taras.boyko@ut.ee

Abstract

The article glances over some milestone works and ideas which appeared in the 1970-1980’s as an attempt to bridge history/historiography and semiotics.

In the 1970’s and 1980’s semiotics in many ways appeared to be (or at least occasionally was presented as) discipline/approach with almost unlimited potential and widest academic reach. Perhaps it is possible to say that during this period semiotics was clearly “in trend”, and even more remarkably, it was in trend not only among the scholars representing various fields of humanities. As not a surprising outcome of this almost overwhelming popularity of semiotics related approaches, many semioticians and scholars who tended to propagate semiotics or semiotic method(s) often allowed themselves to transgress traditional disciplinary boundaries and, in some sense, extend the sphere of applicability of semiotics to neighboring and academically distant areas of scholarship. For the most part, such transgressions or diffusions presupposed spotlighting of those numerous “new” research directions and horizons which semiotics presumably promised to open for the “old” disciplines. When looking at the situation from the history of ideas stands, perhaps makes sense to mention one such example of transgression – case which concerns a number of tries to “semiotize” historiography and studies of the past, or at least make some attempts to somehow bridge semiotics and historical studies.

Influences of semiotics on the field of history in general and professional historians in particular for the most part tended to be not as visible in comparison with the ones semiotics happened to have on areas like literary studies, linguistics or culture studies. But nevertheless these interactions between semiotics and disciplinary history can serve as rather illustrative episode, perhaps even a separate chapter, in the history of the 20^th-century humanities textbook. This very topic of cross-disciplinary interaction deserves some special attention also due to the fact that these attempts to semiotize history occurred roughly at the same time and more or less independently in very different academic environments, thus once again proving that with some scholarly ideas certain thoughts are simply in the air. By these various academic environments meant what can be called “West” and “East”, and “East” here represents Soviet academic milieu. Thus the general intention behind this paper is to trace some of these attempts as well as make a try identify similar (or different) ideas stemming from 1970-1980’s tries to bridge history and semiotics.

“West”

In the west one of the first platforms for the debates on the topic of history and semiotics happened to be journal Semiotica. For any reader interested in the earliest stages of the discussion, a major point to start perhaps should be the issue №40 ¾ from the year 1982 with Peter Haidu’s article Semiotics and History. This piece by the US professor is followed by a commentary and in some sense reply from another North American scholar Marike Finlay-Pelinski. Her article has a bit more nuanced title – Semiotics or History: From content analysis to contextualized discursive praxis. These contributions by Haidu, scholar of medieval literature and critical theory, and Finaly-Pelinski, scholar who came from communication and English studies, nicely set the stage and, what seems to be even more important, in many ways outline those crucial points and discussion knots for the following debate to come.

Professor Haidu’s opening argument is that technicity and formality of semiotics renders it to be appropriate for the analysis of texts as repositories of historical meaning (Haidu 1982:187), while the very model of textual functioning which comes from semiotics is capable of identifying levels of sociohistorical structures (Haidu 1982:188). At the same time major concern, as Haidu calls it, is “coordination of semiotics and history”. But how does he proposes to coordinate the two? Suggestion is that:

…semiotics must consider history, not as phenomenal event, but as an entity producing meaning, as a signifier capable of being assigned a signified. The events of history, that is, must be considered as ‘event-messages’; it is their meaningfulness that allows the imposition of semiotic analysis…It is only when the question of ‘signification’ or ‘meaning’ comes up, and hence the possibility of dealing with semantic values, that semiotics can enter the picture. When it does, it takes history as text. (Haidu 1982:188-189).

The formula “history as text” deserves some particular attention and emphasis. From a surface level it is very traditional and exists more or less from the earliest beginnings of historical writing, simply because one of the basic pillars of historiography is dependence on availability and access to some type of written source(s). But what Haidu reminds us about is the problem of the historian who is concerned with establishing the correct model of the interrelations in material (à sources) him or her studies. Formally, says Haidu, it is identical with the semiotic problem of determining the correct hierarchical organization of various codes (Haidu 1982: 196). Moreover, codes in this context can identify social, political, and economic categories at play in one or the other situation.

Another reason semiotics should “work” with history is enclosed in the attention to such key element as value(s). For Peter Haidu:

Values’ are the units of content to which semiotic analysis addresses itself: ‘values’ are the semantic ‘bits’ that, when assembled, make language and other semiotic systems meaningful […] ‘Values’ are what actions are about: their creation, captation, or exchange. History and narrative are the incorporation of ‘values’ […] And history as the narrative of human values being created, transformed, captured, or exchanged, and narrative as a history of such events, are the entirely ‘natural’ objects of analysis for a narrative semiotics (Haidu 1982: 191)   

With such emphasis on values inevitably comes attention to ideology. On this matter Haidu does not go too far and repeats a well-known catchy formulation of Valentin Volosinov – “wherever a sign is present, ideology is present, too”[i]. And since everything ideological possesses this semiotic value, semiotics turns out to be a privileged instrument for the analysis of ethical, aesthetic, religious, scientific etc. functions included in the domain of ideology (Haidu 1982: 210). While history, as the narrative of these values, tends to be an object par excellence, both on practical and theoretical levels. Haidu is also fascinated with the level of deep structures that generate both historical phenomenality and semiotic textuality. For him attention to deep structures is precisely the point of connection between semiotics and history (here Haidu brings examples of Marxist and Annales School historians as those opposing punctual history that worked and continues to work on the level of particular historical events) (Haidu 1982: 223-224)

Marike Finlay-Pelinski on the other hand suggests that there exist a number of problems with combining so easily Saussurean-oriented semiotics[ii] and history, mainly because such type of semiotics “[…] have a limited view of history […] the very analytical tools of semiotics, taken as a critical metalanguage […] have an epistemological foundation that is profoundly and irremediably ahistorical […] Saussurean-oriented semiotics presents fundamentally ahistorical view of language or text” (Finlay-Pelinski 1982: 229). Texts, according to the Canadian scholar, resist the analytical categories of binary semiotic and instead they “accentuate their own historical and contextual nature as a communicational act and as sign-production” (Finlay-Pelinski 1982: 234).

For Finlay-Pelinski history can be defined as an act, event, practice and, on more materialistic stands, even as interaction or contextualization of all production by certain conditions of production (Finlay-Pelinski, 1982: 230). Moreover, with voicing such an approach she basically juxtaposes these two histories – history as acts, facts and events, and history as a discursive act. It is quite clear for Finlay-Pelinski that: “Since Saussure’s revolt against philology and etymology, many semioticians [apparently pointing first of all to Haidu] have insisted that historical analysis is impossible and that we should concentrate on immanent textual analysis instead” (Finlay-Pelinski 1982: 231).

A few years later the debate on relations and interrelations between sphere of history and semiotics continued in Semiotica issue 54 ¾ (1985). In the case of this volume, the article to pay attention to should be What has history to do with semiotic? by Brooke Williams (Deely). For Williams, a professional historian herself, it is history, viewed and perceived as the logic of historical becoming, what lends the foundation of existential concreteness to the question of how and why sign systems change (Williams 1985: 268). “History […] addresses the interaction of nature and mind through the semiosis that transmits human culture […] history in its proper being is not first of all a discipline, but precisely is the anthroposemiotic transmission and generation of culture wherein nature and mind mutually influence each other in the shaping and constitution of ‘reality’” (Williams 1985: 281).

And at the same time Professor Williams admits that “…human being as both product and producer of culture transcends the physical environment by creating a cognitive map or Umwelt, in which the past subsists and shapes the very sign-configuration of present reality long after physical interactions we define as past have ceased to exist” (Williams 1985: 274). Meaning that what present semiosis does is that it continuously screens for signification of the receding past in light of a constantly advancing current situation, thus clarifying the idea that the whole conversation should be about transmissibility of the past as the creation of this present semiosis as well as about anthroposemiotic understanding of history. Another important idea, and in some sense a proposal, from Williams lays on the lines that:

[…] mediated process of constructing the ‘historical past’…needs to be reconceptualized in the perspective of semiotic, which would account for both the so-called ‘real’ – or mind-independent aspect of history – and the so-called ‘ideal’ – or mind-dependent aspect of history – as these two are distinct but not separate in the semiotic transmission or ‘construction’ of the past through time wherein real and unreal relations commingle precisely as history (Williams 1985: 316)

Finally deserves some special attention one of the culmination points of the article, where Professor Williams notes: “History is always being rewritten because that is its semiosic role in culture…” (Williams 1985: 321).

“East”

On parallel course semioticians who worked in Soviet Union also started to pay attention to some issues and challenges associated with history, historical writing and even historian’s craft per se. For instance, in the early 1980’s Yuri Lotman on a number of occasions addressed one of the crucial historiographic problems – a problem of historical sources. For the Tartu professor, it is evident that any historical document potentially can have varied semiotic nature. And in perspective such type of variability significantly influences what can be so-called “distortion factor” of the overall picture portrayed in the document at stake (Lotman 1982: 44). As an example here Lotman discussed “texts with a strong degree of mythologization”. The later rather often have an apparent predisposition towards hyperbolization and idealization, and Yuri Mikhailovich considered these potential tendencies to hyperbolize and idealize to be some sort of rituals of text composition, which, in his opinion, aren’t always taken into consideration by scholars. Continuing this line of thought Lotman suggest to turn to semiotics and try to apply semiotic analysis to each particular source historian intends to base his research on (Lotman 1982: 45).

Towards the late 1980’s Lotman happened to be even more interested and concerned with these sets of issues and problems associated with history and historical writing(s). For instance, in one of his most important books of the time – Universe of the Mind[iii] – Tartu professor stated that historians, whether they want it or not, condemned to deal with texts, texts being as a sort of intermediary agent between an event as it happened and a historian who investigates this event. Besides being an intermediary, text also turns out to be the most biased element in the entire set of procedures associated with historical investigative practices, mainly because text is always “…created by somebody and for some purpose, an event appears in it in some encrypted way” (Lotman 1990: 217). According to Lotman, the outcome of such a situation for historians is that their starting point in any research narrows down to the need to deal with a potentially misrepresenting element, a necessity to decode this or that text. Moreover, to some extent, even to create a fact while trying to extract some extra-textual reality from the analyzed text and event from a story about this event. Based on such an understanding of the situation in historiography, Lotman proposes to pay more attention to reconstructing the set of codes used by an author (whether it is a chronicler, ancient historian, etc.) of the investigated source text, while at the same time correlating it with the codes used here and now, meaning codes of the particular historian or perhaps even an ordinary reader, as well as bear in mind the difference between the synchronicity and asynchronicity of descriptions.  The whole project is basically to find out what was considered to be a fact for the author of this or that analyzed text and only afterward make any attempts to establish fact(s) “for yourself” – a sort of ground zero for outlining the range of the potential interpretations of this fact (Lotman 1990: 218).

Lotman as well talks about another important issue – he points out inevitable structural unity brought along with the narrativization of events. Such type of unity organizes materials in the system of temporal and causal coordinates. What seems evident for Lotman here is the presence of rhetorical and ideological levels, which accompany a variety of narrative structures. Thus genre based, ideological, political, social, religious, philosophical, and other codes should necessarily be taken into consideration as unavoidable elements of any narrative based source. (Lotman 1990: 223)

Another prominent member of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics – Boris Uspensky – began to write about historical matters even earlier than his colleague and friend Yuri Lotman. Already in the mid 1970’s appeared Uspensky’s classic and widely cited piece titled Historia sub specie semioticae (Uspensky 1976[iv]). In this work Moscow professor noted that:

From a semiotic perspective, the historical process can be conceived of as a communication process in which the new information that is constantly being received conditions a reciprocal reaction on the part of the societal addressee or social group. Some “language”, understood in a broad semiotic rather than a narrow linguistic sense, determines perception of both real and potentially possible facts in the corresponding historical-cultural context. In this way, meaning is attributed to events: a text of events is read by a social group. We can say, then, that in its rudimentary phase, the historical process is a process of generating new “sentences” in some “language” and of having them read by a societal addressee or social group. (Uspensky 1976, 286)

More than a decade later Professor Uspensky continued with the topic and stated: “History is semiotic in its nature… it involves certain semiotisation of reality – transformation of non-sign into sign and non-history into history” (Uspensky 1988: 69). For Moscow scholar the unfolding of events in time implied “language” level (à semiotics of language), while perception of history – sign level (à semiotics of sign). And altogether such combination, along with conditions of temporal sequence & cause-and-effect relations, ensured semiosis of history.

Some conclusions…

Any history of ideas research is always very challenging because it is never enough just to analyze emergence and circulation of a certain idea. It is also necessary to try and trace possible inspirations for one or the other author/scholar in his or her elaboration and use of this idea. But in the case of the described attempts to semiotize history the task seems to be a bit easier, because Western scholars (Haidu, Finlay-Pelinski, Williams) did not quote directly or indirectly Lotman or Uspensky[v]. While the Soviet scholars do not list any works of their North American colleagues at all. So this type of almost absent “communication” between the two camps makes it even more remarkable how similar their academic findings and proposals happened to be at the end.

For instance, it is particular emphasis on the idea of history being some kind of narrative that is open to and even invites semiotic analysis. Both Haidu and Lotman dedicate a decent part of their articles to explanation of how this functioning of history as narrative works, importance and variability of codes in it, etc. Or the idea of history as some type of message (Haidu) or communicative act (Uspensky), a set of messages, once again both entirely fitting into semiotician’s world view. And the notion of text (that was important for almost all the western and soviet scholars) being central axis for both historiography and semiotics. The idea of transmitting human culture, which is clearly visible with Lotman (perhaps one of the first propagandist’s of semiotics of culture) and Williams, who sees history as crucial culture generating force. Finally, expressed in very similar manner by Uspensky and Williams idea about past being a product of some present semiosis, and so on.

References:

FINALY-PELINSKI, Marike. 1982. Semiotics or history: From content analysis to contextualized discursive praxis. Semiotica 40 (3/4). 229-266.

HAIDU, Peter. 1982. Semiotics and history. Semiotica 40 (3/4). 187-228.

LOTMAN, Yuri. 1975. K probleme raboty s nedostovernymi istochnikami [On the problem of dealing with unreliable sources]. Vremennik Pushkinskoy komissii  13. 93-98.

LOTMAN, Yuri. 1982. [editorial note to Mikhail Postnikov and Anatoly Fomenko’s article “Novyye metodiki statisticheskogo analiza narrativno-tsifrovogo materiala drevney istorii”]. Trudy po znakovym sistemam 15. 44-48.

LOTMAN, Yuri. 1990. Universe of the mind: A semiotic theory of culture. London/New York: Tauris.

PASSERINI, Luisa. 1999. History and semiotics. Historein 1. 13-20.

WILLIAMS, Brooke. 1985. What has history to do with semiotic. Semiotica 54 (3/4). 267-333.

USPENSKY, Boris. 1976. Historia sub specie semioticae. In Kul’turnoye naslediye Drevney Rusi. Istoki, stanovleniye, traditsii [Cultural heritage of ancient Rus’: Origins. Formation. Traditions], ed. by Vasily Bazanov, 286-292. Moscow: Nauka

USPENSKY, Boris. 1988. Istoriya i Semiotika (Vospriyatiye vremeni kak semioticheskaya problema. Stat'ya pervaya [History and semiotics: time perception as a semiotic problem; article one]. Trudy po znakovym sistemam 22. 66-84.

USPENSKY, Boris. 1989. Istoriya i Semiotika (Vospriyatiye vremeni kak semioticheskaya problema). Stat'ya vtoraya [History and semiotics: time perception as a semiotic problem; article two]. Trudy po znakovym sistemam 23. 18-38.