of sociosemiotics did not appear in clear theoretical structure, nor was it featured by fine boundaries. It was characteristic that understanding this vague area was even echoed in terminology – sometimes this new land was and is being called social semiotics, sometimes sociosemiotics. Yet there are some decisive and essential arguments for preferring the latter. ‘Social semiotics’ has its historical roots in rather characteristic and circumstantial issues that pertain more to the level of the policy of scholarship than the latter itself. First, during decades following World War II, ‘social issues’ came to the front in at least two aspects. On the one hand, quests for handling societies and creating stabile and manageable social systems obtained a sharpened status. Another aspect was connected with these practical problems of handling social organisations – an overall inclination towards the so-called leftist ideologies (e.g. Marxism, ‘socialist’ tendencies that were switched into scholarship) as opposed to those that were associated with the social collapse of previous ‘world order’ that had led to the disastrous events of World War II.

‘Social semiotics’ seems to have appeared as a combination of these two major points. Here we can draw an illustrative example that is explanatory in several aspects. The study of subcultures – that oftentimes is associated with social semiotics – has been considered as a hijacking of the notion of culture, and turning it into a device for displacing the ‘social’ as a source of explanation (Jenks 2005: 133). Tremendous problems and consequences arise from here. Subcultures, taking up a logical trail, appear as life-styles or ways of life instead of referring to certain social groups that have to do with class division. For example, consider a thin pneumatic mucky Liverpool boy dressed in rugs playing with mates alike with him in a backyard of a grey apartment house. His situation might have been explained in social, societal and sociological terms: having been born into a specific primary group, he found himself in an inescapable vicious circle that pre-determined his further life-cycle. From the viewpoint of post-war culture studies (especially, for example the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) that introduced the notion of subcultures as it is mostly comprehended today, that boy was to be treated a member of a subculture who had chosen his way of life according to his free will. That, of course, was in a suitable coherence with the concurrent governmental policy and practical actions (or inactions) concerning social matters. Furthermore, ‘subcultures’ became into a cliché to designate ‘reparable young white male youth’ (Jenks 2005: 135).

We can see immense and tragic consequences that follow from this example and how this example characterises the emergence and several trends in ‘social semiotics, if we put the previous sentence into other words. Namely: subcultures lost their status as a ‘blank object’ of study, and became into a conventional symbol or a symbolic notion agreed by default to stand for a more-or-less specific societal congregation that was based on voluntary membership and followed a common way of life. It is self-evident that the totality of societal issues and practical problems were much more demanding to map than to just hide them behind the notion of ‘culture’. The latter became a ‘spin-off-term’ stolen from traditional fields concerned with the study of culture (cultural anthropology, cultural psychology, semiotics, theory of culture), and was thrown out there to stand guard in front of societal issues that were simply covered by it. Alike tendencies can be seen also in connection with semiotics, and unfortunately in connection with ‘social semiotics’ as an area formed of case studies based on similar backbones of spun (not to say hijacked or stolen) terms of semiotics. On the one hand we can witness how specific semiotic or semiological terms have been ruthless taken out of the context of semiotics in order to bring charm to, for example of gender, media, fashion, and so on. This is not to say those would not appear as analysable in semiotic terms, but sporadic application of semiotic terms has not benefitted the relevant application nor made semiotics more comprehensible for a wider range of researchers and readers. As a most frequent example, we can even name the ‘signifier’ and the ‘signified’ – terms seeming easily graspable and elegantly applicable. However, it has been exactly drawing them out of the semiotic context that has taken them to purely material and materialistic level. The latter has nearly nothing to do with the original Saussurean paradigm and suchlike misinterpretation (the signifier as the word ‘tree’ and the signified as the real object we can chop for firewood) has no explanatory value in the studies and fields they have been deported to. Rather, one of the few side-effects has been the gradual misinterpretation of semiotics and semiology in general, and associating them with the very concrete structuralist methodology.

From another angle, ‘social semiotics’ as studying, for example advertising, mass media or gender, points to a different misleading way of building up pseudo-disciplines and misinterpreting the so-to-speak parent disciplines. These are often created on the basis of case studies. This, in turn means that they frequently lack of systematic research methodology and rely on the insight of a concrete scholar and are thus determined rather to the status of ideological exclamations than scholarship proper. (A good example here concerns again the issue of subcultures as related to core cultures.)

2. Major premises of sociosemiotics

On the other hand, search for the roots of sociosemiotics takes us back to the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. There we can find movements in the study of man, culture and society that were driven by aspiration for a holistic paradigm. The pragmaticist context of the birth of modern semiotics set up a completely novel understanding how to study meaningful phenomena and was defined by the pragmatic dimension of semiotics. This understanding was shared by ground-breaking works that formed ground for the birth of several disciplines individual disciplines during later years. Yet the foundation of psychology, cultural anthropology, sociology, philology was the same essentially semiotic soil.

The introduction of sociosemiotics is an example of the logic of disciplinary evolution in the course of formation, separation, joining and re-formation of research areas characterised by terms as multi-, poly-, cross-, inter-, transdisciplinarity. In the context of sociosemiotics as a possibility to again join together the semiological and the semiotic trends, it seems important to understand the fundamental need to study man, culture, society and environment from a coherent and holistic perspective. That, at the beginning of the 21st century, leads us back to certain fundamental scholarly principles the held a century ago and can be seen as major (not all premises of contemporary sociosemiotics as well:

· Original pragmati(ci)st context that is not to be taken merely in geographic scale, but which rather indicates to a mode of thinking (incl. e.g. early 20^th cent. psychology in Russia).

· Pragmatics as a dimension of semiotic analysis; involves to research table, in addition to object and researcher, also interpreter or informant or user(s) of semiotic unit.

· Society is a semiotic phenomenon and semiotic phenomena are processual, and they are being created constantly and continually.

· Human being is a semiotic being (Self, Mind) and lives in social-semiotic reality.

· Semiotic reality is in arbitrary relation with different dimensions of environment, but these relations are not arbitrary for the individual.

· Social reality is version of physical and other environments the socium has constructed; available to researcher through individual’s utterances that to a large extent express individualised societal reality.

· Environment and things are meaningful, i.e. social; objectivation and objectification are mutually related.

· Society is set of institutions, while institutions are sets of signs and sign systems are institutions.

· In addition to cognitive processes, also sensory processes are semiotic, i.e. influenced by culture to a large extent.

· Through socialisation, relations between abstract and concrete reference are administered.

· Reality and semiotic reality are segmented and arranged by multiple filters of competence (linguistic, communicative, cultural semiotic).

· Use of sign systems and diverse competence levels connect, via metaneeds, individuals’ secondary and primary needs, cognitive and sensory processes.

These premises entail that ‘social construction’, social constructivism and universal cultural or sociocultural conceptions are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it seems to be the sociosemiotic perspective that could be an option to conjoin the thin and thick description of communities, to find compromises between the etic and the emic descriptive vocabularies. Now, speaking about centripetal and centrifugal forces at work in the case of sociosemiotics obviously presupposes that there exists a central nucleus around which we could detect those forces. That nucleus is logically about the definition of sociosemiotics. Rushing on ahead, we can associate sociosemiotics with the centripetal forces and social semiotics that appeared historically first, with the centrifugal forces – this is about the simple historical evidence of publishing traditions concerning holistic and ad hoc application of both the terms of sociosemiotics and social semiotics.

This topic of defining sociosemiotics has to do with at least two great issues: (a) knowledge management on the metalevel – the very ideology of approaching sociocultural systems theoretically, and (b) management of sociocultural systems on the object-level – the actual shaping of societies and defining cultures in the public sphere.

In fact, the two – the metalevel and object-level developments – are somehow congruent. Namely, we can start talking about the emergence of sociosemiotics in connection with the so-to-speak social or societal explosion. That explosion started off in connection with Wilhelm Wundt’s experimental psychology in late 19^th century and Charles Horton Cooley’s Self or his Looking-Glass-Self early 20^th century (Cooley 1909). While Juri Lotman’s cultural explosion (Lotman 2009) is a concept referring to retrospective knowledge, that social or societal explosion induced also teleological ideas about humanity in general, the metalevel and object-level developments being practically synchronic, if not to say that the organisation of society begins only after certain metalevel arrangement of society. It is important to understand that when talking about constructivism and societies, we have to remember that ‘society’ has not always been out there a priori. ‘Society’ is a conditional phenomenon along with all its institutional organisations on the object-level, and on the other hand it is a similar metalevel invention or a theoretical construct as ‘culture’.

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the so-called indigenous or aboriginal ‘cultures’ were the main objects of study for the European humanities. These ‘primitive cultures’ were not looked at as societies, but rather as communities of culture. Those people were subjects put under culture and unable to sway from behavioural patterns pre-given for them by culture. That made them clearly oppositional to the ‘developed cultures’. At the same time, the Western population lived in ‘societies’ and was acting in its ‘natural’ and ‘civilised’ space. Culture there was not even directly recognizable, it rather was treated as a space of art and artworks. Aside with that ‘cultural space’ or ‘space of culture’, there started to appear achievements categorised as pertaining to ‘civilization’: industrialisation, technical inventions and discoveries, advancements in medicine, the development of natural sciences. These took Europe into the epoch of modernism alongside with the emergence of new identity discourse (primarily the creation of nation states) and besides ‘culture’, theorizing started to involve also the ‘society’. Next to Western societal analysis, connections between the object- and metalevel led also to the study of the Western culture, and in the beginning of the twentieth century, attention was paid already to ‘sociocultural systems’.

3. Sociosemiotics and its parallels

Besides culture and society, in the latter there got together the micro- and the macrolevel of analysis, the individual and the society – we can recall pioneers as P.Sorokin, A.Maslow, B.Malinowski, V.Pareto, L.Vygotski, C.Cooley and other eminent classical authors. The reflectivity of sociocultural systems pointed directly at their semiotic nature, and so the semiotic paradigm met, together with other modes of theorizing, in pragmatism where, in the beginning of the twentieth century, contemporary study of culture and society had started to seed. A good example of ways of thought that was essentially pragmatic and can be seen as a parallel discipline to sociosemiotics, is cultural anthropology. It looked at cultural (or even sociocultural) systems as modes of thinking and as a conglomeration of semiotic constructs, that is – as modelling systems. Cultural anthropology valued the pragmatic dimension at the study of people and culture as much as it was done in the so-called American tradition in semiotics (most openly by C.W.Morris). For example, according to R.Keesing, a scholar surprisingly close to the original cultural semiotics developed in Tartu, says that:

The primary data of ethnographic analysis consist of informants’ statements about the code and records of their speech behaviour . . . All available data, including behavioural records, the ethnographer’s intuitions/and speech behaviour, provide evidence from which an underlying cultural code can be inferred, and against which descriptions can be tested (Keesing 1972: 301).

His concrete proposals for the study of cultural codes departed from the study of language and were following (see table 1).

Table 1: R. Keesing’s comparison of linguistics and ethnoscience (Keesing 1972: 301).

From this very open outline of the study of culture and social behaviour, at least two kinds of observations follow. On the one hand, as said, the study of sociocultural systems must engage the pragmatic dimension. Here lies an advantage of cultural anthropology as compared with cultural semiotics that inclined, or at least is accused in inclination towards structuralism. The pragmatic dimension of social and cultural phenomena means that suchlike studies by their nature belong to social sciences proper: next to the researcher and the object of study, there must always be involved a third party in the face of the informant or the user of meaningful phenomena analysed. It does not mean that the informant must necessarily be embodied in a physical human shape – the party providing the researcher with the possibility of ‘reality check’ can also be formed by a textual body as a corpus of evidence. On the other hand, if we view cultures as semiotic systems, then they coincide with sociocultural systems that have been defined by R.M. Keesing as systems that “[...] represent the social realizations or enactments of ideational designs-for-living in particular environments” (Keesing 1974: 82). This exactly the standpoint of contemporary sociosemiotics: we cannot and must not approach isolated semiotic phenomena in their artificially isolated environments, but have to keep always in mind the complex ‘man-culture-society-environment’.

Perhaps at this point we should recall that alongside with the emergence of the society and the ‘Self’ as its unit, in parallel there came into being contemporary macrosemiotic research units called ‘cultural codes’ by Keesing that seem by now halted at the notion of the semiosphere. Interestingly, Keesing’s ideas about the study of culture coincide not only with the pragmaticist ideas of dimensions of semiotic study, but also with the Saussurean semiological principles that led Saussure to the formulation of semiology as a part of social or general psychology. Talking about the centripetal forces that have lead to contemporary sociosemiotics, we should probably remind that alongside with the pragmaticist and the semiological manifests, at approximately the same time, there emerged similar proposals by Vilfredo Pareto (1935) who designed much of contemporary societal studies under the title of sociology or general sociology with very similar principles as Saussure’s semiology and Peirce’s logic or semiotics. The same tendencies could be detected in cultural psychology and anthropology. These views share understanding of human environments as (semiotically) constructed or at least as mediated by signs and available through signs. Simultaneously have these views taken us to conceptions of the research object of social sciences and humanities as a whole. In different studies there have been applied various expressions for signifying the holistic network of suchlike research objects that condition each other and are mutually connected. Yet their contents and methodological logic for the analysis of man, culture, society and environment is alike, if not practically the same. We can recall, for example, of the following: ‘social world’ (Schutz 1967), ‘social system’ (Parsons 1952), ‘culture’ (Kluckhohn 1961), ‘Lebenswelt’ (Garfinkel 1967), ‘mundane reason’ (Pollner 1987), ‘semiotic reality’ (Merrell 1992), or even ‘semiotic Self’ (Wiley 1994) or ‘signifying order’ (Danesi 1998).

While oftentimes, and surprisingly in the context of semiotics itself, these notions lack concrete instructions for concrete communities, Keesing represents culturo-anthropological view offering quite clear understanding and suggests, as numerous other scholars of culture and society, that at the study of meaning-based communities, we must concentrate at issues pertaining both to perception, cognition and articulation. Alike research programs have been put forth by several authors and disciplines, beginning from grounds for contemporary sociocultural analysis as represented in the hypothesis of linguistic relativity or in principles of ethnomethodology; in semiotics perhaps most straight-forwardly in the seven major strategic points of the signifying order (Danesi and Perron 1999). These points also fit together with another major source for the formation and formulation of sociosemiotics: the systems theory which reached, in the semiotic context, its high tide in the face of J.Ruesch’s Semiotic Approaches to Human Relations – probably the most holistic and monolithic contribution not only to semiotics and psychology, but for all social sciences and humanities published already in the 1970s (Ruesch 1972).

Whereas social semiotics in its centrifugal influences could be associated with the analysis of quite concrete types of objects (gender, media, etc.), then the actual holistic nature of the study of culture and society shows that in the course of socialisation, all societal structures become functional on the metalevel. Ideological tendencies that cast light at specific developments or phenomena in culture and society (feminism, the emergence of ‘new species’ as transvestites, accentuating or underemphasizing differences between races, social groups, gender roles) may, and in fact have, led to insularised and isolated areas of research. The sociosemiotic understanding of the analysis of culture and society calls for – and reminds of – the need for holistic and complex study perspective that would aim at transdisciplinarity.

Cooperation between people forming a society can be described through institutions mediating their interaction, and by the more-or-less commonly consented goals of teamwork. The aims of societal interaction influence the structure of institutions and their mutual relationships. It is important that besides treating societal organisations as institutions, we should have an alike attitude towards sociocultural sign systems. Suchlike a view would probably also help to understand how social situations conjoin social groups diachronically too, and to see how the semiotisation of the world is arranged via diverse communities of competence (linguistic, communicative, cultural, semiotic competence). From these considerations we comprehend the centripetal forces that are at work at the formation of a transdisciplinary paradigm centred at sociosemiotics as aiming to study sociocultural systems as complexes formed of man, culture, society and environment.

References

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